The Emergence and Meaning of Culture: A Historical and Sociological Perspective, Monografías, Ensayos de Cultura y Sociedad

¡Descarga The Emergence and Meaning of Culture: A Historical and Sociological Perspective y más Monografías, Ensayos en PDF de Cultura y Sociedad solo en Docsity! 1 THE ORIGINS OF THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE LITERARY TRADITION there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture would not be the clever savages of Golding’s Lord of the Flies thrown back upon the cruel wisdom of their animal instincts; nor would they be the nature’s noblemen of Enlightenment primitivism or even, as classical anthropological theory would imply, intrinsically talented apes who had somehow failed to find themselves. They would be unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognisable sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases. (Geertz 1965: 112–13) So what then is this thing called culture? What is this mediation that appears to rob ‘man’ of his nature and locate his action and practices within an endowment of socially produced symbolic forms? Culture itself, whatever its facticity, is also a concept with a history, some of which we shall try and trace in the chapters that follow. It is hoped that we will not 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 succumb to any one ‘origin myth’ for, as anthropologists would tell us in relation to primitive cosmologies, such devices only serve to exercise closure, they silence debate and controversy and, usually, justify the existing rationale for the status quo; nevertheless we will ‘dig around’ for sources, albeit competing ones. One compelling account, and one that I shall trade off because it is symbiotic with the upsurge of social theory, is that the idea of ‘culture’ can be witnessed emerging in the late eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth century as part of, and largely as a reaction to, the massive changes that were occurring in the structure and quality of social life (which we might also refer to as the advance of modernity). These changes, at the social, political, and personal levels, were both confusing and disorientating, and certainly controversial. Such changes, through indus- trialization and technology, were unprecedented in human experience; they were wildly expansionist, horizons were simply consumed; grossly productive, for good and ill; and both understood and legitimated through an ideology of progress. The social structure was politically volatile, being increasingly and visibly divisive. This was a situation brought about through the new forms of ranking and hierarchy that accompanied the proliferating division of labour, combined with the density and proximity of populations resulting from urbanization and the improved system of communications. In one sense the overall aesthetic quality of life, compared with the previously supposed rural idyll, was threatened by the machine- like excesses of industrial society. There was an increasing gap between the creative and the productive, formulated for materialism by Marx as ‘alienation’, and for the romantic-idealist tradition by Carlyle as a loss of the folk purity of a past era. The machine was viewed as consuming the natural character of humankind, a call to be later echoed in the work of the Frankfurt School, Benjamin’s ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, even Marcuse’s sense of ‘one-dimensionality’, and finally the cri de coeur of Baudrillard’s evocation of postmodernism with its horror of simulacra. Whereas we began with ‘culture’ mediating between humankind and nature, it can now be seen to mediate between humankind and Machine. This provides us with several available ‘meanings’ of culture. Another account looks back to classical society. ‘Civilization’, deriving from the Latin civis, is a term descriptive of a state of belonging to a collectivity that embodied certain qualities, albeit self-appointed, which distinguished it from the ‘mass’ or more lowly state of being typified as origins of the concept of culture 7 rise to an increasingly anonymous and amorphous urban mass society; thus linking with our initial argument. The impersonal, yet evil, forces of standardization, industrialization and technologies of mass production became the analytic target for the romantic neo-Marxist criticism of the Frankfurt School within their theories of aesthetics, mass communication and mass society, and also in the early sociology of culture propounded by Norbert Elias with his ideas of the ‘civilizing process’. Within the confines of British and American social theory the concept of culture has been understood in a far more pluralist sense and applied, until relatively recently, on a far more sparing basis. Although culture is a familiar term within our tradition and can be employed to summon up holistic appraisals of the ways of life of a people, their beliefs, rituals and customs, we social scientists are rather more accustomed to mobilizing such batteries of understanding into ‘action sets’. That is, we tend to use more specific concepts like, for example, ‘value systems’ (even ‘central value systems’), ‘patterns of belief’, ‘value-orientations’ or more critical notions like ‘ideologies’. Culture to British and American social theorists tends to have been most usefully applied as a concept of differentiation within a collectivity rather than a way of gathering. That is to say that the concept has become artfully employed in, for example, the sociology of knowledge that Karl Mannheim recommended, and also in the spectrum of perspec- tives on the sociology of deviance – ranging from Parsonian theory through to symbolic interactionism – in the manner of ‘subculture’. A subculture is the way of defining and honouring the particular specification and demarcation of special or different interests of a group of people within a larger collectivity (as we shall see in