Definitions of culture in sociology and anthropology

Culture is all around us, an inherit part of our social life as well as our personality and sense
of subjectivity. However, culture, as cultural studies researcher Raymond Williams noted, is
one of the most complex words in the English language. Culture is popularly used to denote
as narrow sense that is usually related to the arts and humanities. In a broader sense, culture
denotes the practices, beliefs and perceptions of a given society. Culture is additionally often
opposed with "savagery", relating to something which is "cultured" as a product of a certain
evolvement from a natural state. In the theoretical sense culture is often related as a system of
structures with power relations running through them.

In social sciences, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, there is hardly a consensus
regarding the meaning of the term culture and various definitions of culture are in circulation.
Researchers Kroeber and Kluckhohn (Culture: A Critical Review of Literature", 1952)
gathered an array of various definitions of culture is sociology and anthropology and have
divided them into six primary categories: 1. Descriptive definitions of culture which view
culture as a total system of customs, beliefs, knowledge, laws, means of expression as so
forth. 2. Historical definitions of culture which view culture as the continuation of
generations. 3. Normative definitions of culture which related to value systems which
construct social and personal behavior. 4. Psychological definitions of culture which stress
culture's role in interpersonal relations. 5. Structural definitions of culture that focus on
relational aspects of cultural components through abstraction. 6. socio-genetic definitions of
culture which focus on the genesis and continued existence of a culture.

A different, more contemporary, way to distinguish definitions of culture is to note the way in
which culture is theoretically perceived as either something which is opposed to materiality,
technology and social structures from which culture is something different, or as a space of
non-material ideas which are also, obviously, abstract. Other definitions of culture focus on
its autonomy from social and economical structures.
This leads us to propose two fundamental understanding regarding definitions of culture: A.
culture is an ensemble of practices, values and meanings common to a collective entity; B.
culture is the totality of activities and objects through which meaning is generated and
circulated in a given collective entity.  

"The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities" by

Stuart Hall – article review and summary

Stuart Hall's "The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities" is a
retrospective account of the origins of cultural studies at the Birmingham Center for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. He immediately opens by noting that cultural studies are an
interdisciplinary field, "a conjectural practice" which stems from different backgrounds and
therefore should not be subjected to categorization ("cultural studies is never one thing"). The
second aspect of cultural studies that Hall stresses is its critical nature, even and especially
towards itself.

Stuart Hall argues that cultural studies have emerged out of a crisis in the humanities, from
which most of the initial cultural studies researchers came.  The condescending tone of "The

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Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities" is apparent here with
utterances like "most of us had to leave the humanities in order to do serious work in it". And
the humanities are indeed, for Hall, the "bad guys" which deeply resented the appearance of
cultural studies. By referring to the humanities' antagonism towards cultural studies Hall
wishes to expose its false claims of being "an integral formation".

For Stuart Hall, cultural studies originated in the debate regarding the nature of social change
in the affluent, mass media culture of postwar Britain. This debate, associated with the first
New Left, regarded works like Richard Hoggart's monumental "The Uses of Literacy",
"Culture and Society" by Raymond Williams and "The Making of the English Working
Class" by Edward Thompson. These writers, like Hall, also came from marginal positions in
the academy, such as adult education, an Hall says that their ways of deliberation came from
that direct contact with "the dirty outside world".

In "The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities" essentially
heroically narrativizes the establishment of the cultural studies center at the University of
Birmingham as a narrative of struggle. He colorfully describes hostile attitudes from both so-
called "parents" of cultural studies, sociology and literature, along with material hardships of
finance and location.

With cultural studies being the protagonist of Hall's narrative, the antagonists were the
"Arnoldian project" manifested in the work of F.R.Leavis. Humanities back then were for
Hall "a very controlled conversation among a very controlled number of people" who were
asking each other "this is so, is it not?" without anybody having permission to say "no, it
isn't".  But Leavis for Hall is not the complete "bad guy" for he was the first to take issues of
culture seriously, and is therefore hailed as the herald of cultural studies. In other words,
Leavis was asking the right questions, he was just giving the wrong conservative elitist
answers. 
Hall savors the utter miscomprehension with which Williams The Long Revolution was
received in the academic world. This is related to cultural studies' initial task of "unmasking
what is considered to be the unstated presuppositions of the humanist tradition", its ideology
and its alleged disinterested knowledge.
After negetivilly defining cultural studies against traditional humanities, Hall turns to
discussing the positive work of cultural studies, and that was seriously theorizing the concept
of culture as an object of contemplation. The relation between culture and politics was the
first field to be concurred through "a series of raids on other disciplinary terrains" such as
sociology, humanities and anthropology, giving birth to the cultural studies' tradition of
interdisciplinary practice. 

