Culture as a Category of Social Life

Sewell talks about various concepts of culture and begins one of his chapters on the topic as follows: “Culture as a category of social life has itself been conceptualized in a number of different ways. Let me begin by specifying some of these different conceptualizations, moving from those I do not find especially useful to those I find more adequate” (Sewell, 2005, p.40).

The first conceptualization he mentions is culture as learned behavior. In his perspective, culture is the entire collection of behaviors, ideas, structures and in this way, it was constructed and carried down through generations. In the setting provided by Sewell (2005), culture is likened to nature. Since anthropologists began striving to establish the cultural variations across populations were not traceable to physiological factors, a concept of culture as acquired behavior felt right. However, ethnic claims almost completely disappeared within anthropological debate, and defining a concept as wide as culture is untenable. During the second quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology developed a broader and therefore more useful conceptualization of culture, which has dominated the humanities in general since 1938. It describes culture as the class or component of learned behavior related to context, rather than just learned behavior in general. However, the idea of culture as meaning is just a set of similar frameworks (Sewell, 2005).

As Sewell proceeds to more useful construct, he presents “culture as all institutional sphere devoted to the making of meaning. This conceptualization of culture is based on the assumption that social formations are composed of clusters of institutions devoted to specialized activities. These clusters can be assigned to variously defined institutional spheres-most conventionally, spheres of politics, economy, society, and culture” (Sewell, 2005, p.41). Sewell (2005) perceives culture as the domain dedicated to the development, dissemination, and application of meanings. The cultural domain may then be subdivided into its constituent sub-spheres, such as architecture, literature, religion, media, or schooling. If culture is interpreted in this manner, culture theory is the review of the events which occur inside these organizationally specified domains and the concepts that emerge within them.

Sewell (2005) comments on this conception of culture a bit critically. He believes that “this conception of culture is particularly prominent in the discourses of sociology and cultural studies, but it is rarely used in anthropology” (Sewell, 2005, p.41). Its origins are most likely traceable to the highly evaluative interpretation of culture as a domain of “rich” or “elevating”

creative and mental activity which, according to Raymond Williams (1985), rose to popularity in the nineteenth century. Sewell (2005) solves this issue through the use of a concept of culture that focuses solely on a narrow variety of interpretations created in a narrow spectrum of social settings. Sewell elaborates on the rise cultural sociology even further. He contends that the enormous development hindered cultural sociology's ability to examine cultural institutions, resulting in a content knowledge separation that was hostile to cultural scientists (Sewell, 2005). Furthermore, Sewell agrees with Boggs (2004) in respect of exponential development of the subfield of cultural sociology over the last decade while claiming that only the abolition of this limiting definition of culture has allowed for it.

Considering the third concept of Sewell, it goes back in traditions which put forward a powerful determinism that may be found in Marxism and American sociology - the concept of culture as creativity or agency. Scholars operating through these cultures have built an understanding of culture as a domain of imagination that avoids the formerly dominant assumption of collective intervention by socioeconomic systems during the last three decades or so. Moreover, there is clear evidence that the difference between American anthropologists and sociologists about the understanding of society is that the contradiction in both culture and framework, which is unquestionably prevalent in contemporary sociological debate, is

meaningless in anthropology. Sewell (2005) regards this approach as pitiful since associating culture with agency and comparing it with form is simply perpetuating the teleological materialism of Marxists who protested against it at the beginning. He also believes that This amplifies the inflexibility of socioeconomic decisions as well as the freedom of symbolic activity. Form and agency are blended respectively in socioeconomic and cultural processes.

Cultural action, for example telling psychological games or creating poems, is inevitably bound by cultural frameworks such as verbal or graphical standards. Industrial activity like car manufacturing and reconstruction, is unlikely without the use of imagination and agency.

In cultural and economic processes, the specifics of the partnership between structure and agency can vary so in case of attributing economic or the cultural specifically to form or agency would be a major category mistake (Sewell, 2005).

The next two concepts Sewell (2005) mentions are the concept of culture as a system of symbols and meanings and the concept of culture as practice. He regards these as the most fruitful and perceives them as currently struggling for dominance. As already mentioned in previous parts of the thesis, these two concepts played the main role for almost half a century.

At the beginning of second half of 20th century, the concept of culture as a system of symbols and meanings played a main role until the late 1970s when the concept of culture as practice became more common.

Sewell provides his take on the first concept.

“Culture as a system of symbols and meanings has been the dominant concept of culture in American anthropology since the 1960s. It was made famous above all by Clifford Geertz, who used the term “cultural system” in the titles of some of his most notable essays.

The notion was also elaborated on by David Schneider, whose writings had a considerable influence within anthropology, but lacked Geertz’s interdisciplinary appeal. Geertz and Schneider derived the term from Talcott Parsons’ usage, according to which the cultural system, a system of symbols and meanings, was a particular “level of abstraction” of social relations” (Sewell, 2005, p.43).

For both of them, cultural interpretation meant separating the meaningful component of human behavior from the movement of actual experiences. The aim of conceptualizing culture as a set of symbols and meanings is to separate linguistic impact on conduct from the types of implications like sociological, regional, technical, and economical. Reason being is that they are inextricably linked within every specific sequence of actions for the purposes of study (Sewell, 2005).

Culture as practice. From mid 1980s until late 1990s, there has been a widespread backlash towards the notion of culture as a system of symbols and meanings in the field of anthropology, which has occurred in a variety of disciplinary settings and philosophical practices. The representation of culture as rational, cohesive, shared, standardized, and stagnant offends analysts employed under each of these banners. Furthermore, it was argued that culture is a realm of practical interaction marked by deliberate intervention, power dynamics, conflict, contradiction, and transition. Another anthropologist, Sherry Ortner (1984), noted the shift to culture, politics, and business, recommending Pierre Bourdieu's (2010) main word practice as an effective descriptor for the new perspective. The publishing

of James Clifford and George Marcus' anthology “Writing Culture” two years later signaled the public's recognition of the problem of anthropology’s culture definition (Sewell, 2005).

Since then, there have been several attacks on the idea of culture as a system of symbols and meanings. The most well-known anthropological literature has argued for the inconsistent and fractured nature of concepts, both in the cultures surveyed and in anthropological documents.

Recent anthropological research has effectively redefined culture as a reactive concept. This focus on the performative nature of culture is, unsurprisingly, consistent with the work of most cultural historians. Unsurprisingly, such emphasis on the reactive nature of culture is congruent with founding of many cultural analysts. They subtly altered the term when they studied history, emphasizing the ambiguity and elasticity of cultural concepts as well as the mechanisms whereby definitions were evolved (Sewell, 2005).

Given that, a plenty of them conceptualize culture as a set of characteristics whose impact on behavior may be likened to that of classic sociological variables like status, ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, business position and so on. Therefore, culture does not become a unified system of symbols and meanings rather than a diversified array of tools which ought to be interpreted as methods of action. Since some of the instruments are distinct, regional, and purpose-specific, they may be used as descriptive factors in ways that culture as a transnational, generic system of meanings cannot (Sewell, 2005).