Culture as a Way of Life

The democratic claim that culture is ordinary — the shared meanings and everyday practices of a whole community, not the preserve of a cultivated few.

Definition

Culture as a way of life is the conception, rooted in anthropology and developed by Raymond Williams, that culture comprises the entire complex of practices, institutions, and shared meanings through which a society lives, rather than a select canon of works.

Scope

This topic covers the anthropological and Williamsian conception of culture as a whole way of life, including Williams's argument that culture is ordinary and Geertz's interpretive, meaning-centred anthropology. It does not cover specific ethnographic methods or particular national cultures.

Core questions

• What does it mean to say culture is ordinary?
• How does the anthropological concept of culture differ from the aesthetic one?
• Can meaning be read, like a text, from a society's practices?

Key theories

Culture is ordinary

Raymond Williams argued that culture belongs to everyone as the ordinary shared meanings of common life, not to an elite, fusing the anthropological and democratic senses.

Culture as webs of meaning

Clifford Geertz treated culture as systems of shared meaning that the analyst interprets through thick description, reading social action as one reads a text.

History

E. B. Tylor's 1871 definition of culture as the whole complex of knowledge, belief, art, morals, and custom gave anthropology its founding concept. In post-war Britain Raymond Williams reworked this into the claim that culture is ordinary, a cornerstone of early cultural studies, while in the United States Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology of the 1970s recast culture as webs of significance to be interpreted.

Debates

Whole way of life versus structure of feeling

Williams refined the broad anthropological definition with his notion of a structure of feeling, raising the question of how diffuse lived experience can be made an object of analysis.

Key figures

• Edward Tylor
• Raymond Williams
• Clifford Geertz
• Richard Hoggart

Seminal works

• tylor1871
• williams1958
• geertz1973

Frequently asked questions

Who said culture is ordinary?

Raymond Williams, in a 1958 essay of that title, which became a founding statement of British cultural studies.