Re: Re: [Urbanstudy] Re: Problematizing Definitions

Just to add something to the genealogy of culture:

The term ?culture? derives from the Latin ?colare,? which implied tending
and developing agriculture as part of subsistence. With the emergence of
capitalism?s division of labor, culture came both to embody
instrumentalism and to abjure it, via the industrialization of
farming, on the one hand, and the cultivation of individual taste, on the
other. In keeping with this distinction, culture has usually been
understood in two registers, via the social sciences and the
humanities­-truth versus beauty. This was a heuristic distinction in the
16th century, but it became substantive over time.
Eighteenth-century German, French, and Spanish dictionaries bear witness
to a metaphorical shift into spiritual cultivation. As the spread of
literacy and printing saw customs and laws passed on, governed, and
adjudicated through the written word, cultural texts supplemented and
supplanted physical force as guarantors of authority. With the Industrial
Revolution, populations became urban dwellers. Food was imported,
cultures developed textual forms that could be exchanged, and consumer
society emerged through horse racing, opera, art exhibits, masquerades,
and balls. The impact of this shift was indexed in cultural labor:
poligrafi in 15th-century Venice, and hacks in
18th-century London, wrote popular and influential conduct
books, works of instruction on everyday life that marked the
textualization of custom, and the appearance of new occupational
identities. Anxieties about cultural invasion also date from this period,
via Islamic debates over Western domination.
 
Culture became a marker of differences and similarities in taste and
status. In the humanities, it was judged by criteria of quality and
meaning, as practiced critically and historically. In the social
sciences, the focus fell on socio-political norms, as explored
psychologically or statistically. So whereas the humanities articulated
population differences through symbolic means (for example, which
class has the cultural capital to appreciate high culture, and which does
not) the social sciences articulated population differences through
social ones (for example, which people are affected by TV
messages, and which are not). Today, those distinctions are obviously
called into question, if they ever amounted to more than 19th-century,
imperial-era forms of disciplinary distinctiveness

Regards to all

Toby Miller


At 05:54 AM 12/21/2005, anant m wrote:

hm. i hope i am not making an ass of myself in the
presence of a whole bunch of cultural studies folks.
i think it is better to think of a geneology of
culture rather than define it. to my reckoning, the
first loaded use of the word culture was made by
mathew arnold.
some time in the second half of the 19th century. this
was just before the time colonial anthropologists were
seriously beginning to wonder if they had it all
worked out. for arnold, culture was high culture all
that is 'beautiful and intelligent' and he was
strongly opposed to the plebian and the ordinary. and
you must read his dismissive references to the irish!
education therefore had to be in the hands of the
cultured and not democratized.
later on a whole range of marxist critics led by
raymond williams turned it on its head and argued that
culture is really the ordinary. this was a way of
challenging the ways in which high culture reproduces
power relations.
raymond williams and his work notwithstanding, culture
remained largely the domain of anthropologists first
the structuralists strauss and then bodley and geertz
types whose primary means of getting at culture was
via ethnography where one places oneself firmly in the
lifeworlds of those whose culture is being studied and
then withdraws to the library to reflect on the
ensembles of meanings and practices that are not one's
own. hence ideas like primitives, savages and noble
savages and then the ultimate 'thick descriptionists
and so on.
Here is the cross that the scholar bears: she/he at
the moment of the ethnographic encounter and actually
coproduces meaning with an interlocutor but when she
or he withdraws to write about it for a diffferent
audience, she or he produces the culture of the
'other' for the consumption of scholarly kin.
thus in your interaction with the woman whose child
you thought was being treated cruelly (at least at
firsy anyway) she and you together coproduced
meaning.but when you report it to us, the woman
remains outside of this conversation and it is her
culture versus our culture that we end up talking
about.
well, that was an attempt at a rough and ready
geneology of culture. i have no idea what culturality
means. others please add or delete.
anant

--- zainab@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I am still interested in understanding the 'general
> meaning' of the term
> culture? What constitutes culture? And what
> constitutes acts of
> culturality?
> Cheers,
> Zee
>
>


                 
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