CULTURA prelungirii Miinii Drepte – 12 & 13…

English Romanticism…

In the nineteenth century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) used the word “culture” to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” This concept of culture is comparable to the German concept of bildung: “…culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.”

In practice, culture referred to an élite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine. As these forms were associated with urbane life, “culture” was identified with “civilization” (from lat. civitas, city). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a “culture” among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between “high culture“, namely that of the ruling social group, and “low culture.” In other words, the idea of “culture” that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.

Matthew Arnold contrasted “culture” with “anarchy;” other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted “culture” with “the state of nature.” According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between “civilized” and “uncivilized.” According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer’s theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan’s theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is really an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, some critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is really an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.

Other 19th century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people’s essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by working-class people) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as “noble savages” living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.

In 1870 Edward Tylor (1832-1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms.^[6] In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture.

CULTURA prelungirii Miinii Drepte – 11…

Culture has been understood as a flux of phenomenon that has presuppositions and foundations from their hunter-gathering and nomadic traditions to cultivation. And now those of historical relevances of human engagement for alternatives reveal a connotation, viz. a phenomenological paradigm of social realty or of a syntagm of human scarcities. Whether this relationship between phenomenological paradigm (hunter-gathering, agriculture, industrial revolution, cultural revolution, globalization) and the syntagm of human scarcities(kingdom, empery, colonialism, post-colonial devolution) is one of the cohesion or of contradiction depends in each case as to the analysis of their approches. Apparently, as such idiosyncratic or irrational characterizations of reality can be attributed at least as much to the social and cultural conditions under which perceptions of objective reality arise as to the perceptual condition of the individual on one hand or the subjective nature of the universal on the other.

When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term “culture” to refer to a universal human capacity.

In the twentieth century, “culture” emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term “culture” in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies…