Culture - A Few Definitions!

Culture | John Storey

In order to define popular culture we first need to define the term ‘culture’.

Raymond Williams (1983) calls culture ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. Williams suggests three broad definitions.

First, culture can be used to refer to ‘a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’.

We could, for example, speak about the cultural development of Western Europe and be referring only to intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic factors – great philosophers, great artists and great poets.

This would be a perfectly understandable formulation.

A second use of the word ‘culture’ might be to suggest ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group’.

Using this definition, if we speak of the cultural development of Western Europe, we would have in mind not just intellectual and aesthetic factors, but the development of, for example, literacy, holidays, sport, religious festivals.

Finally, Williams suggests that culture can be used to refer to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’.

In other words, culture here means the texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning.

Culture in this third definition is synonymous with what structuralists and post-structuralists call ‘signifying practices’.

Using this definition, we would probably think of examples such as poetry, the novel, ballet, opera, and fine art.

To speak of popular culture usually means to mobilize the second and third meanings of the word ‘culture’.

The second meaning – culture as a particular way of life – would allow us to speak of such practices as the seaside holiday, the celebration of Christmas, and youth subcultures, as examples of culture.

These are usually referred to as lived cultures or practices.

The third meaning – culture as signifying practices – would allow us to speak of soap opera, pop music, and comics, as examples of culture.

These are usually referred to as texts.

Few people would imagine Williams’s first definition when thinking about popular culture.