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 DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2006.5.1.43

2006 5: 43ContextsJoseph R. Gusfield

Culture  

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winter 2006 contexts 43

Contexts, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp. 43-44, ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2006 by the American Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions

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culture

We understand words by examining their contextsand by comparing them with other, related words.In both its history and its present uses, culture has

displayed a rich diversity of meanings; some clear and othersambiguous, some popular and others academic.

The origins of the word lie in the concept of cultivation, dis-tinguishing that which is grown under human control, as infarming, from the products of nature. This meaning is still foundin the idea of “cultured pearls” or in medical phrases such as“culturing bacteria.” This contrast between nature and culturestill pervades the variety of the word’s meanings.

Varied uses of the word also point to differences ofmethod and perspective in history, sociology, and anthropol-ogy. A “cultural approach” is distinct from other perspectivessuch as biological, genetic, or social-structural. British usagein the mid-19th century contrasted primitive societies as unciv-ilized and uncultured with contemporary Western societies ascivilized and cultured. Culture was a state of being to beattained, synonymous with civilization. We still use this devel-opmental meaning, referring to people as cultured or uncul-tured. This is not surprising since the word is almost alwaysused to describe groups or societies or parts of a group, aswith subcultures. In more common usages culture has a col-lective reference, as in the “culture of the State department”or the “culture of French Canadians.”

Close to this usage of culture to mean civilization is its use torefer to specific institutions of knowledge and creativity such asart, language, science, religion, film, and literature, which thesociology of culture has taken as its subject matter. Here the focusis on ideas rather than their associated material practices. Formsof thought, knowledge, language, and art that are often associ-ated with the concept of civilization are distinguished from tech-nological practices and institutions.

How this use of culture relates to wider concepts of culturehas been an abiding issue in the humanities as well as in sociol-ogy. The question of whether art and religion reflect a society’sculture or whether they influence the development of that soci-ety is relevant to the role of intellectuals and artists in modernsocieties—as T. S. Eliot realized in 1949.

The word is perhaps most frequently used to refer to thepractices and patterns that distinguish one society or group fromothers. In 1874 the anthropologist E. B. Tyler defined culture as“that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,

morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquiredby man as a member of society.” The definition includes two ele-ments—that which differentiates one group or society from oth-ers and the concept of acquired or learned behavior.

Cultural diversity contrasts with the idea of a universal humannature implied in biological explanations of human behavior.Anthropology has argued that human behavior is produced bydiscrete human cultures rather than determined by biological orgenetic nature. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict made thisview a part of the college education of several generations ofAmerican students. The word culture not only points to sub-stance but embodies a perspective on societies—a way ofexplaining differences, often called “cultural determinism.”Though anthropologists themselves have criticized the perspec-tive in recent years, it remains associated with their discipline.Against this emphasis on culture is a more universal view ofhuman nature, in examples such as the nuclear family or taboosagainst incest or eating human flesh.

Tylor’s definition, however, is a loose collection of practicesand ideas that differ in their significance and constraining char-acter. In Spain the evening meal usually occurs at 10 pm or later;in the United States, it occurs at 6 pm or shortly after. Neithersociety supports this practice with a sense of moral certitude.These are habits. They differ from intensely held beliefs or pref-erences that are perceived as morally binding because theyreflect “human nature.” Stoning to death has been the pre-scribed punishment for adultery in some societies, in contrast toa much milder treatment in others.

Tyler saw cultures as collections of rules and beliefs with dif-ferent levels of significance. Other anthropologists have used cul-ture to refer to a pervasive quality of a society. In this sensecultures are integrated and manifested in a variety of actions.Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture (1934) distinguished twotypes of primitive society: The Dionysian, which values psycho-logical states of excess, contrasted with the Apollonian, with itsmeasured values for sticking to the middle of the road.Pervasiveness and constraint are the salient dimensions of cul-ture in much social research. Its pervasiveness suggests that a cul-ture is shared by a group and, as in Benedict’s work, permeatesmuch of its activity.

Culture constrains through its exclusiveness. Actions arebounded by the categories and rules that exclude alternatives.Members of a society may be unaware that their actions and

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beliefs are unique to their society. Louis Dumont, in HomoHierarchicus, asserts that “the concept of the self in Westernsocieties differs from the concept of the self as a part of a groupin India. The principle of equality permeates Western society,while that of hierarchy permeates Indian culture.” We mighteven reasonably assert that culture “has” us more than we haveit, as Bennett Berger put it.

The constraining quality of culture is perhaps its most vitalaspect in social research. Here it contrasts with social structure.Karl Mannhem’s conception of ideology, for instance, explainsknowledge, including political doctrines, by reference to thesocial and economic position of adherents and spokespersons.In a similar vein, “bourgeois culture” is often thought to reflectthe capitalist middle class.

The conflict between cultural and structural perspectivesfuels one of the most common debates in the human sciences.Karl Marx stated the structural approach succinctly in TheGerman Ideology: “It is not the consciousness of man that deter-mines existence but the existence that determines conscious-ness.” This assertion of social structure as source and explanationof ideas has often been contrasted with cultural approaches suchas Max Weber’s in his famed The Protestant Ethic and the Spiritof Capitalism.

Weber related Protestant ideals to the moral and ethical ele-ments of the character that prized capitalistic behavior. Thehuman meaning of the economic behavior of capitalism couldnot be understood without seeing its cultural framework of eth-ical and cognitive ideas. The cultural roots of economic behaviorwere independent or quasi-independent of economic interests.What was prized was the character of capitalists presentedthrough their economic behavior. The meaning of economicbehavior could not be assumed; it had to be studied.

Over the past three decades the narrower use of culture torefer to the meanings of objects and events has gained favor, inwhat has been called “the cultural turn.” This is also part of thegeneral intellectual movement toward emphasis on the subjectrather than on objective conditions as the sources of action.Studies of social problems have focused on how conditions cometo be interpreted as public problems. Studies of social move-ments have examined the process of framing—which involvesthe categories of language and belief by which situations aredefined. Even scientific knowledge has been found to use cog-nitive paradigms that lead and limit theory and experience. BrunoLatour and Steve Woolgar capture much of this perspective inthe title of their seminal work, Laboratory Life: The SocialConstruction of Scientific Facts.

Clifford Geertz, a major figure in the cultural turn, reconcep-tualized the term ideology in contrast to its traditional utilitarianusage. “The function of ideology,” he wrote in The Interpretationof Cultures, “is to make an autonomous politics possible by pro-viding the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, thesuasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped.”This perspective leads the analyst to examine the discourses weuse to interpret events and objects and give them meaning. It rec-ognizes that meanings may be multiple and may differ acrossand within groups. The ways in which symbol systems enablepeople to interpret their experience, even to construct their expe-rience in a shared way, has become the central focus of a cultur-al perspective.

The cultural turn has resulted in a more searching assessmentof the limits and utility of the concept of culture. Cultures char-acterize modern societies at different levels of uniformity or con-flict; they have diverse relations to social structure; and they aremore or less pervasive and constraining. The problem of the rela-tionship of culture to practice also remains important. Cultureremains an indispensable though ambiguous concept in the dis-course of the social sciences.

recommended resources

Bennett Berger. An Essay on Culture: Symbolic Structure andSocial Structure (University of California Press, 1995). Shows offrecent efforts in the sociology of culture.

Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn:New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (University ofCalifornia Press, 1999). Historians and sociologists suggestpaths of research that follow from the triumph of cultural con-structionism.

T. S. Eliot. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (Harcourt,Brace, 1949). A classic statement of culture as cultivation,including its frequently conservative implications.

Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books,1973). Perhaps the most influential work in the cultural turnof the social sciences.

Joseph R. Gusfield. The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking,Driving and the Symbolic Order (University of Chicago Press,1981). This book explores a number of aspects of meaningin the recognition and punishment of drunk driving.

Marshall Sahlins. Culture and Practical Reason (University ofChicago Press, 1976). Another anthropologist influentiallydebunks materialist accounts of social life in favor of culturalapproaches.

Joseph R. Gusfield has helped inspire the cultural turn through books

such as Symbolic Crusade, The Culture of Public Problems, and

Contested Meanings.

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