The Uses of “Culture”

Looking backward and at the same time eerily anticipating the disciplinary controversies that would follow in the wake of cultural studies, Raymond Williams called “culture” “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (87). The term’s complexity springs not only from its “intricate historical development” and its use to indicate “important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought,” but also from the fact that the distinctions among its uses are extraordinarily difficult and perhaps futile to maintain, at least in any rigid way (87). The “overlap” (91) of meanings within the term—the tendency of latent meanings to spring to life in particular disciplinary or conceptual refinements—defines what Williams considered the full significance of the word. The sense of “culture” as cultivation (its oldest meaning) shades the familiar and universalist definition of “culture” as prestigious intellectual or artistic achievement. These two meanings in turn haunt the anthropological definition of “culture” as the distinctive way of life and system of meaning possessed by every human group, a definition most closely associated with Franz Boas’s early-twentieth-century work but having roots, Williams reminds us, stretching back at least to Johann Gottfried Herder’s pluralistic eighteenth-century philosophy.

“Culture” thus designates particular groups of people and, at the same time, organizes hierarchies of prestige. Difference and value converge within the concept and cannot be neatly disentangled, but what gives this complication of meanings its sting is how useful “culture” has been for creating narratives of social belonging. Culture produces varieties of social cohesion that the political framework of the nation and the flows of capital rely on but that cannot be derived from either of these. The affective power of cultural belonging has long fueled nationalist claims to sovereignty and territory. As postcolonial, feminist, queer, and ethnic studies have revealed, however, that same power to create collectivities that people find meaningful has also made “culture” rich in oppositional possibilities, particularly for the purposes of constructing anticolonial nationalist cultures and insurgent counter- or subcultures, as well as for making these available to disciplinary analysis. The contradictions at work in any appeal to culture have made it both a problem and a solution.

Given such stakes, it then comes as no surprise that “culture” has long been an object of disciplinary struggle (among other struggles waged in its name), characterized by contests over what constitutes it, its relation to state power, and its explanatory analytical power, to name just a few. Reframing the disciplinary conflicts surrounding “culture,” Eric Aronoff’s closely argued book, Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture, returns us to the formative moment of the 1920s, when “culture” achieved its modern form as an internally contradictory analytical category for the emerging disciplines of anthropology and literary studies. Aronoff charts struggles over the meaning and scale of culture in the era when the monolithic Arnoldian conception of “culture” as prestigious aesthetic production—“the best that has been thought and said”—unevenly ceded ground to Boas’s anthropological “culture concept.” Like most transitions in the world of ideas, this one arose from intellectual disagreements and then went on to produce even more controversies as its implications were disputed and its uses developed. Investigating what he calls “the problematic of culture” (5), Aronoff anatomizes interdisciplinary debates about the scale and form of culture—about the stretch of its geographic expanse, whether it was defined by nation or region, and whether its form should best understood in temporal or spatial terms. Some participants in these formative debates, such as Van Wyck Brooks, understood culture to be organically and insistently national in its character and scale, a model of culture derived from European romanticism and often summoned to link a cultural sense of...