|
| |||
|
Culture Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought. The fw is cultura, L, from rw colere, L. Colere had a range of meanings eventually separated, though still workship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still whith occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus 'inhabit' development through cultus, L to cult. Cultura took on the main meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in Cicero, cutura animi, through whith subsidiary medieval meanings of honour ans workship (cf. in English culture as 'workship' in Craxon (1483). The French formas of cultura were couture, oF, which has since development its own specialized meaning, and later culture, which by eC15 had passed into English. The primary meaning was then in husbandry, the tending of natural growth. Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals. The subsidiary coulter - ploughshare, had trevelled by a different linguistic route, from culter, L - ploughshare, culter, oE, to the variant English spellings culter, colter, coulter ans as late as eC17 culture (Webster, Duchess of Malfi, III, ii: 'hot burning cultures'). This provided a further basis for the important next stage of meaning, by metaphor. From eC16 the tending of natural growth was extended to a process of human development, and this, alongside the original meaning in husbandry, was the main sense until 1C18 and eC19. Thus More: 'to the culture ans profit of their minds'; Bacon: 'culture and manurance of minds' (1605); Hobbes: 'a culture of their minds' (1651); Johnson: 'she neglected the culture of her understanding' (1759). At various points in this development two crusial changes occurred: first a degree of habituation to metaphor, which made the sense of human tending direct; second, an extension of particular processes to general process, which the word could abstactly carry. It is of course from the latter development that the independent noun culture began its complicated modern history, but the process of change is so intricate, and the latencies of meaning are at times so close, that it is not possible to give any definite date. Culture as an independent noun, an abstract process or the product of such a process, is not important before IC18 and is not common before mC19. But the early stages of this development were not sudden. There is an interesting use in Milton, in the second (revised) edition of The Readie and easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660): 'spread much more Knownledge and Civility, yea, Religion, through all partrs of the Land, by communicating the natural heat of Government and Culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie num and neglected'. Here the metaphorical sense ('natural heat') still apears to present, and civility (cf. CIVILIZATION) is still written where in C19 we would normally expekt culture. Yet we ca also read `governement and culture`in a quite modern sense. Milton, from the tenor of his whole argument, is writing about a general social process, and this is a definite stage of development. In C18 England this general process acquired definite class asoociations though cultivation and cultivated were more commonly used for this. But there is a letter of 1730 (Bishop of Killala, to Mrs Clayton; cit Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century) which has this clear sense: 'it has not been customary for persons of either birth or culture to breed up their children to the curch'. Akenside (Pleasure of Imagination, 1744) wrote: '...nor purple state nor culture ca bestow'. Wordsworth wrote 'were grace of culture hath been utterly unknown' (1805), and Jane Austen (Emma, 1816) 'every advantage of discipline and culture'. It is thus clear that culture was developing in English towards some of its modern senses before the decisive effects of anew social and intellektual movement. But to follow the development through this movement, in IC18 and eC19, we have to look also at the developments in other languages and especially in German. In French, until C18, culture was always accompanied by agramatical form indicating the matter being cultivated, as in the English usage already noted. Its occasional use as an independent noun dates from mC18. rather later than similar occasional uses in English. The independent noun civilization also emerged in mC18; its relationship to culture has since been very complicated (cf. CIVILIZATION and discussion below). There was at this point an important development in german: the word was borrowed from French, spelled first (IC18) Cultur and from C19 Kultur. Its main use was still as an synonym for civilization: first in the abstract sense of a general process of becoming 'civilized' or 'cultivated'; second, in the sense which had already been established for popular C18 form of the universal historians of the Enlightment, in the secular process of human development. There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In his unfinished Ideas on the Philosohy of the History of Mankind (1784-91) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods'. He attacked the assumption of the universal histories that 'civilization' or 'culture' - the historical self-development of humanity - was what we would now call a unilinear process, leading to the high and dominant point of C18 European culture. Indeed he attacked what he called European subjugation and domination of four quaters of globe, and wrote: Men of all the quaters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, yoe have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior Europea culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature. It is then necessary, he argueed, in a decisive innovation, to speak of 'cultures' in plural: the specific and variable cultures of social and economic groups within anation. This isense was widely developed, in the Romantic movement, as an alternative to emphasize orthodox and dominant `civilization`. It was first used to emphasize national and traditional culures, including the new concept of folk-culture (cf. Folk). it was later used to attack what was seen as the 'mechanical' (q.v.) charakter of the new civilization then emerging: both for its abstact rationalism and for 'inhumanity' of current industrial development. It was used to distinguish between 'human' and 'material' development. Politically, as often in this period, it veered between radicalism and reaction and very often, in the confusion of major social change, fused elements of both. (It should also be noted, though it adds to the real complication, that the same kind of distinction, especially between 'material' and 'spiritual' development, was made by von Humboldt and others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the terms, culture being material and civilization spiritual. In general, however, the opposite distinction was dominant.) On the other hand, from 1840s in Germany, Kultur was being used in very much the sense in which civilization had been used in C18 universal histories. The decisive innovation is G. F. Klemm's Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit - 'General Cultural History of Mankind' (1843-52) - which traced human development from savagery through domestication to freedom. Although the American anthropologist Morgan, tracing comparable stages, used 'Ancient Society', with a culmination in Civilization, Klemm's sense was sustained, and was directly followed in English by Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870). It is along this line of reference that the dominant sense in modern social sciences has to be traced. The complexity of the modern development of the word, and of its modern usage, can then be appreciated. We can easily distinguish the sense which depends on a literal continuity of physical process as now in 'sugar-beet culture' or, in the specialized physical application in bacteriology since the 1880s, 'germ culture'. But once we go beyond the physical reference, we have to recognize three broad active categories of usage. The sources of two of these we have already discussed: (i) the independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, from C18; (ii) the independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, o period, a group, or humanity in general, from Herder and Klemm. But we have also to recognize (iii) the independent andabstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity. This seems often now the most widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film. A Ministery of Culture refers to these specific activities, sometimes with the addition of philosophy, scholarship, history. This use, (iii), is in fact relatively late. It is difficult to date precisely because it is origin an applied form of sense (i): the idea of general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development was applied and effectively transferred to the works and practices which represent and sustain it. But it also developed from the earlier sense of process; cf. 'progressiv culture of fine arts', Millar, Historical View of the English Government, IV, 314 (1812). In English (i) and (iii) are still close; at times, for internal reasons, they are indistinguishable as in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1867); while sense (ii) was decisively introduced into English by Tylor, Primitive Culture (1870), following Klemm. The decisive development of sense (iii) in English was in lC19 and eC20. Faced by this complex and still active history of the word, it is easy to react by selecting one 'true' or 'proper' or 'scientific' sense and dismissing other senses as loose or confused. There is evidence of this reaction even in the excellent study by Kroeber and Kluckhohn, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, where usage in North American antropology is effect taken as a norm. It is clear that, within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be clarified. But in general it is the range and overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence. It is especially interesting that in archaeology and in cultural anthropology the reference to culture or a culture is primarily to material production, while in history and cultural studies the reference is primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. This often confuses but even more often conceals the central question of the relation between 'material' and 'symbolic' production, which in some recent argument - cf. my own Culture - have always to be related rather than contrasted. Within this complex argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as effectively overlapping positions; | |||