Understanding the origin of culture

Shelley Walia

Our vision of culture includes all aspects of society. It is a much recognised fact that culture is presently regarded as a central concept in an array of disciplines, ranging from sociology to history, from anthropology to literary cultural studies, from corporate thinking to criminal conduct, or from culture of suspicion to culture of aggression. Such trespassing across borders creates a situation where we hope for a more organised and well-coordinated interaction across disciplines. By introducing such a critical practice, cultural theorists as well as scholars would have the choice to combine allied courses. This is notably taking place already in the humanities.

The concept of culture covers each element of our everyday life and thus has multifaceted undertones. With the arrival of postmodernism and the swift and fundamental social change in its wake, the nature of those disciplines that both replicate our culture and help to profile it have inexorably undergone transformation. Modes and categories inherited in their predictable form no longer fit modern times as there is a perceptible wearing away of the assumptions and presuppositions that supported disciplines in the past and their unequivocal fixity.

Fred Inglis, a renowned cultural critic, with varied interests in Western intellectual and cultural history, liberal arts, and popular culture, has written the much acclaimed biographies of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, apart from innumerable other works on modernity and globalisation. In his recent book, Culture, he considers ‘Cambridge Historicism’ as well as the need to nudge the reader towards a ‘sense of his and her duties to culture, to call each to the militant colours of the cultures to which we owe our very selves and our keen sense that life is so very worth living.”

The book thus becomes relevant to readers and scholars from numerous divergent disciplines within the academia and outside it. Though it does not have a thesis, it nevertheless provides an explanation of the uses of cultural theory that has possibilities of initiating various dialogues with the marginalised and the popular, between the centre and the periphery. It can be done through the examination of the conceptual history lying behind the contemporary intellectual and popular notions of culture and the ‘discipline of cultural enquiry, which we may as well call cultural studies, notwithstanding the terrible tripe which has been written under that head.’

Inglis therefore begins by introducing the notion of culture and its tortuous historical growth by taking up its origins in the German enlightenment and drawing on the works of Kant, Herder, Schiller, and then moving to the contributions made by Arnold, Carlyle, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Bourdieu, Eliot, Williams, and Hoggart, and an exceptionally motivating analysis of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. The last chapter takes up the recent debates on culture and post-modernism.

The discussion on Gramsci is centered around the need for developing national cultural traditions and religion in his aim to develop a ‘subversive account of culture-as-education’ that takes into account ‘the omnipotent form of national instruction canonised by Holy Mother Church and formalised by her partner, the State’. The emphasis is directly on the study of art and literature that empowers ‘the masses so that culture becomes their own’. Such a movement, argues Gramsci, must be carried through by the intellectuals on the left. And education would involve not only the youth but the adult section of society too as apparent in the activism of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart.

Though Inglis ends his book on the emphasis on ancient values of truthfulness, goodness and beauty, he falls short of facing human history, which extends over a decisive and fundamental period of adjustments when nothing in religion, politics, society, or the life of the individual is unconditional and any endeavour to establish the contrary is condemned to a collapse. The magnitude of such notions as human nature need to be recovered from a non-naturalistic standpoint. Life cannot be unchanging and codified; the very nature of way of life is that it is changing and when one thing changes everything changes with it. Living at the intertextuality of culture, one can feel the propinquity of a variable and an exhilaratingly creative life. The study of culture cannot but remain a postmodern discipline and its ‘incoherence’ central to the global culture industry with all its dominant configurations of new-fangled sentiments and thoughts hastening blindly into a disheveled perplexity of the supermarket and other commonly known features of fashionable culture.