Sociology Of Culture Research Paper

In the social sciences, on the contrary, the term has generally a widely inclusive meaning, which is actually aimed against the humanistic normative conception of culture, since almost anything may be considered as ‘culture.’ This conception, which opens an almost unlimited field to the term ‘culture,’ has been the basis of the ensemble of theories which may be termed ‘culturalist trend.’ It is characterized by a systematical relativism, strongly backed up by the fact that the overall conception of ‘culture’ is in itself a powerful relativistic tool. The popularization of the relativistic use of the term ‘culture’ in postmodern societies since the late 1900s poses a serious danger for culture.

1. The Term ‘Culture’ In The Social Sciences

This term has received, first in anthropology and afterwards in sociology, a very specific meaning, that prevailed despite the reluctance of very important authors, such as Morgan, Durkheim, and Radcliffe-Brown to use it in this way.

1.1 The Tylorian ‘Everything Is Culture’ Conception

At the basis of the concept of culture as it is mostly used in the social sciences stands the well-known founding definition of the English ethnologist Edward Barrett Tylor (1832–1917), in his book Primitive Culture (1871). He borrowed much of the sense he gave to the term from Bismarckian Germany, whose conception of Kultur included any kind of expression of the national character. According to the German usage, Tylor takes culture to be synonymous with civilization, and therefore gives to that word what he calls ‘a wide ethnographic sense.’ For him, culture is ‘that complex whole’ produced by people’s historical experience, of which he gives several examples: ‘know-ledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom.’ But this enumeration is not a closed one. Tylorian culture also ‘includes … any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ This definition is characterized by the huge breadth of its application.

Derived from the German term Kultur, the idea of a broad ethnographic sense of the word ‘culture’ perfectly suited Anglo-Saxon ethnologists from German or Austrian origin. The German-born US anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) and the British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), who was born in Poland as an Austrian subject, both took an outstanding part in the victorious settlement of the term ‘culture’ in the very core of the social sciences.

Although since Tylor many other definitions of culture have been formulated, his ‘everything is culture’ conception remained a basic creed for nearly all anthropologists during the twentieth century, and it still prevails. In its anthropological sense, culture includes religion, law, art, and literature, as well as all of everyday life in its often prosaic and even trivial aspects, such as cooking, sexual habits, or sanitary practices.

In the early 1900s, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and other French sociologists were reluctant to use the term ‘culture’ in its Tylorian sense, and preferred to go on using the word ‘civilization.’ Yet, the anthropologists’ broad use of the term ‘culture’ has progressively spread to sociology. Nevertheless, during the 1950s, many American intellectuals, like Hannah Arendt, did resist the idea of mass culture, which they deemed to be no culture at all, but a deadly threat to it. In the early 1960s, American sociologists still regarded mass culture as a subject of debate, and the mass media as a most important field for sociological studies. Meanwhile, it was a French sociologist, Edgar Morin (1962) who took mass culture as an essential sociological field of study.

1.2 Radcliffe-Brown’s Attempt To Resist Tylorian Culture

The founder of social anthropology, the British anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) based his theory upon the study of ‘social structures,’ along the lines of Durkheim’s sociological concept of function. In order to keep social anthropology completely separated from cultural anthropology, for some 20 years Radcliffe-Brown and his followers avoided using the word ‘culture’ as much as possible. Then, in 1952, he defined culture as ‘the process by which a person acquires, from contact with other persons or from such things as books or works of art, knowledge, skill, ideas, beliefs, tastes, sentiments.’ So culture is for him the process of intellectual, esthetic, and ethical human development. Culture is the process by which one becomes a cultured person.

Though an anthropologist, and although his functionalist theory is as much relativistic and holistic as culturalism is, Radcliffe-Brown has a classical and humanistic conception of culture. This is because the term has no part in his system, not being his own relativistic tool. He states (1952) that ‘the total social structure of a society together with the totality of social usages in which that structure appears and on which it depends for its continued existence’ are constituent of a social system, whereas most anthropologists would have regarded all that as culture. Since he had decided to take as basic the social structure instead of the ‘culture patterns’ of cultural anthropology, Radcliffe-Brown had no need of the Tylorian sense of culture. In fact he had even every reason to refuse that use of the word, which was the basis of a powerful rival theory. Hence his humanistic formulation. Furthermore, Radcliffe-Brown’s functionalism derived from Morgan, Durkheim and the whole French sociological school. As they had not admitted the Tylorian use of the term ‘culture,’ Radcliffe-Brown was naturally induced to follow their example.

