The anthropological meaning of culture has its origins in attempts to be both descriptive and proscriptive. The typical definitions of culture by their very claim to be objective hide from themselves their own assumptions, that is the history of inquiry out of which they function. The way they observe the world doesn't come out of a vacuum. Instead, it has a history of seeing and asking certain questions about things. A short history of the word "culture" helps make this point.
The word "culture" has its origins in the Latin cultura Cultura described the practice of cultivating plants and domestic livestock. This meaning by the Renaissance expanded to include the idea of human development. William Caxton's Golden Legend (1483), for example, could decry the loss of correct worship: "Whan they departe fro the culture and honour of theyr god." (81.1). In similar fashion, Thomas More's Life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandula (1510), could speak of "the culture and profit of theyr minds" as opposed to the "pomp and ostentation of their wit" (1.369). By the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes could write of the training of the human body as culture, and as the eighteenth-century closed, one could speak of a culture of human improvement (OED). The Romantic and pre-Romantic uses of the German Kultur also remained undefined because they had yet to suffer the linguistic rupture that the late 19th century would bring. One could still be cultured, i.e. trained by others to cultivate for oneself a spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, and material way of life, one embodied in a people and period. Culture, as far as they were concerned, must be encultured.
By Sir Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and by Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) "culture" already contained within itself fundamental disagreements as to the nature of human meaning and happiness. The way of life of a people as a Geist was to be studied in an objective manner. For the ethnographer Tylor, culture was a system of human development that may be objectively observed and whose laws may be discovered. "The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action."
For Arnold, on the other hand, culture was a particular capacity that has been cultivated, an aesthetic and moral ability that is educated and matured: "Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good" (31).
These two definitions ironically contain the apotheoses of each other. The Darwinian Tylor's approach to culture enshrined a set of investigative virtues and values: knowledge of principle, disinterested, detached study, an ability to extrapolate natural laws from environment and social behavior, and so on. These are social and ethical values with a certain standard in view arising from a certain point in history. Arnold's protest against the philistines also contained a measure of detachment, in that the good and pleasing are considered something that can be kept in view; they are in a sense presumably undisputable. In other words, the idea of culture now faced a potential set of contradictions: To observe culture in Tylor's sense one had to cultivate a culture of learning in Arnold's sense. Likewise, culture in Arnold's sense could be rendered simply relativistic by students of culture in Tylor's sense. But this raises a unique dilemma: how can observer of culture in Tylor's sense claim to stand in a objective (i.e. cultureless) space in order to reach such conclusions?
Nothing illustrates this quandary better than the unraveling bankruptcy of the term in anthropology in the 20th century.
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