Wagner on the History of Anthropology's
Word "Culture"
This passage is from Roy Wagner's brilliant (&
often difficult) book The Invention of Culture
(1975). Words are the most important examples of arbitrary "symbols", and
the changes in usage and meaning which a word (or other symbol) undergoes
over the generations usually occur by a process of metaphorical extension
which expresses a certain logic, a particular culture's way of making sense
of things by drawing connections among them. Thus, as in this example,
a word used in farming may be extended to the very different domain of
human behaviour. What better example of this process of improvising sense
as we go along than one of the key terms of anthropology: "culture"? Notice
that the ambiguity of a symbol's meaning may be a source of its vitality,
its power for us, rather than being a drawback.
Our word "culture" derives in a very roundabout
way from the past participle of the Latin verb colere, "to cultivate",
and draws some of its meaning from this association with the tilling of
the soil. This also seems to have been the major significance of the medieval
French and English forms from which our present usage derives (for instance
cultura meant "a plowed field" in Middle English). In later times "culture"
took on a more specific sense, indicating a process of progressive refinement
and breeding in the domestication of some particular crop, or even the
result or increment of such a process. Thus we speak of agriculture, apiculture,
the "culture of the vine", or of a bacterial culture.
The contemporary "opera-house" sense of the word
arises from an elaborate metaphor, which draws upon the terminology of
crop breeding and improvement to create an image of man's control, refinement,
and "domestication" of himself. So, in the drawing rooms of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, one spoke of a "cultivated" person as someone
who "had culture", who had developed his interests and accomplishments
along approved lines, training and "breeding" the personality as a natural
strain might be "cultured."
The anthropological usage of "culture" constitutes
a further metaphorization, if not a democratization, of this essentially
elitist and aristocratic sense. It amounts to an abstract extension of
the notion of human refinement and domestication from the individual to
the collective, so that we can speak of culture as man's general control,
refinement, and improvement of himself, rather than one man's conspicuousness
in this respect. Applied in this way, the word also carries strong connotations
of Locke's and Rousseau's conception of the "social contract", of
the tempering of man's "natural" instincts and desires by an arbitrary
imposition of will. The nineteenth-century concept of "evolution" added
a historical dimension to this notion of man's breeding and tempering of
himself, resulting in the optimistic concept of "progress."
Regardless of its more specific associations, however,
our modern term "culture" retains the several associations, and hence the
creative ambiguity, introduced by these metaphorizations. The confusion
of "culture" in the "opera-house" sense with the more general anthropological
sense actually amounts to a continuous derivation of one significance from
the other. It is in the area of this ambiguity, with its contrasting implications,
that we might expect to find a clue to what we most often intend in our
use of the term.
When we speak of "cultural centers", or even the
"culture" of the city of Chicago, we mean a certain kind of institution.
We do not mean steel mills, airports, grocery stores, or service stations,
although these would be included in the more catholic anthropological definition.
The "cultural institutions" of a city are its museums, libraries, symphony
orchestras, universities, and perhaps its parks and zoos. It is in these
specialized sanctuaries, set apart from everyday life by special regulations,
endowed by special funds, and guarded by highly qualified personnel, that
the documents, records, relics, and embodiments of man's greatest achievements
are kept, and "art" or "culture" is kept alive....
The connection between this "institutional" Culture
and the more universal concept of the anthropologist is not immediately
apparent, though it is in fact only thinly disguised by the facades of
libraries, museums, and opera houses. For the very core of our own culture,
in the accepted image, is its science, art, and technology, the sum total
of achievements, inventions, and discoveries that define our idea of "civilization".
These achievements are preserved (in institutions), taught (in other institutions),
and added to (in research institutions) in a cumulative process of refinement.
We preserve a vast panoply of ideas, facts, relics, secrets, techniques,
applications, formulas, and documents as our "culture", the sum of our
ways of doing things, and the sum of "knowledge" as we know it....
The productiveness or creativity of our culture
is defined by the application, manipulation, reenactment, or extension
of these techniques and discoveries. Work of any kind, whether innovative
or simply what we call "productive", achieves its meaning in relation to
this cultural sum, which forms its meaningful context....
...This productivity, the application and implementation
of man's refinement of himself, provides the central focus of our civilization.
This explains the high valuation placed upon "Culture" in the narrow, marked,
opera-house sense, for it represents the creative increment, the productivity
that creates work and knowledge by providing its ideas, techniques, and
discoveries, and that ultimately shapes cultural value itself. We experience
the relation between the two senses of "culture" in the meanings of our
everyday life and work: "Culture" in the more restricted sense stands as
a historical and normative precedent for culture as a whole; it embodies
an ideal of human refinement.
{Notice that, as another artifact of our hierarchical
society, there is an analogous distinction between an "opera-house" and
a "democratised" sense of the word "society": "high society", which points
to a distinction between those in it and those not in it, v.s. for example"Canadian
society", which includes everyone regardless of status or life-style.}
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