Theories of Culture
How thinkers have defined culture itself — from an elite ideal of human perfection, to anthropology's whole way of life, to industrially produced mass entertainment — and why those competing definitions shape everything cultural theory does next.
Definition
Culture, in this area, names the contested object of cultural theory: variously the cultivated achievements of a society, the lived practices and shared meanings of a people, or the commodified products of mass media. Theories of culture are the frameworks that adjudicate among these senses.
Scope
This area surveys the rival concepts of culture that anchor cultural theory rather than any single object of culture. It covers the Arnoldian and Leavisite tradition of culture as the best that has been thought and said; the anthropological and Williamsian sense of culture as a whole way of life; the Frankfurt School's account of mass culture as an industry; and the broader cultural turn that made meaning and signification central to the social sciences. It does not cover specific media, art forms, or national cultures, which belong to their own areas.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- Is culture a select body of great works, or the ordinary texture of everyday life?
- Can the same concept of culture cover both Beethoven and a soap opera?
- Does mass-produced culture liberate audiences or pacify them?
- How did culture move from the margins to the centre of social and humanistic inquiry?
Key theories
- Culture as perfection (the Arnoldian ideal)
- Matthew Arnold defined culture as the pursuit of the best that has been thought and said, a humanising counterweight to social anarchy, locating value in a canon of great works.
- Culture as a whole way of life
- Drawing on anthropology and Raymond Williams, this view treats culture as the ordinary, shared meanings and practices through which a community lives, dissolving the high/low boundary.
- The culture industry
- Horkheimer and Adorno argued that under monopoly capitalism culture becomes an industry producing standardised commodities that reproduce the existing order and dull critical capacity.
History
The modern study of culture inherits a tension between Matthew Arnold's nineteenth-century ideal of culture as moral and aesthetic perfection and the anthropological sense, articulated by E. B. Tylor in 1871, of culture as the whole complex of a society's habits and beliefs. In the mid-twentieth century Raymond Williams reworked the anthropological strand into a democratic claim that culture is ordinary, while the exiled Frankfurt School theorists Adorno and Horkheimer turned a sharply critical eye on mass culture as an industry. By the late twentieth century these debates had widened into a general cultural turn across the humanities and social sciences.
Debates
- High culture versus a whole way of life
- The Arnoldian restriction of culture to a canon of great works clashes with the Williamsian and anthropological claim that culture is the ordinary meanings of everyday life; the dispute sets the agenda for what cultural theory studies.
- Is mass culture emancipatory or pacifying?
- Frankfurt School pessimism about the culture industry contends with later traditions that credit audiences with active, resistant readings of popular forms.
Key figures
- Matthew Arnold
- Edward Tylor
- Raymond Williams
- F. R. Leavis
- Theodor Adorno
- Max Horkheimer
Related topics
Seminal works
- arnold1869
- williams1976
- horkheimeradorno2002
- during2007
Frequently asked questions
- Why does cultural theory spend so long defining culture?
- Because the definition determines the object of study: whether you analyse a Shakespeare folio or a shopping mall depends on whether culture means refined achievement or a whole way of life.
- Did cultural studies invent the broad definition of culture?
- No. The anthropological sense of culture as a whole way of life predates cultural studies by a century, but figures like Raymond Williams gave it new political force.