The Concept of Culture: A History and Reappraisal 3030229815, 9783030229818

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 6
Contents......Page 7
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 8
Chapter 2: Two Singular Conceptions of Culture: The Aesthetic and the Developmental......Page 18
Culture as Aesthetic Cultivation......Page 19
The Anthropological Concept of Culture......Page 26
Chapter 3: ‘Culture’ in Sociology and Cultural Studies......Page 34
Sociology......Page 35
Cultural Studies......Page 48
Chapter 4: Problems with the Concept of Culture and a Suggested Reformulation......Page 66
Culture Contrasts......Page 68
Cultural Deprivation......Page 75
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity......Page 79
Digital Culture......Page 83
A Reformulated Concept of Culture......Page 87
Chapter 5: Epilogue......Page 97
References......Page 105
Index......Page 122

Citation preview

The Concept of Culture A History and Reappraisal

Martyn Hammersley

The Concept of Culture

Martyn Hammersley

The Concept of Culture A History and Reappraisal

Martyn Hammersley Open University Milton Keynes, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-22981-8    ISBN 978-3-030-22982-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22982-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word. [Lucien Febvre (1930), discussing the term ‘civilization’.]

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Anna Traianou for inviting me to talk to her students at Goldsmiths about the concept of culture, thereby prompting me to think more carefully about the topic: this book is the result. I am also grateful to my colleagues Heather Montgomery and Roger Gomm, along with an anonymous referee, for their comments on earlier drafts—the final product has benefitted greatly from their help.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Two Singular Conceptions of Culture: The Aesthetic and the Developmental 11 3 ‘Culture’ in Sociology and Cultural Studies 27 4 Problems with the Concept of Culture and a Suggested Reformulation 59 5 Epilogue 91 References99 Index117

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  The word ‘culture’ is widely used in the social sciences. However, the intended meaning is often far from clear. In this introductory chapter, the history of the term is briefly sketched, and an outline provided of how it has been used in social science. There has been variation in whether ‘culture’ is treated as singular or plural. Two versions of a singular interpretation have been influential: the first is concerned with aesthetic and ethical cultivation; while the second is a developmental conception in which history is portrayed as involving a growth of Culture. There have also been two pluralistic conceptions. One interprets cultures as whole ways of life. The other focuses on the ubiquitous processes of meaning-­ making that occur in diverse local contexts, and the role of distinctive symbol systems or discourses within these. Keywords the Meaning of ‘Culture’ • the History of ‘Culture’ • Civilization • Subculture • Matthew Arnold • Culture and anthropology • Culture and sociology ‘Culture’ is one of the most widely used terms in the social sciences. Yet, while its meaning has long been recognized as problematic—Trilling (1967: 10) described the ‘semantic difficulties’ as ‘notorious’—it is often employed in ways that ignore this. Furthermore, its most common mode of usage today overlaps to some degree with the meaning of other terms, © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hammersley, The Concept of Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22982-5_1

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such as ‘tradition’, ‘civilization’, ‘custom’, ‘myth’, ‘perspective’, ‘worldview’, ‘ideology’, ‘discourse’, and ‘habitus’. These are not in any straightforward sense synonyms, but they have a close (if rather murky) relationship with ‘culture’ in the social scientific lexicon. And they are themselves by no means unequivocal in meaning. For instance, ‘ideology’ is sometimes treated as equivalent to ‘worldview’, which corresponds with some interpretations of ‘culture’, though its predominant sense implies a false representation or form of understanding that has negative consequences. Similarly, ‘discourse’ can refer to speech, but also to a particular system of phrases that formulate some domain in a distinctive way; and, as Howarth (2000: 2) notes, there are even commentators who treat it as ‘synonymous with the entire social system, in which discourses literally constitute the social and political world’. Again, the overlap with some meanings of ‘culture’ is obvious here. There is uncertainty and confusion surrounding all these terms, then; and in my view, this seriously obstructs social scientific analysis. So, my aims in this book are quite specific. First of all, to clarify the different senses that have been given to the word ‘culture’, through examining some of the contexts in which these have been developed and deployed. As we shall see, this is a complicated story, but I believe it repays careful attention. I will also outline some key theoretical contrasts in which the concept is implicated; and, towards the end, I will suggest how the problems to which these give rise could be avoided through a reformulation of the concept for the purposes of sociological analysis. In the Epilogue, I briefly address the relationship between use of the concept in social science and its role in evaluative discussions about what is a worthwhile life, what is the good society, how societies ought to be changed, whether particular institutional or local practices are right or wrong, and so on.1 Help in clarifying the meaning(s) of ‘culture’, and perhaps even in resolving the conceptual problems associated with it, can be gained by examining its etymology. Williams (1983: 87) traces its origins to the Latin words ‘colere’ and ‘cultura’, a core meaning of which was ‘the tending of natural growth’; and, by metaphorical extension, this came to refer 1  There have, of course, been many books devoted to the topic of culture, for example: Williams (1981), Jenks (1993), Bennett (1998), Kuper (1999), Oswell (2006), and Eagleton (2016). However, generally speaking, they have not addressed the concept in terms of its effectiveness for social scientific analysis, which is my exclusive focus here. For discussion of cultural studies and policies in more global terms, see Durrer et al. (2017).

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to the intellectual and moral development of human beings—with an ambiguity about the extent to which this needed to be actively induced.2 The notion of ‘cultivation’ is closely related, along with the German concept of Bildung (meaning ‘personal or spiritual development’) (Bruford 1975), which was modelled on Cicero’s concept of ‘cultura animi’ and the understanding of this developed in early modern Europe (on which see Corneanu 2012). This was the foundation on which some later usage of ‘culture’ built, though we should also note the links back to Greek debates about the relationship between nomos and physis (see Guthrie 1971). In its early employment, the word ‘culture’ was frequently treated as interchangeable with ‘civilization’, but in some contexts their meanings began to diverge (and there was variation in the distinction involved). Indeed, in the nineteenth century, there were influential writers who saw ‘culture’ as referring to what was being lost as a result of the advance of ‘industrial civilization’. This reflected, in part, an opposition between literature, art, and craft, on the one hand, and how science and technology were reshaping society, on the other. And the contrast here was often formulated as between organic growth and mechanical artificiality. Such a view was central to the thinking of Matthew Arnold—poet, literary critic, and school inspector—whose work was a particularly important influence on the subsequent development of the concept of culture, at least in English-language accounts. By contrast, within anthropology, the terms ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ were treated as virtual synonyms in the nineteenth century—here the focus of investigation was the evolution of society from primitive to advanced stages. And, in broad terms, this also corresponds with some later usage of the term ‘civilization’, where it is taken to refer to the level of ‘development’ of Western societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see, for instance, Ferguson 2012).3 2  Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) provide a complementary history of the idea of ‘culture’ to that of Williams. Aside from identifying early hints of the twentieth-century anthropological sense of the term in, for example, Descartes and Pascal, they document and seek to classify the many definitions of ‘culture’ produced by anthropologists in the first half of that century. See also Vermeersch (1965). 3  There have been important national differences within Europe over the past three centuries in the interpretations of, and the relative emphasis on, the terms ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’, as well as change in their meanings. See Kuper (1999: ch 1), and also Leopold (1980: ch 6), Stocking (1987: ch 1) and Elias (2000: ch 1, section II). The culture-civilization contrast was particularly influential in German thought (see Thompson 1990: 124–126), and in English Romanticism, both of which informed Arnold’s conception of ‘Culture’. In France, ‘civilization’ seems to have been the preferred term (Febvre 1930), though ‘la cul-

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An important tension within the meaning of the term ‘culture’ relates to whether it is singular or plural. In the nineteenth century, it tended to be used in singular form by both cultural critics like Arnold and by anthropologists, despite the important difference in the meanings they gave to it. However, even in the eighteenth century, Herder had argued for the plurality of cultures and suggested that each must be understood in its own terms (see Wells 1959; Forster 2010). Herder’s ideas were subsequently taken up in the Romantic Movement, sometimes encouraging an emphasis on the value of ‘folk culture’ and of distinctive national cultures. Other important inheritors of Herder’s ideas were writers in the tradition of nineteenth-century German historicism (Iggers 1968; Beiser 2011) and the ‘Völkerpsychologie’ of Steinthal and Lazarus, subsequently developed by Wundt into a form of cultural psychology (Kalmar 1987; Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 10–11). Building on this body of work, in the early twentieth century, partly under the influence of German anthropology (Stocking 1995; Penny and Bunzl 2003), social and cultural anthropologists in the US and the UK began to frame their discipline as concerned with studying ‘other cultures’, rather than with charting the evolutionary development of ‘Culture’.4 The term ‘culture’ was also important in German sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century, notably in the work of Simmel, Alfred and Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim (see Frisby 1984: ch 4; Inglis and Almila 2016: chs 3, 4, and 6). In this context, the primary focus was the distinctive nature of modernity and its cultural consequences (see Loader 2015). Here, the meaning given to the term was closer to that of Arnold than to either of the senses employed by anthropologists: it reflected the opposition between culture and civilization mentioned earlier. The development of modern forms of life—involving commercialism, industrialization, and an emphasis on scientific and economic rationality—was regarded ture’ and ‘des cultures’ are also used. There is also a historical-sociological conception of civilization that overlaps with one of the meanings of ‘culture’, where the focus is on ‘civility’, most notably in Elias’s (2000) notion of ‘the civilizing process’ (see also Thomas 2018). Interestingly, there were sometimes reactions against both culture and civilization in the name of ‘naturalness’, as exemplified by ‘primitive societies’. The most influential and complex version of this is to be found in the work of Rousseau. 4  Though anthropologists in the UK tended to formulate their focus as ‘social organization’ rather than ‘culture’, there is also a plural conception of ‘civilization’, whereby a variety of ancient civilizations are recognized, such as the Aztec, Inca, Egyptian, Sumerian, and so on as well as the Graeco-Roman. See, for instance, Cline and Graham (2011).

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by these sociologists as irreversible, but at the same time there was concern about what was being lost in terms of Culture as a result. Within Anglo-American sociology, the concept of culture also came to play an important role, for example in countering the dominant influence of economics and its narrow concept of ‘rational action’. Even Sumner, an advocate of laissez-faire economics and a social Darwinist, assigned a key role to ‘folkways’ and ‘mores’ in understanding human action (Sumner 1906; Tufts 1907). And, later, social classes, minority ethnic populations, religious sects, and youth groups came to be seen as displaying distinctive cultures or subcultures, or as representing counter-cultures (Mintz 1956; Cohen 1955; Cloward and Ohlin 1960; Yinger 1960, 1984; Miller and Riessman 1961). Interestingly, the origin of the concept of subculture seems to have been in anthropology—one of the earliest discussions is in Linton’s (1936) Study of Man. He writes that: While ethnologists have been accustomed to speak of tribes and nationalities as though they were the primary culture-bearing units, the total culture of a society of this type is really an aggregate of sub-cultures. Within tribes or unmechanized civilizations these sub-cultures are normally carried by the various local groups which go to make the total society and are transmitted within these groups. In a few cases there may also be subcultures which are characteristic of particular social classes and which are transmitted within them […]. (p. 275)

He goes on to suggest that ‘Each individual accepts the patterns of his own sub-culture as proper guides to behavior and rarely attempts to imitate the patterns of other sub-cultures even when he is familiar with them. In fact, the presence of such differences usually makes him cling more tenaciously to the habits of his particular sub-culture, since these become a symbol of his membership in his particular social unit’ (p. 275). Central elements of the concept of subculture are already present in this early treatment, though it has been a concept predominantly developed and deployed by sociologists rather than anthropologists. Also of significance in the context of sociology was Parsons’s argument that culture represents a separate system from that of the social, shaping human behaviour in terms of both its goals and what are taken to be legitimate means for achieving them (see Schmid 1993). Later, in the 1990s, a form of cultural sociology emerged drawing on but also reacting against Parsons’s approach (see Alexander and Seidman 1990; Alexander 2003;

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Vaisey 2010; Griswold 2013; Inglis and Almila 2016). Meanwhile, in political science, partly under the influence of Parsons, there was a growth of interest in what was referred to as ‘civic culture’ or ‘political culture’, this being treated as a key variable in explaining the stability of governments (see Almond and Verba 1963; Inglehart 1988). Around the same time, in the sociology of organizations and management studies, the notion of ‘organizational cultures’ became very widely employed (see Smircich 1983; Ouchi and Wilkins 1985). And this sense of the term, in particular, has come to be part of everyday usage, for example in declarations that the problems faced by some organization arise from its ‘culture’, so that ‘culture change’ is required. Finally, from the 1960s onwards, a whole new trans-disciplinary field—cultural studies—came to be established, which overlapped with, and rivalled, other social sciences, particularly sociology.5 Within twentieth-century anthropology, parts of US sociology, and in cultural studies, there sometimes arose a very broad conception of culture as concerned with meaning-making; focusing on the means by which people make sense of and give significance to what they experience. This has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Sometimes it has involved a preoccupation with the work of specific categories of people (such as intellectuals—scientists, writers, artists, etc.) or of the mass media or the advertising industry in the production of culture but, often, the interest has been in how ordinary people in ordinary situations construct meanings, for example via narratives. Sometimes meaning-making has been treated as a consciously directed process, but more often as unconscious and closely associated with, and/or analogous to, the use of language. There has also been variation in whether meaning-making is treated as going on alongside other sorts of process, those of a more ‘material’ kind—such as technological and economic developments, and the exercise of political power. Or whether, alternatively, it effectively produces all social phenomena, so that there can be nothing independent of the meaning-­making process. 5  The relationship between these fields is complex: see Williams’s (1981) concept of a sociology of culture, and McLennan’s (2006) argument for a ‘sociological cultural studies’. A small number of economists have also given attention to culture, as represented by the Journal of Cultural Economics, though the interest in ‘culture and economy’ is by no means restricted to them: see Ray and Sayer (1999). There is also a more recent version of ‘cultural psychology’ (see Stigler et al. 1990; Shweder 2003).

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In summary, out of this long and complex history, four, rather different, meanings of the word ‘culture’ can be identified: 1. Aesthetic cultivation. In its earliest formulation, this first interpretation of the term treats culture as singular, as relating to universal human ideals, and as referring primarily to forms of literature, drama, art, music, and ideas that are judged to be especially valuable. Frequently, their value is seen as arising from a capacity to facilitate the harmonious development of intellectual and moral virtues; as contrasted with those ideas, types of literature, and art regarded as worthless, or even as detrimental to intellectual and moral development. This sense of the term did not emerge within the social sciences but in the context of what might be called cultural criticism, for example the writings of Arnold. But, as already noted, a version of it was adopted by influential German sociologists around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. By contrast, later sociological work using this first sense has tended to focus on the role of ‘high culture’ in allegedly reproducing and maintaining social class divisions, and/or Western global dominance; so that, here, the positive value previously assigned to Culture becomes negative. There has also been some work in cultural studies that has inverted the evaluative gradient between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, celebrating the latter. Finally, there is a variant of this first sense of the term that refers simply to ‘the arts and literature’, or even to ‘the creative industries’, with little distinction being made between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ types of cultural product. 2. Developmental. The second influential meaning of ‘culture’ also treats what it refers to as singular, as varying in degree, and as of positive value. However, in this usage, the term covers all aspects of human social life that are a product of learning and adaptation rather than of biological inheritance. Different societies, historical and contemporary, or different segments of a society, are viewed as possessing varying degrees of Culture in this sense, or as representing different stages of cultural development, so that they can be ranked in these terms: either in general or in specific respects, such as in some aspect of technology. So, from this perspective, societies, and social groups more generally, vary in their cultural level, but this is, at least potentially, subject to change over time, rather

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than being permanently fixed. However, usually, change is conceived in terms of a single ladder of development. One version is to be found in the work of nineteenth-century anthropologists, but another arises in the writings of Hegel and Marx—both drawing on the Scottish Enlightenment, notably the work of Ferguson. For Marx, in his early writings, cultures which existed at different times in Europe formed part of a historical process of human development, each one representing a deformed version of human nature, but at the same time containing elements of its true form, all of these being necessary for the eventual full ‘realization’ of human ideals.6 . Cultures as distinct ways of life. The third meaning of ‘culture’ is that 3 which became central in the discipline of anthropology during the twentieth century and up to the present, and it has been influential across social science. Here culture is not treated as singular but as plural. And, as with the second meaning, its reference is not restricted to art, literature, and music, but extends to all aspects of life, along with the values and ideas that shape these. On this view, then, there are diverse cultures, each having internal coherence, their differences perhaps resulting from variation in environment (climate, resources, etc.), or from the fact that they are uniquely created forms expressing distinctive identities. Furthermore, at face value at least, this third usage of the term is descriptive rather than evaluative, by contrast with most versions of the previous two meanings. Nevertheless, sometimes, cultural pluralism is turned into a form of relativism whereby each culture is treated as of value in itself, with no overarching standard available by which they can be judged. Proponents of this third conception of culture have specifically opposed the values built into both of the previously mentioned conceptions, either on the grounds that evaluations must be suspended for scientific work or on the basis of cultural relativism; without a

6  Civilizations outside of Europe were treated by Marx as deviations from this pattern of development, these caused by distinctive features of the local environment, such as the need for large-scale irrigation if agriculture was to take place (see Wittfogel 1957). Marx regarded bourgeois society and culture as a more advanced form than feudal society, and than those various kinds of traditional culture to be found persisting in non-Western societies (Avineri 1968), an idea that was taken over by Vygotsky and Luria in their studies of Russian peasants, see Gielen and Jeshmaridian (1999).

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clear ­distinction between the two sources of objection always being maintained.7 . Culture as meaning-making. Here, culture is treated as a process 4 rather than as an object. The focus is on the collective means by which, or ways in which, people make sense of, and assign significance to, what they experience—with these meanings viewed as producing, or at least structuring, social actions and institutions. Here, language and other kinds of sign are treated as central to the analysis, with particular attention given to the character of texts, sign systems, discourses, or rhetorical forms. These are sometimes treated as generating distinctive experiential worlds. Today this notion of culture is to be found across anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, though in each locale it competes with other conceptions. One influential source was French structuralism; others were symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology in US sociology, as well as cognitive and interpretive forms of anthropology. Like the other definitions of ‘culture’, this fourth one is subject to divergent interpretations. As I noted earlier, this takes place along several dimensions: whether the focus is on key meaning-makers or on all meaning-making in the context of everyday life; whether the process is conceptualized as consciously directed or as operating below or beyond people’s awareness; and whether it is seen as entirely constituting the social world or as going on alongside other forms of structuration, of a more ‘material’ kind. The differences among (and within) these four senses of the term ‘culture’ highlight many of the important complexities surrounding usage of this word in social science today, and it is therefore necessary to examine the sources and character of each of them in more detail. As already noted, the first meaning is exemplified in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural criticism, though it was also deployed elsewhere; the second can be found in early anthropology, the philosophy of history, and Marxism;  Some commentators have regarded cultures in this third sense as going through stages of cyclical development, for example ones analogous to childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age; and this is another way in which evaluation may enter. This idea can be traced back to the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius but was significantly developed by Vico and Herder. However, it has had relatively little academic influence since the middle of the twentieth century. For key exemplars in that century, see Spengler (1918) and Toynbee (1947). 7

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the third is central to twentieth-century social and cultural anthropology. The fourth is less localized but can be found in interpretive anthropology and cultural studies, as well as in interactionist and cultural sociology. In the next two chapters, I will look at how the concept of culture was developed in some of these diverse contexts.

CHAPTER 2

Two Singular Conceptions of Culture: The Aesthetic and the Developmental

Abstract  This chapter examines two influential conceptions of culture that treat it as singular: one focused on aesthetic cultivation, the other a developmental conception characteristic of nineteenth-century anthropology. The ideas of Matthew Arnold are explored in detail to illustrate the first of these, indicating that they are more subtle and complex than is often assumed. The development of this conception is traced into the twentieth century, notably in the writings of Eliot and Leavis. The anthropological idea of a single, evolving Culture is then examined, along with its subsequent rejection by twentieth-century anthropologists. There is also a brief sketch of the range of ideas about culture and society that have subsequently become characteristic of that discipline. Keywords  Culture • Matthew Arnold • T. S. Eliot • F. R. Leavis • Nineteenth-century anthropology • Edward Tylor • Culture and anthropology In the nineteenth century, there were two very influential conceptions of culture. Probably the most famous definition of ‘Culture’ in English-­ speaking countries at this time was provided by Matthew Arnold. He declared that Culture consists of ‘the best that has been known and said in

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Hammersley, The Concept of Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22982-5_2

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the world’ (Arnold 1873: preface).1 He was strongly influenced by German notions of Bildung, as well as by English Romanticism, notably the ideas of Coleridge. Alongside this, British anthropology offered a very different idea of Culture, though this also drew on continental sources, along with American ones (notably the work of Lewis Henry Morgan), and had wide influence. In both cases, Culture was given positive value and was treated as something that varied in degree: among people and/or among societies. The concern for Arnold was the extent to which individuals were cultured (or ‘aesthetically cultivated’), in other words the degree to which their characters were formed by the tradition of Western art and literature, this being taken to represent universal human ideals.2 This served as the basis for his criticism of the typical traits of the three main social classes in nineteenth-century England. In the case of the anthropologists, the term ‘Culture’ covered all aspects of human life that were not determined by biological heredity—and so included technology as much as religion and morality. And the level of culture to be found in Western Europe was usually treated as the end-point, or at least the most advanced stage, of cultural development. So, the task for the anthropologist was to trace this process of development, with the study of contemporary ‘primitive’ societies providing an insight into past stages of development in the West.

Culture as Aesthetic Cultivation For Arnold, ‘Culture’ referred to literature and ideas, and in particular to those which were characteristic of the classical humanist tradition that developed in Europe after the Middle Ages, drawing on the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome as well as Christianity, all this suffused through the influence of German and English Romanticism (see Trilling 1949: Intro). Arnold treats Culture as a source of knowledge and understanding that is essential to living well: it embodies an ideal of the good life, and indicates how this can be realized in the face of a contingent world—‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet describes it. Arnold has sometimes been seen as promoting the culture of a dominant elite or class (e.g. see Turner 1990: 42 or McGuigan 1992: 1  A similar notion, presented via the concept of civilization, developed in France, see Burke (1973). 2  It is worth noting, though, that Arnold was also influenced by Eastern Philosophy, notably the Gita.

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21). And it is true that one of the sources on which he drew, Coleridge, had called for the establishment of a clerisy—an idea later taken up by Eliot. Furthermore, something like the kind of Culture Arnold championed came to operate as a mode of class distinction in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, he did not regard Culture as the possession of a single elite or class. Given that his views are frequently misrepresented, they require detailed attention here.3 Arnold’s starting point, then, was the value of ideas and attitudes represented in, or inculcated by, literature and the humanities, perhaps especially poetry, as offering a higher form of understanding and appreciation that serves to develop personal and public virtue. As this indicates, a conception of the cultured person is assumed, and thereby, indirectly, Culture relates to all aspects of a person’s life. Indeed, for Arnold, what was important about ‘the best that has been said and thought’ was that it facilitated a process of personal development that could, in principle, lead to what he refers to as ‘spiritual perfection’ (Arnold 1993: 65 and passim). He contrasts the value of this with material wealth. So, discussing those whom he refers to as Philistines, Arnold writes: ‘Culture says: “Consider these people, […] their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”’. For Arnold, then, the focus of Culture is on the ancient question of what is a good life, and the virtues that contribute to, or are constitutive of, it. As already noted, Romanticism, as well as classical humanism, was a key influence on Arnold; in particular, an understanding of poetry, and of literature more generally, as going beyond the immediate appearance of the world, and therefore beyond the scope of science—lifting us above ‘lower’ desires to higher forms of enjoyment and better forms of human relationship. This was made possible by the capacity of imagination to fuse perceptions and thoughts into recognition of a harmonious sense of the whole meaning of life. As Coleridge (1907: 6) remarked, imagination can ‘awaken […] the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and direct […] it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an 3  See Striphas (2017), and also Baldick (1983: ch 2). Still among the best discussions is Trilling (1939).

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i­nexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand’. There is opposition here both to the world as represented by natural science, which is viewed as ‘inanimate and cold’, and to the method that produces this—on the grounds that it is not true to human life. And behind science, for Arnold and the Romantics, lay the ‘industrial civilization’ that was transforming English society at the time (see Williams 1958). Thus, in effect, Arnold was also putting forward a version of another ancient argument, this time about the need for virtue in citizens if a society and its members are to thrive, in the true sense of realizing human ideals rather than simply increasing material wealth. In this respect, like other influential figures at the time, he was reacting against key aspects of contemporary society and those trends in political and religious thinking associated with them; though he did not do this in a simple reactionary fashion, in the sense of wanting to turn the clock back—he did not believe that this was possible (see Trilling 1939: ch 2 and passim). Thus, much of Arnold’s polemic was against the materialism and scientific rationalism that was increasingly influential at the time—for example, in the form of utilitarianism and the ‘philosophical radicalism’ closely associated with it, alongside the growing commercialism of British society. He interpreted these as suggesting that human beings should be viewed as primarily, if not entirely, concerned with doing what they desired, with being happy, valuing whatever pleased them, and pursuing wealth. At the same time, he also stood against religious tendencies of a Puritan kind that were, in his view, aesthetically deaf and blind as well as morally restricted. In both cases, he was opposing what he regarded as deformed and excessively narrow views of what is worthwhile in life, those which downplayed or even denied the value of literature and art, and the qualities that these cultivate. While Arnold shared the vocal contemporary concern about the growth of the urban industrial working classes, and the disorder that their empowerment could bring about, he saw this danger as arising primarily from the kind of society that Britain had become: one in which Culture is not accorded its proper role. In effect, feudal habits of deference had been eroded; and, while this was certainly desirable, there was nothing to replace these so as to preserve social unity. Thus, most of his essay on Culture and Anarchy is a reaction against what he sees as the rejection of Culture on utilitarian and/or religious grounds by politicians and

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i­ntellectuals associated with the rising middle classes. He criticized them for their parochialism and self-satisfaction. At the same time, in his essay on Equality he questioned the level of inequality in the distribution of property in nineteenth-century Britain, and also argued that ‘an hereditary aristocracy, whatever its political achievements in the past, was illequipped to understand a modern world that was […] inevitably moving towards greater social equality’ (Collini 1993: x and xiii).4 As this makes clear, Arnold acted as a cultural critic, in other words as a critic of the culture (or cultures)—in the twentieth-century anthropological sense of the term—that prevailed in Britain at the time he lived.5 As I noted earlier, his views have often been regarded as elitist, and it is certainly true that he believed there was a superior form of cultural sensibility and that people varied considerably in the extent to which they had achieved this. He writes that ‘culture indefatigably tries not to make what each raw person may like the rule by which he fashions himself but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful and becoming and to get the raw person to like that’ (Arnold 1993: 64). However, he did not believe that only an elite could achieve spiritual perfection, nor that Culture was currently concentrated in a single social class (he talks of ‘aliens’ within each social class who appreciate Culture); indeed, his primary concern was to encourage its pursuit in all social classes. Furthermore, given that Culture has a moral function, providing the joy and consolation required in the face of the trials and disappointments of life, he insisted that the state should play a key role in promoting, and spreading access to it—particularly through schooling. He regarded this as desirable both because it enabled people to live more fulfilling lives and because it would contribute to harmonious social development. Arnold’s ideas, and the sources on which he drew, had considerable influence during the later nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the idea of Culture as aesthetic cultivation served to define the identity of key segments of the professional middle classes, and of those who aspired to this status. To a large extent, it came to be institutionalized: through the education system and by other means 4  See Trilling’s (1939: 280–282) illuminating discussion of the parallels between Arnold and Rousseau: he was no reactionary, but nor was he a democrat in any simple sense. 5  There were, of course, other influential cultural critics in nineteenth-century Britain, of various political complexions, Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, and Morris being among the best known of the others (see Le Quesne 1982; Stansky 1984; Landow 1985; Collini 1991).

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as well. Collini (1988: 3) notes: ‘Arnold’s ideas have been invoked in justification of so many of those institutions which have contributed a distinctive, and often distinctively high, tone to the cultural life of modern Britain, such as the BBC, the British Council, and university departments of English.’ However, what was involved here was increasingly different in content and spirit from the classical humanism that Arnold espoused (see Collini 1991: ch 9). A conception of Culture and its role that is similar, in many respects, to Arnold’s can be found in the work of prominent twentieth-century writers and literary critics, notably T. S. Eliot, and F. R. and Q. D. Leavis—though Eliot initially rejected Romanticism and the work of Arnold in particular (Loring 1935). All of these writers opposed what they saw as the negative spiritual consequences of industrial civilization, of ‘mass society’, and of the growing influence of science; though what they specifically reacted against, and how they reacted to it, varied somewhat. Eliot seems to use the word ‘Culture’ to refer to what is worthwhile in any aspect of life, and there is a sense in which, for him, whatever belongs to established custom has value by that very fact.6 Thus, he includes under the heading of English Culture not only literature, art, and music but also the activities of civil servants, events like the Henley Regatta and dog races, even pin tables and Wensleydale cheese (Eliot 1948: 31). At the same time, he places considerable emphasis on good manners and a sense of one’s position in society. His focus is very much on what is required for a harmonious, orderly society to exist, especially one that is as large and complex as that of England. At one point, he notes that it is impossible for any individual to be culturally accomplished to a high level in all aspects of life. Rather, what is to be hoped for is that this accomplishment will be true of the whole society, and this is both the function and the source of cultural accomplishment in the individual. Thus, Eliot emphasizes the mutual dependence of cultural work in different fields, so that to be a cultured artist (though not necessarily a great one) it is necessary to have reasonable manners and intellectual gifts. As societies become more complex, their various areas of activity become somewhat independent of one another, and a hierarchy of social classes develops, in line with the status assigned to the occupational tasks to which their members are devoted. 6  He combines something like Arnold’s conception of culture with an organic view of society similar to that of twentieth-century anthropology but also to what might be called Tory traditionalism, as exemplified for example by Samuel Johnson.

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Both these forms of differentiation threaten a process of disintegration and consequent debasement of culture, which Eliot believed was taking place in England (and elsewhere) at the time he was writing. At the same time, he saw the class structure as essential for transmission of both the differentiated and the shared aspects of culture. He also insisted that there is a strong relationship between culture and religion, indeed that a culture is the ‘incarnation’ of a religion. For Eliot, then, the Church of England was essential to English culture. He was arguing, above all, against the rise of meritocracy, which he labels ‘the classless society’, since (in his view) this would undermine the transmission and development of a harmonious culture; he also deplores the spread of agnosticism and atheism, and what he viewed as decadent liberalism (see Taylor-Perry 2001). Even more explicitly and strongly than Eliot, F.  R. Leavis viewed an elite that produces and/or appreciates art and literature as the main bulwark against the depredations of mass society (see Mulhern 1979). However, while the members of this elite were more likely to arise from some classes than others, he did not see it as corresponding to the upper class or the middle class in contemporary English society. What he was referring to was very much an intellectual elite, and a very small and quite distinctive one at that. He also had less confidence than Arnold in the extent to which the bulk of the population of Britain could come to appreciate Culture. For example, in an influential pamphlet we find: In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgement. They are still a small minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response. The accepted valuations are a kind of paper currency based upon a very small proportion of gold. To the state of such a currency the possibilities of fine living at any time bear a close relation. (Leavis 1930: 3)

Leavis was closely associated with the rise of English Studies at Cambridge, and thereby with developing a distinctive canon of good literature to which students should be introduced.7 In addition, there was an 7  Work on the development of a canon of English literature had already begun in the late nineteenth century (Collini 1991: ch 9), but Leavis’s version was at odds with the rather chauvinistic, conventional character of early attempts, partly as a result of the influence on him of Modernism. Interestingly, Arnold was opposed to the setting up of English literature

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attempt to convey the kind of close reading required to identify the strengths and weaknesses of particular novels or poems, this by no means limited to matters of style or effectiveness, but also concerned with the depth of understanding they reveal of human beings and their lives. It was not so much a procedure or method but nearer to a skill, relying upon a developing sensibility. At one point Leavis (1930: 3) quotes his colleague I. A. Richards (1926: 60–61) to the effect that the critic of literature ‘is as much concerned with the health of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body. […]’. Indeed, he argues that the ‘standard of living’ of a society can best be judged—indeed, can only be judged—by the literary critic. It is important to emphasize that what was involved here was not conceived as the application of a priori values, but rather as the discovery of what is valuable in and through the process of reading literature and through life experience. For the Leavises, Culture was to be contrasted with the growing flood of commercial material aimed at a mass market: books, newspapers, and magazines; Hollywood films; and ‘light entertainment’ radio and television. In her study Fiction and the Reading Public, Q. D. Leavis (1939) documents what she claims is a process of socio-cultural disintegration and decline, in the form of a shift from Elizabethan times, when all classes participated in the same Culture, for example enjoying the plays of Shakespeare (albeit on different levels), to the present, when a large body of publications, of various kinds, has emerged that is aimed at entertaining the mass of people. Moreover, symptomatic was the fact that any criticism of this popular material through comparison with works of great literature had come to be dismissed as snobbery.8 What is shared with Arnold, above all, is the view that literature and the arts have a moral function: they champion and inculcate certain virtues and forms of life that are at odds both with the culturally levelling materialism of market forces and democracy, and with what was seen as the spiritually deadening influence of science, industrialism, and urbanization. For Leavis, great works of literature are ‘an antidote, now the only possible antidote, to the cheapening and corrupting of experience which the dominant forces of modern mass society conspired to promote’ (Collini 1993: as a university discipline, believing that the study of this literature should be located in the department of Classics: see Collini (1991: ch 9). See also Collini (2013). 8  The debate over popular or mass culture was, of course, by no means restricted to the UK, see Lowenthal (1961).

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xxxii). Industrial ‘civilization’ was viewed by him, as by Arnold and Eliot, as failing not only to provide what humans need in spiritual terms but also as in fact degrading humanity, reducing human beings to machines or animals, emphasizing information and knowledge over true understanding and genuine feeling. This was the basis for his coruscating attack on C. P. Snow’s argument that ‘two cultures’ had developed within British society, involving a sharp divide between the attitudes surrounding developments in science and technology, on the one hand, and those that dominated literature and the arts, on the other, for example under the heading of ‘modernism’ (see Hewison 1997: ch 5; Collini 1997, 2013; Ortolano 2009). Where Snow argued that this divide must be bridged or eliminated, Leavis challenged the very idea that there were two cultures, effectively portraying Snow as the enemy of Culture.9 Arnold, Eliot, and the Leavises would be appalled by the fact that, today, it is common to view the production of literature and art as part of ‘the culture industries’ (see Hesmondhalgh 2018), as well as being used as an expedient resource by commercial companies, governments, and agencies of various kinds (see Yúdice 2003). This reflects the marketization of ‘culture’ in the second half of the twentieth century, a process continuing into the present. But it also indicates a shift in perspective, part of what has been called ‘the disenchantment of our culture with culture itself’ (Trilling 1967: 19). Where, previously, art and literature had been felt to be infused by a kind of spirituality, serving as an accompaniment to or even a replacement for religion, now they are widely regarded as a matter of ‘cultural consumption’.

The Anthropological Concept of Culture The starting point for nineteenth-century anthropological ideas was very different from the view of Culture as aesthetic cultivation. Anthropology began from increasing recognition that there were societies outside of Europe that had very different beliefs and ways of life from those that most Europeans took for granted.10 This was accompanied by a growing 9  This debate built, in some respects, on an earlier debate between Arnold and T.  H. Huxley, on which see Roos (1977). 10  It is important to note how the predominant meaning of the term ‘anthropology’ changed from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Originally, it referred to the investigation of human nature (particularly its mental aspects) in naturalistic terms, drawing on both theology and medicine. Underpinning this, often, were attempts to resolve the problem

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awareness that there was a similar discrepancy in the case of the classical worlds of Greece and Rome, on which European culture explicitly drew. The existence of ‘primitive’ societies had long been known, of course, but with the growth of European colonialism and missionary activity, along with scientific expeditions to remote regions, greater information became available, and new attitudes started to prevail—along with a desire to understand the reasons for the diversity (see Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: ch 1). Attempts to explain cultural diversity drew, to some degree, on ideas about the effects of geography and climate in producing very different forms of social life, but (in Britain, the US, and France, especially) it rested above all upon a notion of social evolution: the idea that some contemporary non-European societies could be regarded as living relics of social forms that had previously been dominant in the history of human life on earth (Stocking 1987). So, interest in ‘primitive’ communities was initially fuelled by the idea that these could provide evidence about more remote periods in the development of Western societies—their ‘pre-history’—illuminating what little could be inferred from archaeological evidence. This reflected the fact that, at this time, the discipline of anthropology covered the physical as well as the social and cultural aspects of human beings. This evolutionary perspective (which preceded that of Darwin, and differed from his theory in some important respects) generally involved a built-in evaluative framework, according to which there had been a growth of Culture from the earliest ‘primitive’ communities, through what were labelled as ‘barbarian’ forms, leading eventually to the display of civilization in contemporary Europe (Burrow 1966). However, there were disagreements about the nature of this process, and sometimes rejection of key aspects of it (see Stocking 1963). Furthermore, there was a subordinate strand within Western thinking that emphasized what had been lost in the development of European societies, so that other cultures could be regarded as superior in significant respects. This dated back at least to Montaigne’s (1580) essay ‘Of Cannibals’, in which he put forward the idea of ‘le bon sauvage’ (the ‘noble savage’), and was later fuelled particularly by Rousseau’s criticism of the culture of the French upper classes, of Cartesian dualism (see Zammito 2002). But, in the nineteenth century, ‘anthropology’ increasingly came to refer specifically to the study of ‘primitive’ societies, in order to trace the development of the mental and social characteristics taken to represent the highest form of civilization, exemplified by Western Europe. However, the older ‘philosophical anthropology’ continued to be influential in Germany even into the twentieth century.

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who believed themselves to be the epitome of civilization. Closely related was the influence of ideas about the growth and decline of cultures found, for example, in the work of Vico and Montesquieu (Stocking 1987: 13–14). But most influential of all as a counter to evolutionism was German anthropological work in the second half of the nineteenth century which, much more than that in other countries, was shaped by Herder’s emphasis on the diversity of cultures, leading to a rejection of any simple evolutionary progressivism (Stocking 1995; Penny and Bunzl 2003).11 Also important here were methodological arguments, in particular an increasing distrust of reliance on evidence from ‘primitive’ societies as a means of reconstructing the history of the West, along with growing recognition of their diversity and internal complexity. It came to be argued, by the turn of the century, that the focus of anthropology should be on the current operation of these societies, for what they can tell us about the divergent possible forms of social organization and culture. Initially, in large part, the collection of data about these other societies was an amateur enterprise, carried out by travellers and missionaries, so that it was governed by a range of purposes, with little clear understanding of what was relevant, in what terms it should be described, how it should be conceptualized, and so on (but see de Gérando 1800). However, this changed with time so that, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, data started to come more and more from trained observers and later from anthropologists themselves, as anthropology became established within some universities (see Stocking 1983). It is, of course, significant that anthropology developed during a period when several European societies had established or were establishing colonial empires, and the work of anthropologists came to be sponsored by some Western governments because it was believed to provide an important resource in colonial administration. This certainly influenced the attitudes and work of many anthropologists, even if there were tensions and conflicts.12 In Britain, one reason for tension was precisely that by the early twentieth century anthropologists had begun to abandon the previously dominant evolutionary framework in favour of diffusionism (concerned 11  Herder’s views were complex, and they changed over time: there were both pluralist and developmental elements within them. On Herder, see Zammito (2002), Forster (2010), Beiser (2011: ch 3). 12  From the start, the relationship was by no means straightforward: see Kuper (1999: ch 4). In the German context, it has been argued that colonialism had little effect on late nineteenth-century anthropology: Penny and Bunzl (2003).

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with the spread of cultural traits from one society to another) and, subsequently, functionalism (which, in various forms, focused on the ways in which societies were systems, their parts serving essential functions). These theoretical trends involved treating different cultures as unique configurations of traits, or as distinctive social systems, rather than as representing different stages of human development. And this was at odds with colonial ideology: Western colonizers generally saw themselves as representing an advanced form of civilization, which had a right, even an obligation, to ‘civilize’ the rest of the world. Despite the differences between the dominant orientations in nineteenthand twentieth-century anthropology, there was also some continuity. We must be cautious about assuming too quick or sharp a change in orientation away from that of the nineteenth-century pioneers (see Stocking 1983). For example, even in the mid-twentieth century, Kroeber (1952) took culture to be an ‘order of phenomena’, the ‘superorganic’, emergent from the biological, just as the latter was emergent from the inorganic.13 In many respects, this is an elaboration of the very influential anthropological definition of ‘culture’ provided by the nineteenth-century English anthropologist Edward Tylor. For him, the word referred to ‘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 1871: 1). Tylor’s definition displays interesting similarities to, as well as differences from, the concept of Culture employed by Arnold at around the same time, in the sense that both treated the term as singular, and regarded what it refers to as having universal social value. However, Tylor and other nineteenth-century anthropologists assumed long-term progress out of ‘primitive’ beginnings, whereas Arnold looks back to the seventeenth century as the high point in the development of Culture, this being followed by decline, particularly in Britain, as a result of the fragmentation of Christianity, the rise of scientific rationalism, and processes of industrialization and urbanization. Furthermore, Arnold was explicitly engaged in cultural criticism of his own society, whereas Tylor was concerned to document and understand the diverse forms that human social life takes across the world, and the beliefs and practices associated with these, at the same time, given an assumed process of development, he did see anthropology as providing a basis for determining which aspects of modern thought and society were progressive and which were survivals from the past (Tylor 1871: Conclusion; Burrow 1966: ch 7).  This concept is derived from Herbert Spencer’s sociology; see Spencer (1885: ch 1).

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While there has been disagreement about how closely Tylor’s definition relates to later anthropological usage (Stocking 1963, 1968: ch 4, 1987: 302 and passim; Leopold 1980), it does indicate key features that came to be treated as essential to the anthropological conception of culture as a distinctive ‘way of life’—the third conception of culture identified in Chap. 1.14 First of all, Tylor’s definition emphasizes that culture is ‘acquired as a member of society’, rather than through biological inheritance. This was, perhaps, the fundamental contrast that came to define the discipline of cultural or social anthropology. Tylor’s definition can also be taken to indicate another contrast: with the individual differences that are to be found amongst people within any society, as regards abilities, skills, temperament, personality, and so on. These had started to be explored by psychologists at the time Tylor was writing. These two contrasts highlight key boundaries around the discipline, and also important limits to what is covered by the term ‘culture’, even though they have not gone completely unchallenged. Secondly, Tylor’s definition of ‘culture’ is comprehensive in covering not just literature, art, and ideas but also ‘morals’, ‘law’, customary or habitual behaviour, and technologies. In effect, virtually all aspects of human social life are included in the definition. As noted earlier, this broad focus has been a characteristic feature of much twentieth-century social and cultural anthropology. Moreover, while there has been a tendency to treat some aspects of culture as more important than others, this has rarely involved a prioritization of the arts, literature, and philosophy, in the manner of Arnold; partly perhaps because, typically, anthropologists studied non-literate societies, at least up to the middle of the twentieth century. Instead, in much functionalist anthropology especially, stress was usually placed on the role played by norms and values, along with myths and rituals, or shared forms of social organization, in maintaining social cohesion. Another significant feature of Tylor’s definition is that it treats culture as a ‘whole’, suggesting that its various elements shape one another; though, in practice, Tylor tended to focus on the development of particular cultural traits (Stocking 1968: 80–81). Such holism in the context of studying particular cultures, rather than Culture in the singular, came to 14  Of course, it is misleading to assume that twentieth-century anthropology shared a single concept of culture, but I will adopt this fiction for the moment. And, as noted earlier, some British anthropologists denied that culture is the focus of their discipline, treating social organization or social structure as central: see Radcliffe-Brown (1940).

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be given great emphasis with the development of functionalism, in the work of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, the distinctive ‘particularist’ approach of Boas, and also in the subsequent ‘culture and personality’ school of Benedict and Mead. Frequently, cultures were seen as integrated or organic wholes, and it was insisted that they had to be studied as such (Kuper 1999: ch 2). Indeed, the shift from a singular notion of Culture, characterized by evolutionary development, to a focus on multiple cultures not only reflected the growing belief that it is impossible to produce scientific evidence about the past development of non-literate societies, but also a recognition that the cultural features found within a particular society are not a mere collection of traits but are interrelated with one another: that societies are characterized by coherent sets of values, beliefs, forms of social organization, and patterns of behaviour; and that this arises because certain functions must be fulfilled if they are to survive. In the twentieth century, as I indicated, there was also a growing reaction against Western imperialism and the way in which the evolutionary conception of culture appeared to legitimate it. In place of the assumption that Western societies displayed the highest level of culture, there was a strong tendency to point to the positive features of ‘primitive’ cultures, and a denial that there could be any universal standard by which cultures could be evaluated and ranked (Herskovits 1972). Of course, there was far from complete agreement even among those now generally recognized to be the founders of twentieth-century anthropology: Boas, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown. And subsequent generations of anthropologists, while starting under the influence of one or other approach represented by their teachers, developed further variations. In the case of British social anthropology, for example, after Malinowski’s influence had been largely replaced by that of Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-­ Pritchard later broke with both in arguing that anthropology was not a natural science but closer to the humanities. There was also a reaction against the fact that the work of both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown was rather static in focus, assuming a system in equilibrium. Subsequent British anthropologists, for example the Manchester School, as well as Leach and Bailey, treated norms and values as resources that people use to serve their interests in the shifting relations amongst groups within a society, or in dealing with conflicts, these deriving from structural tensions within social relations (see Kuper 2015: ch 6). Furthermore, with the increasing impact of Western societies on other cultures, and the effects of

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urbanization in the Third World, anthropologists also started to give attention to the phenomenon of ‘culture contact’, so that there was greater emphasis on cultural borrowing among groups and on the adaptation of cultural practices to new circumstances, not just those resulting from colonialism but also nation-building, neocolonialism, and globalization. In addition, some anthropologists began to carry out research in Western societies, studying significant forms of cultural variation within these, whether contrasting the rural with the urban or examining the cultural adaptations of ethnic minority groups. All of these developments had significant implications for the concept of culture, introducing new tensions in its meaning. One of these concerned the relative ‘weight’ of cultural and material factors in shaping human behaviour. A very different approach from those found among Anglo-American anthropologists emerged in France, with the work of Lévi-Strauss. While, like Radcliffe-Brown, Lévi-Strauss was influenced by Durkheim and focused on ‘structure’, what he meant by this term—drawing particularly on Durkheim and Mauss’s (1909) Primitive Classification—was quite different from standard usage of the term in anthropology and sociology at the time. Instead of a concern with observable patterns of behaviour and social relationships, and the norms and values associated with these, his model was the structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, so that the focus was on discovering the deep structures that generate the diverse patterns of behaviour and belief documented by ethnographers. So, for Lévi-­ Strauss, the focus was on universal underlying principles that could account for the varying cultural patterns—whether in marriage and kinship or in myths—to be found across all societies (see Jenkins 1979). Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is one version of the fourth interpretation of ‘culture’ I identified in Chap. 1: culture-as-meaning-making. And it came to be an important influence on some British anthropologists, including Needham (1973) and Douglas (1975). In the US, it was a key factor in the development of cognitive anthropology, also sometimes known as componential analysis or ethnoscience, which focused inquiry on detailed documentation of cultural knowledge (see Frake 1962; Tyler 1969). Cognitive anthropology treats culture as made up of a corpus of linguistic distinctions that enables a person to act competently within the relevant group and the social situations that members of this group encounter. Much of this work focused on kinship terminology, but there was also investigation of botanical and other classifications. The work of interpretive anthropologists, such as Geertz, was similar in viewing c­ ultures

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as symbolic systems, but treated culture as a much more fluid and emergent process, often generated through contacts among different groups (see Kuper 1999: Intro). A central feature of this work was Geertz’s development of the concept of ‘thick description’ of human behaviour: this was taken over by many researchers to counter the sorts of ‘thin description’ offered by economists, psychologists, and indeed many sociologists. In effect, this amounted to an insistence on the need for cultural description if human behaviour is to be understood. At the same time, this kind of interpretive anthropology stood in sharp contrast to the ‘cultural materialism’ of Marvin Harris and others, who emphasized the role of material factors in shaping cultures (see Harris 1979). There was also a small group of US anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s who revived the notion of cultural evolution (e.g. see Steward 1955; White 1959; Sahlins and Service 1960). By the second half of the twentieth century, then, there were diverse conceptions of culture employed in anthropology. These had varying degrees of influence on other disciplines. We can note, though, that structuralism had a major impact not just on anthropology but also on the humanities more generally, and on some parts of social science—perhaps above all in the field of cultural studies. In the next chapter, I will examine how culture was conceptualized in this field, but I will begin by looking at the case of sociology.

