cultureThe conception of the nature of culture develops from Roman times
where it signifies cultivating the land to cultivating the human mind by
means of philosophy, according to the Roman writer Cicero. This notion
is rediscovered in nineteenth-century Europe by the German thinkers
Wilhelm von Humbolt (1767–1835) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–
1834), who use it to convey a sense of self-cultivation associated with art,
learning, and music. The first German thinker to call attention to the plu-
rality of cultures is arguably Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803),
who sets the stage for further development of the concept.
From a historical context, the usage of the concept of culture is a recent
event. Raymond Williams in Culture and Society traces it to the English
literary tradition that reacted in part to an emergent middle class whose
interests are shaped by a developing industrial economy and a new evolv-
ing social order. By the nineteenth century, culture refers to human prod-
ucts and natural growth, which transforms culture into a thing in itself.
Consequently, culture becomes habit of mind, intellectual development,
body of arts, and the material, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of an
entire way of life. Besides Williams’s contribution to the subject, Ringer
(1969) distinguishes two concepts of culture in Germany: Kultur and
Bildung, or spiritual formation. These concepts are inseparable from the
notion of education (Erziehung). More than the narrow sense of instruc-
tion, education refers to something more spiritual and humanistic, imply-
ing internal self-development and integration of the self within a process
of self-cultivation.
The concept of culture is important to anthropologists who have con-
ceived of it in different ways. Edward B. Tylor in his Primitive Culture
(1871) defines culture as a complex whole that includes custom, belief,
knowledge, art, morals, law, and other human creations. Contrary to
Tylor, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead emphasize cul-
tural traits not wholes, by stressing culture from a more contextualist
approach. For Clifford Geertz (1973), culture is a set of symbolic mean-
ings shared by groups. These webs of meaning and value constitute ways
of life that are historically transmitted from one generation to the next.
Culture, a system of meaning, is interchangeable with religion, whose
meanings are embodied in symbols.
Reacting against such theories of culture, the historian Masuzawa calls
attention to its indiscriminate usage, its excessive intellectual baggage,
its semantically vague and confused nature, and connects it to the power
of the ideology of modernity. Beyond more than a concept, culture is an
argument, moral persuasion, and an epistemological position that identi-
fies us. Masuzawa reminds us that culture and religion are both histori-
cally specific and recent formations and culture should not be used as an