CULTURAL

Classical Greek and Early European Formulations. As is the case with most of the Principal notions of European ­thought, the idea of culture was anticipated in classical Greece. The philosopher Xenophanes ~c. 570­480 B.C.) gives a clear statement of the principle of cultural relativity:

Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds. . . . The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub­nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

A little later, the writings attributed to the physician Hippocrates find differences in "national character" arising from practice of education and training, from customs, as well as from climate and biology. Herodotus (c. 485­428 B.C.), often considered the founder of history, quotes with approval the phrase of the poet Pindar that "custom is ­the king of all" and reproaches the Persian king, Cambyses, for violating "the long­established usages" of other peoples.

The Greeks went far toward appreciating the anthropological idea of culture. There is, however, no single word in Greece which can be precisely equated. Ethos is contrasted with biological heredity. Thus the orator Isocrates (436­338 B.C. ) says, "It is those who share our culture [ethos] who are called Greeks rather than those who share our blood." Euclides (c. 484­406 B.C.), a dramatic poet, uses tropos (literally, "fashion") in a line which may properly be translated, "Different cultures have different codes of behavior." Perhaps the closest parallel is with nomos ("custom"). In the fifth century B.C. the Sophists contrasted the uniformities of nature (physic) with the diversities of social custom (nomos) and regarded the latter as more or less arbitrary conventions which, since they were humanly created, could be humanly changed.

The Romans did not further develop a concept of culture in the anthropological direction. The word in modern European languages does, of course, derive from Latin culture, from the verb colere, with the meaning of tending or cultivation. Cicero (106­43 B.C.), the orator, used culture in a derived meaning: culture animi ("culture of the mind") is equated with philosophy. In medieval Christian writings, culture frequently had the sense of worship. The old French form was couture, later replaced by culture. The Oxford Dictionary gives the first appearance of culture in English as 1420 with the meaning of "husbandry." It was 1510 before the English word was used to convey "training of the mind" or "manners." Culture in the sense of personal cultivation appears in French at least as early as 1558. Seventeenth­century French usage centered on such phrases as "the culture of wheat" or "the culture of letters," "the culture of sciences." Voltaire and other French writers of the eighteenth century gave a more absolute meaning, that of formation de l'esprit ("cultivation of the mind").

The first known modern formulation that approached the contemporary anthropological notion was by a German, Samuel Fuiendorf (1632­1694). Writing in bad Latin, he offered definitions of culture that,­taken together, represent a full equivalent of the first genuinely anthropological definitions of two centuries later. It has not been established whether Putendorf directly influenced the Marquis de Condorcet,

Johann Gottfried von Herder and other late eighteenth­century writers who also made statements approximating later anthropological conceptions. It is clear that neither Pufendorf nor the eighteenth­century authors used the idea in the plural. As late as 1821 a German dictionary says that Cultur (Kultur) lacks a plural.

Edward B. Tylor and Modern Usage. The contemporary scientific concept derives directly from the English anthropologist, Edward B. Tylor, who in 1871 published Primitive Culture; on the first page of which he gives a definition that has been echoed in numerous definitions since his time: "Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Tylor, however, acknowledges his indebtedness to the German Gustav Klemm, who between 1843 and 1852 produced a ten volume "General Culture History of Mankind." Tylor's contribution was to synthesize, sharpen, and formalize ideas which appear discursively and disjointedly in Klemm.

Tylor's definition seems not to have been followed by any other for thirty­two years. Kroeber and Kluckhohn discovered only six additional definitions prior to 1920. In the years after 1920, however, there was a great proliferation of attempts to refine, expand and re­emphasize the concept. In part, this activity was a consequence of the growth of anthropology. In part, it resulted from the circumstance that the concept was increasingly borrowed by other disciplines, the representatives of which tried to accommodate the idea to their particular needs.

