Semantic Origins.
Both “culture” and
“civilization”
derive their original meaning from
Latin: from cultura
which referred to the
cultivation of the soil, and from
civis which referred to the status of citizenship.
In
Latin, however, both words also acquired secondary
meanings.
Cicero, for example, used cultura in a trans-
ferred sense when he identified
cultura animi (“culture
of the
soul”) with philosophy or learning generally.
Civis denoted not only the fact of Roman
citizenship,
but also its superiority over the primitive condition
of
the foreigner or barbarian. In each case the acquired
as well as the
literal meaning has lingered on into
modern times, although the words
“culture” and “civi-
lization” themselves did not gain currency in
European
thought until the second half of the eighteenth century.
The inherited meanings were, however, soon joined
by others. Indeed, even
before the last decade of the
eighteenth century, the proliferation of
meanings led
the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder
to remark of “culture” that
“nothing was more inde-
terminate than this word” (
Works,
Suphan ed., XIII,
4). Its extended usage in the subsequent period has
not
enhanced its clarity. “Nothing in the world,”
a
twentieth-century writer, A. Lawrence Lowell, com-
plains, “is more elusive.... An attempt to
encompass
its meaning in words is like trying to seize the air in
the
hand, when one finds that it is everywhere except
within one's
grasp” (“Culture,” in
At War
With Aca-
demic Traditions in America,
Cambridge, Mass. [1934],
p. 115). Nonetheless, such attempts have been
made.
A recent survey of the concept, by A. L. Kroeber and
Clyde
Kluckhohn (
Culture, 1952), brought no less than
164
definitions to light. Distinctions between “culture”
and “civilization” have also been rather abundant.
In some cases man's spiritual development has been
identified with culture,
in others with civilization; the
same is true of man's control over nature
and his
external social relations. Frequently man's moral de-
velopment and the improvement of his
material condi-
tions or refinements of
social manners have been
viewed as opposing, rather than reinforcing, tenden-
cies. Then again culture has been
treated as a particular
component or stage of civilization, a sort of
subculture
within a “superculture”; at other times
culture has
been considered the more generic term while civili-
zation has been confined to the
culture of cities. A
distinction commonly made is in terms of modes of
development, according to which civilization (defined
as
“techniques”) is a continuous and cumulative proc-
ess, susceptible to generalizing methods and
capable
of universal diffusion, whereas culture (defined as
“creativity”), occurring sporadically, is not
susceptible
to these methods and not transferable.
On the other hand, a contemporary writer, Raymond
Williams, in his Culture and Society (1958, p. 16),
regards the
concepts as sufficiently synonymous to
warrant the attribution of four
jointly applicable
meanings: (1) a general state or habit of mind,
having
close relations with the idea of human perfection; (2)
a
general state of intellectual development in a society
as a whole; (3) the
general body of the arts; and (4)
a whole way of life, material,
intellectual, and spiritual.
The first three meanings have come to be
associated
with what are called “humanistic”
conceptions of cul-
ture, whereas the fourth
meaning is usually associated
with “anthropological”
approaches. Humanistic con-
ceptions are
held to be selective, separating certain
segments of man's activities from
others, and designat-
ing them as cultural;
anthropological conceptions are
held to be nonselective, by applying
“culture” to the
total fabric of man's life in a
given society, to his entire
social heritage and whatever he may add to it.
While
anthropologists eschew value judgments for fear of
succumbing to ethnocentrism, humanists maintain the
possibility, and indeed desirability, of evaluating di-
verse forms of human activity and human goals in the
light of
universal values which, they insist, are objec-
tively ascertainable. Although there is agreement on
the need to
distinguish the cultural from the biological
in human and social life, the
fulcrum of opinion as to
what is crucial and problematic differs between
these
two conceptions.