CHAPTER 3

‘Culture’ in Sociology and Cultural Studies

Abstract  This chapter examines the various ways in which the concept of culture has been understood in sociology and in cultural studies. The centrality of this concept to nineteenth-century sociology, in several of its forms, is outlined, along with its influence on some kinds of Marxism. The subsequent use of notions like ‘subculture’, ‘counterculture’, ‘organizational culture’, and ‘occupational culture’ in twentieth-century AngloAmerican sociology is also examined. There is also mention of more recent developments in the sociology of culture and of several versions of cultural sociology. In the second half of the chapter, the rather different trajectory of British cultural studies is explored, noting how it deployed, indeed blended, a range of conceptions of culture, against the background of its commitment to be a transdisciplinary form of cultural politics. Keywords  Culture and sociology • Subculture • Organizational culture • Occupational cultures • Cultural studies • Raymond Williams • Stuart Hall • Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies As I noted in the Introduction, the term ‘culture’ played a key role in early twentieth-century German sociology and later in US sociology. However, interpretations of it varied here just as much as in anthropology. There were also significant developments within Marxism, strongly influenced by German sociology at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hammersley, The Concept of Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22982-5_3

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t­ wentieth century. And these, along with anthropological and sociological approaches, shaped subsequent developments in cultural studies, a new interdisciplinary field that drew on, but also challenged, the older disciplines.

Sociology A sense of the importance of culture, albeit without that label being used, can be found even in the writings of Comte, the inventor of ‘sociology’. His work was a response to the breakdown of the ancien regime in France, the Revolution, and the rise of the new industrialism (Pickering 1993). He saw these as heralding an emerging stage in the development of Western society, a positive one in which science would be central, following earlier religious and metaphysical phases. However, whereas some eighteenth-­ century Enlightenment thinkers had believed that once religion, myth, and superstition (all of which we could put under the heading of ‘culture’) had been eradicated, people would act on the basis of Reason, and that this would bring harmony and progress. Comte concluded from the later stages of the Revolution and its aftermath that this assumption was false. He argued that a new form of social order was required that would replace the disorder and instability that the Revolution had caused. And, he claimed, what was required to bring this emerging form of society to fruition was the promulgation of the new scientific philosophy he was developing, under the name of positivism. But this was not simply to be treated as a set of beliefs but rather needed to be embodied in new institutions, as well as in a new calendar and associated rituals. Indeed, like several others before and after him, Comte believed it was necessary to develop a secular religion that would underpin social relations, given the declining influence of Christianity (i.e. of Catholicism) in France (Wernick 2001). We could summarize this by saying that he sought to establish a new culture, interpreting this word in what I have referred to as its twentieth-century anthropological sense—as a ‘way of life’. In fact, like some later writers, he identified a lag between the development of material forces—especially industrialism—and the beliefs, attitudes, and forms of social organization that were required to go with this. His work was designed to close this gap. Comte was an important influence on Durkheim, whose concept of conscience collective is close to being a synonym for ‘culture’. Like Comte, Durkheim argued that France and other Western societies were in a process of transition—with the values, norms, and institutions needed for the

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new type of society still in the process of development (Lukes 1973). In this he was arguing against those critics of industrialism who claimed that it had destroyed, or was destroying, all genuine values, such as those associated with traditional religion. In his later work, Durkheim turned his attention to the origins of religion and the whole framework of cognitive thought in ‘primitive’ societies, arguing that thought and belief do not reflect some transcendent realm but rather the social relations within particular societies (see Pickering 1984). As we saw in the previous chapter, Durkheim’s work was an important influence on anthropology, shaping ideas about culture and social organization, but it was equally influential within sociology in the twentieth century, particularly in the US. In Germany, in the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of culture was used explicitly in the study of law and economics, which adopted a historical (indeed, a historicist) orientation. Here, too, the idea that societies could be organized entirely on the basis of universal Reason was rejected. The distinctive histories of European societies, and especially of Germany, were emphasized, highlighting their unique ideals and institutional forms. It was argued that any changes to be brought about in them through political action must take account of this distinctiveness: an idea that was closely associated with the growth of German nationalism, prior to and following the unification of German states in 1871. Also important was a reaction against French culture prompted by the memory of Napoleon’s invasion of Prussia; though perhaps the strongest influence of all was rejection of the utilitarianism and economic liberalism that became increasingly influential in England, this country being regarded as Germany’s foremost economic competitor. Another relevant component of German thought here was the concept of Bildung, referring to what might be called personal spiritual development. The humanities, particularly literature and philosophy, were regarded as playing a crucial role in this, while the rise of science and the materialistic ideas associated with it, along with industrial development, were viewed as a threat. Bildung was also closely associated with belief in the spiritual mission of the German nation. It was argued by some that, while the material power of that nation seemed to be on the rise, the idea that it could have such a mission was being undermined by the very processes that had led to its economic, political, and imperial success (Ringer 1969). So, the notion of culture was central to the work of ‘the historical school’ in Germany, in relation to legal, political, and economic matters, and it was out of this tradition, above all, that the work of Max and Alfred

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Weber developed, albeit not without challenge on their part. Georg Simmel’s sociology also operated in this context, though interestingly in his early work he drew considerably on the writings of Spencer, a key representative of the English ideas that were anathema to many in Germany. As I noted earlier, the concept of Bildung had been an important influence on English Romanticism, and also directly on Arnold’s discussion of Culture. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the central concerns of Simmel and of Max and Alfred Weber had some similarities with those of Arnold, as well as with twentieth-century critics of modernity such as Eliot and Leavis—not least in adopting a notion of Culture as aesthetic or spiritual cultivation. Whereas Comte and Durkheim, not to mention Spencer, regarded the new emerging society as desirable, these German sociologists, while accepting that it was part of an emerging process that could not be reversed, also believed that it threatened a loss of Culture. In many respects, Toennies’s (1887) hugely influential book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft captured this ambivalence about modernity, and framed subsequent understanding among German sociologists of the processes taking place, despite widespread disagreement with some aspects of his analysis (see Liebersohn 1988). A central concern was how Culture—as exemplified in Germany—could be preserved in the unconducive conditions of modern capitalism, and the bureaucratic modes of organization associated with it. Simmel regarded Culture as consisting of forms—patterns of belief, art, and behaviour—that are generated out of ordinary life. These serve vital needs, but take on an independent existence and can come to constrict personal and social development. In these terms, he distinguished between subjective and objective culture: the first is Bildung, the development of knowledge and sensibility in the individual; the second refers to the collective products of art, music, and scholarship that are available to members of a society in furthering their personal development. Simmel viewed social differentiation, the move towards a more complex society, as the driving force of societal development, this producing quite distinct and relatively autonomous social domains and cultural spheres, as well as increasing individuality among people. He saw individual distinctiveness as of great value, and so he treated this process as beneficial—or, at least, he takes its value as appropriate to modernity. However, he also identifies what he calls the ‘tragedy of culture’, the fact that there is a growing tension between objective and subjective culture so that individuals become alienated from the cultural sphere even while being dependent upon it.

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Above all, they can no longer master the whole of objective culture, and must therefore become specialists, at least to some degree; as a result, they fail to achieve the classical personal ideal of embodying a harmonious cultural unity. Indeed, he suggests that ‘the individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life’ (Wolff 1950: 422). In the ‘cultural sociology’ of Alfred Weber (1912), the focus was on the conflict between modern industrial civilization and what he saw as the life-­ force of culture formation, which was what enabled people to find their lives meaningful. His views were strongly influenced by the vitalist philosophy of Bergson (see Loader 2015). He regarded civilization as concerned with mastering the external world, this requiring rational analysis of causal processes. By contrast, what was at the core of culture was the creative personality which, while individual, is nevertheless connected to collective meanings that characterize whole groups of people, thereby producing distinct cultures. Both civilization and culture were essential but an appropriate balance between the two was required; and he felt that, at the time he was writing, there was a sharp imbalance, as a result not just of industrialism but also of the declining influence of religion. In the case of Max Weber, of first importance in this context was his reliance on Rickert’s distinction between the natural and cultural sciences, and his insistence that human beings ‘are cultural beings endowed with the capacity and the will to take a deliberate attitude towards the world, and to lend it significance’ (Weber 1949: 81)—a version of the fourth conception of culture I identified in Chap. 1. This implies that ideas and values play a central role in social life, if only in directing or redirecting material forces (Eastwood 2005; Lizardo and Stoltz 2018). He also highlighted the socio-cultural formation of the personality, with different types of society producing quite different sorts of person. We can see his essay on ‘Protestantism and the spirit of modern capitalism’ (1904–1905) as emphasizing the role of culture, of a religious form, in the very emergence of modern ‘civilization’, precisely through this process. At the same time, Weber argued that, once established, modern capitalism, and processes of rationalization more generally, no longer require this religious support: they begin to operate in their own terms—ones which are at odds with any notion of Culture of the kind valued by Romanticism and Bildung. Weber explored the long-term development of artistic forms, especially music, in

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terms of this process of rationalization (Inglis 2016). And he hints at what he feels is lost spiritually as a result, and how any re-emergence of this in the modern world, for example in the shape of charisma, is subject to routinization, and thereby exists only sporadically. His attitude towards the resulting ‘disenchantment of the world’ is therefore highly ambivalent.1 Max Weber’s analysis of the process of rationalization, along with Simmel’s notion of ‘the tragedy of culture’, was an important influence on several Marxist writers in the early twentieth century, notably Lukacs and Adorno, and it is worth taking note of their work here. They focused primarily on aesthetic culture—on literature, music, and art—and its implications for how a worthwhile life can be secured under modern conditions. Along with conservative critics, they rejected what came to be labelled as mass culture, viewing this as the ideological product of capitalism, and as functioning to serve it. But they also rejected the kind of Marxism which treats culture as simply corresponding to, forms of economic and social organization linked to the development of technology. Neither Lukacs nor Adorno could be accused of reducing aesthetic culture to a reflection of the interests of particular social classes, or to an instrumental means by which socialism or communism are to be promoted. Both adopted a more dialectical orientation in which culture was a product of society but also played an important independent role in providing symbolic representation of social changes that were taking place, and thereby in guiding action. At the same time, there were important differences between these two influential Marxist writers: their views were at odds about what kinds of art and literature best serve progress, or at least hold out some hope of preserving what capitalism was destroying. Lukacs revered the classical heritage of nineteenth-century novels, particularly those of Balzac and Tolstoy, and he vehemently rejected early twentieth-century modernism and expressionism as the products of bourgeois decadence (Lichtheim 1970). His starting point was not far from that of Max Weber: a pessimistic view of modern society in which any sort of spiritual sense of what is important, and how one should live, was threatened by the processes of rationalization taking place. After his conversion to Marxism, he retained his previous understanding of the human significance of literature and other cultural forms, now believing that the overthrow of bourgeois society was the only hope for the preservation of worthwhile human life. He argued 1

 On the differences in view between Max and Alfred Weber, see Loader (2016).

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that it was capitalism (rather than industrial civilization in general) that was degrading Western Culture, and this underpinned his long-term commitment to Soviet communism. By contrast, Adorno believed that some forms of modernist art and literature played an essential role in subverting the false forms of socio-­ cultural integration that capitalism, ‘the culture industry’, and ‘mass culture’ were spawning—thereby signalling what lies beyond the process of commodification, with its creation of false human needs (Bloch et  al. 1977; Jay 1984). He rejected the idea that the task of art is accurately to reflect the nature of society, in the manner of many nineteenth-century novelists. For him, production of a work of art involved the appropriation of objects in accordance with what he calls the ‘laws’ of aesthetics, thereby giving art autonomy. What is produced is at odds with the real and is simultaneously a critique of it, embodying its contradictions. Adorno was more pessimistic than Lukacs about the scope for resisting the effects of capitalism, and regarded the sort of society developing in the Soviet Union as no better as regards its spiritual character. But he was especially critical of the way in which capitalism was producing a mass culture through the emergence of culture industries such as film and popular music. He saw these—even those of its products celebrated by some on the Left, such as the films of Chaplin or jazz music—as shaping the personalities and attitudes of people in such a way as to turn them into the consumers that capitalism needed, increasing demand for the goods it produces. Only certain forms of modern art, particularly atonal music, carried a potential for redemption from the ways of feeling and thought that capitalism, and modernity more generally, were engendering. Adorno insisted on the distinction between high culture and mass culture, and argued that this could only be overcome through social transformation, in which both forms would be rejuvenated and, in the process, integrated. High art, of particular kinds, was to be championed, but the distortions arising from the fact that it belonged to and served an elite must be recognized, just as much as the distorted and ideological character of mass culture.2 While very influential on later thinking about culture, Lukacs and Adorno were not representative of mainstream Marxist views, particularly 2  It is worth noting that there were some more optimistic views of modern culture associated with the Frankfurt School, notably in the work of Benjamin and Kracauer, which were closer to Brecht’s idea that a new proletarian culture could be developed through the work of writers and artists.

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as regards the relatively autonomous and active role they assigned to culture. And similar variation in attitude can be found within much twentieth-­ century American sociology. Here, too, in some cases, culture was regarded as an epiphenomenon, playing a secondary role to social forces, even if conceptions of these forces usually differed from those of Marxists. Others gave culture somewhat greater weight. For example, Ogburn (1922) developed the concept of ‘cultural lag’: the idea that material progress is continually held back by the slower development of values and attitudes. At the same time his main focus was on the causes of social change, and he placed great emphasis on the role of cultural processes of evolution and invention. While he was concerned with the effects of changes in technology, and had read Marx, his model of society was closer to what later came to be labelled as functionalism (see Duncan 1964). There was also some attention by sociologists to the nature of ‘mass culture’. This was often negative in evaluation, in much the same manner as Adorno, because of what were taken to be its political effects: it was believed to generate a superficial, conformist, and fluid public opinion that would allow manipulation by populist leaders of a totalitarian bent (see Mills 1956; Kornhauser 1960). However, it was also sometimes viewed in more positive terms (for the spectrum of views, see Rosenberg and White 1957). Twentieth-century anthropological conceptions of culture also influenced some areas of sociological work, notably where this involved the identification of subcultures and counter-cultures within Western societies. For instance, there was a concern with the distinctive beliefs, values, and attitudes of groups that were subordinated to, or marginalized within, these societies (lower social classes, ethnic or religious minorities, etc.). One early area of interest was the role of subcultures in generating delinquency and crime, another was how they could block social participation or social mobility. Sometimes subcultures were treated as relatively autonomous forms of life that had persisted from earlier times; alternatively, they were portrayed as the product of a reaction against the dominant culture, or against the inequalities that prevented marginalized groups from participating in this (see Cohen 1955; Miller 1958; Cloward and Ohlin 1960). In the context of cultural studies—to be discussed in the next section—this line of investigation was developed, but also challenged, through being embedded within a Marxist perspective and/or through the adoption of a much more celebratory attitude towards ‘youth cultures’ (see Gelder and Thornton 1997).

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However, use of the concept of ‘culture’ or ‘subculture’ to understand the behaviour of subordinate or marginalized groups also sometimes involved negative evaluation of them. A classic example of this is Lewis’s (1959) concept of ‘the culture of poverty’: he saw this culture as keeping some groups in poverty even when structural conditions had changed in such a way as to provide them with opportunities to improve their standard of living.3 While Lewis was an anthropologist, this concept was taken up primarily in sociology and psychology, along with associated ideas like ‘cultural deprivation’. At the same time, this line of analysis was sharply criticized, on the grounds that all cultures should be respected and/or that it involves blaming the victims of inequality by underestimating the role of structural and situational factors (see Chap. 4). There was also some sociological work, in both Europe and the US, focusing on elite or dominant class cultures. Whilst, strictly speaking, this too amounted to a concern with a particular type of subculture, albeit one that was in the centre rather than at the periphery of society (Shils 1975), the emphasis here was often on the way in which the aesthetic and other preferences of this dominant class or elite had come to be imposed upon society as a whole—this paralleling the notion of a ‘dominant ideology’ (see Abercrombie and Turner 1978; Turner et al. 1980). Involved here is a kind of mirror image of Arnold’s perspective: the content focused on is similar—‘high culture’ in the sense of literature, philosophy, and the arts— but a different evaluation is involved: the primary concern is with how this serves to reproduce a class-divided society that is regarded as unjust.4 A recently influential version of this perspective is the work of Bourdieu (e.g. see Bourdieu 1987; Jenkins 1992). He treats what is of value within a society as arbitrary, in the sense that it does not derive from any intrinsic 3  Interestingly, this is an example of what Bourdieu later labelled ‘habitus’: a set of durable dispositions generated through experience of socially structured situations in the past which may continue to govern behaviour even when social structural conditions have altered. 4  Some research has documented the declining role of ‘high’ culture over the course of the twentieth century: taste became more diverse, and was often closely tied to particular culturally defined identities, sometimes as part of fashion changes or subcultural movements. This reflected an important cultural shift (Martin 1981), the result being a much more complex patterning of taste than was characteristic of British society at the beginning of the century (Bennett et al. 2009). This was a development that had already been noted by some commentators in the US in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, Bell (1965: ch 1) had emphasized the extent to which there had been a differentiation of taste amongst the burgeoning middle classes, as well as increased enjoyment of multiple forms of cultural production.

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or transcendent source. Rather, value is entirely an effect of the exercise of power, or ‘symbolic violence’, by a dominant group.5 But he draws a distinction between different fields that are relatively autonomous from one another. Thus, the distribution of power in the cultural field does not simply reflect that in the economic or political field. At the same time, there are important connections. Thus, what counts as valuable in cultural terms reflects the relationships amongst groups in that field, but also, in a more mediated fashion, those in the other two fields mentioned as well. For example, Bourdieu presents social class differences in school performance, in obtaining educational credentials, and thereby in subsequent occupational position, as operating through differences in ‘cultural capital’ available to children from different class backgrounds—differences in the cognitive and other educationally relevant resources and capacities inherited or inculcated in homes. Those who possess this capital—much of it embodied in the form of what he calls ‘habitus’—tend subsequently to have much higher levels of educational achievement than those with lower levels, since they experience continuity between home and school; where others face discontinuity, lacking much of what is required for scholastic success. Given the link between educational credentials and occupational recruitment, the culture of the dominant group in the cultural field serves to subordinate other groups, reproducing a social hierarchy in cultural terms but also reproducing divisions in the socio-economic field. Indeed, Bourdieu argues that the process of social reproduction that had previously operated directly via the control of wealth and through political power now takes place via culture and the education system, and is legitimated in this way. So, in this theory, Culture is effectively evaluated negatively because of its role in reproducing the class structure and thereby (it is implied) social injustice. 5  For an account of Bourdieu on value, see Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 47–59). He seems to regard all value as a socio-historical product, but believes that there is value in the establishment and exercise of autonomy from the economic and political fields by those in the scientific field, and that the exercise of this scientific reason is politically progressive. On the model of Bachelard (see Gutting 1989: ch 1), he assumes that sociology can replace philosophy, and that its reflexive character can provide for its authority, this removing obstacles to societal self-understanding. It is necessary to point out, though, that while Bachelard could assume progress in science, the task being to remove obstacles to this, it is quite unclear what progressive trend Bourdieu is assuming within modern societies. Indeed, it is not obvious on what grounds he could formulate any such progress, given his concept of value.

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As noted in Chap. 1, the idea of culture also came to be used by sociologists and others in the study of organizations, thereby generating a considerable literature on ‘organizational cultures’.6 This built on earlier work that had distinguished between the formal structures of organizations, these marking out the official distribution of authority and responsibility, and the somewhat different informal patterns that usually develop, often involving an at least partially discrepant distribution of power; with actors who are apparently in positions of authority often being impotent in important respects, while some positions that are low status in official terms exercise considerable power, especially in terms of veto or redirection. These informal patterns came to be seen as resulting from the development over time of local cultures within particular parts of organizations that were at odds with formal structures of authority. These cultures were sometimes regarded as essential to the organization’s operation, but they could also be viewed as a source of dysfunctionality or resistance (e.g. see Gouldner 1954a, b; Crozier 1964). Building on this, there is, today, an extensive how-to-do-it literature in the field of business studies defining undesirable and desirable culture traits for organizations, and practical suggestions about how to change an existing culture to one facilitating (say) innovativeness, staff retention, productivity, or work-life balance. In parallel with the study of organizational cultures, there has also been investigation of occupational cultures, these transcending the particular organizational contexts within which practitioners may work. Here the emphasis is on how differences in orientation arise from specialization of task within a large complex society, these differences often being treated as resulting in distinct worldviews or divergent attitudes (see, for instance, Bensman and Lilienfeld 1991). In its earlier form, this focused on such features as a ‘service ethic’, which was regarded as a central feature of professionalism and as serving the interests of clients. Later, ‘professional culture’ often came to be regarded as suiting the interests of professionals rather than those of their clienteles, while perhaps obscuring its ideological function from both of them (Larson 1977). Examples here would include not only the ‘canteen culture’ taken to be characteristic of ground-­ level police officers, but also the preoccupation of high-status professional groups, such as doctors, with defence of their own interests, not least 6  One of the earliest examples of this was the Human Relations school of management growing out of the well-known Hawthorne experiments (Mayo 1933; Gillespie 2008). On the concept of organizational cultures, see Ouchi and Wilkins (1985), Alvesson (1993).

