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 directly opposing ideas when concerned with the definition of culture and I believe that these oppositions exist for several reasons. To begin with, these definitions were stated in completely different centuries; Matthew Arnold was educated in 1841 as a Scholar of Balliol College at Oxford University. Williams, on the other hand was educated over one hundred years later at Oxford and I believe Williams experience of the ‘social snobbery’ that seemed to exist while he was there was merely a little snippet of what Oxford perhaps used to be like as a whole one hundred years earlier. It seems that Williams was part of the rebellion that occurred in opposition to ‘high culture’ and if you study more closely the definitions of culture today you will see that Williams definition relates with today’s definitions of popular culture.
A clear implication of the idea that mass culture opposes high culture and is essentially a product of the formation of high culture can be sited in John Frow’s book, ‘Cultural Studies and Cultural Value’.
‘the high art of our age is paradoxically indeed culture creating art in that it creates its opposite, mass culture. It generates a culture of life in order to articulate itself in tension with it’ (Frow,1995, p18).
In this statement, Frow is suggesting that the term ‘high culture’ has moved from what it used to be known to what it means today and its ‘new meaning’ has formed the meaning of mass culture. It is an idea which supports the notion that the
meaning of a sign is in its relation to other signs, rather than deriving from any inherent features of signifiers or any reference to material objects.
An example of a more recent definition of culture would be Robert Murphy’s definition,
‘Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society and transmitted from generation to generation. It thus refers to the norms, values and standards by which people act, and it includes the ways distinctive in each society of ordering the world and rendering it intelligible. Culture is…a set of mechanisms for survival, but it provides us also with a definition of reality. It is the matrix into which we are born; it is the anvil upon which our persons and destinies are forged’. (Murphy, 1986, p14).
As you can see, there are strong similarities that exist between this definition of culture and Raymond Williams’s definition of culture. They are both concerned with society and the behaviour of people in society and neither of them suggest that culture is merely associated with the ‘high class’ person, but directly and indirectly, they both suggest that culture relates to ‘society’ as a whole and all of its inhabitants.
When studying these conflicting definitions of culture it is clear to see that it is possible to have different approaches to the study of culture, particularly as the word ‘culture’ is a difficult word with multiple and changing meanings. Also, Matthew Arnold and Raymond Williams, although both educated at Oxford, actually came from two very different childhood backgrounds. Arnold came from a very ‘well to do’
upbringing, his father was Headmaster at Rugby school, and he was educated at Winchester one hundred years earlier that Williams. Williams on the other hand, came from a modest background, his father was a railway signalman and he attended the local grammar school. I think it would be fair to suggest that Raymond must have felt like an outsider at Oxford because of his social background and because of this situation he perhaps had different views opposed on him and was open to different sorts of social situations in comparison to Matthew Arnold. Ulf Hannerz conveys this idea explicitly when he says
‘People manage meanings from where they are in the social structure’ At any one time the individual is surrounded by a flow of externally available, culturally shaped meaning which influences his ordering of experiences and intentions’. (Hannerz, 1991, p65)
Here, Hannerz suggests that things look different depending on where you see them from. For example, Williams interprets ‘culture’ to be something quite different from what Arnold interprets culture to be and I see this to be predominantly due to their differences in social background.
As for the question, is it ‘desirable’ to have different approaches to the study of culture? This is a question which can be answered in many different ways, much like the definition of culture. As you can probably tell, having different approaches to the study of culture gives a much broader view on culture as a whole. I have only taken a look at a limited number of anthropologists, but there are many more different
variations on the definition of culture. As we have already seen, people come from different backgrounds and different social status; definitions of culture have also been taken from different time periods which change their impact as definitions. Some people may say that these many conflicting and variations of definitions are not a good thing because they leave the definition of culture in limbo. However, I believe that this broad spectrum of ideas and views is essential to with hold a deeper understanding of the term that is ‘culture’. I see it is what has made our society what it is today. In his introduction of his book, John Frow acknowledges the fact that Cultural studies is continually being researched when he says,
‘I pose these questions with in the framework of the discipline of cultural studies. But that discipline – both as a relatively arbitrary institutional demarcation and as a set of problems still in the process of being formed and enunciated – is itself a symptom of one of these problems’.
(Frow, 1995, p1)
In this statement Frow recognises that Culture is still being ‘formed’ and expressed even today and it is in a state where its meaning is constantly being assessed and constantly varied. He does however recognise this fact as a ‘problem’, something which is an inconvenience, something which is not necessary. In my opinion, it is highly likely that he takes this view because his book is critiquing the discipline of cultural studies. In his book he argues that the field of culture has multiple centres and multiple domains of value and he implies that this is a problem. I
would have to disagree with his theory, although initially the idea of having many conflicting views and opinions of cultural studies is a daunting prospect, in the long term it is something which can only be beneficial to the study of culture. After all, culture, as defined in the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology is,
‘All that in human society which is socially rather than biologically transmitted’
(Marshall, 1998)
I believe that when social scientists use the term culture they tend to be talking about a less restrictive concept than implied in everyday speech, because ‘culture is something that is socially transmitted rather than biologically transmitted’ (Marshall, 1998, p137)
It is therefore something which is learned. For example, many qualities of human life are transmitted genetically - an infant’s desire for food is triggered by physiological characteristics determined within the human genetic code. An adult’s specific desire for cereal and milk in the morning, on the other hand can not be explained genetically, rather, it is a learned ‘cultural’ response to morning hunger. So, culture is something which is ‘learned’ and the study of culture initiates learning, not only about the arts, or high society, but also when concerned with the masses and different ethnicities and all aspects of culture and cultural studies generally. In my view, this can not be a bad thing as it merely broadens our view of culture and allows the people who create the culture they live in to see it and other cultures from many different perspectives.
Bibliography
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Arnold.M, Culture and Anarchy Third Ed, 1882 New York Macmillan and Co
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Decerteau.M, Culture in the Plural, 1997 University of Minnesota Press
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Frow.J, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, 1995 Oxford University Press
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Hannerz.U, Cultural Complexity, Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, 1991 Columbia University Press
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Inglis.F, Cultural Studies,1993 Blackwell, Oxford UK and Cambridge USA
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Lee.D, Freedom and Culture, 1959 Englewood Cliffs
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Marshall.G, Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 1998 Oxford University Press
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Strinati.D, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, 1986 Routledge
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Giddens.A and Turner.J, Social Theory Today, 1987 Polity Press
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Williams.R, Convictions, 1958 N.McKenzie