However, Malinowski, the other great name of anthropological functionalism, regarded a broad conception of culture as natural. Posthumously published in 1944, his most important book is entitled: A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s, anthropological functionalism was divided into two rival schools: ‘social structure’ against ‘culture,’ Radcliffe-Brown’s school versus Malinowski’s school, one of their motives of dis- agreement being opposing ideas about the concept of culture. In the UK, this quarrel was considered as opposing social anthropology to cultural anthropology. But, at the same time, nearly all US anthropologists were adherents of cultural anthropology since studying ‘cultures.’

As a result of that, in the USA, since the end of the 1940s, the functionalist theory has been taken over, in an somewhat attenuated way, by sociologists, chiefly Robert King Merton and Talcott Parsons, who adhered to the social anthropologists’ point of view. Accordingly, they stressed society and not ‘culture’ as the subject of their research. US sociologists thus stood opposed to US cultural anthropologists. So that the past rivalry of the functionalists schools of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown had become a professional quarrel opposing US anthropologists and sociologists, since the former claimed to deal solely with ‘culture,’ and the latter with ‘society.’

Yet, in the early 1950s, some of Radcliffe-Brown’s followers began to use the term ‘culture’ with a very broad meaning: for Raymond W. Firth, it included both the way of life and the content of social relations (1951), and for Meyer Fortes, both social structure and organization (1953). Afterwards, in 1958, Amer-ican anthropologists and sociologists made an end to their quarrel by means of a peace treaty signed by A. L. Kroeber and Parsons, who mutually acknow-ledged the validity of one another’s field of study: society as well as culture. The ‘everything is culture’ conception had won.

2. The Culturalist Trend

The Tylorian ‘omnibus conception of culture’ (Singer 1968) has been the basis of the set of theories known as ‘culturalism,’ and it remains the basis of the culturalist way of thought which still reigns over anthropology and a large part of sociology.

In the first half of the twentieth century, US cultural anthropology has been principally influenced by Tylor, Boas, and through him by the German diffusionists, like Fritz Graebner, who had introduced the idea of Kulturkreis (culture area). In the 1930s, US cultural anthropologists began to develop the idea that each ‘culture’ was an individual unity, well-organized and functioning as a system. This holistic and systemic conception was clearly formulated by Malinowski in the article on ‘culture’ that he wrote for the Encyclopœdia of the Social Sciences (1931). A few years after, Margaret Mead (1935), Ralph Linton (1936) and Abram Kardiner (1939) emphasized the idea of a ‘culture’ being an integrated totality. The aim of ethnologists and anthropologists became to show the inner coherence of each ‘culture’ functioning as an organized whole, in which any component element is linked to all the others.

For the ethnology and cultural anthropology of the 1930s–1950s, the organization of culture systems consisted of a complex architecture of ‘patterns of culture,’ which Ruth Benedict had endeavored to describe and classify (Patterns of Culture,1934). Hence the definition formulated in 1952 by Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn:

‘Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior, acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups … ’

Each society is regarded as a distinctive cultural whole, characterized by its peculiar system of values. The beliefs existing in a given society are thought to be a product of ‘culture.’ Following Linton, several culturalist authors even affirmed that the personality structure of the individuals in a particular group was determined by the group’s ‘culture.’ The most extreme advocate of this opinion was Kardiner, with his idea that each sociocultural system shaped a basic personality, the ‘I’ just being a ‘cultural precipitate.’ Therefore, culturalists deem socialization, the social process through which the main values of a society are transmitted from one generation to the next, to be of the utmost importance, and they believe it to be a very deterministic process. On the whole, those theories led to an extremely mechanic conception, which attributes to ‘culture’ the production of beliefs, and to inculcation and conditioning the power to put them into people’s minds and to determine their behaviors. So the US anthropologist Leslie A. White, the leader of the culturalist school called ‘culturology,’ went so far as writing (1968) that ‘man is, and remains, a puppet of his culture.’

Culturalism has rightly been reproached for its belief in the ability of social systems to work in such a mechanical way that people so much believe what they have to believe that they feel the need to do what they have to do. It has also been established that the culturalists’ holistic conception of a system of values common to a whole society was generally untrue, except perhaps in the very simplest ones. Hence the notion of ‘subculture’ used by culturalists for their study of complex modern societies. As for the culturalist principle of an inner coherence of culture systems, which comes from a counterhistorical method, it maybe partly exist in the most simple societies, but certainly not in complex ones. Against this assumed idea of a whole inside linkage of each ‘culture’, the French sociologists Raymond Boudon and Francois Bourricaud also observed (1982) that the ‘everything is culture’ conception was based upon an erroneous obviousness, so that it would be more adequate to use the term ‘culture’ only when speaking of artifacts and mental products.

