Culture
Hans Johst (often attributed to
Hermann Göring): “When I
hear the word ‘culture’ I
reach for my gun” (“I release
the safety catch of my
Browning”)
Cyril Connolly
(English writer):
“When I hear the
word ‘gun’ I
reach for my
culture.”
„I don’t know how many
times I’ve wished that
I’d never heard the
damned word.”
(Raymond Williams,
British cultural theorist)
Binary oppositions (binarities,
dichotomies) (kétosztatúságok)
• More than mere contrast: explanatory function,
covering an entire field, establishing hierarchy
• subject – object (self – world)
• soul (spirit) - body
• essence – appearance (depth – surface, truth – lie)
• male- female, sun – moon, day – night
• good – evil, right – wrong
• democracy – totalitarianism
• individual – community, public – private
• Culture - ???
Culture: its etymology
to inhabit
colere
– colony
cultivate
–
protect, worship –
coulter, agriculture
cult
I. Culture as cultivation
•
•
•
•
•
cultura animi - cultivation of the soul
F. Bacon: „culture and manurement of minds”
(agriculture, body culture, cell culture)
)
Nature+culture
= fully human
nature is unfinished; culture: perfection of
nature and not its opposite („cultural
instructions”)
• Culture as process
II. Culture as a value-laden term
1. Culture ~ civilisation
vs. barbarity, savagery, primitiveness
(European idea)
2. Culture = expression of collective
(national) spirit (Völkergeist, J. G.
Herder)
vs. „others”, aliens
World War One
poster (UK, then
US, 1917)
On club: „Kultur”
On helmet:
„Militarism”
Value-laden “culture” – detached itself from material
things (19th century Britain)
culture is “a study of
perfection, … perfection which consists in
becoming something rather than in
having something, in an inward condition
of the mind and spirit.” (Culture and
Anarchy, 1869)
Matthew Arnold:
III. The anthropological meaning of
“culture”
- Late 19th cent: rise of ETHNOGRAPHY and
ANTHROPOLOGY as a discipline
- E. B. Tylor, James G. Fraser, Arnold Gehlen,
Norbert Elias, Bronislaw Malinowski, Émile
Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Clifford Geertz
Human being unable to survive in nature
→ puts culture between
himself and nature
culture = second nature
(Arnold Gehlen, Norbert Elias - German
anthropologists)
Anthropology and ethnography (from
mid- C19)
Study of “primitive” societies
Small communities ~ laboratories
Two conclusions
1. “primitive culture” is not really “primitive”
E. B. Tylor (Vict. anthropologist): we should
appreciate “the real culture which better
acquaintance always shows among the
rudest tribes of man” (e.g. Aborigines)
Anthropology and ethnography
2. Cultures are all different, but the fact of
having a culture is a universal human feature
comparative anthropology
Fraser: The Golden Bough (Az aranyág)
Anthropological meaning of „culture”
- broad meaning: a distinct way of life (Tylor: culture is
“that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member
of society” (1871)
- neutral
- plural: „cultures” rather than „culture”
- culture: a human universal
- Nature vs. culture again
- Every culture is an adequate response to its
environement, working well
- Culture: second nature of meanings, symbols
Raymond Williams (English critic):
“Culture is ordinary. …Every human society
has its own shape, its own purposes, its
own meanings. Every human society
expresses these, in institutions, and in
arts and learning. The making of society is
the finding of common meanings and
directions.” (1958)
• T.S. Eliot: culture in the widest sense
“includes all the characteristic activities
and interests of a people: Derby Day,
Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of
August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin
table, the dart board, Wensleydale
cheese, boiled cabbage, beetroot in
vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic
churches and the music of Elgar” (1944)
Ethnocentrism
Eskimo – „eaters of raw meat”
Pygmy – „size of a fist”
Hungarian – „alliance of tribes”
Apache – „enemies”
Tsigan – „outcasts”
(magyar, roma, dine, inuit, baka)
Our own ethnos is always the standard of the
normal, of the human
What it is that all cultures have in
common (LCD of cultures)?
• Where is the boundary between nature and
culture?
• Laws, rules
• Appearing as: prohibitions, taboos, ‘don’t’s
• ‘Two feet good, four feet bad’
• (Orwell’s Animal Farm)
• dietary habits and fasting (no meat on Friday)
Threshold of culture
• Cannibalism?
• hunger cannibalism vs cultural cannibalism
(mortuary, sacrificial)
• Incest?
• Licence of gods: quod licet Iovi non licet bovi
Francisco Goya:
Saturn Devouring
His Children
(1819-23)
(symbolic) meaning as the thresholod of
culture
• Clifford Geertz (US anthropologist) about the
‘winking boy’
• ‘THICK DESCRIPTION’: to ‘describe’ is never
enough
• Cultural practices as texts (a Balinese
cockfight)
• (professional wrestling, a duel, sy beating a
drum, slaughtering an animal)
Culture and meaning
• Culture is „webs of meaning... woven by us”
(Geertz)
• Objects, texts, practices, institutions
• No meanings in nature (stones, trees)
CULTURALISM
•
•
•
•
coherence of a culture
Emile Durkheim: collective representations
Völkergeist (‘spirit of the people’)
Like cells in a body
Symbol and function
• Function (use) + (symbolic) meanings
• In culture, nothing (?) is exhausted by its
function/use
Basic human (animal) needs: eating, protecting
our bodies
Everything else is meaning
• Meals: help define communuty
• Clothes: ‘culturalising’ the body
Saudi athlete
wearing hijab in
London 2012
Culture and meaning
‘Which is Adam and which
is Eve?’
‘I do not know, but I could
tell if they had their
clothes on.’
(Samuel Butler)
gendering the body
Male and female peacock
„the great renunciation”
Man: serious labour,
sober clothes
Woman: frivolous
decoration,
flamboyance
Rigaud: Louis XIV
19th century:
Victorian boy
• Victorian card
Queen Victoria and baby Prince Arthur
William Orpen:
A Bloomsbury Family
(1907)
Botticelli: Virgin Adoring the Sleeping
Child (1490)
Cimabue: The
Virgin and Child
Enthroned with
Two Angels
Mrs. Eisenhower in
pink
(presidential
inauguration,
1953)
Wearing jeans
(the meanings
of jeans)
Marlboro ad
Camel ads
Culture and meaning
‘Which is Adam and which is
Eve?’
‘I do not know, but I could
tell if they had their
clothes on.’
(Samuel Butler)
Saudi athlete
wearing hijab in
London 2012
• Nothing is
exhausted by its
use value
• Clothes:
‘culturalising’ the
body
burqa
Male and female peacock
„the great renunciation”
Man: serious labour,
sober clothes
Woman: frivolous
decoration,
flamboyance
Rigaud: Louis XIV
Victorian boy – F. D. Roosevelt
Victorian boy
• Victorian card
Queen Victoria and baby Prince Arthur
Botticelli: Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Child
(1490)
Cimabue: The
Virgin and Child
Enthroned with
Two Angels
Marlboro ad
Camel ads
Culture as (a web of) meanings
• Who puts the meanings into them?
• Who is weaving the webs?
• Is there a difference between the web itself and the
meanings?
• Richard Dawkins: the web weaving itself
• (culture is about the survival of ‘memes’)
• Culture like gossip?
• What is the stake of this?
• Self, individuality, identity, subject(ivity)
Culture and individuality
Liberal views of individual freedom and culture (Dworkin,
Kymlicka, Rawls) individuals have life plans - culture is “the
context of choice”: it is “only through having a rich and secure
cultural structure that people can become aware, in a vivid
way, of the options available to them, and intelligently
examine their value.”
No conflict between the liberal concern for our freedom (to
judge the value of our life-plans) and cultural identity
culture “provides the spectacles through which we identify
experiences as valuable”
“familiarity with a culture determines the boundaries of the
imaginable”
What do we buy when we buy a cinema ticket or
a car?
What else is offered with a product?
Ideas and iIdeology
• Ideology:
• (1) a set of (political) ideas shared by a group
(green, conservative, liberal, nationalist)
• (2) unquestioned, „natural”, invisible system of
ideas:
(„false consciousness”)
e.g.: books for boys=books for everyone
How do ideologies work?
•
•
•
•
Louis Althusser
Ideologies address the subject:
offering a view of ourselves and of the world
ideological messages do not simply influence us to
think about the world in certain ways but are
responsible for calling us into being as thinking
individuals and for making us who we are
• e.g. TV news vs mobile phone commercials
Cultural products
• Enter the circulation of meanings and
representations
• acquire ‘added meanings’
Mickey Mouse
• 1935: Intnl symbol of
good will (League of
Nations)
• Loved by Th. Roosevelt,
King George V, and
Mussolini
• 1944: D Day code-name,
US army mascot
• Anti-semitic and antiAmerican ideologies
“Mickey Mouse is the most
atrocious ideal that has ever
been offered to mankind … The
healthy sentiments of every
independent-minded young
man worthy of respect must
suggest that this ugly and dirty
parasite, this greatest bacillus
host of the animal kingdom
cannot be the ideal animal. We
must not allow Jews to degrade
humanity! Down with Mickey
Mouse! Let everybody wear
the swastika!”
Art Spiegelman: Maus (1991)
Cultural products
• Meanings added in the course of cultural
circulation
meanings ‘already’ in the texts (intentional or
unintentional)
art: the most useful ideological tool precisely
because it seems to be outside the system
Disney and ideology
• Children’s films
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, 1937
(Wizard of Oz, 1939)
• The ‘construction’ of ‘the child’
• The idea of the ‘family movie’
Comic Book Art Specifications
(1970s)
- no political ideas
- no races, no stereotypes
- no classes, no social differences
- no modern weapons
- no sexuality, no love
DuckTales (1987-90)