Williams’ insistence that culture is ordinary, however, cuts both ways. Is this, then, what Williams meant by ordinary culture? Because in some ways, pub culture and club culture, queer culture and black culture are certainly more ordinary and less highfalutin than opera and ballet, more concerned with ‘handling’ their social and material existence than trying to transcend it. We use the word ‘culture’ in this second sense when we speak about Irish culture, business culture or working-class culture. The ‘culture’ of a group (…) is the peculiar and distinctive ‘way of life’ of the group (…), the meanings, values and ideas embodied in institutions, in social relations, in systems of beliefs, in mores and customs, in the uses of objects and material life. Thus, other than a ‘high culture’ which might distance itself from everyday life, this second understanding of culture is much more down to earth, describing the way everyday people manage their lives and give meaning to it: This ‘particular way of life’ is rooted in “the way, the forms, in which groups ‘handle’ the raw material of their social and material existence”. Here, culture “indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, (or) a group”. However, there is a second line of thinking about culture, one that is less interested in artworks, but more in lived experiences and everyday practices. In this view, culture “is the sum of the great ideas, as represented in the classic works of literature, painting, music and philosophy – the ‘high culture’ of an age”. This culture is not ordinary, but extra-ordinary, apparently “the high point of civilization”. ![]() This traditional understanding of culture is what you will still find in the ‘arts & culture’ section of a newspaper or a magazine this is the kind of culture your teachers at school probably bored you with. ![]() The “most widespread use” of the term culture, Williams explains, was that “which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity (…): culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film”. Culture, for most people at the time, was everything but ordinary: Shakespeare, Elgar, opera, Turner, Eliot and the Elgin marbles. What might not seem controversial in our 21st-century everything-goes multiverse was considered a shocking statement in the late 1950s, the time when the first contours of the newly arising field of Cultural Studies took shape. “Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact”. We will attempt to define the term nonetheless, and in this attempt, we will follow Raymond Williams, who not only admitted to the complexity of culture, but found a formula that became central to Cultural Studies. It’s a word that everyone uses freely, but which is difficult to pin down. ![]() “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”. (NB: If you happen to suffer from photosensitivity, please be aware that there are flashing lights between 06:35 and 07:28, 12:34 and 13:16.) What is Culture? Christian Huckīad news first. ◄ An Introduction to the Study of British and American Cultures What is Culture?Īs you might have guessed, Cultural Studies studies culture.
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