The overwhelming bulk of published cultural anthropology consists in description. Like biologists, anthropologists found it necessary to conceptualize a great array of structures and forms. Slowly, the harvest of a rich diversity of examples led to investing the concept of culture with more meanings. Starting with the premise that the descriptive materials were all relevant to a broad and previously neglected realm of phenomena, the basic idea has been developed not so much through the introduction of strictly new insights but rather through creating a fresh configuration of familiar notions: custom­tradition­organization­etc.

In divorcing customs from the individuals who carried them out and in making customs the focus of their attention, anthropologists took an important step ­­ a step that is perhaps still underestimated. When a time backbone was added to the notion of group variability in ways of doing things, not only group differences, but the notion of the historical derivation and development of these differences entered the picture. When the concept of ''way'' was made part of the configuration, this conceptualized bodies of custom persisted and changed in time.

Acceptance Outside Anthropology. It was fifty years after Tylor's definition before the technical meaning appeared in an English or American dictionary. Not until 1932 did the French Academy admit "culture" as "now sometimes synonymous with civilization." In French and in British English, the modern anthropological meaning of culture has not yet been generally accepted as standard. Most other Western languages (including German, Russian, Spanish, and American English) freely use the term.

Society. As Philip Bagby says, it is an error "to identify a culture with the society in which it is found and to talk about them both as if they were the same thing." A society is a group of people somehow organized so that its members interact with each other more frequently than they do with members of other societies. A culture is the recurrent pattern of the interactions of a group of people which may or may not be a society. The concept of society is far more concrete, that of culture far more abstract. A society is made up of specified individuals whom an observer can see and count. A culture is the investigator's construct or "model" of certain regularities in behavior and of standards or codes for behavior. A society has natural and definite boundaries; a culture can be located in space, but its boundaries are more fluid, less definite.

It is true that in the formative period of sociology and anthropology, as Kroeber and the sociologist Talcott Parsons put it, "culture and society were used with relatively little difference of meaning in most works of major influence." Kroeber and Parsons continue:

In the anthropological tradition, Tylor and Boas used culture to designate that aspect of total human social behavior (including its symbolic and meaningful products) that was independent of the genetic constitutions and biological characteristics of organisms. The ideas of continuity, creation, accumulation, and transmission of culture independent of biological heredity were the ,k­y ones. On the sociological side, Comte and Spencer, and Weber and Durkheim, spoke of society as meaning essentially the same thing that Tylor meant by culture.

Social System. Since about 1940, some prominent American sociologists (notably Parsons) have advocated a more analytical and abstract conception than that of a society as composed of specific individuals. They suggest the futility of quarreling over whether culture is best understood from the perspective of a society or society from that or culture. They propose rather approaching the sociocultural continuum from two independent and about equally abstract perspectives, seeing how each works and is interwoven with the other Kroeber and Parsons write:

It is useful to define the concept culture for most usages more narrowly than has been generall;7 ­the case in the American anthropological tradition, restricting its reference to transmitted and created content and patterns of values, ideas and other symbolic meaningful systems as factors in the shaping of human behavior and the artifacts produced through behavior. On the other hand we suggest that the term . . . social system be used to designate the specifically relational system of interaction among individuals and collectivities. To speak of a "member of a culture" should be understood as an ellipsis meaning a "member of the society of culture X." One indication of the independence of the two is the existence of highly organized insect societies with at best a minimal rudimentary component of culture in our present narrower sense.

Social Structure. This term has been and is used by many British anthropologists with a denotation almost identical to that of the "social system" of Parsons and others. Indeed, although the modern concept of culture comes largely from England, the British social anthropologists have since about 1935 been rather ambivalent about employing it. Bronislaw Malinowski did contribute extensively to an understanding of culture prior to his death in 1942, and Raymond Firth continues to develop the concept. Others, however, have avoided the term, preferring "social structure" as a core concept. Meyer Fortes proposes that culture designate the qualitative aspect of social facts; whereas the term structure by applied ''. . . to those features of social events which are actually or ideally susceptible of quantitative description and analysis."

