INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL

AND CULTURAL THEORY

MA PROGRAMME:
BRITISH CULTURE AND CIVILISATION
IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALISATION

2017–2018
 Introduction: the concept of culture

Culture and civilisation

Adaptationist vs. ideationist theories of

culture

Traditional vs. critical theories of culture

 Etymology
 Culture: from the Latin colere = “to till the soil”, but also “to
inhabit,” (a meaning surviving in the word “colony”)
 From past participle cultus (“tended,” “cultivated”): cultura
(“a toiling over,” as in cultura agri – ″cultivation of the field”);
 In the Middle Ages: cultura mentis - the process of spiritual
and mental transformation and growth of the individual or
the society;
 Cicero: credited with the first use of this metaphorical sense
in cultura animi
 In English – culture: imported from Old French in the 15th
century
• 1605 - Francis Bacon: “the culture and manuring of
minds” (the effort and work involved in the cultivation
and perfection of human aptitudes)

• Joseph Addison: “The Mind that lies fallow but a single

day sprouts up in follies that are only to be killed by a
constant and assiduous culture.” (The Spectator, 1711)

• The 18th century (the Enlightenment): the consecration

of the figurative sense of the term - the emergence of
the conceptual opposition between nature and culture;

• culture = the sum total of knowledge accumulated and

transmitted by mankind along the ages, an attribute
that distinguishes the human species – optimism, faith
in human perfectibility
 Culture vs. Civilisation
• Origin of the term civilisation: the Middle Ages - civitabilis =
“entitled to citizenship,” “urbanisable” (from civis: “citizen”; civitas:
“city state”; civilitas: “citizenship”); original meaning: the general
attribute of the citizen in relation with the other members of the
civitas/city.
• The 18th century – civilisation: used by by the French rationalist
philosophers to mark the antithesis with the earlier, darker age of
feudalism;
• In English, too, the meaning of “civilisation” was associated with
the task of civilising others, with the spreading of political
achievements and the emergence from a “barbarous” state.
• Civilisation as a process = the passage from the primitive state
associated with Nature to a more evolved state of moral,
intellectual and social achievement, called Culture.
 The French-German debate
• the latter half of the 18th century - culture and civilisation: opposite terms in
Germany;
• bourgeois intelligentsia vs. the the superficiality of the court nobility
(preoccupied to emulate the “civilised” manners and the refinement of the
French court)
• frequent associations:
– Culture = profundity; anything contributing to spiritual and intellectual
enrichment;
– Civilisation = shallowness; the frivolity of external graces

• Culture: individual (personal accomplishment) vs. civilisation: collective

(improvement of social interrelations)
• From the original social foundation of the opposition culture/civilisation to one
defined in national terms – the idea of a unified culture as a distinctive
national attribute.
• German intellectuals assumed the mission of rehabilitating and asserting the
values of the German language and culture; the imitation of French manners:
perceived as alienating; the idea of a unified culture as a distinctive national
attribute.
 Culture and nation

