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If we look in an old dictionary -- say, a pre-1960 Websters -- and youll likely find a definition of culture that looks something like this: "1. ... By the time the Websters definition above was written, another definition had begun to take precedence over the old Latin denotation; culture was coming to mean "the training, development, and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners" (Oxford English Dictionary). The OED traces this definition, which today we associate with the phrase " high culture," back as far as 1805; by the middle of the 20th century, it was fast becoming the words primary definition.
However, if you try a more modern source, like the American Heritage English Dictionary, youll find a primary definition of culture which is substantially different than either of the two given above: "The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. ... Well, in the past 40 years, the use of the word "culture" has been heavily influenced by the academic fields of sociology and cultural anthropology. These fields have gradually brought what was once a minor definition of culture into the mainstream.
According to another point of view the definition of culture is for instance ; “ Im walking down a street in the meat packing district late at night, dressed in a black singlet and jeans. ...
Culture ; “ a wardrobe of signs” . This is the first thing we can say culture is: a wardrobe of signs people put out to each other, indicating where we are coming from and what were about, so other people can size us up and decide what to do next. ... This is the second thing we can say about culture, and the different ways of knowing who we are and who others are through culture. Modern, urban culture is as much about indifference as it is about difference, as sociologist Georg Simmel surmised. ...
Culture can be open or closed to different behaviours and attitudes.
So culture is a set of signs and rules for their use that signal how we might differ from an other. ...
This is the third thing we can say about culture: there are ethical and political questions at stake as to how open or closed a particular culture is to different behaviours and attitudes, both within the ranks of those it considers inside it, and those it considers outside. ...
Culture: a whole way of life, a structure of feeling
Cultural historian Raymond Williams spent a lot of time trying to come up with a definition of culture. ... This expression gives us the sense of culture as something we learn, perhaps without really being aware of it, yet it shapes our awareness of everything around us and how we react to things. ...
Culture uses rituals and artefacts to sustain its coherence
Culture is something one picks up and intemalises. ... Yet a culture also passes through a set of things external to the members of the group it defines, as artefacts, rituals, texts. These things should not be confused with culture itself. One learns a culture through these things, but these things only come to have meaning within the networks of actions that people make of them. ...
This is the fourth thing can be said about culture. ... Understanding culture is not just a matter of reading its texts. ... In New York, gay culture has been hard hit by the AIDS pandemic. Urban working class culture is struggling because blue collar jobs are drying up. In both cases, the sense of identity provided by the culture is a resource for coping with these bad tums of fortune, but in neither case can culture itself reverse that fortune. ...
Culture is the process at work that lends continuity and meaning to lives
Modern living added a whole new dimension to what it is cultures have to manage. ...
Capitalism accelerated the changes that culture has to try to make intelligible to its members. This is one of the reasons a wide range of people have come to focus on culture, because it appears to be the process at work that lends continuity and meaning to lives that otherwise are battered pretty hard by rapid economic and social change.
So the sixth thing can be said about culture is that it has become a focus for attention as capitalism increases the pace and scale of change people have to adapt to. This idea goes back to the Scottish enlightenment, and the idea Ive already discussed of the role culture has to play once the division of labour has fragmented life and makes of us narrow people. Culture: compensation for a fragmented and alienated life
More radical writers, influenced by Marx, will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. ...
Culture is more important than the economy for many
While radical post-Marxist critiques of culture as compensation for capitalism may be on the wane, other strong positions on the role of culture have arise to take its place. What One Nation in Australia has in common with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Serbian nationalism is a sense that culture comes first and the economy has to conform to its dictates. Or in other words, culture is not there to supplement for the limits of the market, the market is there to supplement culture. ...
A less apocalyptic view of culture sees it simply as resistance. ... For de Certeau, culture resides in the qualities of little everyday actions, always singular, particular, almost unnoticeable. ...
So far I have talked about culture as a structure of feeling that everybody within a particular culture more or less shares. There is another notion of culture altogether, which is culture as the best of what was thought and expressed. The English Victorian essayist Mathew Arnold thought of culture this way, and literary and fine art studies still do to this day. ... They tend to rest on the belief that the study of particularly good artefacts of culture will make you a refined and gentle human being. So in a sense literary or art intellectuals form a peculiar kind of culture. ... This kind of critical culture is really just a particular example of the wider process of culture at work. ... It is perfectly clear that literary and fine art cultures have no special knowledge of culture in general. ...
To sum it up: Culture makes use of artefacts and rituals to pass on notions of identity. ... But it gets even harder when culture finds itself circulated and negotiated not just through media that can simultaneously reach millions. ... "
Ethical relativism is the theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of ones culture. ... These customs can not be said to be correct or incorrect for that implies we have an independent standard ; every standard is culture – bound. ... Ethical relativism reminds us that different societies have different moral beliefs and that our beliefs are deeply influenced by culture. ... Yet, if everyone conforms to the ethic of their own culture, then the history generated will also be nomothetic.
Approximate Word count = 6199
Approximate Pages = 24.8
(250 words per page double spaced)
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