Resources Towards a definition of culture
- Louis-Philippe Gratton
- Thursday, 01 April 2004 12:43
- Last updated: Sunday, 07 August 2011 13:08
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“Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”1, writes Raymond Williams. It is certainly hard to define culture in any other languages too. There is as many definitions of the word as there are authors who wrote about it, many of them giving different definitions from one book to another. Dictionaries, general or specialised, also offer their own defitions of the word culture.
The word of course evolved throughout the years, changing to embrace many different concepts. A good start in English is to refer to the inevitable book by Raymond Williams: Keywords – A vocabulary of culture and society2. In French, Philippe Bénéton's Histoire de mots: culture et civilisation3 is the reference to know more about the evolution of the word culture.
The goal is not to offer the definite documentation file about culture, but to give a short list of definitions scattered around many books and articles. Even though the list is quite short, it shows the impressive diversity of definitions given to culture and how the word has many different meanings depending on the author and his/her discipline. The list is indexed alphabetically by author's names.
English definitions
“In anthropology, the integrated system of socially acquired values, beliefs, and rules of conduct which delimit the range of accepted behaviors in any given society.”
– Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th edition.
“[T]he cultural life of the nation, the intellectual and emotional engagement of the people with all forms of art, from the simplest to the most abstruse.”
– United Kingdom, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Government and the Value of Culture (May 2004).
“I use the terms culture and art interchangeably to cover man-made artifacts or performances that move us and expand our awareness of the world and of ourselves.”
– Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, Cambridge (MA)/London, Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 5.
“In the end, culture is everything that can be shared.”
– Nancy Duxbury et Rowland Lorimer, “Of culture, the economy, cultural production, and cultural producers: an orientation“, (1994) 19 Can. J. of Comm. 259, 261.
“Culture here means a body of artistic and intellectual work of agreed value, along with the institutions which produce, disseminate and regulate it.”
– Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, Malden (MA), Blackwell, 2000, p. 21.
“Culture can be loosely summarized as the complex of values, customs, beliefs and practices which constitute the way of life of a specific group.”
– Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, Malden (MA), Blackwell, 2000, p. 34.
“Culture is just everything which is not genetically transmissable (sic).”
– Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, Malden (MA), Blackwell, 2000, p. 34.
“Alternatively, you can try to define culture functionally rather than substantively, as whatever is superfluous to a society's material requirements.”
– Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, Malden (MA), Blackwell, 2000, p. 36.
“In other words, culture was simply what was distinctive about others.”
– Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process, London/New Delhi/Thousand Oaks (CA), Sage Publications, 1994, p. 67.
“[I]t understands to cover the whole range of practices and representations through which a social group's reality (or realities) is constructed and maintained.”
– John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, New York, Clarendon Press/Oxford, 1995, p. 3.
“[D]efined as the production and circulation of symbolic meaning.”
– Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication – Global culture and the economics of information, London/New Delhi/Thousand Oaks (CA), Sage Publications, 1990, p. 155.
“A culture is a way of doing things and a way of reflecting on what we do.”
– John Hutcheson, «The thief of arts – Will free trade rob us of our culture», The Canadian Forum (Toronto), février 1987, p. 9.
“Culture in the study of international relations may be defined as the sharing and transmitting of consciousness within and across national boundaries, and the cultural approach as a perspective that pays particular attention to this phenomenon.”
– Akira Iriye, “Culture and international history“, in Michael J. Hogan et Thomas G. Paterson (dir.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 215 and Akira Iriye, “Culture“, (1990) 77 J. Amer. Hist. 99.
“The culture of a society is the whole complex of knowledge and beliefs and attitudes and practices which are embodied in the society, and in its social, political and economic arrangements.”
– Albert Wesley Johnson, “Free trade and cultural industries“, in Marc Gold et David Leyton-Brown (dir.), Trade-Offs on Free Trade – The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, Toronto, Carswell, 1988, p. 350.
“I understand culture to be rooted in the shared knowledge and schemes created and used by a set of people for perceiving, interpreting, expressing, and responding to the social realities around them.”
– John Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace – Conflict transformation across cultures, Syracuse (NY), Syracuse University Press, 1995, p. 9.
“[T]he way of life of any society.”
– Ralph Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality, New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1945, p. 19.
“It refers to the total way of life of any society, not simply to those parts of this way which the society regards as higher or more desirable.”
– Ralph Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality, New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1945, p. 30.
“[T]he social heredity of a society's members.”
– Ralph Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality, New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1945, p. 32.
“A culture is the configuration of learned behavior and results of behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society.”
– Ralph Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality, New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1945, p. 32.
“Culture is the expression of human values. It may be very intense and conscious, as in art objects and performances or religious practice. It may be pervasive and relatively unconscious, in the rituals of food, the use of time or family celebrations. It embraces the extremes of this spectrum and everything between. Culture is everything we don't have to do to survive – but are compelled to do to feel human.”
– François Matarasso, “Culture, economics & development“, in F. Matarasso (dir.), Recognising Culture – A series of briefing papers on culture and development, London, Comedia/Canadian Heritage/Unesco, 2001, p. 3.
“Culture is that which individuals, groups and societies produce and acquire in order to function effectively.”
– Roland Robertson, Globalization – Social theory and global culture, London/New Delhi/Thousand Oaks (CA), Sage Publications, 1992, p. 40.
“[A]ll those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure.”
– Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York, Vintage Books, 1994, p. XII.
“What we need to understand is not what culture is, but how people use the term in contemporary discourses.”
– John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism – A critical introduction, London/New York, Continuum, 2001, p. 5.
“Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is 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.”
– Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, The Collected Works of Edward Burnett Tylor, vol. 3, London, Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994, p. 1.
“Where culture meant a state or habit of the mind, or the body of intellectual and moral activities, it means now, also, a whole way of life.”
– Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, London, Chatto & Windus, 1958, p. XVIII.
“[C]ulture is a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values.”
– Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, London, Chatto & Windus, 1961, p. 41.
“[C]ulture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded.”
– Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, London, Chatto & Windus, 1961, p. 41.
“[T]he independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity.”
– Raymond Williams, Keywords – A vocabulary of culture and society, revised ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 90.
“This seems often now the most widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film.”
– Raymond Williams, Keywords – A vocabulary of culture and society, revised ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 90.
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1 Raymond Williams, Keywords – A vocabulary of culture and society, revised ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 87.
2 Ibid.
3 Philippe Bénéton, Histoire de mots: culture et civilisation, Paris, Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1975.