Culture: Definitions and Concepts

PAUL COBLEY
London Metropolitan University

Since at least the nineteenth century, culture has been one of the most difficult, richly
connotative concepts to define. While it is widely accepted that its roots are to be found
in the Latin verb colere, among whose associated meanings is “to cultivate,” this has
been all but forgotten in ordinary language. Being a web of meaning in which social life
is suspended, culture most commonly goes unnoticed, and requires detailed inquiry,
or what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (borrowing from the philosopher, Gilbert
Ryle) called “thick description.” Geertz used Ryle’s example of two boys in a room,
rapidly contracting their right eyelids: is this a wink, a twitch, a deliberate message,
to someone in particular, coded, without cognizance of the rest of the company? These
and other preparatory questions have to be addressed before any analysis can reach an
understanding of the “piled-up structures of inferences and implications” (Geertz 1993,
7) that characterize communications in any culture. Culture, thus, can be said to consist
of all the structures and processes of → meaning in which communication takes place.

ELEMENTS AND DIMENSIONS OF CULTURE

In the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, anthropology, relying
on ethnography as its “method” or approach, came to interpret the communications
of diverse peoples in order to reach an approximation of their culture. Ethnography,
further, provided a template and inspiration for understanding not only so-called
primitive peoples, but also cultures in the industrialized west and, indeed, the
broader concept of culture itself. As argued by Marcus and Fischer (1986, 20),
much anthropology in this period involved a “salvage motif,” or a determination to
capture cultural diversity, mainly of non-western peoples, coupled with a cultural
critique of “ourselves” in the west. The implication was that “primitive” culture is
somehow “authentic” in comparison to the “mass” culture that has grown in the
west during the past two centuries. If culture resides in communication, societies
with mass communication will have increasingly diverse and diffuse cultures,
and no common cultural core (→ Communication: Definitions and Concepts).
In modernity, then, the definition of culture has been made more difficult by the
global proliferation of media and messages. In the second half of the twentieth
century, anthropology responded, in part, by transforming its methodology: “thick
description” of multiple and complex cultures could only be achieved through
a melange of interpretive approaches from the humanities, complementing the

The International Encyclopedia of Communication, First Edition. Edited by Wolfgang Donsbach.

© 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405186407.wbiecc173
2 CU L T U R E : DE F I N I T I O N S AND CO N C E P T S

methodologies of the social sciences. As media and communication research took

shape during this same period, it imported several of the lessons and legacies of
anthropology.
Summarizing elements of prevalent conceptions of culture across the humanities and
social sciences, Jenks (2003, 8–9) offered a fourfold typology. First, culture is a cerebral
or cognitive capacity (→ Cognition). This notion considers culture the product of a
uniquely human consciousness, an exemplification of the status of humans as “chosen.”
Although culture may thus be considered the pinnacle of human achievement on earth,
the concept of culture as cognition also feeds into ideas of false consciousness, as found
in varieties of Marxism – an unrealized human potential. Second, culture is embodied
and collective. Culture can be seen as evidence of moral development, indeed, an evolu-
tionary feature of humans as group and species. However, this understanding of culture
also informed the civilizing process that was foisted on to “savage” or “primitive” soci-
eties as part of imperialism and colonialism. Third, culture is a descriptive category:
it refers to a body of work, “the best which has been thought and said in the world”
(Arnold 1869) – special knowledge, training, and socialization whose products are
commemorated in museums and archives. Yet, any account of which insights are spe-
cial or best is not just descriptive, but normative. Fourth, culture has been understood
as a social category. This is the idea, widespread in contemporary research, that culture
constitutes the whole way of life of humans generally and of specific social groups and
peoples.
The breadth of such a typology re-emphasizes the open-ended status of culture in
modernity. Mass communication has produced a proliferation in the number and
types of texts and other cultural artifacts; it has also, in extending their availability,
resulted in a blurring of the boundaries between texts intended for the elite and
those for the “masses.” Still, despite reports and debates concerning a collapse of
the high-culture/low-culture distinction, it remains important to assess cultural
practices in the context of other social structures. Jenks (2005) has suggested that
the modern understanding of culture unfolds along a dimension involving tensions
between absolutist and relativist tendencies. In the former case, attempts will be made
to establish and maintain a given cultural formation while eschewing traces of others;
in the latter case, the inclination is to see cultures and cultural artifacts as functionally
equivalent and even, sometimes, essentially equal. If this first dimension captures the
qualities of cultural products and processes in themselves, another related dimension
addresses the interrelations between cultural forms and their social uses. This other
dimension involves tensions between elitism and egalitarianism: culture can either be
considered either the preserve of the few or, alternatively, the possession of many or all.
Within a matrix of such dimensions, culture can be defined and practiced in different
ways with specific social implications. For example, egalitarianism may be compatible
with absolutism if the public at large is educated to gain access to, and to accept, one
cultural canon. And relativism may feed elitism if the capacity to appreciate multiple
or rapidly shifting cultural styles becomes a mark of social distinction.
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CULTURE AS AN ESSENTIALLY CONTESTED CONCEPT