greater depth in Chapter 7). So just as classical sociology in the form of Tönnies or Durkheim, or indeed Comte, had recognized that the composition of the overall collective life emerged through the advance of the division of labour – by dint of the fragile integration through interdependence of a whole series of smaller, internally cohesive, social units – so also does modern social theory by articulating the specific mores of these minor groups, albeit often as ‘non-normative’ or even ‘deviant’. This dispersion of subcultures is at the base of what we might mean by a ‘pluralist’ view of culture; it is modern and democratic and shies away from all of the excesses of a grand systems theory with all of its incumbent conservative tendencies and its implicit ‘oversocialized conception of man’ (Wrong 1961). Such thinking succumbs, however, to the problem of order. Without a coherent, overall theory of culture 10 origins of the concept of culture (which still, in many senses, eludes us), it is hard to conceive of how consensus is maintained within a modern society. In response to pre- cisely this problem, contemporary Marxism has generated the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ which supposes that varieties of hegemonic strategies of mass media and political propaganda create a distorted illusion of shared concerns in the face of the real and contentious divisions that exist between classes, genders, ethnic groups, geographical regions and age groups. Such a thesis is by no means universally accepted within the social sciences and in many ways the more recent explosion of interest in and dedication to the schizophrenic prognosis of postmodernisms (and even complexity theory) positively accelerates the centrifugal tendencies of the cultural particles. I will now attempt to summarize some of the above accounts of the genesis of our concept ‘culture’ through a fourfold typology from which we can move on. 1. Culture as a cerebral, or certainly a cognitive category. Culture becomes intelligible as a general state of mind. It carries with it the idea of perfection, a goal or an aspiration of individual human achievement or emancipation. At one level this might be a reflection of a highly individualist philosophy and at another level an instance of a philo- sophical commitment to the particularity and difference, even the ‘chosenness’ or superiority of humankind. This links into themes of redemption in later writings, from Marx’s false consciousness to the melancholy science of the Frankfurt School. In origin we will see it mostly in the work of the romantic literary and cultural criticism of William Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle and latterly Matthew Arnold. 2. Culture as a more embodied and collective category. Culture invokes a state of intellectual and/or moral development in society. This is a position linking culture with the idea of civilization and one that is informed by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (1809–82) and informative of that group of social theorists now known as the ‘early evolutionists’ who pioneered anthropology, with their compet- itive views on ‘degeneration’ and ‘progress’, and linked the endeavour up with nineteenth-century imperialism. This notion nevertheless takes the idea of culture into the province of the collective life, rather than the individual consciousness. origins of the concept of culture 11 3. Culture as a descriptive and concrete category. Culture viewed as the collective body of arts and intellectual work within any one society. This is very much an everyday language usage of the term culture and carries along with it senses of particularity, exclusivity, elitism, specialist knowledge and training or socialization. It includes a firmly established notion of culture as the realm of the produced and sedimented symbolic; albeit the esoteric symbolism of a society. 4. Culture as a social category. Culture regarded as the whole way of life of a people. This is the pluralist and potentially democratic sense of the concept that has come to be the zone of concern within sociology and anthropology and latterly, within a more localized sense, cultural studies. A PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION: ARISTOTLE, LOCKE, VICO, TURGOT AND BENTHAM Although, as one major strand in our modern thinking displays, culture is often understood in relation to achievements within the realms of art and literature, the nearest classical approximation to our present-day view is found not in the study of aesthetics but in moral philosophy. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics reveals an understanding of human excellence, shared normative expectations as evaluative criteria, and a sense of the natural disposition of humankind to such achievement. The work rests on an essential teleology that all things are to be understood in terms of their purposes but their purposes are not wilful, nor merely contingent, they are inherent in the nature of things. The ‘good’ for Aristotle is that which all things aim at and the ‘good’ for humankind is happiness in the form of virtuous action. This is the true realization of human nature and all other conduct falls short of our true potential. The virtue or excellence of a human being is achieved through the maximization of the potentialities of our nature and as people are essentially rational creatures their ‘good’ is found in the activity of the soul in accordance with reason. Although Aristotle is offering a type of naturalism it is in no sense a reductionist argument because it enables the important difference between empirical reality and a sense of the ideal – this is a conceptual gap that is often relevant to the analyses and recommendations of cultural theorists. In our search for origins an unlikely source but, I believe, a genuine one, is to be found in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 12 origins of the concept of culture