• The late 18th and the 19th century - the emergence of two
opposing archetypes, corresponding to opposing views of
nation:
– the French conception of culture: universalist – culture:
a wider dimension; defines humanity in general before
defining a particular nation – this conception corresponds
to a view of the nation as a free association of citizens
and as a rational and voluntary political construction, a
civic, contractual, elective nationalism;
– the German conception: particularist – corresponds to
an ethno-racial view of the nation;
• This difference in the conception of culture was to underlie
its future definitions in the social sciences.
 Culture and progress
• The origins of the modern concept of culture: in philosophy and
the literary tradition.
• The 18th and 19th centuries - important changes in the life of
Western societies:
• the ideology of progress;
• industrialisation and rapid technological advancement;
• social and political changes;
• population increase;
• the massification of life.
• Culture: a privileged realm in which the individual could assert his
essential humanity.
– The 18th century – man’s humanity: defined against a
primitive, natural state;
– 19th century – culture: called to defend humanity from the
alienating effect of an increasingly mechanised civilisation.
 High culture vs. popular culture
The elitist view of culture
• The Romantic reaction against the rationalism and utilitarianism
of civilisation – the notion of culture: the implication of elitism
• 19th century English thinkers (Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle,
Matthew Arnold), like the German Romantics, were insisting on
culture as the totality of the utmost achievements in the field of
thought, arts, and literature – the idea of excellence and high
standards
• A period of change and conflict – it was important to reflect on
what was worth preserving in a society, what was meaningful to
its civilisation – the issue of good vs. bad, central vs. peripheral
in a culture
• The rise of the industrial civilisation: felt as a threat to culture –
a new debate about the division between high/elite culture and
the emerging popular/low culture.
 The aesthetic vs. the anthropological view of
culture
• The distinction between elite culture and the emerging
popular/low culture: made by means of the aesthetic criterion.
• The Romantic distinction between art which appeals to the
imagination (an “intellectual” faculty) and the work which only
addresses itself to the senses.
• The preoccupation with the mechanism of aesthetic pleasure
was accompanied by concerns with the true mission of the
artist and of the intellectual elite.
• The aesthetic view of culture vs. the anthropological view
• the emergence of positivism in the 19th century; the
appearance, among other disciplines, of sociology and
ethnology as scientific approaches which aimed at explaining
human diversity on grounds other than biological (racial).
 The concept of culture as an instrument in
sociological and ethnological investigation

• a scientific concept – no longer a normative,

prescriptive meaning, but a purely descriptive content.
• The ethnologist and sociologist vs. the philosopher:
description of the manifestation of culture in human
societies vs. the definition of culture (in terms of
inclusion and exclusion)
• As a conceptual tool in the social sciences, culture
retained a relative epistemological autonomy –
unaffected by the debate on the opposition culture vs.
civilisation
 Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917)

• British anthropologist
• The first definition of the ethnological concept of culture – 1871:
Primitive Culture
• He borrowed the notion of culture in its ethnographic sense from
the German anthropologist Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802-1867)
• Tylor’s definition cancels the older opposition between culture
and civilisation:
“Culture or civilisation […] is that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any
other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society.”
• Emphasis on the the social, collective dimension of culture
• Tylor embraced the universalist conception of culture of the 18th
century Enlightenment thinkers – attempt to reconcile it with the
problem of the evolution of culture.
• Influenced by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) – social darwinism –
evolutionist theory applied to culture
• The continuity between primitive and advanced culture – no difference
in nature between primitive and civilised man, but in the degree of
advancement on the evolutionary scale of culture
• All human beings are “culture beings”
• Ethnological studies of cultural survivals (in Mexico) – i.e. of the traces
of ancestral customs existing alongside recent cultural features –
established comparatism as the essential method in cultural
anthropology.
• The principle of cultural relativism – there are no scientific standards
for establishing the cultural superiority or inferiority of one group to
another (vs. cultural ethnocentrism: the belief in the superiority of
one’s own culture over others).
 Franz Boas (1858-1942)
• American anthropologist – formed in German universities
• The adept of the particularist notion of culture
• Drawn rather to what constituted the uniqueness and specificity of a
particular culture, and to the way in which individual behaviour is related
to the cultural context to which it belongs.
• Boas’s objective was rather the study of cultures – the pluralisation of the
word culture
• It was cultural, not social, difference that explained human diversity.
• More of an analyst than a theoretician –pioneered the in situ investigation,
the observation of a particular culture through long-term immersion in the
life of the observed group (the “participant-observation” method) – an
inductive and intensive field-method
• Boas practically invented modern ethnography as a basic method in
anthropology.
• The anthropological view of culture that emerged in
the 19th century led to the broadening of the concept

• No longer a matter of aesthetic excellence but the

whole way of life of a social group.

• The concept of culture acquires a scientific status –

available to other sciences as well: a valuable
conceptual tool in social psychology, in
psychoanalysis, in linguistics, history, philosophy,
or economy.

• Extremely diversified definitions and acceptations –

the proliferation of theories of culture
 Possible classifications of theories of culture
Roger M. Keesing (1974): distinction between theories which see
cultures as adaptive systems and theories which regard
cultures as systems of ideas.

A. The cultural adaptionists:

 Cultures are systems of socially transmitted behaviour patterns

that serve to relate human communities to their ecological
settings
 A vision of culture as a compensatory process – the
biologically fragile human being becomes capable of acting
upon nature, transforming it according to its needs and
projects.
 Technology, economy and social organisation: the fields in
which adaptive changes occur most obviously
B. Ideational theories of culture (religion, ritual,
symbols, worldview) – several versions:

 Culture as a cognitive system – “a society’s

culture consists of whatever it is one has to know
or believe in order to operate in a manner
acceptable to its members. Culture is not a
material phenomenon: it does not consist of
things, people, behaviour, or emotions. It is rather
an organization of these things. It is the form of
things that people have in mind, their models for
perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting
them” (Ward Goodenough)
 Culture as a structural system – e.g. Claude Lévi-
Strauss (Structural Anthropology, 1958): the
fundamental symbolic opposition Nature/Culture
 Cultural configurations, in their diversity, both
synchronic and diachronic, are the surface
manifestations of deep structural patterns, the
specific transformations of a rule-system that is
immanent and unconscious.
 Cultures in this view are seen as the result of the
mind’s effort to impose an elaborately patterned
order on the changing and random reality.
 Culture as a symbolic system – an organised collection of
shared meanings, expressed symbolically (Clifford Geertz;
Louis Dumont);

The emphasis is on its “semiotic” aspect, on the activities and social

actors involved in the exchange of meaning, i.e. in symbolic
action. For Geertz, culture is like an assemblage of texts, which
are to be not decoded, as for structuralists, but interpreted,
which, for the cultural analyst, may be a slow and difficult task.

“Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in

webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be
those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an
experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in
search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social
expressions on their surface enigmatical.” (Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures, 1973; ch. "Thick Description: Toward
an Interpretive Theory of Culture", 1973)
Unlike structuralists, who envisaged the formalisation of
cultural patterns into a “grammar,” Geertz sees the
organisation of a particular culture not as a regular
and symmetrical spiderweb, but rather as an
octopus,

“whose tentacles are in large part separately

integrated, neurally quite poorly connected with one
another and with what in the octopus passes for a
brain, and yet who nonetheless manages to get
around and to preserve himself, for a while anyway,
as a viable, if somewhat ungainly, entity.” (Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973)
 Traditional vs. critical theory
A distinction proposed by Max Horkheimer, in 1937 – a working tool in
fields like social philosophy, the philosophy of history, or cultural
studies.

 Traditional theory presupposes a radical separation between the

subject and the object of knowledge, a separation which constitutes the
theorist into a disinterested observer, describing an object which is
already “there”, prior to the act of representation.

 Critical theory places emphasis the “constructedness” of both the

subject engaged in the act of knowing and the object of knowledge;
both of them are seen as the result of complex social processes.

 Critical theory a form of social critique aiming at change and intellectual

emancipation

 Analysis of the dominant ideological premises (the “ruling

understandings”) and the misrepresentations that legitimate and justify
domination
 Traditional theory Critical theory
 Culture: freedom  Culture: a network of relations of power
from nature, the that produces values, beliefs and forms of
process by which knowledge.
man is fully  not a “given”, but the result of praxis,
humanised.
 not the realm of freedom, but of
contradictions – the systems which integrate
the individual and make possible human
action are never entirely under his control;
 culture: a social construction which
includes the theoretical practice itself.

 Emphasis on  Emphasis on discontinuity, difference,

homogeneity, totality conflict and heterogeneity (postmodernism,
and harmony, feminism, psychoanalysis, neomarxism,
positing a human postcolonialism, transculturalism).
nature that is
unchangeable;