Within a matrix of absolutism/relativism and elitism/egalitarianism, culture stands as

an essentially contested concept (Gallie 1956), having a consensual core meaning, but
also a series of connotations that give rise to continuous scientific as well as social
debate. These connotations can be traced to the conceptual root of culture in cultiva-
tion and, especially, the extended metaphor of horticulture, i.e., the enhancement of
gardens or natural environments. In use as early as 1837, when it was employed by
the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the notion of culture as horticulture can be
seen as absolutist (there is a state of cultivation against one of non-cultivation), rela-
tivist (there are different kinds of cultivation), and elitist (only some could or should
have the power of cultivation), as well as egalitarian (everyone can, potentially, culti-
vate). The connotations of culture in the sense of meaningful communication, similarly,
are traversed by absolutism, relativism, elitism, and egalitarianism. One connotation of
culture is civilization, the idea that participation in a culture qualifies the individual for
membership and, even, status within a community. Further, at the community level, cul-
ture as ongoing cultivation suggests dynamism, emergence, and potential change, partly
in opposition to the static implications of “tradition,” especially in a modern context.
In summary, culture generally connotes process and movement: a process of educating
and socializing people within specific webs of meaning, and a movement of meanings
within and, perhaps, beyond a given community. In the last case, culture may amount
to a colonizing process, complementing political and economic imperialism, or extend-
ing a national monoculture, for example, through elite adoption and transformation of
popular culture.
Even the distinction between culture and its etymological opposite – nature – contributes
to contested definitions. The root of “nature” is the Latin verb nascere, “to be born,”
suggesting a contrast between qualities of innateness and processes of cultivation. This
distinction has been emphasized within elitist and absolutist conceptions in an attempt
to delineate culture as the height of achievement by human consciousness. The position
was typified in Romanticism’s ambivalent relation to nature, celebrating the union of
humans and their natural environment, while simultaneously elevating the work of
the artist as the cultivator of such a union. In the wider history of ideas, the notion of
Kultur as a privileged domain of human activity established itself contemporaneously
with Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Germany,
anticipating subsequent anthropological research on cultures in the plural and the very
concept of culture. An elitist/absolutist conception of culture has remained influential
in theories of communication and society, including, perhaps curiously, neo-Marxist
analyses by the Frankfurt School from the 1920s to the 1970s. Here, an elitist definition
of culture served to exclude popularly consumed artifacts produced by the industries
of mass communication. Although Marxist and other critical work might be expected
to pursue egalitarianism, or an alternative culture of the proletariat, an absolutist
conception of culture may have been attractive across ideological divides in social
theory as a representation of what societies might become in contrast to a state of
nature.
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CULTURE, COMMUNICATION, AND SOCIETY

Culture as Social Practice

Contemporary research on culture, communication, and society, while diverse,

commonly addresses culture as an integrated constituent of social practice. The idea of
culture as a whole way of life, associated primarily with the work of Raymond Williams,
has been adopted by sociologists, anthropologists, and communication researchers
as a framework for investigating the bewildering variegation of communications in
modernity. Williams (1981) envisaged culture as an object to be studied by sociology
rather than, say, art theory, because culture is a product of broader social formations,
institutions, organizations, and ideologies, which make up particular historical means
of production and reproduction. His works (see especially Williams 1965) stressed
that culture is a process whose continual movement and development are checked
only by the vicissitudes and conflicts between those other social factors that make up
its context. Unlike other egalitarian conceptions of culture that frequently have an
absolutist tinge, holding that fine art should be the province of all, Williams’s premise
was that the practices of all people in a society are eligible to be considered parts of
culture. Countering any relativist overtones in this position, Williams instead sought to
erase the line between elite and popular culture, stressing not their relativity but their
commonality.
Another influential body of work on culture as social practice is that of Pierre Bour-
dieu. Two of his concepts have passed into general usage in cultural and communication
theory. First, Bourdieu (1986) conceived culture in terms of the specific habitus that
different groups in society rely on as they orient themselves in, interpret, and act on
everyday contexts. The habitus is at once an embodied predisposition and a socially
patterned space of evaluative positions. It comprises “both the generative principle of
objectively classifiable judgments and the system of classification … of these prac-
tices” (1986, 170) – a person’s habitus generates value judgments, and these judgments
bear witness to the place of that person in the larger social space. Accordingly, “taste”
is an expression of how social groups – stratified by income, occupation, education,
etc. – pursue different variants of language, art, and style. Second, Bourdieu described
the distribution of such cultural resources across the social space in terms borrowed
from Karl Marx; depending on the amount of cultural capital that individuals have accu-
mulated, they may, or may not, be able to participate in particular aspects of social and
cultural life. Even when practicing an egalitarian conception of culture, for instance,
making museums accessible to all classes, Bourdieu noted, a society will tend to repro-
duce the elitism inherent in its stratification.
 CU L T U R E : DE F I N I T I O N S AND CO N C E P T S 5

