What is Culture?

Abstract

There are at least two everyday, commonsense meanings of culture. The first is the ‘best’ achievements and products in art, literature and music. The second is the artificial growth or development of microscopic organisms or species of plants, a meaning deriving from a much older usage of the verb ‘to cultivate’: meaning to husband, and originally referring to agricultural techniques. Both these meanings are relevant to what is discussed in this book. More immediately we need to remember that although sociology is concerned with commonsense meanings, it must also look beyond them for theories, explanations and interpretations. Durkheim saw the study of ‘collective representations’ and their symbolic meaning as central to a sociological understanding of the social. In a very different tradition, Max Weber saw sociology as one of the ‘cultural sciences’, concerned with values and meaning, developing concepts and interpretations relevant to the society in which they take shape (Weber, 1949). A basic proposition of modern sociology is that concepts, ideas, words and other symbolic systems arise out of the society or group in which they operate. In this chapter we shall see that the development and use of the concept ‘culture’ relates to the beliefs and values people have about societies, social change and the ideal society they seek. We shall also see that much work on the concept has come from writers outside academic sociology, including literature, philosophy, politics, history and anthropology. Indeed, it is difficult to argue that there is a distinctive sociology of culture at all.