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) was vague on the concept of culture for a long time, similar ideas flourished in other ways. All the classic sociological theorists were writing when the idea of culture was in flux, so they did not offer paradigmatic approaches to understanding “culture.” Nevertheless, all of them bequeathed related ideas and theoretical propositions that remain crucial, combining in different ways in later cultural sociology. Karl Marx showed how meaning-making could be important for domination, with his concept of ideology (Marx 1978 [1846]; see also Eagleton 1991; Wuthnow 1992). Max Weber established an important place for interpretive analysis in sociology and offered particular theories of social status and of historical rationalization which remain influential for cultural sociology (Weber 1998 [1904–5]; see also Schroeder 1992). Émile Durkheim provided the foundations of cultural analysis in sociology with his theories of collective conscience, collective representations, cognitive categories, and ritual (Durkheim 1995 [1912]; see also Alexander and Smith 2005). Georg Simmel contributed extensive reflections on the individual’s relation to surrounding culture by distinguishing objective and subjective culture (Simmel 1971; see also Frisby and Featherstone 1997). However, while all offered useful ways of thinking about cultural elements like rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories, they mostly did so only as a sideline in the course of answering other sorts of questions.
In the 1960s, a sociological best-seller encapsulated a fundamental cultural insight in its title – the central idea of “the social construction of reality.” Authors Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann aimed to provide a “sociological analysis of the reality of everyday life” (1966, 19). They applied insights from the twentieth-century sociology of knowledge, formerly devoted to what they called “theoretical thought,” to mundane settings – “what people ‘know’ as ‘reality’ in their everyday non- or pre-theoretical lives” (1966, 15). For this they drew on the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz for insight on common sense; they followed Weber’s emphasis on subjective meanings; they adopted some of Durkheim’s ideas about the impact of “social facts” for the individual; they modified Durkheim’s view with a more dynamic idea of dialectical influence between individual and society that they attributed to Marx; and they used George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionist understanding of socialization (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 16–17). Even though they avoided developing the concept of culture, their well-known work provided an undisputed position statement for sociologists interested in culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict. The platform they offered for understanding meaning-making was widely adopted in sociology, and, as a result, what came to be called “social constructionism” came to be taken as sociological common ground (Vera 2016; for an extended critical assessment see Smith 2010, 119–206).
For Berger and Luckmann, structured patterns of social relations in groups are internalized by individuals in everyday life, and individuals then reproduce and sometimes change those patterns. For instance, an individual might internalize hierarchical family relations and then go on to live them out anew. Internalization is mediated by “signs” generated by surrounding social relations. So a child might understand family hierarchy through practical signs of interactional deference or explicit symbols of authority. This perspective on “the social construction of reality” synthesized disparate strands of social theory, from the macro to the micro – theories of objective social structure, theories of interaction, and phenomenological theories of subjective experience. Essentially, Berger and Luckmann offered a distinctively sociological vocabulary for understanding processes of meaning-making – in other words, for understanding “culture.”
So although sociologists were often vague about the concept of culture through the mid-twentieth century, they came to view what were essentially cultural processes through the lens of concepts like “ideology,” “collective conscience,” “interpretation,” and “the social construction of reality.” For some sociologists, the widespread