Subcultures

The boundaries of culture are frequently challenged from both within and without. In
the second half of the twentieth century, it became increasingly clear that western cul-
ture was producing a number of distinctive “subcultures” internally. These are generally
thought to consist of communities of people who come together to pursue practices and
observe customs (sometimes recently developed) that are somehow divorced from or
in opposition to “mainstream culture.” Frequently, though not exclusively, subcultures
have been associated with youth tastes and pastimes, not least popular music. Facilitated
and amplified by the mass media, subcultures form within as well as across national
boundaries.
The relation of subcultures to culture in general, however, remains ambiguous. On
the one hand, mainstream culture may integrate and co-opt subculture in an ultimately
elitist fashion; on the other hand, subcultures may transform mainstream culture in an
egalitarian direction as subcultural vocabularies and styles become naturalized forms
of communication in the culture.

Intercultural Communication

While subcultures may transform a culture “from within,” cultures are also affected by
communication “from without.” Intercultural communication has usually been under-
stood in research as subject to difficulties and limitations (→ Intercultural and Inter-
group Communication). Growing out of anthropological work in the first half of the
twentieth century, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has been influential, if debated, since
the 1950s: it states that communication between different cultures is impeded by the
distinctive languages and other → codes on which they are based, so that cultures can
never be fully communicative with each other. Put briefly, the language you speak places
you firmly within one culture and at a distance from any other culture.
Nevertheless, mass communication, globalization, and intensified commerce have
meant that different cultures are increasingly exposed to diverse communicative
practices and traditions – both verbal and nonverbal – far beyond translation in any
traditional sense. The idea of monocultures is being challenged by notions of cultural
hybridity. For example, → postcolonial theory has suggested that only mental and
physical repression have enabled particular cultures to maintain a mythical mono-
cultural status. Similarly, research on imperialism has noted that western cultures,
in addition to imposing themselves on those being colonized, were changed in the
interaction (Bhabha 1985). In the case of commercial exchanges, cultures can be seen,
over time, to enter into a more consensual process of hybridization. Intercultural
communication, thus, occurs not just through specific acts of translation, but through
interactions in all areas of social life.
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SEMIOTICS OF CULTURE AND NATURE

The inclusive conception of culture as social practice has been developed further in
research on the semiotics of culture. Semiotics has commonly been concerned with inter-
personal communication (→ semiotics), whether technologically mediated or not, but
has also addressed interspecies or interorganism communication, seeking to reorient
the culture/nature distinction. Thomas A. Sebeok summed up this position when refer-
ring to culture as that “minuscule part of nature compartmentalized by some anthropol-
ogists” (1986, 60). Communication can be said to take place across nature and culture,
comprising both verbal and nonverbal signs (→ Sign Systems). Whereas the signs of
the known universe are predominantly nonverbal, a small number are based on the
uniquely human capacity for language, which is the primary source of culture. Con-
temporary semiotics has described language as a modeling system, following the work
of the Moscow–Tartu school and Sebeok (1988), and conceives culture as the outcome
of three distinctive processes of modeling in humans. The primary modeling system
is language as a cognitive capacity for differentiation, ontogenetically and phylogenet-
ically manifested in nonverbal communication. The secondary modeling system is the
capacity for verbal communication, manifested in speech and writing. Culture is the
tertiary modeling system, in which complex and metaphorical manifestations of the
primary and secondary modeling systems are circulated (Sebeok and Danesi 1999).
One ambition of the semiotics of culture is to avoid the pitfalls of egalitari-
anism/elitism and absolutism/relativism, in consonance with Williams’s (1981)
conception of culture as a whole way of life. Another ambition, comparable in certain
respects to that of → cognitive science, is to renegotiate the culture/nature dichotomy,
which has been on the interdisciplinary research agenda since, in 1959, C. P. Snow
lamented the divergence of the humanities and the sciences.

SEE ALSO: → Code → Cognition → Cognitive Science → Communi-

cation: Definitions and Concepts → Intercultural and Intergroup Communication
→ Meaning → Modernity → Postcolonial Theory → semiotics →
Sign Systems

References and Suggested Readings

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Arnold, M. (1869). Culture and anarchy: An essay in political and social criticism. London: Smith,
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Benedict, R. (1935). Patterns of culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bhabha, H. K. (1985). Signs taken for wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a
tree outside Delhi, May 1817. Critical Inquiry, 12(1), 144–165.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste (trans. R. Nice). London:
Routledge.
Clifford, J. (1986). On collecting art and culture. In The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century
ethnography, literature and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 215–225.
Eco, U. (1975). Looking for a logic of culture. In T. A. Sebeok (ed.), The tell-tale sign: A survey of
semiotics. Lisse: Peter de Ridder, pp. 57–83.
 CU L T U R E : DE F I N I T I O N S AND CO N C E P T S 7

Eliot, T. S. (1958). Notes towards the definition of culture. London: Faber and Faber.
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167–198.
Geertz, C. (1993). Thick description. In The Interpretation of Cultures. London: HarperCollins,
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Jenks, C. (2005). Culture, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
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