A few anthropologists have dared to criticize the mechanical conditioning model of culturalism. It is chiefly the English anthropologist Robin Horton (1973) and the American anthropologist Melford E. Spiro (1987) who disputed the creed according to which belief and behavior did not result from reasons but were just the product of cultural conditioning. Nevertheless, since Boas the culturalist point of view does represent the mainstream in anthropology. And it has also influenced a great deal of sociology, and even philosophy. For instance, Richard Rorty asserts in a perfectly culturalist way that the idea prevailing in democracies of totalitarianism being evil is just the result of cultural conditioning (1989). The culturalist trend always works for the benefit of relativism, and the mere use of the term ‘culture’ in an ‘everything is culture’ sense does just the same.

3. The Comprehensive Sense Of ‘Culture’ : A Relativistic Tool

As an evolutionist, Tylor naturally regarded nine-teeth-century England as the pinnacle of civilization. But since he intended ‘to treat mankind as homogeneous in nature,’ he felt the need of a concept synonymous with ‘civilization,’ but more applicable to everybody and every society, past as well as present. Hence his widely inclusive definition of culture, which permitted him to find evidences of ‘culture’ among all societies and human groups, ‘though placed in different grades of civilization.’ Since everything was asserted to be culture, it became possible to find ‘culture’ everywhere. The Tylor revolution granted a ‘culture’ even to the most primitive peoples.

Yet, the most famous ethnologist in the 1870s and 1880s, the American evolutionist Lewis H. Morgan (1818–81), did not adopt the Tylorian meaning of the term ‘culture.’ In his book Ancient Society (1877), he went on using the notion of ‘society’. Instead of Tylor’s stages of ‘culture’, he prefered to delineate ‘ethnical periods,’ which he considered to be developmental stages leading, through barbarism, from savagery to civilization. But Morgan died and Tylor prevailed, and in the USA, at the end of the 1800s, Boas, being of German origin, naturally used the Tylorian sense of culture.

It was also Boas who threw out of anthropology the very idea of grades of civilization determining a hierarchy of societies and human groups. Rejecting the evolutionist theory, he declared the total relativity of ‘cultures.’ The ‘Boas revolution’ closely followed the Tylorian one. However, through Boas, cultural relativism actually proceeded from Nietzsche, who had brought all traditional values to trial, and announced that they were now delusive, since deprived of basis by the decline of dogmatic creeds. As it is well known, Nietzsche sought to destroy the very idea of objective reality, so that he is the father of modern relativism. The influence of Nietzschean ideas ac- counts for Boas’s basic postulate of the relativity of values in the different ‘cultures’ and his complete rejection of the value judgments of nineteenth-century evolutionism.

In the 1940s, cultural relativism received, through the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits’s Cultural Anthropology (1948), the support of Ernest Cassirer’s German historical idealism (1942). According to Herskovits, exactly following Cassirer, human beings are living in a symbolic universe built by them: the universe of ‘culture,’ and so know no reality but the symbolic, that is, cultural. Herskovits asserts that all human experience of the physical world as well as of society are determined by enculturation, and accordingly culturally mediated. In this theory, all perceptions, evaluations, and judgments are a function of the cultural system to which one belongs, and are relative to it. Since Herskovits as well as Cassirer consider that all ‘reality’ is perceived through the screen of ‘culture,’ this one is deemed to be the measure of all things.

The Tylorian sense of ‘culture’ has been very useful for cultural relativists, as it permitted them to dispense with the word ‘civilization’ in order to avoid the closely related ideas of hierarchy and comparative judgment. Being based upon the determinist assumption that values are a function or product of each ‘culture,’ cultural relativism does infer that all value judgments are necessarily culturally conditioned or determined. Therefore they are deemed to have no validity outside the cultural context from which they proceed. Value judgments concerning alien ‘cultures’ are therefore strictly forbiden by cultural relativism, which reproaches those judgments with being the product of a preference for one’s own ‘culture’ and a prejudice against the other ones: namely ethnocentrism, which twentieth-century relativistic anthropology has regarded as the supreme offense, as much as evolutionism itself. Since the relativistic postulate of comparative judgment having no validity is asserted to be accurate, the corollary cannot but be the principle of an equivalent validity of all value systems. So that the American anthropologist David Bidney could observe (1968):

‘Reverence for cultural values, rather than reverence for life, becomes the absolute virtue advocated by the cultural relativist.’

