Contexts

http://ctx.sagepub.com/ Culture
Joseph R. Gusfield Contexts 2006 5: 43 DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2006.5.1.43 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ctx.sagepub.com/content/5/1/43

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

American Sociological Association

Additional services and information for Contexts can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ctx.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ctx.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://ctx.sagepub.com/content/5/1/43.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Feb 1, 2006 What is This?

Downloaded from ctx.sagepub.com at University of Bucharest on March 11, 2014

keywords joseph r. gusfield

culture

e understand words by examining their contexts and by comparing them with other, related words. In both its history and its present uses, culture has displayed a rich diversity of meanings; some clear and others ambiguous, some popular and others academic. The origins of the word lie in the concept of cultivation, distinguishing that which is grown under human control, as in farming, from the products of nature. This meaning is still found in the idea of cultured pearls or in medical phrases such as culturing bacteria. This contrast between nature and culture still pervades the variety of the words meanings. Varied uses of the word also point to differences of method and perspective in history, sociology, and anthropology. A cultural approach is distinct from other perspectives such as biological, genetic, or social-structural. British usage in the mid-19th century contrasted primitive societies as uncivilized and uncultured with contemporary Western societies as civilized and cultured. Culture was a state of being to be attained, synonymous with civilization. We still use this developmental meaning, referring to people as cultured or uncultured. This is not surprising since the word is almost always used to describe groups or societies or parts of a group, as with subcultures. In more common usages culture has a collective reference, as in the culture of the State department or the culture of French Canadians. Close to this usage of culture to mean civilization is its use to refer to specific institutions of knowledge and creativity such as art, language, science, religion, film, and literature, which the sociology of culture has taken as its subject matter. Here the focus is on ideas rather than their associated material practices. Forms of thought, knowledge, language, and art that are often associated with the concept of civilization are distinguished from technological practices and institutions. How this use of culture relates to wider concepts of culture has been an abiding issue in the humanities as well as in sociology. The question of whether art and religion reflect a societys culture or whether they influence the development of that society is relevant to the role of intellectuals and artists in modern societiesas T. S. Eliot realized in 1949. The word is perhaps most frequently used to refer to the practices and patterns that distinguish one society or group from others. In 1874 the anthropologist E. B. Tyler defined culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,

morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The definition includes two elementsthat which differentiates one group or society from others and the concept of acquired or learned behavior. Cultural diversity contrasts with the idea of a universal human nature implied in biological explanations of human behavior. Anthropology has argued that human behavior is produced by discrete human cultures rather than determined by biological or genetic nature. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict made this view a part of the college education of several generations of American students. The word culture not only points to substance but embodies a perspective on societiesa way of explaining differences, often called cultural determinism. Though anthropologists themselves have criticized the perspective in recent years, it remains associated with their discipline. Against this emphasis on culture is a more universal view of human nature, in examples such as the nuclear family or taboos against incest or eating human flesh. Tylors definition, however, is a loose collection of practices and ideas that differ in their significance and constraining character. In Spain the evening meal usually occurs at 10 pm or later; in the United States, it occurs at 6 pm or shortly after. Neither society supports this practice with a sense of moral certitude. These are habits. They differ from intensely held beliefs or preferences that are perceived as morally binding because they reflect human nature. Stoning to death has been the prescribed punishment for adultery in some societies, in contrast to a much milder treatment in others. Tyler saw cultures as collections of rules and beliefs with different levels of significance. Other anthropologists have used culture to refer to a pervasive quality of a society. In this sense cultures are integrated and manifested in a variety of actions. Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture (1934) distinguished two types of primitive society: The Dionysian, which values psychological states of excess, contrasted with the Apollonian, with its measured values for sticking to the middle of the road. Pervasiveness and constraint are the salient dimensions of culture in much social research. Its pervasiveness suggests that a culture is shared by a group and, as in Benedicts work, permeates much of its activity. Culture constrains through its exclusiveness. Actions are bounded by the categories and rules that exclude alternatives. Members of a society may be unaware that their actions and

Contexts, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp. 43-44, ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. 2006 by the American Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

winter 2006 contexts

Downloaded from ctx.sagepub.com at University of Bucharest on March 11, 2014

43

beliefs are unique to their society. Louis Dumont, in Homo Hierarchicus, asserts that the concept of the self in Western societies differs from the concept of the self as a part of a group in India. The principle of equality permeates Western society, while that of hierarchy permeates Indian culture. We might even reasonably assert that culture has us more than we have it, as Bennett Berger put it. The constraining quality of culture is perhaps its most vital aspect in social research. Here it contrasts with social structure. Karl Mannhems conception of ideology, for instance, explains knowledge, including political doctrines, by reference to the social and economic position of adherents and spokespersons. In a similar vein, bourgeois culture is often thought to reflect the capitalist middle class. The conflict between cultural and structural perspectives fuels one of the most common debates in the human sciences. Karl Marx stated the structural approach succinctly in The German Ideology: It is not the consciousness of man that determines existence but the existence that determines consciousness. This assertion of social structure as source and explanation of ideas has often been contrasted with cultural approaches such as Max Webers in his famed The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber related Protestant ideals to the moral and ethical elements of the character that prized capitalistic behavior. The human meaning of the economic behavior of capitalism could not be understood without seeing its cultural framework of ethical and cognitive ideas. The cultural roots of economic behavior were independent or quasi-independent of economic interests. What was prized was the character of capitalists presented through their economic behavior. The meaning of economic behavior could not be assumed; it had to be studied. Over the past three decades the narrower use of culture to refer to the meanings of objects and events has gained favor, in what has been called the cultural turn. This is also part of the general intellectual movement toward emphasis on the subject rather than on objective conditions as the sources of action. Studies of social problems have focused on how conditions come to be interpreted as public problems. Studies of social movements have examined the process of framingwhich involves the categories of language and belief by which situations are defined. Even scientific knowledge has been found to use cognitive paradigms that lead and limit theory and experience. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar capture much of this perspective in the title of their seminal work, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts.
Joseph R. Gusfield has helped inspire the cultural turn through books such as Symbolic Crusade, The Culture of Public Problems, and Contested Meanings.

Clifford Geertz, a major figure in the cultural turn, reconceptualized the term ideology in contrast to its traditional utilitarian usage. The function of ideology, he wrote in The Interpretation of Cultures, is to make an autonomous politics possible by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped. This perspective leads the analyst to examine the discourses we use to interpret events and objects and give them meaning. It recognizes that meanings may be multiple and may differ across and within groups. The ways in which symbol systems enable people to interpret their experience, even to construct their experience in a shared way, has become the central focus of a cultural perspective. The cultural turn has resulted in a more searching assessment of the limits and utility of the concept of culture. Cultures characterize modern societies at different levels of uniformity or conflict; they have diverse relations to social structure; and they are more or less pervasive and constraining. The problem of the relationship of culture to practice also remains important. Culture remains an indispensable though ambiguous concept in the discourse of the social sciences.

recommended resources
Bennett Berger. An Essay on Culture: Symbolic Structure and Social Structure (University of California Press, 1995). Shows off recent efforts in the sociology of culture. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (University of California Press, 1999). Historians and sociologists suggest paths of research that follow from the triumph of cultural constructionism. T. S. Eliot. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (Harcourt, Brace, 1949). A classic statement of culture as cultivation, including its frequently conservative implications. Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973). Perhaps the most influential work in the cultural turn of the social sciences. Joseph R. Gusfield. The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking, Driving and the Symbolic Order (University of Chicago Press, 1981). This book explores a number of aspects of meaning in the recognition and punishment of drunk driving. Marshall Sahlins. Culture and Practical Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1976). Another anthropologist influentially debunks materialist accounts of social life in favor of cultural approaches.

44

contexts winter 2006

Downloaded from ctx.sagepub.com at University of Bucharest on March 11, 2014