Civilization. Civilization and its cognates is an older word than culture in English, French, and German. The two words have been and continue to be used as synonyms in English and French. On the other hand, some writers carefully restrict "civilization" to cultures found in urban or literate societies. They speak, for example, of Chinese civilizations but of Eskimo culture. Rather consistently, civilization has the connotation of an "advanced" culture (Robert Redfield, in Civilization, an article in Collier's Encyclopedia, thus differentiates the two). Tylor wavered for a time between the two terms. Perhaps he finally chose culture precisely because it was less burdened with the evaluative connotation.

In German there have been attempts to contrast culture and civilization. Some writers have identified civilization with spiritual enrichment, culture with technological and economic activities. Others have reversed this distinction, assigning to civilization the objective technologica1 and informational sphere; to culture they assign religion, philosophy, and art. One or the other of these usages has been followed by certain writers in English, particular sociologists and philosophers. Oswald Spengler denotes by civilization the final, petrifying, noncreative phase of a major culture. In this he has had few followers outside the German-speaking world.

NONAMTHROPOLOGICAL USES OF THE CONCEPT

Behavioral scientists differ only in what points they choose to emphasize and how much they feel it necessary to make explicit. The same may be said of biologists, physicians, and philosophers using the term in its anthropological sense. There are no thoroughly consistent tendencies characteristic of the various academic disciplines. Definitions by psychologists or instance, appear in each of Kroeber and Kluckhohn's six major groups Nevertheless, a few trends are worth mentioning. Archaeologists often give prominence to artifacts in their statements. Psychologists are likely to stress learning, habit, adaptation. Psychoanalytic psychiatrists give weight to culture as sublimation or as inhibiting of impulse. Sigmund Freud, writing to Albert Einstein, defined culture as a system of defenses consisting of a "progressive displacement of instinctual aims and a restriction of instinctual impulses." Philosophers and some sociologists tend to see ideas, symbols, and values as the core of culture.

Culture became popularized as a literary word in England just two years before Tylor's book Primitive Culture appeared. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) Matthew Arnold wrote of culture as "the study and pursuit of perfection." This sense has mainly persisted in the humanities, with humanists expressing considerable resistance to the broader anthropological meaning. Thus Werner Jaeger objects that anthropology "has made out of a concept of value a mere descriptive category which can be applied to any nation, even to 'the culture of the primitive,' because it has entirely lost its true obligatory sense." T. S. Eliot tries to bridge the gap between the conception of the behavioral scientists and that of literary men, but after reviewing various meanings he decides that "culture may even be described as that which makes life worth living." The physicist­novelist C. P. Snow, in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959), also moves freely between the humanistic and the anthropological notions. He says, for example: ". . . the scientific culture really is a culture, not only in an intellectual but also in an anthropological sense."

On the whole, the scientific concept appears to be gaining at the expense of the humanistic, evaluative one. The technical term appears with increasing frequency in novels, moving pictures, television programs, comic strips, and other popular media. In ordinary speech in the United States "cultivated" and similar adjectives are replacing "cultured" (in the meaning of knowing foreign languages, painting, music, and literature). The designation "a culture" or "the culture of " is seldom restricted to "high cultures" or ''civilizations." In the discipline of history, the concept as formulated by behavioral scientists appears to be gaining ground over the humanistic one. Many younger American historians, at least, would accept Bagby's assertions that "culture is the patterned or repetitive element in history" and "culture . . . is the intelligible aspect of history."

More and mere statements by humanists appear to have at least overtones of the anthropological idea. Jose Ortega y Gasset writes, "we understand by culture . . . a system of attitudes . . . which has meaning, coherence, efficacy . . . a body of solutions. . . . There have existed and there exist many cultures." Andre Malraux refers to culture as "the incarnation of a system of values." Erwin Panofsky says: ". . . science endeavors to transform the chaotic variety of natural phenomena into what may be called a cosmos of nature, the humanists endeavor to transform the chaotic variety of human records into what may be called a cosmos of culture."

from "Culture," by Clyde Kluckhohn Collier's Encyclopedia, Volume 7, 1967.