- The term "culture" originated from the Latin word "cultura" meaning "to cultivate". It was first used by anthropologist Edward Tylor in 1871 to refer to the complex whole of human knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, laws, and customs acquired by a society. - In the 19th century, "culture" came to refer to the refinement and betterment of individuals through education, and then the fulfillment of national aspirations. Matthew Arnold viewed culture as a means to moral perfection and social good. - Raymond Williams defined culture as the ordinary customs and practices of everyday people that constitute a whole and distinctive way of life, democratizing the concept and opening it up to

1. Culture

2. Culture

3. What culture has meant before:
The first use of the term ‘culture’ and
Concept of Culture
Culture derived from the Latin word cultura
stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate.
The term was first used by the pioneer English
Anthropologist Edward B. Taylor in his book,
Primitive Culture, published in 1871.
Edward B. Taylor
(1832-1917)

4. What culture has meant before:
 Taylor said that culture is that complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, art, law,
morals, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Edward B. Taylor
(1832-1917)

5. What culture has meant before:
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 grouped/ national aspiration.

6. What culture has meant before:
• Raymond Williams (1981/82)has suggested that
the word culture began as a noun, connected to
growing crops, that is, cultivation.
• Having germinated from the soil, the concept of
culture grew to encompass human beings so
that to be a cultivated person was to be a
cultured person.
31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988

7. What culture has meant before:
• 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.
• Matthew Arnold’s view that acquiring culture
was the means toward moral perfection and
social good. Here culture as human
‘civilization’ is counterpoised to the ‘anarchy’ of
the ‘raw and uncultivated masses’.
24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888

8. What culture has meant before:
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/of the world.
More generally, concept of bildung means
senses of developmentalism, self-cultivation,
and self-generation.

9. What culture has meant before:
• Later, the English literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis was to
hold that high or literary culture, captured in the artistic and
scholarly tradition, kept alive and nurtured the ability to
discriminate between the best and the worst of culture; that is,
between the canon of good works and the ‘addictions’ and
‘distractions’ of mass culture.

10. What culture has meant before:
• During the nineteenth century it was apparent to
the ‘cultured’ that not all persons were equally
civilized.
• In practice, culture referred to an elite 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.
 By the nineteenth century in Europe
CULTURE meant the habits, customs and
testes of upper classes.

11. • By contrast, Raymond Williams utilized the spirit of a
nineteenth-century anthropological understanding of culture
as ‘a whole and distinctive way of life’.
• For Williams, it was the customs and practices of ordinary
men and women that composed culture.
• In this view, culture is lived experience constituted by the
tapestry of texts, practices and meanings generated by
every one of us as we conduct our lives.
Raymond Williams’ definition of culture:

12. • Willams’ anthropological understanding of culture has two
implication:
i. The stress on the ordinariness of culture and active-creative
capacity of common people to construct shared meaningful
practices suggests that we are all cultured. We all know
‘how to go on’ within our form of life.
Raymond Williams’ definition of culture:

13. • 2nd implication:
ii. Comprehending culture as a ‘whole way of life’ had the
pragmatic consequence of splitting off the concept from the
‘arts’, legitimizing popular culture and opening up television,
newspapers, dancing, football and other everyday artefacts
and practices to critical but sympathetic analysis.
Raymond Williams’ definition of culture:

14. Raymond Williams’ definition of culture:
Ordinary
A way of life
Democratized
Meaning creation