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gaining power over other occupational groups within their sphere of operation (Freidson 1986, 2001). Around the turn of the twentieth into the twenty-first century, there were also developments within sociology that focused on the concept of culture as it applies to whole societies, or to the whole of social life, rather than to particular social groups, organizations, or occupations. This has taken a couple of forms, often labelled as ‘the sociology of culture’ versus ‘cultural sociology’ (see Inglis and Almila 2016: Intro). The first adopts a conception of culture as one part or aspect of society—including literature, art, and music but extending to other kinds of creative work— whereas the second focuses on the role that culture (in the anthropological sense of values, symbol systems, or symbolic resources) plays in human social life more generally. Interestingly, there has also been work that has applied a cultural sociological approach in the sociology of culture (for instance, Acord and DeNora 2008). The sociology of culture is a subdiscipline, whereas cultural sociology tends to be a distinctive approach towards the whole disciplinary field— one that has also colonized specific areas, as in the case of cultural criminology which ‘emphasizes the centrality of meaning, representation and power in the contested construction of crime’ (Ferrell et  al. 2015: 2). Moreover, within the sociology of culture, there is a range of approaches. We can distinguish in relatively crude terms, for example, between the study of ‘the culture industries’ from a political economy perspective, on the one hand, and an approach that treats symbolic systems as relatively or completely autonomous from economic processes, on the other hand, or even as themselves constituting what counts as ‘the economy’. We should also note that definitions of the range of phenomena that are of concern to sociologists of culture can vary considerably, from a relatively narrow focus on what is produced within an aesthetic frame, on the one hand, to the whole of what Marxists label as the superstructure of society, on the other. This potential expansion of the realm of culture can, in its most extreme version, endanger any distinction between the sociology of culture and cultural sociology (see, for instance, Griswold 2013). There has been much debate about the nature of cultural sociology. In particular, Alexander (2003) has sought to set out a distinctive conception of the new approach, sharply contrasting it with previous work, whether in sociology or cultural studies. His approach, Durkheimian in inspiration, is concerned with the cultural logic of the various rhetorics and rituals by which people’s understanding of situations, and their actions within them,

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are mediated. He argues that the task of cultural sociology is ‘to provide the internal architecture of social meaning via concepts of code, narrative and symbolic action, so that culture can finally assume its rightful place as equivalent to, and interpenetrated with, other kinds of structuring social force’ (Alexander 2005: 22). He insists that culture operates within ‘pressure-­packed, highly contradictory social structures’ and that groups struggle to gain control over cultural forms which are ‘continuously subject to the fissures of historical transformations, the regulative patterning of institutional fields, the political-economics of production and distribution, the fragmentation of audience response, and to such events as wars, revolutions, electoral victory and defeat’ (Alexander 2005: 23). And, from this point of view, culture is simultaneously constraining and enabling (Alexander 2003; Hays 2000). To a considerable extent, then, Alexander adopts the culture-as-meaning-making definition, but rather than treating the process this refers to as determining the whole nature of social life, in the manner of Lévi-Strauss for example, he treats it as taking place alongside, and as being shaped by, other kinds of structuring. Here we can see, again, the persistent tension between the roles assigned to cultural and material aspects of social life.7 Important for some recent cultural sociology has been rejection of the idea, treated as central to the influential sociological framework of Talcott Parsons (Schmid 1992), that culture determines the ends to which action is directed, these then being pursued by rational means. Instead, it has come to be argued that culture is a toolbox that people use to make sense of and to decide on actions of particular kinds in particular situations (see Swidler 1986). Here, as with Alexander, we have a predominant emphasis on culture as meaning-making. This approach involves rejecting the idea that values or attitudes determine behaviour, along with the assumption that culture is a system or a variable that has a causal effect. Rather, it is treated as a contingent set of resources available to people, which they use—consciously or unconsciously—in the course of their lives, according to circumstances. In part what is involved is a shift of attention away from a macro- or meso-level concern with explaining institutional patterns in terms of values and norms, towards a more micro-focus on the actions of individuals, albeit ones that are located within contexts that may be more or less institutionalized (see, for instance, Swidler 2001). So, culture is defined as a body of ‘complex rule-like structures that constitute resources 7

 For a critical view of this and other aspects of Alexander’s position, see McLennan (2005).

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that can be put to strategic use’ (DiMaggio 1997: 265). However, there has been some criticism of this shift, pointing to the unavoidability of making claims about motivation—about what cultural resources are used to do and why—and the need to spell out what assumptions about this are being made (Vaisey 2010). It is nevertheless agreed by both sides of this debate that people often shape their values, aspirations, and aims, around the learned capacities they have developed, rather than simply selecting means appropriate to serve independently determined ends. There has also been work within cultural sociology concerned with how culture is symbolically condensed in material objects, not simply because these were made for some purpose or audience but also because they come to function in particular ways within certain contexts, serving as affordances or barriers to various lines of action, or as symbols of identity (Acord and DeNora 2008). This links to notions of ‘material culture’ (see, for instance, Tilley et al. 2006) and lays the basis for detailed micro-­ focused research on artefacts of many kinds, sometimes linking up with work that would not normally be included under the heading of either sociology of culture or cultural sociology, such as Suchman’ s (1987) study of people’s interactions with photocopiers. Here, then, it is worth mentioning developments within the field of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, which later became Science and Technology Studies. In the early 1970s, there was a significant break with previous work in this field, which had effectively denied that social factors affect the content of science, being focused instead on its mode of social organization and the role of ‘scientific norms’. In this earlier work, scientific knowledge was treated as beyond socio-cultural explanation, though episodes in the development of science where false ideas were pursued were regarded as open to such explanation. Following on from the work of Kuhn (1970), the new sociologists of scientific knowledge insisted that science must be treated in the same way as any other socio-cultural phenomenon, suspending the issue of the truth of particular scientific claims, this being held as irrelevant to the mode of sociological explanation required: it was now assumed that the same kinds of socio-cultural process are involved in generating both what is taken to be true and what is taken to be false. Indeed, it was noted that even the means by which the truth of knowledge claims is adjudicated, or discoveries produced, can be subjected to sociological investigation. Also emphasized was that scientists necessarily draw on the ideas that are available to them within the societies in which they work, and generate distinctive sets of assumptions within

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particular fields of investigation that can change over time—what Kuhn referred to as ‘paradigms’. In both these respects, science was now to be regarded as a cultural phenomenon.8 To summarize, within sociology we find a range of conceptualizations of culture, drawing on and paralleling those discussed in the previous chapter. In nineteenth-century French sociology, while the term ‘culture’ was not much used, the central role of what might reasonably be referred to as cultural phenomena in producing social order is nevertheless emphasized. In early German sociology, something similar to the notion of aesthetic cultivation is deployed as a contrast with the material effects of ‘civilization’; this is also important in some versions of early twentieth-­ century Marxism, albeit now sometimes focused specifically on the effects of capitalism. Within US sociology in the twentieth century, the predominant concept of culture was a version of the twentieth-century anthropological one, whether applied at the societal level or in relation to subcultures, organizational, or occupational cultures. However, there was also the development of a ‘cultural sociology’ that treated culture as a set of resources deployed in context-sensitive ways at the level of action. In my discussion of how the concept of culture has been used within sociology, I have largely ignored one important influence upon it in the second half of the twentieth century: the development, from the late 1960s onwards, of the interdisciplinary field called cultural studies. Sociology’s relationship with this has been complex and contested, not least because of the tendency for cultural studies to turn into a discipline in its own right.9 I cannot here examine this relationship, but in the next section of this chapter I will examine the early history of cultural studies and the ways in which ‘culture’ has been conceptualized by some of its practitioners.

Cultural Studies From the 1960s onwards, cultural studies emerged in the UK as a newly named field that straddled the humanities and the social sciences (for introductions, see Tudor 1999; Rojek 2007; Turner 2003). It represented 8  There is a journal entitled Science as Culture which exemplifies much of this work. See also the journal Social Studies of Science. 9  On the issue of its disciplinarity, see Storey (1996), Bennett (1998), and McLennan (2006).

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both a challenge and a stimulus to work in existing disciplines, especially sociology. A number of commentators have identified phases or ‘moments’ in its development, but, as is generally recognized, while there have certainly been changes over the course of its history, as well as internal differentiation and geographical diversification, any very precise periodization, or even exact distinctions among approaches, tend to be somewhat arbitrary. There are, however, significant differences between the initial development of the field, in the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, and its subsequent trajectory in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), founded by Hoggart but later directed by Stuart Hall, as well as between these and the emergence of film studies organized around the journal Screen (Hall 1980a; Tudor 1999). I will focus here largely on these early developments in the UK because they came to more or less define the various understandings of ‘culture’ that continue to be central in cultural studies even today. The work of Hoggart and Williams was strongly influenced by the tradition of cultural criticism exemplified by Matthew Arnold and the Leavises. But, while starting from what I have called the aesthetic cultivation concept of Culture, they also transformed it in important respects. For example, where the Leavises had looked back to an organic form of society that had been destroyed by capitalism, and sought to preserve the literary tradition that had developed in reaction to this, as a remedy for the ills that now prevailed, Hoggart and Williams pointed to the working-class cultures in which they had each been brought up—in Yorkshire and Wales, respectively—as embodying those ideals, and therefore as offering a living source from which the necessary rejuvenation of social and cultural life could also draw.10 While these two authors shared this broad commitment, their work was very different in character. In his book The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart (1957) sought to document working-class culture, in a manner analogous to a sociological community study (of which there were quite a few at this time, see Klein 1965) but with a different evaluative slant, and primarily 10  In fact, Frank Leavis was not blind to this. For example, in his Introduction to Mill’s essays on Bentham and Coleridge, he suggests that Arnold’s characterization of the working class is a ‘simplification’ of the actual concrete complexities. His source for this is Beatrice Webb’s autobiography, and her description of the community life of her working-class cousins in a Northern Mill town (Leavis 1950: 21).

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on the basis of his own experience of being brought up in a working-class area of Leeds. He also focused on what he saw as the damage that was being done to this culture by commercial mass media and by institutional change. By contrast, in Culture and Society Williams (1958b) traced the history of the tradition of thought that had placed emphasis on the importance of Culture in the face of growing industrialization and commercialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And he highlighted the potential contribution of working-class radicalism and its institutions to the development of a common culture attuned to changing economic and political conditions (see also Williams 1961). In an early influential essay, Williams (1958a [1989]: 8) wrote: There is a distinct working-class way of life, which I for one value—not only because I was bred in it, for I now, in certain respects, live differently. I think this way of life, with its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed by the great working-class political and industrial institutions, is in fact the best basis for any future English society.

However, it is important to recognize that, like Arnold and the Leavises, Williams and Hoggart were still concerned with distinguishing what is of higher and lower quality in literature and the arts. And, like their predecessors, they saw this as important because it relates to how well people live, and to how their lives can become better—in what can be broadly defined as a spiritual (albeit secular) not just a material sense. Moreover, while these authors argued that there were valuable features to be found within traditional working-class culture, they were not championing this over the dominant culture. Indeed, the superiority of much of what is available in the latter was recognized. Thus, Williams (1958a [1989]: 5–6) writes: At home we met and made music, listened to it, recited and listened to poems, valued fine language. I have heard better music and better poetry since; there is the world to draw on. But I know, from the most ordinary experience, that the interest is there, the capacity is there.

Furthermore, he denies that the dominant culture is simply the product and possession of the dominant social class, insisting that: A great part of the English way of life, and of its arts and learning, is not bourgeois in any discoverable sense. There are institutions and common meanings, which are in no sense the sole product of the commercial middle

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class; and there are art and learning, a common English inheritance produced by many kinds of men, including many who hated the very class and system which now take pride in consuming it. (p. 8)

Even more surprisingly, perhaps, he acknowledges that: The bourgeoisie has given us much, including a narrow but real system of morality; that is at least better than its court predecessors. The leisure which the bourgeoisie attained has given us much of cultural value. (p. 8)

To repeat the point, neither Hoggart nor Williams (in his early writings, at least) was championing working-class culture against Culture. Moreover, in these writers’ work, there is still a conception of social life in which literature and the arts are seen as playing a central role. Like Arnold, Williams regarded education as civilizing, so that restricted access to it was a form of deprivation—not cultural deprivation in the sense of people being deprived of all culture, but deprivation of the wider experience of Cultural works to which all should be entitled because they facilitate personal and social development (Williams 1961). It is important to note that there is a complex relationship involved here between at least three elements: local working-class cultures, Culture, and the commercial orientation of bourgeois society and the ‘mass culture’ it produces. What Williams and Hoggart objected to was barriers being put up between elite and working-class culture, not to any evaluative hierarchy in itself. Indeed, they both make negative judgements about much of the ‘culture’ of contemporary British society. And, in substantive terms, their evaluations here are still quite close in character to those of Leavis, Arnold, and the Romantics. They are very much opposed to a cultural populism that would erode or reverse the hierarchy assumed by this tradition. But, while still operating with a concept of Culture, it is certainly not one that treats Culture as the property of an elite or of an upper class. Also, like Arnold and Leavis, they see developments within bourgeois society as threatening Culture, as well as threatening working-class communities, and thereby undermining what is necessary for good living. It is essential to underline these parallels with the position of Arnold and Leavis because, within the field of cultural studies, there has ­sometimes been a misreading of this work, particularly that of Williams.11 For exam11  One aspect of this has been a tendency to exaggerate the differences between these two writers. For Williams’s own view of the differences, see Williams (1957). See also Hoggart and Williams (1960).

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ple, McGuigan (1992: 21) describes the essay from which I have just been quoting as ‘a clear and concise rebuttal of what, for purposes of brevity, can be labeled “elitist” conceptions of culture’. Yet, as I have indicated, even though Williams rejects any sharp contrast between elite and working-­ class culture, and denies that Culture is, even less should be, the possession of an elite, his concern was still with making ‘the best that has been thought or known in the world’ (Arnold 1993: 79) available to everyone. This goes alongside his celebration of key features of working-class culture, rather than standing in opposition to it. Much the same is true of Hoggart. Nevertheless, their work came to be seen as foundational for British cultural studies, in which rather different modes of evaluation operated.12 An important way-stage in the development of this field was the publication of Hall and Whannel’s (1964) book The Popular Arts. While building on the work of Hoggart and Williams, these authors resisted their tendency to judge popular, commercially produced cultural forms as necessarily inferior to Culture. They argued instead for recognition of different cultural genres, including those with popular mass appeal, and insisted that each of these should be treated as of value in its own terms (pp. 36–38). Nevertheless, they emphasized that within genres, evaluations can and should be made. An example is their claim that Adam Faith ‘as a singer of popular songs’ is ‘by any serious standards far down the list’ (Hall and Whannel 1964: 28). While Hoggart and Williams were significant forerunners, and Williams’s subsequent work was also an important influence, the emergence of cultural studies as a distinct field effectively began with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in 1964 by Richard Hoggart—though the key role was played by Stuart Hall, who initially served as research fellow but later became its director when Hoggart left to go to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1968. Hall (1990: 13 12  See Hewison’s (1997: chs 4–6) discussion of the historical context of Hoggart’s and Williams’s work and that of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Williams (1977) later developed his position into an explicitly developmental conception of culture, one that, as Bennett (1998: 95–101) notes, has some parallels with that of Tylor: ‘For both Williams and Tylor, the concept of culture forms part of an account of a general process of human growth and development; for both of them a necessary part of cultural analysis consists in the identification of those particular forms of culture which contribute to or impede this general process’ (p. 100).

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and passim) has provided an illuminating account of the antagonism displayed towards the Centre by the English Department at Birmingham, which he describes as committed to the ‘Arnoldian project’ exemplified by the Leavises, as well as by the sociologists in the University, who resisted what they saw as an interloper on their territory. Nevertheless, Hall managed to define the field’s focus and orientation and, in association with students and staff, produced a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical research that became influential worldwide.13 As the name of the Centre indicated, the focus was largely on contemporary, or at least recent, cultural phenomena, by contrast with Williams’s (and to some extent Hoggart’s) more historical perspective; and it came to focus on popular culture—from ‘bestselling’ books and magazines to news programmes and soap operas on television, or Hollywood films—as well as on the youth subcultures influenced by these; precisely those phenomena which Hoggart, and to some degree Williams, had deplored. In part this shift probably stemmed from recognition of the fact that members of the working class (and, for that matter those in other classes, including the researchers themselves) had become enthusiastic consumers of some mass media products, while the sorts of working-class culture valued by Hoggart and Williams had virtually disappeared. But there was also a significant move against what was seen as the elitist attitude involved in a rejection of new forms of popular culture, an elitism also held to be evident within some forms of Marxism—for instance, Adorno’s dismissal of jazz. Indeed, it came to be argued that commercially produced cultural forms appeal to the preferences, and even draw on the cultures, of ordinary people; and that they are never simply passively consumed but are to some degree appropriated and ‘popularized’ in the process of reception. This was a central theme in the studies carried out of various youth subcultures that emerged from the 1950s onwards, from ‘teds’, ‘rockers’, and ‘mods’ to punks, ‘goths’, ‘emos’, and ‘lolis’ (see Gelder and Thornton 1997; Gallacher and Kehily 2013). The conception of culture that much of this work employed was close to the pluralist notion of ‘culture-as-a-­ way-of-life’, and in some respects it paralleled and drew on subcultural studies in sociology. 13  For useful discussions of Hall’s work, see Procter (2004) and Morley and Chen (1996). There may be a risk here not only of exaggerating the role of Hall in the Centre, though I think this was huge, but also of assuming a coherent and stable ‘Birmingham School’: see Hall (1990).

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Also significant was the growing influence of Marxism in the 1960s, and of rather different forms of it from those that had previously been prominent in Britain. As a key member of the ‘New Left’, Hall was at the centre of these developments in the 1950s and 1960s. By the middle of the twentieth century, Marxism was a heterogeneous and internally conflicted ‘tradition’. And the conflicts were not just between Stalinist orthodoxy and Trotskyism but also between both of these and various kinds of Western Marxism, such as those developed by Lukacs and Korsch; by the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School, including Adorno and Marcuse; by Gramsci; by Sartre; and by Althusser and his students—these all differing from one another in fundamental respects (see Kolakowski 1978). While Marxist ideas had shaped Williams’s work to some degree, despite his sharp criticism of orthodox Marxist literary criticism, CCCS took on a much more explicitly Marxist orientation. Furthermore, while building on the work of British Marxists, notably Edward Thompson’s (1963) historical analysis of ‘the making of the English working class’, it also drew heavily on ‘Continental’ forms, especially the work of Gramsci and Althusser. This reflected a significant, and contentious, shift within the New Left (Anderson 1964; Thompson 1965). The significance of Marxism for much work in cultural studies has been that it has framed the focus of analysis—the role of culture in reproducing the existing social order—and motivated a commitment to investigating this role with a view to engaging in a form of cultural politics that challenges it (see Procter 2004). Thus, Hall (1990: 12) famously described cultural studies as ‘politics by other means’. And what was drawn from Marxism, often, was a view of culture that is ‘developmental’ rather than ‘pluralist’ in character, in the sense that particular cultural features were judged according to whether their effect was likely to be progressive.14 At the same time, even the two continental Marxist writers who most strongly shaped cultural studies, Gramsci and Althusser, differed markedly in orientation, in ways that were relevant to the tensions that came to emerge within the field between ‘culturalism’ and ‘structuralism’. Gramsci’s writings derived not just from his engagement in political ­activism, and his imprisonment by Mussolini, but also from the tradition of Italian idealism, notably the philosophy of Croce (Joll 1977). Thus, Gramsci adopted a neo-Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s work, viewing history as a process of teleological development that could eventually  This parallels the later work of Williams (1973, 1977).

14

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result in the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a communist society. But this depended upon effective political mobilization on the part of the working class, for example via workers’ councils in factories as well as the Italian Communist Party. As a result of his dialectical stance, like Lukacs and Adorno, Gramsci did not regard the dominant culture as simply a reflection of capitalism, and as therefore to be rejected, but rather as containing much of permanent value that needed to be reconstituted in proletarian terms—in this respect his position has similarity with that of Williams. However, what was drawn from Gramsci’s work by those developing the field of cultural studies was quite selective, focusing largely on his formulation of the concept of hegemony. What he meant by this term was the ways in which social classes seek to exercise control by cultural not just by coercive means (see Anderson 1976 [1977]; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). In line with this, a great deal of CCCS’s work was concerned with processes of conflict and mutual influence between mass-produced popular culture and the spontaneous cultural practices of subordinate groups.15 Althusser’s approach differed sharply from Gramsci’s in rejecting teleological views of history, and therefore the conception of socio-cultural development characteristic of much Marxism (Callinicos 1976). Drawing on both structuralism and Bachelard’s historical epistemology, he identified a sharp break between the pre-scientific, Hegelian—and therefore ‘ideological’—writings of early Marx and those produced after his ‘epistemological break’ into science, in particular Das Kapital. This was associated with strong opposition on the part of Althusser to the ‘humanistic’ Marxism influential in France in the early 1960s, including that of Sartre. Once again, though, the reception of Althusser’s work by those in cultural studies was quite selective. Perhaps the most influential of his writings in this field was his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in which he portrays structurally generated ideologies as ‘hailing’ individual subjects (a process he calls ‘interpellation’), and thereby as effectively ­constituting them as subjects with particular identities, beliefs, and social functions (Althusser 1971).16 Here we can see an overlap with the notion 15  On the history of the term ‘hegemony’, and its role in the work of Stuart Hall, see Anderson (2016, 2017). For an excellent discussion of the problems surrounding the values at the core of Marxism, see Lukes (1985). For a critical discussion of the influence of Gramscianism on cultural studies, see Harris (1992). 16  There is a parallel here with the way in which Christian theology sees God as ‘calling’ people to lead virtuous lives. Durkheim’s view of society as instigating such religious demands is perhaps an important bridge here.

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of hegemony, despite the significant differences in orientation between Althusser and Gramsci, and it was this overlap on which much work in cultural studies drew, this representing an important attempt to theorize the relationship between socio-economic processes, culture, and agency. At the same time, as we shall see, the tension between what can be crudely referred to as voluntarism and determinism structured much theoretical debate within the field. So, under the influence of Gramsci and Althusser, a great deal of work in cultural studies was centrally preoccupied with the ideological role of culture. However, neither of these writers provided a method for analysing ideology in texts or for investigating its effects. While Althusser and his students had developed a structuralist method of analysis in examining the work of Marx, for the most part researchers in cultural studies turned to other structuralists for an analytic method, notably the semiotics of Barthes and/or the revisionist psychoanalytic position of Lacan, both of which were influenced by structuralism.17 Much structuralism adopted what I referred to in the Introduction as a culture-as-meaning-making position. Its core idea was that the surface features of texts—the latter term being applied not just to print but also to other media, for example to television and film—can be scientifically investigated by identifying the underlying rules that generate those features (see Hawkes 1977; Thwaites et al. 1994). This semiotic form of analysis was initially drawn from Saussure’s linguistics, which had emphasized the importance of studying the synchronic structural relationships within languages; their diachronic development having previously been the main concern of language scholars (Culler 1976). Saussure’s ideas were significantly developed by Jakobson and others, not least in building on his idea of semiology: the application of a structuralist method beyond the fields of grammar and semantics to the area of linguistic style, and even to other forms of expression than language.18 As we saw earlier, these ideas were 17  It is important to note that this turn to structuralism within cultural studies was part of a broader, and more complicated, trend. Important for the development of cultural studies was the impact of structuralism on the discipline of English Literature in Britain from the 1970s onwards. Williams (1981b) provides an illuminating discussion of the connections, disparities, and tensions, between more traditional approaches within this discipline and the various kinds of Marxist, and especially structuralist, work that came to be influential at that time. 18  There has, of course, been much discussion of the relationship between language and culture, including the idea that the distinctive lexical and/or grammatical structures of par-

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picked up by Lévi-Strauss and applied in anthropology, but they were also adopted by other French scholars around the same time, notably by Barthes, who (in his early work) was specifically concerned with the ideological role of mass culture (see Barthes 1972). He focused on the ways in which, via the connotations of words and images, various aspects of popular culture—from newspaper pictures to wrestling matches—served to convey messages that reinforced dominant French bourgeois society (see Culler 2002). Working largely independently of CCCS, a group of scholars associated with the journal Screen in the UK more or less established the field of film studies in the 1970s, and were particularly important in demonstrating how structuralist method could be applied in analysing this type of cultural product. They drew on psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Lacan, in order to theorize the processes by which people consuming texts, of whatever kind, are subjectively constituted in the process; this understood against the background of a notion of cultural reproduction in which both the structuring of texts but also the psychosocial processes of their reception generate ideological domination and thereby reproduce capitalism and/or patriarchy. This was a pioneering line of investigation that had considerable influence on cultural studies and beyond (see Tudor 1999: ch 4 and passim). At the same time, this structuralist work raised some fundamental questions: about whether or not a societal context could be assumed to lie outside of the constitutive processes being studied, shaping them; and about what form of agency, if any, could be assumed, given these processes. Indeed, resistance grew within cultural studies against the idea that audiences passively receive and internalize media messages, and to the tendency of structuralist analyses to focus on texts without, it was alleged, locating these sufficiently in their socio-political contexts. One source on which this resistance drew was the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov, who had criticized Russian formalism—an early version of structuralism—along similar lines (see Voloshinov 1973; Brandist n.d.). In a very influential paper, reacting against the US tradition of communications studies, as well as those forms of Marxism and of structuralist work that implied a deterministic conception of media effects, Stuart Hall (1980b) distinguished three types of response to texts. The first was adopticular languages are a key factor generating different cultures. For a useful overview, see Kramsch (1998).