The term ‘culture’ used in a comprehensive sense has been the main vector of the egalitarianist assumption ensuing from cultural relativism, according to which all value systems must be considered to be equally legitimate units. If the meaning of the word ‘culture’ is taken to include ways of life as well as social relations, there is ‘culture’ everywhere. Whereas the humanistic idea of culture stands opposite to the absence of culture, or even the barbarity, of certain individuals, groups, or societies, the very fact of absence of culture or barbarity is denied by using the term ‘culture’ about these individuals, groups, or societies. Since everybody belongs to a social structure and a value system, everybody is regarded as belonging to a ‘culture’ or a ‘subculture.’ Sociologists as well as anthropologists consider each society and each social group to have its ‘culture,’ and they usually strictly obey the relativistic prohibition of comparative evaluations of values, which would lead to classifications showing the factual existence of various grades of civilization. The widely inclusive conception of ‘culture’ of the social sciences is used with the purpose of eliminating the very idea of uncultured groups. It allows indeed the social scientist to report the presence of ‘culture’ in the working class or in a primitive tribe as well as in the most learned circles. The ‘everything is culture’ use of the word ‘culture’ works just like an optical illusion. It brings about that fallacious value of equality of all societies and groups which is imperatively ordered by cultural relativism. The term ‘culture’ taken in a comprehensive sense is a necessity of cultural relativism, of which it is the most indispensable tool as well as the very basis.

The theory according to which all reality is symbolic is in no way cogent. As has been noticed by Raymond Boudon and Francois Bourricaud (1982), if that means that all human experience is mediated by a symbolic system like articulate speech or science, it is merely a commonplace statement. And if symbolic is taken as synonymous with ficticious, it is an erroneous idea. Likewise, the rejection of value judgments actually lacks logical validity. As a matter of fact, the assumption of an equivalent value of all ‘cultures’ is itself nothing but a value judgment, hidden behind the virtuous looking facade of cultural relativism. The prohibition of value judgments thus results from a value judgment. As emphasized by Allan Bloom (1987), the assertion of values and ‘cultures’ being relative is by no means proved: it is just a philosophical postulate, which stems from a political intention. And when cultural relativism disclaims freedom of judgment and rational analysis in order to prevent the development of any prejudice against alterity, it is just a way to avoid subjecting our own prejudices to logical criticism. Hence, the social sciences have the utmost need, as David Bidney (1968) had already stressed, ‘to transcend the limitations of both cultural relativism and ethnocentrism through the pursuit of scientific truths concerning facts and values.’

However, the relativistic trend prevails, particularly in anthropology. Since nearly all twentieth-century anthropologists have repudiated evolutionism, Leslie A. White (1968) and his school being the main exception, anthropology has been, through the twentieth century and at the present time, essentially relativistic. Despite the endeavors of some authors like Melford E. Spiro (1987) and Robin Horton (1973), or like the British anthropologist Robin Fox (1989) who has turned to sociobiology, anthropology and cultural relativism may almost be taken as synonyms. The US social anthropologist Clifford Geertz did affirm (1984) that cultural relativism was justified by the factual obviousness that value systems are of course disparate. According to Geertz (1984), relativism has such an obvious validity that it is impossible to resist it. Yet, what is most obvious is that relativism is the core and basis of culturalism, and that twentieth-century anthropology works as a relativistic machine. Accordingly, the relativists’ fancy for anthropology is in no way surprising. They have often stated anthropology to be the queen of sciences. The cognitive relativist Feyerabend even asserted (1975) that it was the sole genuine science.

The use of a broad sense of the word ‘culture’ as a relativistic tool is also present in the other social sciences, especially in sociology. Such is the case in the neomarxist functionalist theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1979). In the 1960s and 1970s, Bourdieu emphasized the statement that culture (in the classical and humanistic sense of the term) was nothing but a ‘culture’ expressing the beliefs and behavior of the ‘dominant class.’ According to him, this ‘culture’ is just a ‘culture’ amongst many others, but it is imposed as the only legitimate one by school, universities, and other cultural institutions, in order to bring about what he terms ‘social reproduction.’ Since they have been brought up in other ‘cultures,’ working-class children are considered by Bourdieu to be handicapped when facing at school a ‘culture’ which is not their own one, while children from the dominant class have all the means to be successful with it. So, stresses Bourdieu, the domination of the same upper class can be reproduced from generation to generation. Bourdieu deems culture to have in itself no real superiority, but just to be useful for the members of the dominant class in order to distinguish themselves from the rest of the society. He regards artistic or literary value, which he believes to have no actual existence in itself, as merely resulting from the preferences of the dominant class, and hence as being an illusion. Therefore, the combination of Bourdieu’s Marxist ideology with his perfect relativism leads to an absolute cultural nihilism.

