Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The word ‘culture’ is probably the single most central concept in twentieth-century anthropology. It has an especially complex history, of which anthropological usage is only one small part. Etymologically it is linked to words like ‘cultivate’ and ‘cultivation’, ‘agriculture’ and ‘horticulture’. What these different words have in common is the sense of a medium for growth, a meaning quite transparent in modern biological usage where a mould or bacterium may be grown in a laboratory in an appropriate ‘culture’. In English in the seventeenth century it became common to apply this meaning metaphorically to human development, and in the eighteenth century this metaphorical meaning developed into a more general term (Williams 1983). In German (where the word was spelt first Cultur, and then Kultur), the term was used in works of speculative history from the second half of the eighteenth century and, crucially, started to be used in the plural in the sense of humanity being divided into a number of separate, distinct cultures.
What emerged from this history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a complex of overlapping, but potentially different meanings. On the one hand, there is what has become known as the ‘humanistic’ sense of culture, which is singular and evaluative: culture is what a person ought to acquire in order to become a fully worthwhile moral agent.
Some people have more culture than others—they are more cultured—and some human products are more cultural than others—the visual arts, music, literature. Then there is what has become known as the ‘anthropological’ sense, which is plural and *relativistic. The world is divided into different cultures, each worthwhile in its way. Any particular person is a product of the particular culture in which he or she has lived, and differences between human beings are to be explained (but not judged) by differences in their culture (rather than their race).
Much ink has been expended—especially in American anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s—on a supposedly ‘true’ or ‘correct’ definition of culture, one which would isolate and clarify just what it is we study as anthropologists, while marking off ‘our’ word and its meaning from other, nonanthropological usage. In this article, we will not attempt any such definition. What makes a word like culture so important for anthropologists is precisely the arguments it generates about disciplinary identity; what makes those arguments important is the way in which the concerns of the non-anthropological world keep leaking into our own private disciplinary disputes, despite all our best attempts to establish boundaries around what we see as our intellectual property. Instead of a definition, we offer an ethnographic history in three phases: the prehistory of the pluralistic concept of culture from its roots in German Romantics like †Herder to its anthropological working out in the writings of *Franz Boas; the competing definitions of mid-century American anthropology, in the context of European suspicion of the term; and the rise and demise of one particular version—culture-as-symbols-and-meanings—in the second half of the twentieth century.
This is the complete article, containing 497 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Culture
