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10/29/2019 Chapter 3: Culture and Media

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Definitions of Culture

Culture is a vague term we use to rationalize many behaviors and describe all sorts of peoples and patterns. We talk about a culture of poverty in the United States (see Chapter 10). We hear about corporate cultures and subcultures, culture wars, the clash of cultures, culture shock, and even cultural conflicts on a global scale. Culture is casually used as shorthand for many things, ranging in meaning from innate biological tendencies to social institutions, and everything in between.

Culture = Human – Nature We might say that culture is the sum of the social categories and concepts we recognize in addition to our beliefs, behaviors (except the instinctual ones), and practices. In other words, culture is everything but nature. The last sentence captures exactly how culture has

been defined through the ages—in opposition to nature. The word culture derives from the Latin verb colere (“to cultivate or till”), suggesting the refinement of crops to meet human needs. (We still use culture as a verb in a similar sense, as when we culture bacteria in a petri dish.) The more common meaning of culture as a noun developed from the same kind of human control and domination over nature. We could say that culture began when humans started acting as the architects of nature by growing crops rather than hunting and gathering, hence the terms agriculture and aquaculture (growing fish and other aquatic organisms for human consumption). Dating back centuries, the term culture has referred to the distinction between what is natural—what comes directly from the earth and follows the laws of physics— and what is modified or created by humans and follows (or breaks) the laws of the state. That said, culture is both the technology by which humans have come to dominate nature and the belief systems, ideologies, and symbolic representations that constitute human existence. In the fifteenth century, when European nations

organized expeditions to extend commerce and establish colonies in North America, Africa, and Asia, Western peoples confronted non-Western natives. The beliefs and behaviors of these peoples served as a foil to European culture. Today, we recognize that culture is always relative. We cannot talk about culture without reference to the global world, but the definitions, practices, and concepts that we use in this chapter largely emanate from a Western viewpoint. It may also be easier to identify cultural elements when they are different from our own. The challenge in this chapter will be to take what we see as natural and view it as a product of culture. We’ll also explore the media and the role they play in the birth and dissemination of culture.

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Culture = (Superior) Man – (Inferior) Man As colonialism led to increased interaction with non- Westerners, Europeans came to recognize that much of what they took for granted as natural was not. Alternative ways of living existed, as manifested in a variety of living arrangements and marital rules, different styles of dress (or lack thereof), other ways of building cities, and other kinds of foodstuffs. Take, for example, the fact that American architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to use the three major Greek styles of columns: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. This was merely a product of tradition: There’s nothing natural about these columnar styles that made them the dominant choices in the American architecture of those centuries. And if you traveled to non-Western cities, you would encounter examples of other columnar styles—for instance, the massive fluted columns in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, or the Toltec columns in Tula, Mexico. Such differences may not seem so striking to us now, but think about what it was like for Westerners who rarely came into contact with non-Westerners.

Clockwise from top left: US Capitol, Washington, D.C.;

Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.; Blue Mosque,

Istanbul, Turkey; and Toltec columns, Tula, Mexico

In the wake of these colonial encounters with the New World, philosophers began to define culture in contrast not just to nature but also to what other peoples did, realizing that the way they performed tasks or lived life was a historical product of specific cultural influences. People started to contemplate why their traditions, beliefs, styles of art, and other ways of living arose. There was nothing inevitable about them, and valid alternative approaches to interacting with the world existed. Coming face-to-face with these alternative ways of living caused Westerners to question the culture that they had so far taken for granted. Philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau idealized non-Western “savages” in contrast to corrupt and debased Europeans; others declared their own culture superior, going so far as to claim that non-Western peoples didn’t have culture. Ethnocentrism is a term that encapsulates the sense of taken-for-granted superiority in the context of cultural practices and

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A sixteenth-century

Aztec’s drawing of

the conquistador

Hernán Cortés. Why

did Western

definitions of

culture change

during the Age of

Exploration?

attitudes. It is both the belief that one’s own culture or group is superior to others and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one’s own. At the time, some even believed that non-Westerners did not have souls and weren’t human, and this notion was used to justify slavery, violence, and oppression. Such claims obviously weren’t true (and we owe a lot to anthropologists for disproving them), but the long history of racism with which we still struggle does have some of its roots in these ideas.

Culture = Man – Machine Not long after European empires began to emerge and spread, new technologies and forms of business upended European definitions of culture at home. Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, goods that were previously expensive and handcrafted began to be mass-produced and priced within the reach of the average European. New industries and a growing middle class of merchants and industrialists started to transform the political and social climate of Europe, particularly in Great Britain. In response to these rapid social changes, the poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) redefined culture as the pursuit of perfection and broad knowledge of the world in contrast to narrow self-centeredness and material gain. Intellectual refinement was the “pursuit of our natural perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Arnold’s definition of culture in his book Culture and Anarchy (1869) elevates it beyond dull, middle-class institutions such as religion, liberal economics, and political bureaucracy. Arnold’s definition of culture was an extension of

views advanced in Plato’s Republic, which argues that culture is an ideal, standing in opposition to the real world. Plato argues that God is the ideal form of anything. A carpenter, for example, tries to construct a material embodiment of that ideal form. He starts with a vision, the divine vision of what a chair or table should look like, and he works his hardest to bring that vision to fruition. Of course, it can never be perfect; it can never approximate the platonic ideal. The artist’s job, in contrast, is to represent the ideal

within the realm of the real. In fact, there’s a long history of artists attempting to represent the ideal female in sculpture and painting, but in reality, no woman could ever exist as a flawless object, content to be gazed upon. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque has an unrealistically long spine,

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allowing her to appear smooth, supple, and gracefully elegant as she shows us her backside but turns her face to meet the viewer’s gaze with a hint of a smile. In this conception of art—and this understanding of culture— there is a single, best example of any element in the world, from the ideal woman to the ideal form of government to the ideal citizen, which humanity ought to emulate. Furthermore, we see that the ideal woman (and meal and family and governmental structure) is a fluid notion, changing from one place to another and across time periods. Can an ideal be discovered, as Plato believed, or is it constructed?

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque

(1814).