In sociology, the culturalist holistic idea of values being the product of closed wholes has probably been taken in the most absolute way by ethnomethodologists. According to them, ‘cultures’, subcultures, and any other groups are so much closed units that their values have solely an inside meaning. And they even assert that observers can understand nothing of the cultural products of a group in which they are not immersed. So ethnomethodologists deny the validity of outside observers’ studies, affirming that their supposed understanding would be distorted by the fallacy of sociocentrism. Although ethnomethodologists do not consider, as most culturalists do, social actors to be ‘puppets of their culture,’ ethnomethodology is certainly an extremely relativistic sociological theory, based upon an ‘everything is culture’ conception.

Several streams of sociology explain beliefs and behavior by the mechanical model of inculcation and conditioning, just as does cultural anthropology. So does the neomarxist functionalism of Bourdieu (1979), with the theory or habitus thought as a class-conditioned behavior. But the idea of inculcation and conditioning by means of socialization is also present in the whole Durkheimian trend, and even to a certain extent in Parsons ‘functionalism’, since it particularly stresses social integration. And, of course, behaviourists following B. F. Skinner’s positivistic line regard moral instincts as a product of social conditioning.

As they have to study the diversity of ‘cultures,’ and as this term has long been linked to the idea of relativism, anthropologists have a professional slant to take cultural relativism as granted. But the prevailing of relativism in the social sciences is very much strengthened by the general relativistic atmosphere which characterizes postmodern societies. Relativism has invaded literary criticism, with the deconstructionistic theory of the French Heideggerians Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, and the French Heideggerian Michel Foucault has initiated a relativistic interpretation of history. As Allan Bloom (1987) and Raymond Boudon (1990) have pointed out, all those theories mainly derive from the Nietzschean assertion that there are no facts, but only interpretations: a famous phrase that Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and their followers wrongly separated from its context, so that they unduly took it literally. These same authors’ theories have been used as a justification by the relativistic movement known as political correctness, which since the 1980s has dominated US universities. Relativism has even been epistemologicaly theorized, chiefly by Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) and Paul K. Feyerabend (1975). Feyerabend’s anarchist cognitive theory, which does not differentiate science from archaic myths or from magic, is clearly a counter-epistemology. With Feyerabend’s well-known saying, ‘anything goes,’ relativism leads to nihilism.

The lack of validity of these theories has been pointed out by Raymond Boudon (1990, 1995), who demonstrated that cognitive relativism was based upon an epistemological archaism. He also observed, about the assertion of an obvious legitimacy of relativim, that since Geertz (1984) considered all conceptions of the world to emanate from ‘cultures,’ relativism itself was one of these conception. There-fore, in a culturalist perspective, relativism in no way can be a methodological rule that is above suspicion, but just a plain ‘cultural product’ of postmodern societies. In fact, it is because relativism does fit in with them that it is at the present time so fashionable. Here lies its strength, which is extremely dangerous for culture.

4. Cultures Versus Culture

The ‘everything is culture’ conception is no longer confined to anthropological and sociological books and journals, but has spread beyond, so that the broad sense of ‘culture’ now belongs to everyday language. It is daily used by the media, and has become popularized.

There is even in several countries a ministerial department entrusted with ‘culture’—an idea proceeding from the USSR. Such a department was created in France as early as 1958, and departments were established in the 1980s and 1990s in some other Western democracies, such as Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Germany. The French Culture Ministry has adopted since the 1970s, and still more since 1981, a comprehensive sense of ‘culture.’ In the sociological research ordered by this department, the different ways of filling spare time, and all kinds of fun and entertainment, are called ‘cultural habits.’ In a political purpose, the ‘wide ethnographic sense’ of culture is officially acknowledged by the French government.

The term ‘culture’ as it is used in postmodern societies, particularly in the media, has mostly nothing to do with genuine culture, but is more frequently used in order to refer to beliefs, behaviors, ways of life, customs, habits, and even the whole of society: ‘culture’ is now often used instead of the term ‘identity.’

Having a relativistic effect, a broad use of the term ‘culture’ puts everything on the same level, so that fun and entertainment are regarded as equal to genuine culture. As pointed out by Allan Bloom (1987), the failure of culture becomes a ‘culture.’ Though the present democratic societies formally worship ‘culture’, the popularization of the relativistic use of the term actually destroys in the whole society the very idea of the eminent value of culture. Here is indeed the main danger for culture.

Raymond Boudon (1999), following Tocqueville, has shown that relativism is the very theory congruent with democratic societies, as it conciliates their egalitarian passion with the variety of the opinions. Hence, through the popularized relativistic use of the term ‘culture’, it is democratic egalitarianism that stands as an adversary of culture.

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