A break from the traditional humanities also meant a break from its bibliography, and a here
Hall notes that cultural studies could not have happened without the translation of European
work conduct by the New Left Review. Without Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and others,
cultural studies students wouldn't have had anything to read.

Hall notes that at the beginning of cultural studies as a academic movement it was impossible
to teach it as a discipline or an established body of knowledge. Instead cultural studies started
out as a cooperation of teachers and students that was manifested in the pedagogical methods
of the Birmingham School for cultural studies. Hall also stresses the usefulness of cultural
studies knowledge as politically engaged with the "out there in the dirty world". That, the
criteria for work done in cultural studies was work on things "that mattered", things that arise

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from the researcher's experience, or in other words: Gramsci's notion of the "organic
intellectual" and the transformation of knowledge into practice. As Hall puts it, cultural
studies saw itself as a "tiny piece of a hegemonic struggle". Knowledge produced in cultural
studies is not valuable on its own account, but has to be transmitted to society in order to be
relevant. In other words, the practice of cultural studies is to bring theory and practice
together.

As for the "crisis of humanities" spoken about in the title, Stuart Hall relates to what is known
as "the standards debate", an attack on the free public education system and what is being
taught in history and literature. The lack of basic English skills and knowledge of the English
history among British students is being widely lamented about. This lamentation, Hall argues,
is connected with Thatcherism, "a profound crisis of national identity" and the erosion of the
nation-state. Under the threat of "others", Thatcherism as attempting to find out who can still
be "English", and these "truly English" people are reduced to only a handful of Oxford
scholars after Thatcherism excluded virtually everybody, including its own "uneducated"
youth. And in order to fight off this sense of losing the English identity, a national curriculum
and standard system is being imposed and the humanities are "invoked as the last bastion of
the liberal defensive operation". England took to the Falklands in order to maintain its past as
a possible future.  This identity crisis is exactly what cultural studies wanted to figure out
when it first began, and so the crisis of humanities to which cultural studies owe its
emergence is really the crisis of Brithishness. The project of cultural studies is to theorize
these processes and find ways for the excluded to have their part in the national culture and
community.

Still, cultural studies are a minor academic vocation, and while the humanities are not, they
did take on some the agenda contested by cultural studies. On the other hand, while a lot of
people nowadays talk the cultural studies "talk", not all of them also do the "walk" part of the
equation by taking on the larger historical and social contexts. 

An introduction to Cultural Studies

So what is Cultural Studies anyway? The fact that university faculties and degrees bear this
name might suggest that Cultural Studies is an academic discipline, but this suggestion is
only partly true. It is possible to offer the observation that Cultural Studies is a unified field in
approach, but not in methodology or field and objects of investigation. As suggested by its
name Cultural Studies engage with culture, and especially contemporary culture. But while
culture is alternately viewed and studied from various perspectives such as sociology,
economics etc., the praxis of Cultural Studies is not easily discernable and definable as those
academic fields are.

Cultural Studies first appeared in England in the 50's, with its antecedents being the Frankfurt
school and successors in the Birmingham school or the Centre for Contemporary Culture
Studies (CCCS). What first singled out this new approach was the rejection of objective
positivism in humanities and the focus on subjective, "lived" experiences of culture. Another
characteristic of Cultural Studies in its inception was the somewhat holistic to the cultural

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experience, one that does not enable the isolation of "literature", "cinema", "economy" etc.,
but sees them as interrelated.

Cultural Studies were, at least at the beginning, openly associated with what is known as the
Marxist "New Left". This meant that a special sensitivity to social injustice and inequality led
Cultural Studies to view traditional social studies not as an answer to social problems, but
rather as part of the problem itself. Another key characteristic of the field is the
dismantlement of the high/low culture dichotomy, which first led to an interest in common
pop culture and secondly rejected individual originality for social conditioning of production
of cultural products.

In the later chapters of our introduction to Cultural Studies we will briefly discuss the history
of the field with the occasional mentioning of a few key figures. We will then try to outline
the main paradigm of the field by illustrating some of its main problems and engagements. As
was mentioned above, Cultural Studies are very tricky to define for its interdisciplinary
tendencies in methodology and "all over the place" subjects of inquiry. This introduction
might could serve as the first step in getting a notion of what Cultural Studies are, but more
than anything, Cultural Studies are a way of thinking and approaching phenomena, a way a
thinking that cannot be acquired in traditional training methods but mainly by just diving into
this exciting world, and this is what this site is all about!

This introduction was prepared with the aide of Simon During's introduction to "The
Cultural Studies Reader"(1993), Simon During's "Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction"
(2005) and Chris barker's "Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice".