Culture

• 1. Introduction

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  Culture is a word the ancient Roman orator Cicero used as an agricultural metaphor. In his Tusculanae Disputationes, he wrote of cultura animi, the cultivation of the soul. A farmer tills a field. Cicero imagined a philosopher tilling a mind, growing it toward the highest possible ideal for human development. The same farming image hides inside the English language itself. In Middle English, the word culture meant a place tilled. Trace it back further and you reach the Latin colere, meaning to inhabit, to care for, to till, to worship. From this single root grew one of the most contested ideas in all of human thought. How did a word about plowing soil become a way of describing whole societies, their arts, their laws, their habits, their gods? Why do scholars still argue over whether one culture can ever be ranked above another? And what happens when soldiers deliberately target a people's monuments as a weapon of war?

• 2. The Tilled Soul

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  Samuel von Pufendorf borrowed Cicero's farming metaphor and dragged it into the modern age. He kept the sense of cultivation but dropped the assumption that philosophy was humanity's natural perfection. In his usage, and that of writers after him, the word came to refer to all the ways human beings overcome their original barbarism and, through artifice, become fully human. The philosopher Edward S. Casey put the older meaning plainly. To have a culture, he wrote, is to inhabit a place intensely enough to cultivate it, to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly. By the 18th century, German thinkers had reshaped the word again. They were developing Rousseau's criticism of modern liberalism and Enlightenment, and they began to set culture against civilization. The anthropologist E. B. Tylor offered the definition still cited worldwide. Culture, he said, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Tylor's complex whole would soon become the seedbed for an entire science of human variety.

• 3. Refinement Versus The Folk

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  Matthew Arnold, the English poet and essayist who lived from 1822 to 1888, used culture to mean an ideal of individual human refinement. He called it the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know the best which has been thought and said in the world. In practice this elite ideal attached itself to art, classical music, and haute cuisine. Because those pursuits belonged to urban life, culture became fused with civilization, a word descended from civitas, the city. Arnold set culture against anarchy, drawing a sharp line of refinement. But the Romantic movement opened a second meaning by turning to folklore. Suddenly a culture could be found among non-elites as well, and the distinction hardened into high culture against low culture. The idea that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected the inequalities inside European societies. Some critics, following Rousseau, flipped the hierarchy entirely. They saw the refinement of high culture as corrupting and unnatural, a thing that distorts people's essential nature. To these critics, folk music produced by rural, illiterate peasants honestly expressed a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. The same impulse painted indigenous peoples as noble savages, living authentic and unblemished lives untouched by stratified capitalist systems.

• 4. The Psychic Unity Of Mankind

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  In 1860 the scholar Adolf Bastian, who lived from 1826 to 1905, argued for the psychic unity of mankind. He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal the same basic elements beneath their differences. Every society, Bastian said, shares a set of elementary ideas, the Elementargedanken. Each distinct culture is merely a local modification of those ideas, a folk idea or Völkergedanken layered over the shared foundation. This was a radical departure. It paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. The thread runs through specific people. Franz Boas, who lived from 1858 to 1942, was trained in this German tradition and carried it with him when he left Germany for the United States. Earlier German thinkers had set up the terms of the debate. Immanuel Kant, who lived from 1724 to 1804, defined enlightenment as man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity, and urged Sapere Aude, dare to be wise. Johann Gottfried Herder, who lived from 1744 to 1803, answered Kant by insisting that human creativity matters as much as human rationality. For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences that give a coherent identity and a sense of common destiny to a people. In 1795 the Prussian linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, who lived from 1767 to 1835, called for an anthropology that would synthesize the interests of Kant and Herder.

• 5. The Central Concept

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  American anthropology took the word and made it the unifying idea of the whole discipline in the 20th century. There it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode experiences symbolically, then to communicate those symbolically encoded experiences to others. The discipline organized itself into four fields, each with a role in studying culture. They are biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and, in the United States and Canada, archaeology. Franz Boas coined a memorable term for the way culture shapes perception. He called it Kulturbrille, or culture glasses, the lenses through which a person sees their own culture. Martin Lindstrom observes that these culture glasses, which let a person make sense of the world they inhabit, can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately. Anthropologists divide culture into the tangible and the intangible. Material culture covers physical expressions like technology, architecture, and art. The immaterial side holds the principles of social organization, mythology, philosophy, literature both written and oral, and science. Cultural universals appear in every human society, including art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies such as tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. This ability to act imaginatively with symbols arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago.

• 6. Reading Everyday Life

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  Stuart Hall, who lived from 1932 to 2014, and Raymond Williams, who lived from 1921 to 1988, developed cultural studies in the United Kingdom. Influenced by Marxism, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities, things like art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing. They saw patterns of consumption as determined by relations of production, which pulled their focus toward class relations. Richard Hoggart gave the field its institutional home. He coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. From the 1970s onward, Hall worked alongside Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie to build an international intellectual movement. The field treats a text as far more than written language. A film, a photograph, an item of fashion, even a hairstyle counts as a text, a meaningful artifact to be read. One famous study pressed on the limits of Marxist assumptions. The book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, by Paul du Gay and his colleagues, set out to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings people attribute to them. The sociologist Georg Simmel, who lived from 1858 to 1918, framed an older version of the question. Culture, he said, is the cultivation of individuals through external forms objectified in the course of history.

• 7. How Cultures Move

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  Raimon Panikkar identified 29 distinct ways that cultural change can come about. His list runs from growth and evolution to revolution, mutation, diffusion, osmosis, syncretism, indigenization, and transformation. Change arrives from inside and outside at once. Internally, cultures are pulled by forces encouraging change and forces resisting it. The feminist movement, for example, introduced new practices that shifted gender relations and altered both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions can also intervene. After tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication became available, which led to the invention of agriculture and a cascade of cultural shifts. Externally, contact between societies moves ideas across borders. In diffusion, the form of something travels from one culture to another even when its meaning does not. Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination among the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th century. Acculturation describes a harsher process, the replacement of one culture's traits with another's. This is what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during colonization. Panikkar's vocabulary of change suggests that no culture sits still, including the one a listener carries through their own day.

• 8. Culture As A Target

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  Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, has stated that the destruction of cultural assets is part of psychological warfare. The target of such an attack is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. The aim is to wound the particularly sensitive cultural memory of a people, along with their growing cultural diversity and the economic basis, such as tourism, of a state or region. Against this stands a network of agreements and organizations. UNESCO and its partner Blue Shield International coordinate international protection and local implementation. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions both deal with safeguarding culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights works in two directions. It gives people the right to participate in cultural life, and it gives them the right to the protection of their contributions to that life. The threats are not only military. Tourism itself now shapes the various forms of culture, sometimes through physical damage to individual objects and increasing environmental pollution, sometimes through socio-cultural effects on the societies that host it.