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tion of the ‘preferred reading’: in other words, simply taking over the ideological message built into a media product. However, he argued that, while this may be the most common response, people could also adopt the message in a more qualified way, applying it selectively in particular situations. Or, finally, they could reject the message on the basis of some alternative framework. What motivated Hall’s more nuanced approach to textual effects was not simply recognition of variation in audiences’ responses to media products—evident, for example, in the research of Morley (1980)—but also a political emphasis on the scope for resistance to the dominant social order, a possibility that the Althusserian conception of ideology, and much of the work inspired by structuralism and psychoanalysis, appeared to rule out.19 Here, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony continued to play a significant role for many, leading to the ‘reception’ of media messages being regarded as a key site for at least potential resistance and struggle against processes of socio-cultural reproduction. A balancing act was involved here, as in much other Marxist and sociological work, between acknowledging the ideological role of the media while yet denying that they can simply imprint attitudes on audiences. In other words, the central theme was that social reproduction takes place in and through cultural processes, but that it is not free of contradictions (in the Marxist sense of conflicts among socio-historically embedded structures), and indeed that these provide scope for progressive cultural politics. An important influence on the development of cultural studies, as on many other fields in the late 1970s and 1980s and subsequently, was the emergence of ‘new social movements’, in particular, feminism; this label differentiating them from those of a more traditional kind that were social class-based. These movements broadened the political commitments underpinning cultural studies, forcing the need to find new formulations of the character that a radical perspective should take (see Brunsdon 1996). One aspect of this was the politics of ‘new times’ (Hall and Jacques 1989) and a move to a ‘cultural politics of difference’ in which people are portrayed as occupying multiple subject-positions, not just a single one defined in terms of social class. This ‘intersectionality’ was regarded as providing scope for alliances to resist the various sorts of oppression involved. At the same time, it generated conflicts and dilemmas. And, in analytic terms, it

19  A similar tension was to be found in later use of the work of Foucault, Bourdieu, and de Certeau (see During 1993: 10–11).

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made the attribution of distinct cultures to members of particular social categories problematic. Feminists played a particularly important role in the study of film, for example investigating the gendered character of the products of Hollywood, and exploring the nature of women’s responses to them. This was complemented by research on forms of literature that were largely directed at women, notably women’s magazines and romantic fiction. This was one of the areas where there was particular insistence on the active role of ‘consumers’ of media products, and there was much discussion of the political implications of women’s use of this literature. One aspect was an emphasis on the pleasure they gained from it, partly under the influence of Barthes’s discussions of plaisir and jouissance but also the work of Chodorow (1978). And this marked a significant shift in the conception of culture being employed. Where much work in cultural studies had, in effect, adopted a developmental conception of culture, in which the value of cultural phenomena was judged in terms of the extent to which it was taken to obstruct or enhance socio-political change, there subsequently arose a tendency to evaluate media products in terms of the pleasure derived from them by ordinary people, this sometimes amounting to a form of ‘cultural populism’ (McGuigan 1992). An influential example of this tendency was the work of Fiske, though he combined it with the idea that the products of mass culture are an inadequate substitute for a genuine popular culture, and with a commitment to a ‘progressive’ politics that would bring about such a culture (see, for instance, Fiske 2010). Here, there is a tension between a developmental and a pluralist conception of culture. Another significant influence within cultural studies from the 1980s onwards was postcolonial theory, which largely developed in the wake of Said’s (1978) Orientalism (see Hall 1992a; Said 1993; Gilroy 1993, 2010; Bhabha 1994; Brah 1996; Spivak 1999). Central to this influence was not only a recognition of the globalized nature of societies today but also of the extent to which cultures are fabricated, for example through activities of othering, as Said had documented in the case of Western images of ‘the East’. Furthermore, cultures came to be seen as interpenetrating one another as a result of contact and communication, as borrowing and imposing on one another, thereby producing hybrid forms. While the exercise of global power by the West, in cultural as well as in other ways, was foregrounded, those on the receiving end of this were not portrayed

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as passive, nor as lacking cultural resources to deflect and reinterpret the effects of this cultural domination. The cultural studies field that emerged from the confluence of all these developments, over a period of around three decades, was, not surprisingly, heterogeneous; and, as should be clear from the discussion here, it involved a blending of several conceptions of culture. Indeed, to a large degree the field was united only by what it rejected: the ‘elitism’ of Arnold and the Leavises, and also of Adorno, on one side, and the reductionism and determinism of orthodox Marxism, on the other, along with the latter’s neglect or playing down of other kinds of oppression than that relating to social class. What resulted were analyses of popular forms of culture that, while often emphasizing the ideological role of capitalist commercialism, also insisted on the originating sources of creativity that underlay these forms and their reception—but with considerable variation in relative emphasis on those two aspects. And there was also a move away from an exclusive emphasis on social class, with more attention given to other social divisions, as both significant features of the social landscape but also as potential sources of resistance and transformation. In recent years, the field of cultural studies has increasingly been viewed as in crisis (Turner 2012). One response to this has been a shift in focus to the study of cultural policy, to the role of culture as an instrument, or technology, for ‘acting on the social’ (Hunter 1988: 114; Bennett 1992a, b, 2000, 2006). This has drawn heavily on the Foucaultian notion of governmentality (Bennett 1998: ch 3 and passim), and the interest has been not just in policymaking but also in specific institutional settings—schools, galleries, museums, theatres, libraries, and so forth—that function to regulate everyday attitudes and behaviour. Also involved here, in some cases, is a significant modification in political orientation on the part of the analyst, a shift to what has been referred to as ‘pragmatic reformism’ (Striphas 2017). Thus, Bennett (1992b: 32) advocates ‘talking to and working with what used to be called the ISAs [Ideological State Apparatuses] rather than writing them off from the outset’. This reflects both a rejection of the idea that power is centralized and must be resisted, and a re-focusing on the task of addressing specific issues from the point of view of ‘access, equity, empowerment and the divination of opportunities to exercise of appropriate cultural leadership’ (Bennett 1992b: 396). Reflecting on the history of cultural studies from the point of view of the conceptions of culture involved, the four I identified in Chap. 1—aesthetic cultivation, evolutionary development, pluralistic ways-of-life, and

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meaning-making—have all been involved in various ways, albeit not always clearly distinguished from one another. In particular, an aesthetic focus on artworks often blurred into usage of the anthropological sense of the term as referring to a whole way of life, with each being modified considerably in the process. And this was often combined with a focus on meaning construction. An illuminating example is Hebdige’s (1979) study of the aesthetic dimensions of youth subcultures, with style seen as subversive, where any distinction between professional art production and the cultural activities of young people was broken down. At the same time, structuralism also encouraged a focus on sign systems and meaning-making, while a developmental model of culture, drawn from Marxism, remained influential and underpinned much significant work (for instance, Willis 1977). Aside from this creative blurring of different conceptions, there are also some significant additional aspects of cultural studies’ treatment of ‘culture’ that ought to be mentioned. One of these was bringing ‘culture’ into association with ‘ideology’, a term whose meaning is equally variable and contentious (see Hammersley 2018). However, the relationship between the two often remained obscure, with a tendency to treat ‘ideology’ as referring to the bad parts, and ‘culture’ to the good ones, that make up the site of hegemonic struggle. Equally important, though, this relationship was also implicated in the troublesome question of the scientific nature of cultural analysis. The early work of Hoggart and Williams assumed a kind of analytic expertise similar to that characteristically claimed by literary critics, based on connoisseurship as much as on science; and they were able to adopt a relatively relaxed attitude towards this issue. However, under the influence of Althusser, and of structuralism more generally, cultural analysis came to be presented as scientific, and thereby as epistemically privileged. But this claim to scientific warrant was challenged almost from the beginning. One reason for this was an insistence, shared with Hoggart and Williams, on the capacity for understanding and creativity of ordinary people, along with recognition of the vulnerability of cultural analysts themselves to ideology, deriving from their class backgrounds and other social positions. Equally important, as I noted in the previous chapter, in some areas of social science and the humanities there was an increasing tendency to treat science as simply one cultural practice (or set of cultural practices) amongst others, by no means insulated from wider socio-­cultural forces. For example, feminists emphasized the extent to which science had been distorted by patriarchal attitudes, and there were similar arguments from a postcolonial perspective. For these reasons,

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it was often insisted that the tendency to privilege science in Western societies must be actively subverted. As a result of these factors, over time there came to be less emphasis on the scientificity of cultural analysis, and this threatened the concept of ideology, given that it relies upon the contrast with science. This tension remained unresolved. Another significant conflict within cultural studies, mentioned earlier, was that between the ‘culturalism’ of Williams and Hoggart, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ‘structuralism’, of various kinds, that increasingly came to dominate the field (Hall 1980a; Johnson 1986 [1987]). There are at least two strands to this. First, there is the tension between an emphasis on cultural factors as against material factors, as regards their relative contribution to social processes. This had long been present within Marxism, with arguments against economic reductionism, on one side, and accusations of idealism, on the other. Second, there is the conflict between a focus on the analysis of particular cultural phenomena and structuralism’s concern with the generative rules that produce such phenomena—rules that may be generic rather than culturally specific. A further complication here is that the structures with which structuralism is concerned are intrinsic to culture, by contrast with the notion of material structures, relating to technological and economic relations, characteristic of most Marxism.20 Recognition of an increasingly wide range of social divisions also had implications for the conceptualization of culture. While the main emphasis in the study of youth groups was on the role of social class, here age and generation were also necessarily involved. And the complex structuring of subcultural formation emerged even more clearly with feminist analyses of a ‘culture of femininity’. Not only did this refer to the members of a very large social category, rather than to a specific group or social class located in its own territorially based community, but this culture of femininity was specifically defined not in terms of opposition to patriarchy but rather by a concern with heterosexual relationships (with some feminists viewing this culture as ideological, while others did not). While later studies of women showed that this was by no means the only form of women’s culture, recognition of such variation raised further questions about the attribution of cultures or subcultures to social categories. Furthermore, the later developments in second-wave feminism increasingly emphasized 20  Note that even if we adopt a definition of ‘culture’ that includes the economy and technology, this difference in the meaning of ‘structure’ remains.

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intersectionality: the ways in which women’s identities (and, for that matter, men’s too) are multiply defined in terms of ‘race’/ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, ability/disability, and other dimensions as well. This further highlighted the problem of attribution. One consequence of this, shaped by a general opposition to ‘essentialism’ (the treatment of a culture as having an intrinsic character and as uniquely attached to an independently existing identity), was that the concept of culture sometimes came to be displaced by the notion of discourses that circulated in particular contexts, perhaps with these drawn on flexibly by participants according to circumstance. This involved a much more fluid conception of the terms in which people make sense of, think/feel about, and respond to, the world, than that characteristic of earlier cultural analyses. Any correspondence between a particular set of ideas, sensibilities, attitudes, and so on and a particular group of people is greatly weakened here, as too is the idea that their behaviour is determined by these. Instead, it is recognized that people’s actions are situationally variable.21 This parallels developments within sociology, discussed earlier, that focused on the notion of culture as a toolbox. Finally, it is perhaps worth saying something about the political commitments built into cultural studies. Most work in this field has displayed an evident political attachment—to Marxism, feminism, or at least to a broad kind of Leftism. Thus, Hall (1992b: 281) argues that the project in which the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was engaged was the production of organic intellectuals, on the model of Gramsci.22 It is significant that, at more or less the same time that the field of cultural studies emerged, the forces of the Right were gaining in power and influence in the UK and also in the US. One aspect of this was promotion of a traditional view of Culture (see Cox and Dyson 1971; Hewison 1997: 21  For example, in the study of youth groups, there emerged a field of ‘post-subcultural studies’ (Weinzierl and Muggleton 2003), signalling an emphasis on the fluidity and hybridity of youth cultural styles (see also Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995).These developments were no doubt encouraged by, and in some cases also shaped, the development of various kinds of discourse analysis in the same period, by post-structuralists and others (see Hammersley 2002). 22  As has been pointed out by Bennett (1998: 31–33), there are fundamental problems with this notion. Indeed, for Gramsci, the organic intellectual is tied to aiding the struggle of a particular social class, and this means being subordinated to the organizations which lead that struggle, as contrasted with the detachment, though not neutrality, of the ‘traditional intellectual’. See also Hammersley (2000).

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167–169), but an even more influential component championed ‘the economic logic of the market’, precisely the sort of philistinism that Arnold, the Leavises, and others had challenged. Opposition to these political developments on the part of those working in cultural studies focused on protecting subordinated cultures and sustaining the prospect of social change designed to realize the ideals of equality and freedom characteristic of the Left. In being patently a political as much as an intellectual enterprise, cultural studies shares an important feature in common with Arnold’s advocacy of Culture, while differing in this respect from anthropological work that, generally speaking, was primarily aimed at documenting the nature and development of Culture, or the character of particular cultures. This is not to deny that the latter may have been done for political reasons, was shaped by political assumptions, and could have had political effects, notably in connection with colonialism and neocolonialism. Of course, Arnold’s political orientation was very different from that of most cultural studies writers in the twentieth century. But it is equally true to say that the political orientations I listed above as associated with the development of cultural studies are by no means entirely compatible with one another— Marxism, structuralism, and feminism, for example. Moreover, while the more recent turn to a focus on cultural policy involved a shift in political orientation, it retains a commitment to an interventionist conception of research—indeed Bennett (1998) sees universities, and therefore all research and teaching that takes place within them, as part of what Foucault refers to as governmentality, and argues that cultural studies should become ‘a reformer’s science’, echoing Tylor. I have focused here largely on developments within cultural studies up to the end of the twentieth century. More recently, there has been some stasis in, or even disintegration of, the field, with fears expressed for its future (Turner 2012). There are several dimensions to this. One is resistance to the process of institutionalization through which the field had become a discipline in its own right. The objection here is both to academicization and to increasing severance from political practice. Another fear is of a process of routinization characteristic of disciplines, this stifling new ideas (see Miller 1994). At the same time, internal developments, such as the focus on cultural policy, have been controversial for allegedly undermining the fundamental commitments of the field (Jameson 1993; McGuigan 1996: ch 1; Miller 1998; Sterne 2002). Meanwhile, there have been external changes, such as growth in the sociology of culture and

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cultural sociology, discussed earlier, which have impinged on the territory claimed by cultural studies. There have also been influential developments, both within Science and Technology Studies and feminism, that have appeared to downplay the significance not just of culture but also of discourse, in the form of the ‘new materialisms’ (see, for instance, Fraser et al. 2006; Coole and Frost 2010). These reject what is regarded as a false conception of nature, as inert and atomistic, and of culture as merely ideational (see Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). In effect, what is offered is a new vitalism, in which many features of human beings—especially agency—are assigned not just to other animals but even to inanimate objects. The aim here is to dissolve the distinction between the biological and the social, which underpinned all of the main conceptions of culture I have discussed. New materialists argue that decentred, relational modes of understanding can overcome the tension between cultural and material factors, as well as that between determinism and voluntarism, both of which are, as we have seen, characteristic of cultural analysis. What sometimes appears to be involved here is a complete abandonment of the concept of culture. For example, the anthropologist Paul Rabinow (2003: 84) admits that his work no longer focuses on any of the main themes characteristic of cultural analysis: ‘meaningful totalities, ordered semiotic fields, multiplying habitus, contested identities, etc.’ (see also Shweder 2003: Intro).

CHAPTER 4

Problems with the Concept of Culture and a Suggested Reformulation

Abstract  The previous chapters have highlighted some problems with the concept of culture: conflicting conceptions have been adopted, or put together in ways that are open to serious question. In this chapter these problems are shown to derive, in large part, from the fact that ‘culture’ is implicated in a range of quite different contrasts: with what is worthless or morally damaging; with biology; with materiality; with ‘society’; with what is universal to humans; and with variability within groups and societies. Also of significance have been contrasts with economic rationality, and with agency more generally. The problems arising from these oppositions are further illustrated by discussion of three controversial topics: cultural deprivation; multiculturalism; and the notion of ‘digital culture’. Finally, an attempt is made to reconceptualize ‘culture’ for analytic purposes, and the implications of this are briefly illustrated by exploring the explanations put forward for the 2011 riots in London. Keywords  The meaning of ‘culture’ • Cultural deprivation • Multiculturalism • Digital culture • Culture and rationality • Culture and agency The complex history of the concept of culture has been outlined in earlier chapters. The aesthetic cultivation sense of the term, the first of the four senses I identified in Chap. 1, formed part of a critique of prevalent attitudes in nineteenth-century British society. It identified the kinds of © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hammersley, The Concept of Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22982-5_4

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­ ersonal ideal, knowledge, and appreciative capacities to which, it was p believed by the critics, everyone should aspire. It came out of a conception of what a good life for a human being is; this deriving from Renaissance ideals and Romanticism, as well as from a conception of spiritual development drawn from Christianity. And central to it was evaluation of forms of literature and art, and the beliefs and attitudes they embodied or were thought to engender. This constituted the basis for what came to be referred to as ‘high culture’, but, over time, there was a tendency for this to lose its original inspiration and to become treated by many as little more than a symbol of superior social status (so that what was involved was ‘taste’ rather than Arnold’s emphasis on virtue). It was in these terms, especially, that the concept of Culture came to be criticized by many sociologists and cultural studies writers, as representing no more than the culture of the dominant class, which served to reproduce social inequality through legitimating it. Meanwhile, as we saw, in some quarters ‘popular culture’ came to be celebrated, or at least those forms judged to be politically progressive in spirit and/or in their effects, so that the high culture/ low culture distinction was subverted or even inverted. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century anthropologists were initially concerned with describing and explaining the diverse ways of life, beliefs, and technologies, as well as kinds of art and music, to be found in ‘primitive’ societies—as a means of documenting a process of socio-cultural development of which Western culture was the most advanced form. Here, the term ‘Culture’ was defined in broad, rather than specifically moral or aesthetic, terms, and relied upon an evolutionary conception of the growth of civilization. This employed what I referred to earlier as a developmental model of culture, one also to be found in many versions of Marxism. So, as with aesthetic cultivation, here too there was an evaluative component to the accounts provided, albeit a rather different one. By contrast, in twentieth-century anthropology, evaluation was suspended so as to facilitate understanding ‘other cultures’ in their own terms, or as distinctive forms of social organization. Nevertheless, implicitly or explicitly, this was sometimes extended into a more general ethical or philosophical principle of cultural relativism, or multiculturalism, one that specifically challenged the discourse of Western imperialism. What was employed here was the third influential sense of the term ‘culture’ I identified: as a ‘way of life’. Finally, both structuralism and much cultural sociology tended to interpret ‘culture’ as referring to a meaning-making process, sometimes viewed as distinctive to ‘culture workers’ but often treated as a ubiquitous

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­ enerative feature of ordinary social life. In some versions, this takes the g form of viewing what people believe and do as entirely determined or constituted by generative cognitive principles or logics of which they may be unaware, these serving psychological and/or social functions. Often, though, in both sociology and cultural studies, we find this fourth conception of culture mixed with one or more of the other three, or operating alongside perspectives that appeal to various ‘material’ factors, such as technological development, social divisions, and group interests. Despite the array of meanings given to ‘culture’, as I noted at the beginning of this book, the ambiguities are rarely explicitly addressed when the word is used by social scientists, the result being vagueness, uncertainty, and sometimes confusion—along with debates in which the parties talk past one another. There are also problems internal to each of the four conceptions of ‘culture’. In this chapter, I will identify the key contrasts in which this term is implicated, as a result of its history, and the difficulties of interpretation and understanding that these produce. I will also look at three specific topics—cultural deprivation, multiculturalism, and the notion of ‘digital culture’—that have been subject to controversy, and in which some of these contrasts are evident, in different ways. Finally, I will propose a revised concept of culture (for the purposes of social analysis), designed to avoid the problems.

Culture Contrasts The meaning of ‘culture’ on particular occasions of use derives from one or more of several contrasts in which it has been deployed. These relate to diverse contexts and therefore do not have fixed and well-defined connections with one another, though there are occasional overlaps amongst them: Culture versus what is worthless or morally damaging. This contrast was, of course, central to the aesthetic cultivation sense of the term. While it sometimes hovered behind nineteenth-century anthropological accounts, the emphasis on evolution ran counter to it; and there was sometimes even a reversal of evaluation, with the ‘naturalness’ of ‘primitive’ society being held to highlight the artificiality or decadence of modern ‘civilization’. Twentieth-century anthropology, however, largely rejected this contrast, in favour of recognizing multiple cultures, with evaluation suspended, or these cultures being treated as incommensurable. Of course, it was recognized that within each culture, there were evaluations of attitudes, behaviour, artefacts, products, and so on in aesthetic and other

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terms, but these were treated by anthropologists as entirely dependent upon the particular values that prevailed within that culture. By contrast, in cultural studies there was sometimes an inversion of the ‘high culture’/‘low culture’ hierarchy, with greater value being placed upon working-class, ethnic minority, and youth group cultures than on conventional middle-class attitudes and pursuits, and/or on those of non-­Western cultures as against that of the West. Here too, then, we have discrimination between what is judged more and less valuable, albeit in terms that are very different from those of Arnold—and, in fact, also from those of Hoggart and Williams too. Culture versus biology. This contrast underpinned the nineteenth-­ century anthropological sense of ‘Culture’. It was built into the very definition of the term offered by Tylor. Similarly, in their Völkerpsychologie, Lazarus and Steinthal drew a distinction between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ ethnology in the mid-nineteenth century (Kalmar 1987: 674), and this was influential for Simmel, for the development of German anthropology, and thereby for Boas and his students in the US. As a result, it remained an essential distinction for anthropologists even after they had shifted from a singular to a plural conception of culture. To some extent, this contrast also lay behind the aesthetic cultivation sense of the term, in that such cultivation required a suppression of natural (egoistic or sexual) desires; though, in the work of Frank Leavis, with his championing of the novels and criticism of D. H. Lawrence, there was a reaction against this in favour of a notion of the natural as representing what is genuine in life (Jacobson 1967; Black 1995). In the twentieth century, the implications of biology, and especially of ‘race’, for human behaviour were downgraded by most anthropologists, and attempts to explain human behaviour in terms of genetic inheritance were strongly resisted (e.g. see Sahlins 1976). As a result, there were conflicts between anthropologists and proponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, but also within the discipline between mainstream anthropologists and a minority who sought to combine biological with cultural explanations (see, for instance, Chagnon 2013: ch 14). All these very different views have retained the distinction between culture and biology, differing simply in their attitudes towards it. However, in some nineteenth-century discussion, there had been a blurring of the relationship between culture and biology, as a result of non-Darwinian views of evolution, according to which cultural attributes could be biologically inherited, and also because strong parallels were frequently drawn

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between biological and cultural inheritance (see Burrow 2000). And, in recent times, there has been some questioning of the distinction, as a result of biological work on epigenetics: the way in which genes may be turned ‘on’ or ‘off’ by environmental factors. Partly inspired by this, as we saw, some ‘new materialisms’ have put forward a vitalistic conception of nature that undercuts any sharp distinction from culture (see Fraser et al. 2006; Coole and Frost 2010; Meloni 2017). Culture versus materiality. There are several versions of this contrast. Under the aesthetic cultivation sense of ‘culture’, what was of most value in human life was contrasted with mere material concerns: a preoccupation with money and everyday practical matters, or, more broadly, with lower rather than higher needs and desires. Another version juxtaposes culture—as relating to human feeling, spiritual matters, or ultimate goals—to an emphasis on technique—mere means; though, of course, nineteenth-century anthropology treated all of Culture as responding to human needs, so that technology was as much a part of it as religion or art.1 A third version of this contrast—one which came to be influential within anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies—focused on whether patterns of behaviour are to be explained as the product of values, beliefs, and modes of thinking, on the one hand, or as a result of ecology, technology, and/or economic interests, on the other. Within anthropology and sociology, some argued that cultures are adaptations to diverse environments, physical and socio-cultural, and that cultural forms could hold back technological or economic development. The parallel with Marxism is obvious here. By contrast, there were strands of American anthropology that tended to treat cultures as if they were free creations through which groups, communities, or societies expressed themselves, defining their distinctive identities. The question of the proper balance between an emphasis on material and cultural factors in social explanations has been a matter of longstanding debate and continues 1  In recent decades, the idea of ‘material culture’ has been revived, referring to the role in cultures of artefacts of various kinds (Miller 1987; Tilley et al. 2006). It is sometimes argued that culture is always embodied in material form and has material effects (see, for instance, Oswell 2006). There is a link here not only with ‘new materialisms’ (Fraser et al. 2006; Fox and Alldred 2017; Almila 2016) but also with applications of neuroscience (see, for instance, Greenfield 2014), and attempts to use biological evolution through natural selection as model for the way in which cultures develop, with memes (on analogy with genes) as units of culture that form assemblages that compete with one another, thereby revealing which are best fitted to survive and have influence (Blackmore 2000).

