Cultural challenges and conflicts frequently target social categories, too. Older people might challenge regulations that make them “too old” to drive, and childcare workers might organize to become a profession. By looking at categories we take for granted, we can attune ourselves to observe another important type of cultural difference.
So to investigate culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict, we need to stop taking meaning-making for granted. Thinking about elements of culture – like rituals, symbols, values, norms, and categories – provides a vocabulary and an orientation with which to become more mindful of meaning-making in all its vast variation. Having initiated a more mindful attention to cultural elements surrounding us and cultural differences we encounter, we are in a better position to analyze and understand them.
The idea of culture
Many generations of scholars have sought to understand culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict. Before turning to contemporary cultural sociology, it is helpful to deepen our initial orientation to the idea of culture by considering how it emerged and how it was taken up in sociology. The idea of culture carries historical connotations which echo around contemporary approaches. This historical baggage explains why some people say the idea of culture is confusing. Unpacking the baggage clarifies what we think of when we think of culture and shows how contemporary cultural sociology’s conceptual tools help specify and focus cultural explanation.
The contemporary idea of “culture” emerged in Europe as a way of characterizing differences between human groups, and changes within them. We know relatively little about pre-modern and non-Western understandings of what we would now call cultural difference. Among the ideas that survive, and are viewed as prefiguring contemporary cultural investigation, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (c. 485–c. 425 BCE) is remembered for his careful observation and analysis of differences between different groups and regions in their everyday practices, including food, clothing, gender relations, sexual behavior, religion, and military organization, recognizing that “practices and norms which one nation may regard as right and proper may be considered outlandish and even shocking by another” (Evans 1982, 40; see also Ginzburg 2017). North African scholar and political leader Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) is admired for his Muqaddimah, or “introduction to history,” in which he analyzed asabiyyah (social cohesion or group solidarity) – which is stronger in nomadic, tribal societies compared to complex societies with central government – thus outlining an original theory of the role of culture in society (Çaksu 2017; Dhaouadi 1990; Gellner 1988). Europeans around Ibn Khaldun’s time often followed the classical geographical tradition, in which the physical environment caused social traits which were passed on to future generations – so, for instance, groups from harsh regions developed harsh characters. But one early geographer, Nicolas de Nicolay, after travelling with a French ambassador in the Ottoman Empire in 1551, abandoned this geographical determinism for a more modern attention to socialization, situated action, and social engineering (Mukerji 2013).
Raymond Williams, a twentieth-century British sociologist, literary critic, novelist, and activist, traced the European development of ideas about culture from around this time in the sixteenth century in his investigation of “keywords” (Williams 1976). According to Williams, the idea of culture emerged in the English Renaissance as a noun of process. At first, “culture” referred to the process of nurturing crops or animals, but the reference was gradually extended from agricultural husbandry to human development, as in the “culture” of skills, or the soul. This extension of the idea of active cultivation to human development from husbandry accompanied shifting ideas about responsibility for human nature, from religion and metaphysics to humanity itself. In this early phase, “culture” as a process always implied the cultivation of something, whether crops or skills.
But after the Industrial Revolution, from the late eighteenth century, “culture” began to refer to a general human feature, an institution, or a property of whole groups: an abstract thing more than an active process. By the mid-nineteenth century, in the English language, “culture” contrasted moral and intellectual activities with emerging economic and political trends in capitalism, industry, democracy, and revolution. This marked a stronger practical separation of ideas, ideals, and arts from other important economic and political activities and powers then disrupting traditional society. “Culture” became a court of appeal set against economic and political changes, a basis for value judgements made by English Romantic writers and others critical of the Industrial Revolution. “Culture” as an abstract quality of inner or spiritual development separated the arts, religion, and other institutions and practices of meaning and value from economic and political institutions and practices. British educator Matthew Arnold, for example, argued in 1869 that “culture,” considered as sensitivity and flexible judgement informed by the arts and humanities, could be an antidote to the destructive materialism of modernity (Eagleton 2000, 11; Griswold 2013, 4–5). This historical genealogy still influences us when we think of the arts and popular culture as distinct from – perhaps “higher” and “purer” than – economic and political processes.
Meanwhile, increasing European awareness of other peoples and exploration and conquest around the globe created a different, more comparative set of connotations to the idea of culture. The culture concept was used to emphasize and analyze differences among human populations. Especially for German thinkers such as eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, “culture” became associated with the “whole way of life” of a group (Eagleton 2000, 12–13, 26). Sometimes, different cultures were seen as representing different stages of human progress, traceable through such features as means of subsistence, arts, beliefs, and religion (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963 [1952], 32). However, from the late nineteenth century, anthropologists pluralized and relativized the idea, recognizing that different cultures could not be evaluated according to a simple hierarchy – “culture” became “cultures” considered of equal value. This plural, relative, comparative sense of culture as a whole way of life was foundational in anthropology (Benedict 1959 [1934]; Kuper 1999; Ortner 1984; Stocking 1968).
This genealogy is still influential for popular understanding of “culture,” too. We are now very familiar with the idea that cultures are diverse, and similarly we usually assume that cultural possibilities are innumerable, that elements of a culture form interrelated patterns, and that these elements need to be placed in context to be understood. We might travel to experience “a different culture,” or celebrate diverse “cultures” in a city festival. These connotations all developed in anthropology and spread into common usage by the mid-twentieth century.
Because of this complex genealogy, the idea of culture is often used in quite different ways, even by the same person. Sometimes, following the first historical thread, you may use the term to refer to a distinct institutional realm of arts and humanities, different from – and maybe lesser or greater than – “practical” realms of politics and economics. At other times, following the second historical thread, you may use the term to characterize whatever is shared by a whole group, in contrast to other groups. Simply recognizing the genealogy of these connotations can help eliminate unnecessary confusion and ambiguity.
Culture in sociology
Until later in the twentieth century, sociologists also used the idea of culture quite loosely and ambiguously. Because, as Robert Nisbet has argued, “sociology, more than any other discipline, has taken on the conflicts between traditionalism and modernism in European culture” (1993 [1966], vii), culture was often seen in the first sense, as a separate realm of human life. On the other hand, the popularization of the anthropological idea that culture is a property distinguishing whole groups also influenced sociology, to the extent that twentieth-century sociology textbooks referred to “the anthropological idea of culture” for many years.
But even though sociology (unlike anthropology)