But, first, a brief philological
excursion. The word had, to begin with, one
clear meaning; then, after a kind of binary
fission abetted by Marxists (who came to talk
of "capitalist culture") and by
a new school of anthropologists (who wrote
about "cultures" in the South Sea
islands unknown to history), it grew to have
two meanings, quite contradictory. And today,
it is, in my opinion, for all practical purposes
of literary and intellectual communication,
enervating and quite meaningless. When I hear
the word culture I reach for my blue
pencil.
The first bifurcation was
disastrous: namely, when the anthropologists
began to speak of "primitive cultures."
Indeed Sir Edward Tylor's classic work of
1871 was entitled Primitive Culture;
and the formidable Oxford English Dictionary
refused to admit "culture" in that
meaning to its pages. Culture by very definition
could not be primitive; it was among
the highest achievements of mankind. It was
not merely descriptive but prescriptive; it
was evaluative, judgmental. It called attention
to standards of tested excellence in art,
music, and literature, and even to humanist
aspirations in social behavior. But Tylor—and
after him, Malinkowski, Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict,
et al.—won the battle of words.
Culture was universalized; no tribe, no continent
could be discriminated against; all values
were relative. The editors of a subsequent
edition of the OED in Oxford finally
conceded the point, and nobody's culture anywhere
was ever the same again.