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today, with criticisms of idealism on one side and of reductionism on the other (for an interesting discussion, see Williams 1981). Culture versus society. When ‘culture’ is viewed as plural, and interpreted as referring to a whole way of life, it often seems to swallow up much if not all of what normally comes under the heading of ‘society’. At other times, culture is treated as a part or subsystem of society, with its own distinctive functions. Aside from the casual use of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as partial synonyms, there is uncertainty about the meanings entailed even when the relationship between the two is more carefully attended to, as with Eliot’s (1948: 37) declaration that a culture is the creation of a society while also being ‘that which makes it a society’. The anthropologist Raymond Firth (1951: 27) provides a slightly clearer distinction, claiming that the terms ‘represent different facets or components in basic human situations’: if, for instance, society is taken to be an organized set of individuals with a given way of life, culture is that way of life. If society is taken to be an aggregate of social relations, then culture is the content of those relations. Society emphasizes the human component, the aggregate of people and the relations between them. Culture emphasizes the component of accumulated resources, immaterial as well as material, which the people inherit, employ, transmute, add to, and transmit.

Nevertheless, a little reflection on this formulation soon reveals that, in practice, distinguishing between what is cultural and what is societal is likely to be challenging. The problems here stem not just from the way that the term ‘culture’ is used but also from vagueness in the meanings given to the term ‘society’. That word is sometimes employed to refer to a particular nation-state or similar territorially defined unit. However, it may also apply to a component part of a nation, this being explicitly distinguished from its polity and its economy, as in use of the phrase ‘civil society’. Equally, ‘society’ is sometimes employed to refer to what might be better called sociation: diffuse processes of social interaction and the patterning of relationships of the various kinds that these generate. This is hard to distinguish from the fourth conception of culture that I identified in Chap. 1. Finally, the term has been used to refer to a specific type of social relationship characteristic of the modern world: thin and superficial rather than deep and communal (Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft). All of these usages overlap with some

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i­nterpretations of ‘culture’ and, as a result, the relationship between the two concepts is uncertain or unclear. Similar uncertainty arises with the concept of ‘subculture’ and its relationship to the groups, sub-groups, or social categories that are taken to be bearers of subcultures. At the core of this problem is the relationship between beliefs, attitudes, preferences, and so on, on the one hand, and personal appearance or behaviour, on the other. The two are not easily distinguished: it has been argued that there is an internal, rather than external or causal, relationship between them; methodologically, inference often has to be made back from appearance and behaviour to beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. Culture versus what is universal to humans. Most nineteenth-century usage of the term ‘Culture’, whether in cultural criticism or in anthropology, assumed its universal character. The word referred either to what were taken to be ideals about the good life, and the virtuous person, that applied to all human beings, or to a universal process of socio-cultural development. However, in the twentieth century, when the idea of a plurality of cultures became dominant, opposition arose between culture and universality. This surfaced in disputes about the extent to which human behaviour is characterized or shaped by underlying cultural universals, of one kind or another (Murdock 1945; Lévi-Strauss 1966), and about the implications of cultural pluralism for notions of rationality (see Wilson 1974; Hollis and Lukes 1982). There was also much discussion of cultural relativism and its moral implications (Moody-Adams 1997; Lukes 2008). For instance, there have been heated debates about whether there are universal rights (of human beings, of children) applying across all cultures, and, if there are, whether these should be applied in standard ways or interpreted so as to take account of cultural differences (Ignatieff 2001; Freeman 2011). Another example of this conflict relates to the universalistic claims made by feminists about equality for women, on one side, and, on the other, arguments defending cultural practices at odds with that principle, at least as championed in the West—whether this is the wearing of the hijab or female genital cutting (Alvarez 2009). Defences of these practices have sometimes drawn, explicitly or implicitly, on anthropological arguments, and some anthropologists have defended them on grounds of cultural difference (e.g. see Shweder 2000, 2005). Cultural holism versus internal heterogeneity and situational variability. Anthropological conceptualizations of ‘other cultures’ have been criticized for tending to assume that there are isolated communities, each with

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its own distinctive character, as regards beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviour.2 There was a tendency towards this as a result of the shift in focus, at the start of the twentieth century, from evolutionary and diffusionist perspectives to a particularist or functionalist concern with societies/cultures as wholes or systems. And this did sometimes lead to neglect of the extent to which cultural features are shared across communities, and of internal cultural differentiation—though, as I noted earlier, the concept of subculture was originally developed within anthropology (see Linton 1936: 275). Of course, internal differentiation is especially obvious in the case of large, complex societies; and, as we saw, sociologists have given considerable attention to this—as it relates to age or generation, social class, and also organizational and occupational divisions. Sometimes this focus on sub-groups within larger societies has been motivated by a belief that these, at least, must display coherent and distinct cultures. Yet, very often, on further investigation, significant differentiation has been found within them.3 One, radical, response to this has been to reconceptualize culture as ongoingly constituted in processes of social interaction (Zimmerman and Pollner 1970) or as involving the circulation of multiple discourses or variation in ‘interpretive repertoires’ (see Wetherell and Potter 1988, 1992; Montgomery and Allan 1992; McKenzie 2005). This issue also relates to a longstanding problem in the sociology of knowledge, concerned with how cultural features can be rigorously attributed to particular groups (see Child 1941), especially when attention is paid to the contextually variable practices that people employ when assigning cultural features to themselves and to others (Moerman 1968; Sharrock 1974; Jayyusi 1984). There are a couple of other contrasts that should also be given attention. Unlike most of those I have already mentioned, these have often been used to depict culture as undesirable. Both arise from elements in Enlightenment thought and have been associated with key features in the development of Western societies in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries (perhaps for this reason, there is considerable overlap between them, but they do also have distinct elements). In the Introduction, I noted how contrasts were sometimes drawn between culture and civilization, or 2  For a corrective to this and other misrepresentations of anthropology along similar lines, see Lewis (1998). 3  Interestingly, both Sapir (1949) and Radin (1933), both students of Boas, tended to argue that each individual possesses a unique configuration of cultural features.

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c­ulture and modernity. In many respects, the contrasts outlined below represent versions of these but with culture as the target of criticism: Culture versus rationality. This contrast involves a rejection of custom, myth, or culture, in favour of forms of rationality modelled on economic calculation and/or on scientific thinking. The latter are taken to involve the exercise of reason by individuals without restraint or restriction by conventional attitudes, and on the power of this to generate productive innovations, to capitalize on opportunities, or to produce new knowledge. Here, culture is sometimes viewed as a barrier to be overcome (see, for instance, Banfield 1958) and is used as an explanation for differences between societies in their levels of development. This conception of rationality is central to much modern economics, but a similar idea has also informed a great deal of philosophy, for example Kant’s conception of Enlightenment as the freedom and courage to think rationally for oneself. This critique of culture, and celebration of individualism and science, was opposed not just by nineteenth-century critics of industrialism, influenced by Romanticism, but also by many twentieth-century anthropologists, who emphasized what they claimed were the distinctive inner logics of other cultures, and the rationality of apparently irrational actions when viewed in these terms. Similarly, some working in the field of development studies pointed to the ways in which local cultures could offer protection against the depredations of capitalism and/or could actually facilitate economic development (Geertz 1963; Hirschman 1970). In broader terms, cultural critics on the Left, from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno onwards, have challenged Enlightenment conceptions of rationality, treating them as oppressive reflections of bourgeois and/or Western culture. Nevertheless, these conceptions still have considerable currency, shaping the meaning of ‘culture’ as it is used today, in some contexts. Culture versus agency. In this final contrast, as with the previous one, ‘culture’ is treated as synonymous with ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’, and the opposing value is the exercise of creativity on the part of individuals or groups. Once again, what is implied is exercising choices rather than simply following the course indicated by habit or tradition. However, here the contrast employed is not with rationality specifically, but with a much more open conception of what agency involves, one where the model is art rather than science or economic behaviour. This is exemplified, for instance, in some conceptions of modernity as requiring people continually to reflect on and reconstruct their identities and life projects (see, for instance, Giddens 1990), even to turn their lives into artworks (see

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Nehamas 1986). Here, novelty and change are counterposed to culture: the latter often being portrayed as a barrier to personal and social development, one that must be overcome if authenticity is to be achieved. It is worth noting a couple of tensions to which this contrast gives rise. Like the notion of aesthetic cultivation and developmentalist conceptions of culture, it can clash with a multiculturalist commitment to respect cultures that do not place a high value on autonomy. It can also come into conflict with the desire to avoid ‘blaming the victim’, this tension arising from the fact that the unavoidable accompaniment to autonomy is personal responsibility (see Gomm 2001). As I have indicated, each of the eight contrasts is open to different interpretations. In combination, they generate a wealth of confusing and sometimes conflicting connotations for the terms ‘culture’ and ‘cultural’. Moreover, each involves fundamental problems that are difficult to resolve. And these problems have been evident in various disputes and discussions in which social scientists have been involved, over the past 50 years. In the next section, I will briefly examine three of these, focusing on the concept of cultural deprivation, the issue of multiculturalism, and the idea of digital culture.

Illustrative Areas of Cultural Dispute Cultural Deprivation The idea of cultural deprivation was developed to explain educational underachievement among lower-class children in the US, many of whom were African-American, though it was later applied in other countries, for example in the UK to white working-class children.4 It must be viewed against the background of other explanations for underachievement that were prevalent at the time. In the past there had often been formal barriers 4  For examples of this argument, see Deutsch et al. (1967) and Riessman (1962). For a history of the concept, see Friedman (1967). Raz (2011) has argued that the concept derived from other concepts of deprivation, most notably sensory deprivation that had been given considerable attention in the 1950s. Another form of the cultural deprivation argument, without use of the term, is proposed by Turnbull (1972) in his account of the Ik: he argued that the latter’s culture had been degraded by the effects of extreme poverty—though see Beidelman (1973) and Barth (1974). This links to the ‘culture of poverty’ argument developed by Lewis (1959), in the context of anthropological research in Mexico, and back to nineteenth-century anthropological ideas about the possibility of a degeneration of Culture.

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in gaining access to secondary education and to universities, these relating to social class, ‘race’/ethnicity, gender, and religion, and the existence of these constituted an obvious explanation for variation in levels of educational and occupational achievement. Where these barriers were not present, or were progressively being removed, another explanation lay in poverty or lack of the necessary financial resources to exploit what opportunities were formally available. Differential achievement was also sometimes explained by appeal to genetically inherited differences in ability or character. By the 1960s, in the US and the UK, formal and financial barriers to access had been largely removed, as regards primary and secondary education, and explanations in terms of genetic inheritance had been generally discredited, even in psychology (though they were later revived). Nevertheless, educational and occupational inequalities persisted. It was in this situation that cultural explanations came to the fore, although they were by no means new. At the very least, the concept of cultural deprivation pointed to the fact that some children were much less well-prepared for school by their home backgrounds than others: especially those from lower social classes or groups. This was claimed to be the result of various factors, such as their receiving less support and encouragement from parents to pursue their education, family disorganization, a lack of books in the home, a failure of parents to read to their children or to talk to them (at least, in the appropriate ways), and so on. It was sometimes argued that these children’s parents did not, in present circumstances, have the capacity to prepare their children for school, and to support them while they were there. As a result, these children suffered from various deficits: linguistic, cognitive, and/or motivational. On this basis, it was suggested that compensatory forms of education were required to provide equality of opportunity for school success. The concept of culture involved here is clearly an evaluative one, since ‘deprivation’ implies an undesirable lack of something. However, what is lacking could be identified via a notion of aesthetic cultivation, a developmental conception of ‘culture’, or even in terms of the requirements of a particular culture. Advocates of cultural deprivation varied somewhat in their conceptions of culture, but, in practice, they generally took the current requirements of the education system as given, and defined deprivation in relation to these. Much of the focus was on language, and what were taken to be its implications for cognitive and emotional development; this sometimes being regarded as involving a cumulative process of disadvantage, such that children from deprived groups were likely to fall

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further and further behind in school. As already indicated, it was also often argued that a cycle of deprivation is involved: parents who were culturally deprived passed this on to their children, who subsequently transmitted it to their children, an idea that was sometimes blended with the notion of an underclass. At the same time, those arguing for the importance of cultural deprivation insisted that socio-cultural intervention could reduce or eliminate educational inequalities, and thereby facilitate a move towards meritocracy. (By contrast, hereditarian doctrines were taken to imply the inevitability of social class and ethnic differences in educational and occupational achievement, thereby justifying inequalities.) The main opponents of the concept of cultural deprivation were cultural difference theorists (see, for instance, Valentine 1968). They argued that no children can be deprived of all culture (Keddie 1973: 8), and insisted on the intrinsic value of lower-class cultures: lower-class children and others from marginalized groups were neither empty vessels nor culturally incompetent. This was put forward primarily on the basis of an assumed cultural relativism, rather than in terms of any particular evaluative standard. The critics argued that underachievement arose from the fact that a culture alien to these children—the dominant, middle-class culture—was enshrined in schools, setting the criteria for success, and thereby virtually ensuring these children’s failure. Moreover, in the US, this argument was racialized so that what was at issue was the dominance of white culture, which generated discrimination against black children. An implication that could be drawn from cultural difference theory is that children should be educated solely in line with their own cultures, rather than required to learn a culture that is alien to them. Or, alternatively, it might be argued that, within the school curriculum, there should be equal representation of the different cultures present within a society, and perhaps also of forms of pedagogy reflecting these cultures. The first of these proposals was rarely supported, perhaps because it would amount to a form of segregation. To a degree, the second was advanced under the heading of multiculturalism, which is discussed in the next section. However, in fact, despite their sharp disagreement in theoretical terms, cultural difference theorists usually differed much less than might be expected as regards practical recommendations from those employing the notion of cultural deprivation (or related ideas like ‘the culture of poverty’) (Edwards and Hargreaves 1976). For example, one of the foremost proponents of cultural deprivation theory, Riessman (1962), had been

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keen to emphasize that lower-class children do not simply lack culture— the problem is that they are deprived of several essential requirements for success within the school system. Moreover, he recognized that some alteration of those requirements is required, along with a need for greater appreciation of the value of lower-class culture. On the other side, cultural difference theorists, such as Baratz and Baratz (1970), despite vigorous denunciation of cultural deprivation as a racist concept, ended up proposing rather similar remedies to those recommended by cultural deprivation theorists. Even Valentine (1969), who implies in places that a major social transformation is required, puts forward a more modest proposal (albeit one that was unlikely to be acted on) about positive discrimination in the field of employment. Moreover, it should be clear that, from one perspective, the explanation for educational underachievement assumed by cultural difference theorists here is very similar to that built into the concept of cultural deprivation - to do with the gap between home and school. It also corresponds quite closely with that based on the concept of cultural capital developed by Bourdieu (discussed in Chap. 3). What we have here is a tendency for evaluative critique to obscure similarities in factual claims. However, cultural difference theorists were primarily concerned with the fact that the notion of cultural deprivation could be used, and (they claimed) was often used by teachers and others, to assign responsibility for underachievement to children and/or to their parents; and that it had shaped teachers’ expectations of lower-class children and thereby itself depressed their level of school performance. Here we have a rather different explanation for underachievement: the belief that teachers and schools play the major role in determining children’s differential achievement. Furthermore, cultural difference theorists argued that cultural deprivation was in effect being treated as a permanent feature of some social groups, in a manner that ran parallel to assertions of differences in inherited intelligence, thereby justifying the subordination of those groups within society—in effect, ‘blaming the victim’. What we have here is an understandable concern with the unintended political and educational consequences of the idea of cultural deprivation as well as a rather different explanation for social class and ethnic differences in school achievement. Here, the key factor is taken to lie in the operation of schools, and in particular in what is claimed to be their discriminatory practices against certain categories of children, even if largely unconscious on the part of individuals or operating at an institutional level. This idea underpinned a considerable body of sociological work (for a critical assessment, see Foster et al. 1996).

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Both sides in this debate treat culture as of value, but in rather different ways. Those promoting the notion of cultural deprivation effectively assign primary value to the culture that is enshrined in the school curriculum, on the basis of aesthetic cultivation, of a developmental conception of Culture, or on the assumption that this curriculum legitimately represents the culture of the society concerned. The other side of the argument, cultural difference theory, places value on what are seen as the distinctive home cultures of those marginalized groups who underachieve within school. This is premised on a cultural relativism according to which all cultures must be assigned equal status. And it is sometimes buttressed by a social constructionism that effectively treats cultures as exercises in autonomy, rather than as adaptations to circumstances (see, for instance, Keddie 1973). There is an obvious clash of value-judgements here, but also of assumptions about the nature of culture. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity As illustrated in its use by cultural difference theorists to attack the concept of cultural deprivation, the twentieth-century anthropological conception of culture, while formally non-evaluative, has often merged into a form of cultural relativism, with equal respect being demanded for different cultures (Herskovits 1958, 1972). This relativism was central to the idea of ‘multiculturalism’ that developed in Western societies in the second half of the twentieth century, for example in discussions within the UK about the education of children from immigrant communities; about the rights of indigenous and other subordinated communities in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; about the Western canon of literature taught in universities, particularly in the US; and about ‘hate speech’ and the need for ‘safe zones’ on campus where members of minority groups can be confident that they will not encounter comments, texts, or images they find demeaning or distressing. Multiculturalism challenged the idea that immigrant or indigenous communities should assimilate to, or integrate into, mainstream culture— by learning to speak the dominant language, and by adjusting other aspects of their lives in line with predominant norms. Instead, cultural diversity was to be tolerated or even celebrated. In some respects, this was a practical adaptation to the demands made by subordinated communities themselves, but it was also often motivated by a cosmopolitanism that emphasized the value of knowing about, and having experience of, ­cultures

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other than one’s own. In such terms, the presence of other cultures within a society provided an opportunity for what could be called ‘cultural tourism at home’. Ethnocentricity was regarded as a vice, not only in intrinsic terms but because it was frequently assumed to result in conflict and violence. At the same time, there have been arguments that multiculturalism involves only a token acceptance of selected features of other cultures, rather than genuine engagement; and that the concept of culture it employs reifies and stereotypes particular practices, treating these as defining the identities of people—‘othering’ them. Also involved, it was sometimes argued, is a tendency to treat cultural practices as if they were independent of the situations in which people act, rather than as adaptations to those situations. In short, multiculturalism has been highly controversial (Kelly 2002; Meer et al. 2016). In the field of education, as we saw, it suggested that the school curriculum, and perhaps even pedagogy too, must be changed to accommodate minority groups. Certainly, if children from those groups are to be able to compete fairly with those from the majority group, their cultural backgrounds must be respected so that they do not develop a negative sense of self-identity. But some commentators insisted that school and university curricula should be enhanced to reflect the broader range of cultures within society; that minority groups have a right to expect their cultures to be represented, alongside the majority culture. This was central to arguments over the ‘Western canon’, as enshrined in humanities courses in the US, and elsewhere (see Searle 1990). It was pointed out that little, if anything, of what was included in that canon came from the cultural backgrounds of the large populations of African-Americans and Latinos living in US society, not to mention indigenous American Indian communities. In its broadest terms, multiculturalism relates to the question of how those from different cultural backgrounds should be treated within society. As Taylor (1994) has argued, what is involved here is a clash between two fundamental political principles. On one side is a longstanding form of liberalism for which the central commitment is fair treatment of individuals, meaning that they should be differentiated solely on grounds that are relevant to whatever decision is being made: in other words, treatment should be culture-blind. Thus, in selecting people for educational courses and for occupational positions, or in their treatment in law courts, the health system, or the media, no attention should be given to their cultural

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background as such: the rights and responsibilities assigned to citizens should apply irrespective of this. The principle prioritized here is procedural equality across individuals; people’s substantive goals, interests, identities, and so on are deemed irrelevant to how they should be treated, unless directly related to the issue concerned. As indicated, this ethic was taken to apply not just to state policies and legal institutions, but also, for example, to how professionals should treat their clients, to how non-state organizations ought to recruit staff and deal with customers, and even to how people should deal with strangers in public settings. What is involved here is the universalism that Parsons (Parsons and Shils 1951) took to be a central feature of modernity. Of course, the institutionalization of this ideal did not stop discrimination taking place, and the charge that cultural minorities are treated as ‘second-class citizens’ has long been made. But a more fundamental challenge to this form of liberalism began to gain ground in the 1960s. This multiculturalist challenge came from what Taylor refers to as ‘the politics of recognition’ (or ‘the politics of difference’), which insists that people should be treated in ways that recognize and respect their distinctive cultural identities. The fundamental premiss of this is the idea that: Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by misrecognition [on the part] of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. (Taylor 1994: 25)

Debates about this reflect a long-running tension within Western societies, between the universalism often identified with the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and an emphasis on distinct cultural identities (see Berlin 1981), on the other. The key argument underpinning the politics of recognition is that formal procedures are not neutral in cultural terms; that, to a significant extent, they involve substantive cultural assumptions that are not necessarily shared by all groups within a society. In effect, they ‘[force] people into a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them’, a mould that is a reflection of the dominant culture (Taylor 1994: 43). On this basis, there is a demand that cultural distinctiveness be recognized and respected; in other words, differential treatment of citizens according to their culture is required, in line with their right to express that culture and to have it respected by o ­ thers.

