The Definition of Culture

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Clarissa

March 12, 2014

Antonio Munoz Molina is a great Spanish writer. I say “great ” not in the sense of “he’s like totally cool” but in the sense that he has achieved greatness. Munoz Molina is not my cup of tea politically but aesthetically he is bizarrely good.

He is also brilliant. Here is what he has to say about the transformation of the concept of culture in the last couple of decades:

Culture used to be something that people acquired through their individual effort. And now it has transformed into a collective space where one happened to be born. It is no longer a project but a destiny. Today, it is a return to the community of origin instead of a solitary emancipation. Culture has become about hiding inside a limited space instead of joining the wider world.

The writer says that the Right used to believe in the essential nature of culture, in the crucial importance of the small community where one chanced to be born. Today, the Left has become the most militant defender of parochialism, rootedness, and essentialism.

P.S. The translation is mine. In the original, this was, of course, a single endless sentence.

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3 responses to “The Definition of Culture”

J. Otto Pohl

March 12, 2014

This idea of culture is not new not even among the Left. It goes back to Renan and is the basis of Soviet ethnos theory and nationality policies. This definition of culture got a big “scientific boost” from Boas and his followers who redefined culture along these lines for almost all anthropologists and ethnographers. Most notably in the USSR Lev Shternberg and his successors such as Mikhail Shirokogorov. The South African volkekundiges also used this definition of culture to justify apartheid taking Shirokogorov as one of their main theorists. Probably the best work on how this definition of culture underlies both the “new racism” which dating back to Renan is not new at all and “multi-culturalism” is Kenan Malik’s, The Meaning of Race: Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (1996).

http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/03/ethnic-theory-and-practice-in-ussr-and.html

http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/11/soviet-ethnos-theory-international-law.html

http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/03/shirokogoroff-shirokogorov-common-link.html

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Z

March 12, 2014

Left idea, I guess, is to stop saying non western cultures aren’t cultures and that only western culture is “universal.” But still goes back to Renan and yes, there are Problems.

But, the culture that one attains, works toward, and so on, that individuates one, isn’t something else? Isn’t Munoz Molina conflating two things (although the quotation is clever, yes)?

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musteryou

March 12, 2014

Everybody automatically being imbued with culture is the lazy person’s way out, just like every uneducatedidiot doesn’t have to be because he is already an inborn genius in the right light, just waiting to be discovered.

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