What is Culture? Is it Possible or Desirable to have Different Approaches to its Study?

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Sarah Jane Lacey

What is Culture? Is it Possible or Desirable to have Different Approaches to its Study?

In his book ‘Culture and Anarchy’, Matthew Arnold said that to have culture ‘is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world known everywhere’. (Arnold, 1882, p 28).

 In this statement he captures the conceptual essence of high culture, or perhaps more to the point, what has become ‘high culture’. Since this time, the term "culture" has come to have a broader meaning, more inclusive of everything within a given culture rather than simply the most elite cultural manifestations. This has caused the term "high culture" to begin to serve for referring to those aspects of culture which are most highly valued and esteemed by a given society's political, social, economic, and intellectual elite. For example, Opera would be associated with high culture as it is enjoyed and spectated by the ‘social elite’ and the people who can afford it (economic influence). Generally, the most powerful members of a society are the ones who have the most influence over cultural meaning systems, and therefore the more powerful classes tend to enjoy the privilege of defining ‘high culture’.

        In opposition to this idea Raymond Williams stated;

‘Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, and its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in

 institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing them selves into the land.  A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in two senses: to mean a whole way of life-the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning-the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind’. (Williams.R,1958, p6).

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        As an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford, Raymond Williams spectated culture in the ‘highest’ sense of the word.  Anthropologists such as Matthew Arnold that associated culture with ‘good – breeding’ did not impress Williams. In his book he talks about the snobbish behaviour he saw in Cambridge teashops while he was studying there. (Williams.R, 1958, p37) For centuries the city and university had represented high culture, in terms of the arts and learning, for example scholarship, architecture and music and yet Williams remarks that learning is an ‘every day activity’.

        

As you can see, Williams and Arnold have ...

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