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An example would be that members of aboriginal groups should be assigned certain rights not available to other citizens, such as to exclude those judged to be outsiders from the areas in which they live ‘in order to preserve cultural integrity’ (Taylor 1994: 39–40). Initially, multiculturalism concerned ethnic or racial minorities within Western societies, but over time application of the notion of cultural difference was extended to cover other sorts of group or social categories, such as women—viewed as subordinated within patriarchal culture—or gays and lesbians—required to hide their sexual orientation in homophobic societies. In relation to these groups, too, there came to be a shift away from the idea of fair treatment to a principle of equal representation—on the grounds that minority or marginalized groups were underrepresented in high-status positions within society. Also relevant in this connection have been efforts to extend the notion of toleration to include the suppression of disparaging comments about minority groups (‘hate speech’). Multiculturalism prompted opposition in some quarters, on the grounds that its cosmopolitanism undermines the sense of identity of people in the cultural mainstream. Indeed, it was suggested that it threatens even the distinct identities of those who promote it, since it endorses all cultures as of equal value. In this respect, many of the debates of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century between supporters and opponents of the Enlightenment were replayed, albeit in a new political key. As a result, a number of flashpoints occurred relating to multiculturalism, for example over the publication of material judged to be disrespectful to a minority culture, or over the wearing of distinctive forms of clothing. The first involved conflict between respect for a culture and free speech. In the second case, the problem sometimes arose where the clothing concerned prevented the application of some universal rule that was judged to be important. For example, a turban makes it difficult to wear a crash helmet when riding a motorbike, a burkha prevents recognition of a person and therefore can be a cover for crime. But, often, the conflict was also symbolic: in France, the wearing of any religious insignia in schools is banned, and burkhas were taken to come under this heading. This relates not only to the division within French society between migrants from the ex-­ colonies, and their descendants, living in marginalized communities within that society, and the dominant white population, but also to the longstanding conflict between secular republicanism and Catholicism. The case of multiculturalism highlights a series of questions: What belongs to particular cultures, and how is this to be decided? Do general

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social categories display distinctive cultures or subcultures, not just territorially based groups? How far does cultural diversity justify relativism? Is there a right of cultural expression? There is also the question of whether all cultures should be respected: what about those that declare white supremacy or the unique truth of some religion? In light of this, we should remember the close relationship that has sometimes obtained between the concept of culture and forms of nationalism or populism (see Gellner 1998). As Spencer (1990) notes in the case of Sri Lanka, nationalists there drew on anthropological ideas and literature in fashioning their accounts of the distinctive national culture that they sought to defend or promote. One of the key themes in much nationalist discussion of culture, and occasionally in anthropological ones too, is the notion of cultural authenticity: a concern with what is essential to a particular culture and, conversely, what is peripheral or alien to it. Another closely related feature is the claim that only insiders can make authoritative judgements about the culture concerned, including about the interests of its members. Needless to say, all of these are contentious ideas. Digital Culture The final example I will discuss is of a rather different kind from the previous two, though it has also been a focus for debate. The term ‘digital culture’ is widely used today, generally referring to the many aspects of modern life that are now facilitated and shaped by various types and uses of digital technologies.5 Indeed, it is often argued that few, if any, areas of human activity have remained untouched by these technologies. Relevant here is not just the capacity of mobile phones to allow people to be contacted and to communicate at almost any time, orally or by text, but also the facility to make, send, and receive images, still and moving, as well as to make and replay audio-recordings, to connect to websites of many kinds, including social media, to play video-games with others remotely, and so on. In addition, there are the multiple ways in which digital technology now shapes many forms of work, and mundane tasks such as buying goods and services (even when this is done offline), calling a taxi, checking bank accounts, keeping in touch with friends, and so on. In some cases, the new technologies simply provided a different way to do what was 5  The meaning of this term overlaps with those of ‘cyberculture’ and ‘internet culture’ (see Silver 2004). For an account of the development of these technologies, see Gere (2008).

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­ reviously done, but they have also generated new forms and sites of social p interaction, new kinds of product and service (see Miller 2011). Digital technology has also been seen as encouraging a significant change in sensibility, away from primary reliance on the textual, by making the production and the sharing of images and audio clips extremely easy.6 This parallels earlier historical arguments about the effects of the spread of writing on modes of cognition (see Goody 1977; Ong 2002). There has also been comment about the influence of digital culture on forms of writing themselves, encouraging not just the use of much jargon, technical and colloquial, including acronyms, but also a shift to more informal modes of expression in public, for instance a downgrading of attention to spelling and grammar. A key implication of the idea of digital culture is that social interaction via digital means is not a mechanical process of stimulus and fixed response, but involves the emergence and creation of shared understandings that guide people’s engagement with what others are doing—culture in the fourth sense I discussed in Chap. 1. Involved here are both ‘making sense’ of what is happening and a set of evaluative characterizations of types of actor and forms of action online, whether this is friends and friending or trolls and trolling. Also involved are distinctive language forms that are made possible via digital technology, not just the provision of images as a substitute for, or accompaniment to, descriptions but also, for example, the development of a whole vocabulary of emoticons. While in some respects these can be seen as a substitute for the non-verbal behaviour that would carry some of the messages in face-to-face interaction, it is equally important to treat them as part of the development of a distinctive medium of communication. Of course, digital forms of social contact, and digital culture more generally, are not insulated from face-to-face social interaction, or from the use of older kinds of mass media. Rather, there is close interrelationship and mutual influence. This is why the term ‘digital culture’ has often come to refer to all aspects of social life in societies where digital communication is available, rather than some isolated segment of it. And one of the issues this raises is whether digital technologies are spreading a homogeneous 6  Visual culture has, of course, become a major interdisciplinary area of academic investigation. See, for instance, Mitchell (1994), Evans and Hall (1999), Mirzoeff (2009). The idea that digital technology is bringing about a cultural transformation has sometimes been influenced by McLuhan’s (1964) earlier claims about the effects of television: its capacity to create an open and instantaneous web of communication in which hierarchy and distance are abolished—a ‘global village’.

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culture that obliterates all others, or whether, by contrast, they are used in culturally variable and creative ways. Part of the force behind the former charge is the way that they tend to subdue differences in place and time, thereby perhaps threatening the survival or emergence of localized cultures. At the same time, it is clear that digital technology supports a variety of subcultures, both ones that predate its emergence and those that stem from it, whether this is online mothers’ networks, virtual worlds, groups providing mutual help for those suffering from particular illnesses, gaming communities, pro-ana websites, or paedophile rings. The notion of digital culture involves a sharp break with most anthropological conceptions of culture in one obvious and crucial respect: it is not centred on face-to-face contact among people. While digital technology can be, and is often, used today to engage with people whom one knows face-to-face, it also allows sustained contact with people one has never met and is never likely to meet. This raises questions about whether digital culture represents a further move away from Gemeinschaft to predominantly Gesellschaft forms of social relations, or whether it facilitates new forms of Gemeinschaft or pseudo-Gemeinschaft life. One area of debate about this, for instance, concerns the character of ‘friendship’ on Facebook (Madge et al. 2009). There is also an analogy between the terms ‘digital culture’ and ‘print culture’, the latter referring to the effects of the invention and use of printing on European society in the early modern period (Eisenstein 1979, 2013). The notion of culture assumed in both cases is, in some respects, similar to that of nineteenth-century anthropology. Thus, there is recognition of the role of technology—of ‘material culture’—in the shaping of society, rather than culture being treated as limited to values and ideas, or treated as relatively free-floating. Furthermore, the focus is not on the unique culture of a particular society but rather on a culture that is spreading across the world, part of a process of globalization. Moreover, generally speaking, the spread of digital culture is viewed as more or less inevitable, though not always as positive. A focus on the participatory character of digital culture, as against the transmission mode characteristic of radio and television broadcasting, plus the way in which many artists have embraced the technology, also means that there is often an aesthetic aspect to discussions of digital culture, albeit one far removed from the views of Arnold, Eliot, and the Leavises. This has been encouraged by the ways in which digital technology has facilitated the production and

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­ odification of still images and videos, as well as of audio extracts or podm casts (see Gere 2008). While, for the reasons just outlined, some commentators regard digital culture as ‘democratizing’, in the sense that it enables active participation on the part of anyone with access to the technology, this claim is open to question. Not only is much of the infrastructure that supports digital culture commercially owned and deployed, but also digital media are now crucial to the operation of most large commercial enterprises. These engage digitally with potential customers and use data generated by people’s participation on websites to maximize revenue through targeted advertising and other means. For them, digital culture is positive because of the business opportunities it provides. At the same time, the demands of digital culture are often seen as requiring ‘culture change’ within commercial and other organizations. Central here is the idea that the digital revolution has speeded up processes within markets, not least the ‘mobility’ of consumers, thereby requiring that firms become more agile and entrepreneurial if they are to flourish, or even to survive (see, for instance, Goran et  al. 2017). In analogous ways, governmental institutions are often required to show that they are ‘digitally accountable’. Moreover, there is an overlap between ‘digital culture’ and what has been labelled ‘promotional culture’ (Wernick 1991; Davis 2013). This is the idea that, under the influence of advertising and public relations, self-­ promotion (in an exaggerated form) has become endemic, not just in the public sphere but also in everyday life. The facilities provided by digital technology have undoubtedly increased the scope for this. And it has also become clear that this technology can be used to manipulate people, notably through the manufacture and distribution of ‘fake news’. Digital culture can be viewed in a variety of ways, then. It could be seen simply as an additional set of tools through which people make sense of the world and communicate with one another. Even in these terms, though, it may be reshaping human behaviour. For example, the sense of anonymity characteristic of much online participation (‘no-one knows you’re a dog on the Internet’, as the old cartoon has it) may encourage attitudes and actions that were previously rare in face-to-face situations, but that may become more frequent as a result of digital culture. There is also the question of by whom, and for what purposes, the opportunities provided by digital technologies are being used: are they opening up a new age of creative participatory democracy; or do they facilitate exploitation by commercial enterprises, the spread of a promotional culture, online

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bullying, grooming by paedophiles, and so on? Others argue that they amount to powerful new systems of social regulation in themselves. Indeed, here notions of cultivation, personal and/or social development, or Gemeinschaft, could be used to argue that there is no such thing as digital culture, that what we are witnessing is the disintegration of Culture, or perhaps indeed of any form of culture. As we have seen, there are also those who argue that digital culture brings about a fundamentally new mode of cognition or sensibility, but there are differing views about what is involved, as well as about whether it is desirable or deplorable.

A Reformulated Concept of Culture As my discussion in this chapter has shown, the term ‘culture’ is implicated in a variety of contentious contrasts, and this partly accounts for the ambiguities, uncertainties, and debates surrounding its use. In the remainder of the chapter, I will suggest a way of reformulating the concept. As regards the four senses of the term I identified in Chap. 1, what I propose is a version of the last of these, but it is also designed to serve most of the functions for which the one most commonly used today—the idea of culture-as-a-way-of-life—is employed. It should be clear that it is not possible to have a single concept that will satisfy all of the purposes for which the word ‘culture’ has been used. So, while what I outline here avoids many of the problems I have identified, it will be restricted in its application: it is specifically designed to suit the needs of sociological analysis. Of course, what such analysis entails is far from a matter of consensus. So I will begin by indicating two contentious assumptions on which I am relying. The first is that the evaluative purposes which drive much use of the term ‘culture’, even in the social sciences, need to be suspended, so that the task is restricted to documenting socio-cultural processes and patterns, and explaining them and their consequences. I have argued elsewhere that this is essential if academic sociology is to flourish (Hammersley 2014, 2017), but this is far from generally accepted. One ground for this restriction is that social scientists have no distinctive expertise, and therefore no authority, to engage in evaluation of the phenomena they investigate (whether, as regards what is of aesthetic value, what counts as moral virtue, or what ought to be viewed as social progress). Furthermore, documenting facts is much more difficult than often seems to be recognized, and a concern with evaluating social phenomena can seriously obstruct it. This does not mean that the social scientist should try to rid herself or

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himself of value assumptions, which is in any case impossible. Nor does it deny that our motivation for doing research, and for studying particular topics, is often because we hope that doing this will have practical benefit. It also does not require that social scientists keep their value assumptions a secret, not mentioning them in their research reports. It does not even rule out indicating possible evaluative or prescriptive implications that could follow from the factual findings produced. But it does require that researchers should not present evaluations of the phenomena they are investigating as if these were validated by the analysis, and that they must work hard to guard against their own value-commitments and interests (and those of others) distorting their pursuit of factual knowledge. Furthermore, in producing any recommendations on the basis of their work, they need to make clear that these are conditional on acceptance of particular value-assumptions that are external to sociological research (Hammersley 2014). This first precondition clearly rules out usage of at least the first two senses frequently given to the term ‘culture’ I identified. A second requirement, in my view, is to recognize the perspectival character of all social inquiry: it cannot comprehend reality ‘as a whole’ or grasp social phenomena ‘as they are in themselves’. Research necessarily involves selection and abstraction: it is guided by the particular questions that are being addressed. There has been a tendency to treat cultures and subcultures as if these were objects that occur naturally in the world, and are therefore immediately available for exhaustive description and explanation. Recognizing that this is not the case, that all knowledge is perspectival, should help to damp down fruitless debates about, for example, the relative importance of biology and culture, material and cultural factors, or about whether the focus for analysis should be at the macro-, meso-, or micro-level. No conclusion can be reached about these matters in general terms. I suggest that this approach can even help us in dealing with arguments that question whether there is any phenomenon to which the term ‘culture’ refers (this doubt is raised by the work of Turner 1994), since we can focus on the practical matter of whether or not this concept (in some form) has any explanatory value, and judge the issue instrumentally—in terms of the cogency of what is produced. We should not assume that some single set of ontological assumptions about the nature of social phenomena is the one and only productive basis for academic inquiry. On the basis of these two preconditions, I now want to move to the task of redefining ‘culture’ so as to facilitate explaining individual actions, collective patterns of behaviour, and/or the outcomes of these. In this

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context, I suggest that the term is best treated as referring to the generative, learnt capabilities, attitudes, habits, and technologies that shape, and are drawn on in, human action. As already indicated, this is a version of the fourth definition of ‘culture’ I identified in Chap. 1. In the way it is formulated here, it cross-cuts the distinction between cultural and biological factors, in the sense that it does not rule out the role of the latter; it also marks off the reference of ‘culture’ from most senses of ‘society’; and it eliminates any need to assume the existence of distinct, free-standing cultures that are internally homogeneous. Under this conceptualization, then, the term refers to all the predispositions and resources that belong, or are available, to a particular agent (individual or collective) at the point of action; these being similar to and different from (in varying degrees and respects) those of other agents.7 Or, rather, it refers to those predispositions and resources that are relevant in explaining some particular action or outcome. In these terms, culture is one of two factors that may be used to explain any action, any institutionalized pattern of behaviour, or any social outcome of some other kind. The other factor is the situation faced by the agent on the occasion, or over the period, concerned. It is important to emphasize that the distinction between culture and situation is an analytic or relational one: what is treated as cultural and what as situational will depend on the focus of inquiry, and, in particular, upon the agent whose behaviour is being explained. After all, other people will almost always represent the most important elements of the situation an agent faces, and they will carry cultural features with them that shape their behaviour and thereby that situation. What this highlights is the need for the focus of any analysis to be made quite clear, since this will determine what counts as culture for its purposes. In other words, what is culture and what situation is a functional matter. As a brief illustration of this reconceptualization of ‘culture’, I will discuss the task of explaining the riots that took place in London, and in a few other British cities, in August 2011 (Lewis and Newburn 2011; Morrell et al. 2011; Reicher and Stott 2011). There is an initial issue here, as in many other cases, of exactly what is to be explained: even in London the riots were not a single homogeneous event; they began in one area in reaction to a police shooting and the aftermath to this, but spread to other 7  Individual agents can act on behalf of groups, organizations, governments, and so on, rather than simply on their own behalf, and they will usually do this in concert with others. In these terms, we can make analytic use of the notion of collective agents.

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areas, and increasingly took the form of shoplifting, looting, and the destruction of property. We must also ask: Are we trying to explain why they occurred where they did or when they did, or why some people were involved while others were not? These are somewhat different research questions, requiring different explanations. For present purposes, I will focus on the last of them: What prompted some people to participate in the riots while others did not. This was the central concern of most commentary at the time, and a range of explanations was put forward, some of which could be labelled as ‘cultural’ in the sense outlined above. Such explanations often echoed ideas about cultural deprivation discussed earlier. For example, the serving Prime Minister (Cameron 2011) opined that ‘there are pockets of our society that are not just broken but frankly sick […]. It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to feel the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and their actions do not have consequences.’ We can reformulate this explanation, in a non-evaluative form, as follows: ‘participation in the riots is to be explained by a difference in attitude on the part of those involved from other people in British society—they feel they have been unfairly treated and that their rights are not respected.’ What is meant by ‘attitude’ here is a predisposition to classify situations and people in particular ways, both descriptive and evaluative, which potentially motivates a particular type of action, or range of actions. This is one, very important, kind of cultural feature—a kind that all of us display, including Conservative politicians. Other explanations for the riots put forward at the time emphasized situational factors. For example, another Conservative politician suggested that ‘there were people who joined in out of a sheer sense of collective intoxification—a kind of madness that gripped a lot of people’ (Johnson 2012). So, here it is not a difference in cultural factors, in the distinctive features of the people concerned, that is held to be the explanation, but rather what happened in the situation in which people found themselves: ‘they got caught up in the events.’8 There is the potential implication here that anyone would, or at least could, have responded in the same way. I have noted elsewhere (Hammersley 2014: ch 6) that both these types of explanation have a history in social science—they were not the inventions

8  This politician, Boris Johnson, also went on to appeal to a kind of cultural explanation similar to that offered by David Cameron.

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of these politicians nor simply a product of their political ideology, even though the latter shaped their use of these types of explanation. Of course, these two sets of factors—cultural background and immediate social situation—do not exhaust what must be taken into account in the task of sociological explanation. Each of them is itself open to further explanation: Why is the cultural background of the agent, or agents, as it is, and why is the situation how it is? Thus, quite a lot of explanations for the riots appealed to more remote factors. Those that focused on cultural factors sought to account for why the people involved in the riot had the distinctive attitudes they did. For example, Cameron identified the source of the problem as ‘the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations’, by which he meant an increased tolerance for ‘irresponsibility’, ‘selfishness’, and lack of ‘discipline’. He claimed that ‘some of the worst aspects of human nature’ had been ‘tolerated, indulged—sometimes even incentivised—by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralised’, and he also refers to ‘communities without control’. Shorn of its evaluative components, this amounts to what, in the context of sociological studies of delinquency, has long been referred to as control theory, whose lineage can be traced back to Durkheim (Hirschi 2002: 16). By contrast, most commentaries by sociologists at the time tended to emphasize situational factors, and were concerned with why the situation of those involved in the riots took the form it did. However, there was by no means entire agreement about the nature of the situation or its causes. Some pointed to the immediate circumstances that had prompted the rioting in North London: the police shooting and the behaviour of the police towards the local community where the victim lived. But this was very often generalized to an account that placed this community in a broader category as part of a substantial section of the British population that are disadvantaged by the economic and political system. Here the situation that is taken to explain the rioting is extended to this group’s position in society, in all relevant respects (not just in relation to the police) and as a longstanding feature (not the specific events that prompted rioting). Furthermore, there is at least a hint that the cause lies in the operation of a particular economic system—capitalism—or in the widespread operation of racism. This was not always spelt out, though one online commentator referred to ‘the horrors imposed on the world economy by the IMF, neo-­ liberalism, the crimes of the international bankers and support for criminal

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wars against civilian populations’.9 And, once again, it is not hard to trace the sociological genealogy of this type of explanation. It is worth adding that explanations in terms of immediate cultural factors may nevertheless appeal to more remote situational factors. This was the case with Oscar Lewis’s concept of the ‘culture of poverty’. As we saw earlier, he argued that poverty can lead to the development of a characteristic type of local culture that reinforces people’s disadvantaged situation by preventing them from capitalizing on opportunities available to improve it. At the same time, he traces the sources of poverty back to the capitalist system, by contrast with some later usage of this idea tended to focus exclusively on the attitudes of the poor, treating these as the cause of their disadvantage, thereby ignoring the more remote situational factors, and truncating Lewis’s argument (see Rodman 1977). From the examples I have used here, there may be a temptation to assume that cultural explanations are ‘conservative’, more likely to be used by the political Right, while situational explanations, especially those that trace causes back to the social system, are ‘of the Left’. However, this is not the case. As I noted earlier, one Conservative politician (Boris Johnson) used a situational explanation, one that echoes nineteenth-century crowd psychology (see Borch 2012). On the other side, a possible cultural explanation for the riots is that they were a sign of growing class-consciousness on the part of the working class; in Marx’s terms indicating a shift from this being a ‘class-in-itself’ to a ‘class-for-itself’. To my knowledge, this explanation was not used by any of the commentators, but it was specifically disavowed by one writer on the Left: ‘it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the “rabble”, those outside organized social space, who can express their discontent only through “irrational” outbursts of destructive violence’ (Žižek 2011). It is also important to emphasize that explanations appealing to factors more remote from the specific attitudes of, or situation faced by, people involved in the riots, nevertheless assume that these more remote factors operate through those specific attitudes and/or situations. Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere, which factors are picked out as the main ones in an explanation is not simply a matter of the causal processes involved but 9  This post seems to be no longer available. Previously, it was to be found at: http://letters.mobile.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2011/08/10/victor_david_hanson/view/ index3.html.

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also of the value-relevance frame within which the explanation is produced. To a large extent, the difference between the explanations offered by Conservative politicians and sociologists, in their comments on these riots, stemmed from a difference in their value-frameworks (Hammersley 2014: ch 6). Furthermore, we should note that this does not necessarily imply a conflict in fundamental values: the differences could stem from variation in how the same broad values, such as notions of fairness, are interpreted and applied—for instance, whether or not very large differences in wealth and income are judged to be unjust in themselves. Of course, there can be interplay between culture and situation. For example, attitudes may be adjusted as a result of the situation faced: through what Rodman (1963) calls ‘value-stretch’, where a value is redefined so as to allow its realization even in the unpropitious circumstances faced; or via what Matza (1964) referred to as ‘techniques of neutralization’, which suspend application of a value to particular people, organizations, or situations, thereby allowing differential treatment of them—for example, on the grounds that they deserve it, that it does not injure them, and so on. Moreover, this interplay can vary in the degree to which it is ‘active’. Much of human behaviour has the character of relatively routine action in which there is little deliberation, and, very often, this action forms part of institutionalized patterns in which others play similarly habitual roles, these mutually supporting one another.10 Here there is minimal active interplay between culture and situation, though of course situations still have to be made sense of as belonging to one type rather than another, and thereby as requiring one sort of response rather than another. While habit is rarely a matter of simple or literal repetition—it always involves at least some variation and drift over time—such institutionalized patterns can nevertheless be contrasted with those where a habitual pattern of action is disrupted, or where no established culturally given course of action is prompted, so that perhaps even the goals being pursued are uncertain. In such situations, reflection and deliberation necessarily take place—at least where scope for this is available—with the result that, at a minimum, there is consideration of strategy or at least tactics. As a result, the outcome will be less predictable from, and explainable via, knowledge of culture and situation, since elements of both may be open to reassessment in relation to one another, and thereby to adaptation in the course of action. It needs to be underlined that the interplay of culture and situation involved here  See Berger and Luckmann (1967) on habituation and institutionalization.

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is a matter of degree so that there is a considerable middle-ground between these two poles. Some explanations for the riots assumed interplay between culture and situation. For example, Bauman (2011) used an analogy between a minefield and social inequality, suggesting that in both cases explosions are always going to occur, but with little scope for predicting with certainty when or where this will happen. However, he goes on to argue that the looting and destruction of property that happened in the riots stemmed, on the one hand, from a cultural disposition generated within British society that gives priority to acquisition of the latest consumer goods, and, on the other, from the opportunity that the rioting offered to people who could not normally afford those goods to obtain them. In this explanation, a type of attitude to be found across a whole population—desire to possess the latest products—is a background factor, and so too is a general situational difference between groups in their opportunity normally to be able to satisfy this desire. Meanwhile, the rioting served as a specific situational factor that offered some a chance to gain satisfaction that was not normally available, and perhaps also to engage in destruction of the shops that display the goods but demand prices which they cannot afford. We should also note the way in which similar attitudes within and across particular families, households, peer groups, or local communities can draw together through processes of mutual identification, and a sense of mutual belonging. This can result directly from an alignment of interests, facing shared problems, and/or the mobilization of support under the banner of some distinctive ethnic, religious, or national identity. This process of drawing together—creating stronger parallels in attitude and behaviour among members than existed previously—at the same time involves the loosening of links or ties outside the network—and, in addition, the marking of boundaries and identification of out-groups, symbolically and/or materially. It is this that creates a sense of coherent and separate cultures, in the twentieth-century anthropological sense of the term. However, such a process does not completely eliminate the spread of cultural features across boundaries or the emergence of internal differentiation, nor does it prevent change resulting from external factors. So, boundaries are often fuzzy, and their significance frequently treated as contextually variable. This kind of communal process was also appealed to in some explanations for the 2011 riots, where it was argued that a substantial section of the population feels a sense of alienation, and that this generates and

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r­einforces attitudes and lines of action among their number that would not be regarded as legitimate by other members of society. For example, while everybody has some notion of property rights—in the sense of accepting and respecting the idea of ownership—there are variations in how this value-principle is interpreted, perhaps in terms of what are taken as exemplars. Despite sharing this value, some may come to see certain institutions, such as the police or department stores, as legitimate targets for attack, on the basis of the sort of neutralization techniques mentioned earlier. A sense of belonging underpins recognition of property rights, and a sense of not belonging may motivate infringement of those rights, but this may also be reinforced by joining with others who feel they have been excluded. While the reconceptualization of ‘culture’ I have put forward here is by no means original, it is at odds with a great deal of conventional usage. This includes where the word is commonly treated as virtually synonymous with ‘community’ or ‘society’, or where, conversely, its reference is restricted to values and norms, or to ‘symbol systems’. It seems to me that these other approaches either render the term superfluous (given the availability of alternative terminology) or seek to restrict its meaning in a way that is not viable. Furthermore, while the approach I have recommended allows for shared culture as well as for cultural variability, it does not require there to be distinct and internally homogeneous cultures. Instead, we can recognize that any actor carries within her or himself a range of cultural tendencies and resources that are similar to, and different from, those of others—to various degrees, and in various respects. Nor is there any need to assume that the cultural tendencies and resources characteristic of any individual agent at a particular time form a coherent whole. While there may well be a strain to consistency, it seems likely that, as Schutz (1962) argued, this operates only sporadically—emerging when inconsistencies give rise to problems or puzzles—so that there are always likely to be tensions in the cultural background of any actor, and such tensions may have explanatory significance, just as may tensions within the situation faced, for example through generating conflicting interests. It is important to reiterate the analytic or functional character of the concept of culture being put forward here. In Weberian terms, it is a way of making sense of what in concrete reality is extremely complex, variable, and changing. What counts as culture, and what belongs to situation, are relative to the focus on a particular agent (individual, group, organization, or set of such) as regards some particular decision, action, or outcome. They are agent-, location-, and time-relational. And which aspects have

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explanatory relevance depends upon the research questions being addressed. At the same time, this does not rule out the use of ideal types that posit groups or communities as having shared cultural predispositions and resources that mark them off for one another. What is essential, though, is not to confuse these types or models with the phenomena being investigated, which at most will only approximate to them in relevant respects. Similarly, this approach to culture does not rule out developmental accounts. Indeed, it is important to understand why people have acquired the particular predispositions and resources they have, and we can expect that there will be systematic processes involved in this. What is proscribed, though, is any teleological assumption to the effect that these processes are part of a single, unitary trend; that they are directed by some agent (God, Nature, or History); and/or that they are intrinsically normative, in the sense of necessarily leading to the realization of human values. In this chapter, I have explored some of the key contrasts in which the term ‘culture’ has been implicated, and the problems of interpretation and analysis to which these lead. Some specific illustration of these problems was provided through discussion of three controversial topics: cultural deprivation, multiculturalism, and digital culture. Towards the end, I sketched one way of trying to resolve these problems for analytic purposes. However, this reformulation does not address the other functions, over and above description and explanation, that the term ‘culture’ has been used to serve in public discussions and, indeed, in much academic work. For this reason, it may be unlikely to dislodge the broader meanings of the term that I documented in earlier chapters. As we saw, to a large extent these have been evaluative in character. In the Epilogue, I will consider the role that values can and should play in relation to the concept of culture.

CHAPTER 5

Epilogue

Abstract  This final chapter focuses on how, in using the concept of culture, we necessarily rely upon value-principles. Academic deployment of this concept has frequently involved practical evaluations: of literary, artistic, or media products; and/or of people, institutions, groups, or societies. However, the grounds for the value-judgements involved have frequently remained unclear, nor has much attempt been made to justify them. In Chap. 4, I argued that academic research should not evaluate the phenomena being studied, but, even where this principle of objectivity is observed, practical values are needed to provide a relevance framework for determining what questions are worth investigating, and what would count as answers to them. However, there has been a general tendency to blur the difference between social science and cultural or social criticism. Keywords  The meaning of ‘culture’ • Culture and values • Value appraisal • Objectivity My starting point for this book was that, while the term ‘culture’ is very widely used in academic and popular discourse today, it has a range of discrepant meanings. Within the academic realm, these are illustrated, for example, by the conflicting approaches to be found within both cultural studies (McLennan 2006) and cultural sociology (Inglis and Almila 2016).

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Furthermore, the concept involves some deep-seated problems. These have underpinned a range of debates, both theoretical and practical, over the past 100 or more years. In earlier chapters, I traced the history of different senses of the term ‘culture’. This history has often been neglected, and, even when it has been given attention, there has been a tendency to rely on caricatures of the ideas involved, so that the problems surrounding the concept of culture have been obscured. As a result of its lack of clarity, and the problems it entails, the concept does not currently serve as an effective analytic tool. In Chap. 1 I identified four influential interpretations of the term ‘culture’, as concerned with: aesthetic cultivation based on universal ideals; a teleological process of social development; multiple forms expressing quite different ways of life and sets of values; and processes of meaning-making that take situationally variable forms, generating diverse understandings. In sketching their history, I tried to reveal the subtleties of the various positions adopted, and the complexities of the issues to which these relate. I also examined the range of contrasts in which the concept of culture is implicated (with what is worthless or damaging, with biology, with materiality, with society, with universal human nature, with heterogeneity and fluidity, with rationality, and with agency). Finally, I considered how to avoid the problems surrounding the concept, for the purposes of academic analysis. A basic requirement, I suggested, is to suspend those aspects of the concept designed to serve evaluative goals—whether the pursuit of spiritual or moral ideals, socio-political change, organizational effectiveness, or whatever—and to focus on what is needed to facilitate the task of describing and explaining social phenomena. In Chap. 4 I outlined the sort of conceptual reformulation that is required for this. As should be clear from earlier chapters, deployment of the concept of culture has frequently involved practical evaluations: of literary, artistic, or media products, and/or of people, institutions, groups, or societies. The writings of Arnold, Eliot, and the Leavises about culture were explicitly evaluative, concerned with personal and social development, and relying on a range of values embodied in a notion of organic or harmonious community that, it was sometimes claimed, had existed in the past, whether in ancient Greece or in England in the seventeenth century. Tylor’s anthropology was a ‘reformer’s science’ concerned with identifying and criticizing functionless ‘survivals’ from the past in contemporary society (Burrow 1966:ch7). Similarly, much work in cultural studies, while claiming the mantle of social science, explicitly or implicitly, has also been evaluative in orientation, for instance engaging in criticism of the role of ‘high culture’ and of the attitudes towards popular culture associated with this, of the ideological function

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served by the commercial distortion of popular culture, and of British society as characterized by social inequalities and discrimination against the working class, women, and cultural minorities. Much the same evaluative orientation has also shaped a substantial proportion of sociological work. At the same time, there has also been work framed by rather different values, for example in the study of crime and delinquency, in explaining educational underachievement, and in determining what is required if commercial or public-sector organizations are to be efficient or innovative. Many of the value-commitments underpinning social scientific work have been controversial, in terms of public opinion at large, and sometimes even within the academic field concerned. Yet, the values involved have rarely been made clear, and even less common has been any sustained attempt to justify them. Thus, to a large extent, Arnold and other advocates of aesthetic cultivation seem to have assumed that the case for what they championed had already been conclusively made, during the Renaissance and later by the Romantics, or that it could be immediately apprehended through honest attention to lived experience or engagement with great literature. Generally speaking, much the same lack of any felt need for justification was also true of nineteenth-century anthropologists in their assumptions about the development of society, with the West standing at the head of that process. Of course, both these sets of assumptions have subsequently been roundly rejected. As regards aesthetic cultivation, by those championing science and industrialism, such as Snow (see Collini 1997; Ortolano 2009), as well as by social scientists who deny any cultural hierarchy and condemn the role of high culture in reproducing social inequalities. Meanwhile, the developmental model came to be denounced by twentieth-century anthropologists, and by many others, on the grounds that it amounted to ethnocentrism. However, very often, these criticisms have also been presented with very little attempt to explicate and justify the value-judgements on which they depend; indeed, they have frequently relied primarily upon derogatory labels that seem designed to circumvent the need for clarity and argumentative support. Thus, notions of aesthetic cultivation or cultural evolution have been rejected as ‘elitist’, ‘hegemonic’, or ‘neocolonialist’. Of course, these terms certainly carry indications of underlying values. And, as we saw in Chap. 3, work in cultural studies has often relied upon a version of the developmental model that demands progress towards a society characterized by individual freedom, social equality, and respect for human rights. But these value-principles are by no means unequivocal in

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meaning, or always mutually compatible, nor are they the only values that could be relevant in evaluating the phenomena concerned. The problems surrounding them have long been documented by philosophers. For example, there are difficult questions, and disagreements, about what people should be free from, and free to do (Williams 1962; MacCallum 1972), and these questions are likely to be answered differently according to who is involved and in what context. In the case of equality, or social justice, there are disagreements about in what respects people should be treated the same and in what ways differently (Ryan 1993; Cavanagh 2002)—as we saw in discussing multiculturalism in Chap. 4. Meanwhile, rights claims vary in their character, and frequently conflict with one another (Jones 1994). What emerges from these philosophical discussions is that more precision is required about what sorts of freedom, forms of equality, or types of right are believed to be justified, and why. Moreover, when such clarification is attempted, in place of vague political slogans, disagreement soon arises among those purportedly on the same ‘side’. Even when the plurality of cultures is valorized—for instance as the product of free and creative expression—with an insistence that cultures must be respected by being treated as of equal value, questionable value assumptions are nevertheless involved. Indeed, cultural relativism involves antinomies: people within most cultures do not usually regard all other cultures as of equal value to their own; therefore, if we insist on their right to express their culture, this involves endorsing their negative evaluations of other cultures. Moreover, while toleration is often desirable, it is not the same as celebrating all cultures, and it always has limits. For instance, even many of those who adopt some form of multiculturalism would not be prepared to accept justifications for female genital cutting that rely on relativist arguments. It is one thing to insist that the role of this practice in the cultures concerned must be understood, along with the beliefs that underpin it, but this does not require us to treat it as legitimate. Here, and elsewhere, it is important to be clear about the values involved, and about how particular value-judgements are to be justified, if they can be. It should also be said that there has rarely been much attempt to justify the assumption that social scientists can claim intellectual authority in putting forward practical evaluations. Marxism does offer a rationale for this, via a developmental metanarrative (see Prokopczyk 1980), but this seems to have been largely abandoned even by Marxists (and for good reasons), with no viable replacement available (Hammersley 2014: ch 4). And the other sources on which cultural analysis has drawn, such as structuralism,

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would appear to leave little or no room for any claim that academic research can be a privileged source of practical value-judgements. Of course, as individuals, social scientists have a right to make such judgements, but they are not justified in claiming, or trading on the assumption that, they have distinctive authority in this regard. Doing so amounts to an abuse of the genuine authority that they can claim in producing factual knowledge (Hammersley 2017). While a considerable proportion of social scientific work employing the concept of culture has taken the form of social criticism, this is not true of all of it. In particular, much twentieth-century anthropological work sought to suspend Western assumptions in order to understand other cultures in their own terms. And in some sociological work, there was also a sustained attempt, following Weber (1949), to adopt an objective or value-neutral stance, restricting the task to documenting socio-cultural practices and explaining them. However, it is important to remember that Weber also insisted that social science necessarily relies upon value-­ relevance: it uses practical values to determine which questions are worth investigating, as well as what would count as answers to them. Thus, a commitment to objectivity does not imply that the evaluative concerns which have motivated much usage of the term ‘culture’ are spurious or illegitimate. To the contrary, it must be recognized that, outside the sphere of social science, practical evaluations are central for all human beings, since they concern the ways in which people decide what is worthwhile in life, define their own identities, relate to other people, carry out their work, and develop political commitments. As already underlined, what is denied by Weber is that social scientists can claim distinctive authority to make such evaluations, and it is insisted that they must not put these forward in research reports, or in teaching, in ways that imply, or can be taken to imply, that they have such authority. It should be said, though, that even social scientific work on culture that has sought to adhere to the principle of objectivity has often failed to make explicit the value assumptions on which it has relied in framing research questions, and determining what would count as answers to them. Instead, there has been a tendency to treat cultures and subcultures as if they could be described and explained entirely in their own terms. But, as Wagner (1981) pointed out in the context of anthropology, the concept of culture is a Western one, formulated to meet particular intellectual purposes— ‘culture’ is not simply a name for a pre-existing object in the world. This

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is not to adopt an extreme form of constructionism, whereby social science simply invents the world that it purports to study. But it is to insist on the perspectival character of social science, and indeed of all perception and cognition. The idea, sometimes falsely associated with the word ‘objectivity’, that it is possible to document the nature of ‘things-in-­ themselves’, in a manner that captures their essences, is not defensible (Hammersley 2011). Thus, what counts as culture depends upon what is being described or explained, and for what purposes. For example, it will vary according to whether the interest is in why, in a particular society, kinship is matrilineal rather than patrilineal; how hunter-gatherer communities are organized so as to meet the requirements of human survival, and why they may fail to do this; why some members of a community engage in particular forms of deviance while others do not; why particular groups of young people adopt a distinctive form of dress and speech, and engage in unusual patterns of behaviour; why some organizational policies have unintended consequences of particular kinds; why occupational practitioners claiming an altruistic orientation engage in behaviour that appears designed to protect their own interests; and so on. The tendency to leave values implicit may stem from general, and justified, rejection of the idea that there is some means of demonstrating the validity of an evaluation—so that it commands, or should command, universal or near-universal assent. All attempts to do this have failed, and the prospect has been discredited by the increasing prevalence of fallibilistic, if not relativistic, conceptions of scientific knowledge—science being the model usually adopted for such ‘demonstration’. The result of this, very often, has been recourse to the opposing, sceptical, view that all evaluations are simply expressions of opinion or of personal or community preference, and are therefore necessarily ‘subjective’ in character. This is frequently taken to imply either that these evaluations must all simply be respected as true in their own terms, or that the only basis on which they can be opposed is through sheer insistence on a contrary commitment. But, as noted earlier, the first view cannot be consistently applied: we cannot celebrate, or even tolerate, all evaluations and the actions, practices, or institutions based on them; some will always have to be judged unacceptable. Meanwhile, the second view reduces evaluation to fixed, ideological commitments, and threatens to turn all disputes into no more than verbal battles, or worse. Yet arguments about value-principles and their application, while certainly not resolvable by science, or in any demonstrable fashion, are not

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simply a matter of expressed preference or ‘commitment’. There is scope for rational appraisal, and thereby for discussion, even though the prospect of universal agreement is more remote than with factual matters. What this process of appraisal requires is careful attention to the meanings of the principles involved, and their sources; to how they are being interpreted, and to their implications in diverse cases; as well as to the factual assumptions on which these implications rely.1 Moreover, it is important to recognize that, to a considerable extent, the value-principles underlying discussions of culture, in its various senses, are often common ones. For example, the values defining Arnold’s aesthetic cultivation are similar in some key respects to the conception of true humanity motivating Marx’s arguments (his concern was not simply with eliminating social inequalities). These include ideas about what is a worthwhile life, as well as notions of freedom and social justice. This is why Lukacs and Adorno could adopt views about Culture that have significant similarities with those of Arnold and the Leavises. Indeed, the overlap is hardly surprising given the influence of Renaissance humanism and of Romanticism on all of them. The sharp differences that nevertheless arose in their views stemmed, to a large extent, from divergences in how they interpreted these values in the circumstances they faced. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that, despite appearances, these differences are not much greater than those between Marx and many people on the Left today. For example, few would now share Marx’s positive view of the role of British colonialism in India (Avineri 1968), or his negative evaluation of the ‘lumpen-proletariat’ within Western societies (see Hayes 1988). Recognizing that there can be better and worse forms of evaluative argument relating to culture, even though there are no absolutely conclusive ones, is an uncomfortable middle ground to occupy. Moreover, it is a position that may not be very effective in political battles, where confident declarations regarding the truth of evaluations and proposals tend to be more effective than highly qualified assessments of the arguments on each side, and of how differences might be resolved in the particular case. And yet, when we look at the results of ideological position-taking, and the actions based on it, generally speaking these do not offer much of a recommendation. Even those who win the cultural battles often find that what they have achieved is rather different from what they expected and wanted. 1  For an account of the role of reason in value inquiry, see Toulmin (1960). What is involved here is what Weber referred to as value clarification: see Bruun (2007).

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The value issues to which the concept of culture relates are, then, not only important but also open to rational appraisal and discussion, and they require this. However, this is not a task that social science can perform directly. It can provide knowledge about how human beings live, and why they live in the ways that they do, but not about how they ought to live or how society ought to be organized. While factual knowledge is an essential resource in reaching sound value conclusions, combining social science with evaluation of the phenomena being investigated has not usually resulted in a rational approach to this, but has often been based, instead, on ideological commitments treated as self-evidently true. This has been a pervasive tendency within cultural studies, and indeed in much sociology (Foster et al. 1996; Hammersley 2014: chs 5 and 6). One explanation for this, I suggest, is that academic empirical research is already sufficiently demanding in itself—any attempt to engage in value inquiry alongside this becomes unmanageable. Another reason is that, if such inquiry is to be effective, it must always be focused on particular cases, rather than seeking to justify principles in the abstract; whereas the drive of most academic social science is towards general conclusions, of some kind. So, the task of clarifying cultural values, and engaging in discussions about the evaluations that must necessarily be made about what is better and worse aesthetically, ethically, and politically, is important. And social science can provide important resources for this, in the form of factual knowledge. Furthermore, these values provide the relevance frameworks within which social science must operate. But to go beyond this, to engage in cultural or political criticism through academic research, is to conflate and confuse these two very different activities, and to do a disservice to both: engagement in cultural politics, whether on the Left or the Right, is in sharp tension with simultaneous pursuit of academic inquiry. Working at one task single-mindedly, rather than playing at several, is what is required. The conceptual problems surrounding ‘culture’, and many other key concepts employed by social scientists, stem in part from a failure to respect this requirement.

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Index1

A Adorno, Theodor, 32–34, 46, 48, 53, 97 Alexander, Jeffrey Charles, 38–40 Althusser, Louis, 47–49, 54 Anthropology and culture, 3–5, 12, 19–26, 60–62, 65–66, 93 Arnold, Matthew, 3, 3n3, 4, 11–16, 22, 42, 42n10, 45–46, 53, 57, 60, 62, 78, 92, 97 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 50 Baratz, Joan, 71 Baratz, Stephen, 71 Barthes, Roland, 49, 50 Bauman, Zygmunt, 87 Benedict, Ruth, 23–25 Bennett, Tony, 53–54 Bildung, 3, 12, 29, 30

Boas, Franz, 23–25, 62, 66n3 Bourdieu, Pierre, 35–36 C Cameron, David (UK Prime Minister), 83, 84 Canon, Western, 73 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 42, 45–46, 56 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 3 Civilization, 3, 3–4n3, 19 Cognitive anthropology, 25 Coleridge, 13 Comte, Auguste, 28–29 Cultural capital, 36 Cultural deprivation, 35, 68–72 Cultural difference theory, 68–72 Culturalism, 55 Cultural lag, 34 Cultural policy, 53–54

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Hammersley, The Concept of Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22982-5

117

118 

INDEX

Cultural populism, 52 Cultural relativism, 25, 65, 72, 94 Cultural sociology, 38–40, 60 Cultural studies, 6, 34, 41–58, 60, 92 Cultural studies, political commitments, 56–57 Culture vs. agency, 67–68 Culture and cyclical development, 9n7 Culture and situation, 82, 86 Culture and values, 92–98 Culture, a reconceptualization, 81–89 Culture, as aesthetic cultivation, 7, 12–19, 42–44, 59–65, 93, 97 Culture, as developmental process, 7–8, 20–21 Culture, as distinct ways of life, 8–9, 23, 60 Culture, as meaning-making, 6–9, 60 Culture vs. biology, 67–68 Culture, contrasts with other concepts, 61–68, 92 Culture, different meanings of, 6–10, 91 Culture, etymology, 2 Culture, ‘high,’ 7, 16, 35, 35n4, 60, 62, 92 Culture vs. materiality, 63–64 Culture of poverty, 35, 70, 85 Culture, ‘popular,’ 7, 45–48, 50, 52, 53, 60, 92, 93 Culture vs. rationality, 67 Culture vs. society, 64–65 D Diffusionism, 21 Digital culture, 77–80 DiMaggio, Paul, 40 Discourse(s), 2, 66 Dominant culture, 35–36, 48, 60, 72–76 Dominant ideology, 35 Durkheim, Émile, 25, 28, 29

E Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 16, 64, 78, 92 Elitism, 14–17, 46, 53 Equality, 15, 93, 94 Essentialism, 56 F Feminism, 51–55 Firth, Raymond, 64 Fiske, John, 52 Foucault, Michel, 53, 57 Freedom, 97 Functionalism, 22–24 G Geertz, Clifford, 25, 26 Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, 30, 78, 80 Gramsci, Antonio, 47–49, 51, 56, 56n22 H Habitus, 36 Hall, Stuart, 42, 45, 50–52, 56 Harris, Marvin, 26 Hebdige, Dick, 54 Hegemony, 47–48, 51 Herder, Johann, Gottfried, 21 Hoggart, Richard, 42–46, 54–55, 62 Howarth, David, 2 I Idealism, 47, 63–64 Ideology, 2, 35, 48–49, 54 Imperialism, 24, 29 Interpretive anthropology, 26 J Jakobson, Roman, 49–50 Johnson, Boris (UK politician), 83, 85

 INDEX 

K Kuhn, Thomas, 40–41 L Leavis, Frank Raymond, 16–19, 42, 42n10, 46, 53, 62, 78, 92 Leavis, Queenie Dorothy, 16–19, 42, 46, 53, 92 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 25–26, 49–50 Lewis, Oscar, 35, 82, 85 Linton, Ralph, 5, 66 Lukacs, György, 32–33, 97 M Malinowski, Bronislaw, 24–25 Mannheim, Karl, 4 Marx, Karl, 7–8, 8n6, 48, 97 Marxism, 7–9, 32–34, 46–49, 55, 60, 63–64, 85, 94 Mass culture, 18n8, 28, 33–34, 50 Mass society, see Mass culture ‘Material culture,’ 78 Matza, David, 86 Mauss, Marcel, 25 McGuigan, Jim, 44–45, 52 Mead, Margaret, 24 Montaigne, Michel de, 20 Morley, David, 51 Multiculturalism, 70, 72–76, 93–94 N New Left, 47 ‘New materialisms,’ 51–52, 63 ‘New social movements,’ 51–52 O Objectivity, 95–96 Occupational cultures, 37–38

119

Ogburn, William Fielding, 34 Organic intellectuals, 56, 56n22 Organizational cultures, 6, 37 Orientalism, 52 P Parsons, Talcott, 5, 6, 39, 73–75 Perspectival character of social science, 81–82, 95–96 Political/civic culture, 6 Politics of recognition, 74–75 Postcolonial theory, 52 Post-subcultural studies, 56n21 Preferred reading, 51 Print culture, 78–79 Professional culture, 37 R Rabinow, Paul, 58 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald, 24–25 Richards, Ivor Armstrong, 18 Riessman, Frank, 70 Rights, 65, 93, 94 Riots in Britain in 2011, 82–89 Rodman, Hyman, 86 Romanticism, 12–13 S Said, Edward, 52 Saussure, Ferdinand, 49–50 Schutz, Alfred, 88 Science and Technology Studies, 40–41 Screen, 42, 50 Simmel, Georg, 4, 29–32 Snow, Charles Percy, 19 Sociology and culture, 28–41 Sociology of culture, 38

120 

INDEX

Sociology of scientific knowledge, see Science and Technology Studies Spencer, Jonathan, 76 Structuralism, 25–26, 47–51, 54–55, 60 Subculture, concept of, 5, 34–35, 65 Sumner, William Graham, 5 Swidler, Ann, 39–40 T Taylor, Charles, 73–75 Trilling, Lionel, 1, 19 Tylor, Edward, 22–26, 57 V Valentine, Charles, 70–71

Völkerpsychologie, 4, 62 Voloshinov, Valentin, 50 W Weber, Alfred, 4, 29–32, 97n1 Weber, Max, 4, 31–33, 95 Whannel, Paddy, 45 Williams, Raymond, 2, 2n1, 3n2, 42–48, 54–55 Y Youth cultures, 34, 46, 55, 56n21 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 85