The Culture of Culture

...The "multiculturalism" festivals held in many towns and universities are sometimes reduced to celebrating the exotic foods and costumes of Third World peoples, like movie travelogues of the 1940s...

...William Perry, the press told us last winter, became Secretary of Defense because he understood the "culture" of the Pentagon...

...of Complaint, of Disbelief, of Narcissism??all the way through Nature to Protest to Science to the University, and finally ending with The Culture of War...

...As the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt notes, "These are the 'progressive' arguments of torturers...

...In practice, what it usually means is that those aspects of non-European cultures that are compatible with Western feminism and some minimal notion of human rights are held up as examples of diversity...

...At other times the term connotes ethnic ancestry, as in the "cultural weapons" of the Zulus or the "cultural pride" American blacks can express by wearing Charles Walker's clothes...

...Ours is one of the very few countries with big, influential populations from four continents...

...What does the word signify here...

...And to attack a culture these days will sooner or later inspire a charge of genocide, another growth stock on the lexical market...

...Besides the fact that the whole line of argument depends on Western anthropological doctrine for its underpinnings, it grossly libels the very cultures it ostensibly defends by implying that the most fundamental human rights have no place in them...

...Culture seems to be everywhere these days...

...Quite the opposite...

...In most women's studies departments, for instance, the suggestion that men and women have non-trivial differences that are biological rather than cultural in origin constitutes the heresy of essentialism and can get you run out of town faster than almost any other sin...

...By the time [a child] can talk," the latter wrote in 1934, "he is the little creature of his culture...

...Describing something as the product of culture can therefore imply either of two contradictory things about it: that it is not genetically inherited and can (usually should) be changed, or that it exists in an entrenched realm of its own which, because of the doctrine of cultural relativism, is immune to criticism from outside...

...Wherever the right not to be tortured for political dissidence may have originated, it long ago became the common property of the human race...

...In some versions of this defense by the Chinese government and its apologists, the modern police state becomes an expression of traditional Confucianism...

...A common word has taken on an increasingly nebulous range of meanings that reveal more than just confusion...

...a culture of dealing with money...

...Sometimes the writer really means attitudes, sometimes custom or fashion, sometimes behavior...

...Profound, inherited social differences come to be idealized precisely because they are breaking down so rapidly under the pressure of an international popular culture, largely inspired by the United States, with CNN and MTV as its most powerful symbols...

...In the course of lambasting the Navy over the Tailhook scandal, Eric Schmitt of the New York Times wonders whether "more paper proclamations will change the ingrained attitudes of a male-dominated culture trying to shed a reputation for contempt toward women...

...The passion for finding a distinct culture behind every tree may be more than anything a plea for variety in an increasingly homogenized world...

...The culture of a society, Eliot believed, was a total way of life that derived ultimately from religion...

...Or, a more tantalizing question, what is there about American scholarly and journalistic culture in the 1990s that makes the word culture so attractive...

...It is a part of my thesis that the culture of the individual is dependent upon the culture of a group or class, and that the culture of the group or class is dependent upon the culture of the whole society to which that group or class belongs...

...The same kind of dual judgment makes sense within a society that sometimes thinks of itself as multicultural in origin...

...The claim that every "culture" and all of its expressions should be equally respected is too sentimental for anyone to follow consistently, but it nevertheless gets a lot of play in the abstract...

...Has culture acquired the significance of a cough...

...A New York Times story about a company that makes preppy clothes for a predominantly black clientele paraphrases the owner, Charles Walker Jr., to the effect that Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger "didn't make clothes that reflected blacks' lifestyles or culture,'' and adds that the new line of gear "allows the wearer both to dress in preppy style and to express cultural pride...

...The Zulus say their "cultural weapons" should be exempt from bans that apply to other weapons...

...and simultaneously asserting that some values transcend cultures...

...Meanwhile the news from South Africa includes a controversy about whether Zulus should be free to carry such "cultural weapons" as spears and machetes in political demonstrations...

...In Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1949), T.S...

...To deprive Zulus of their spears is to attack their culture...

...While such books as Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism and Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaintemploy culture in one of its familiar meanings...

...Much current journalistic use of the term has to do with the intermediate "cultures" that Eliot mentions...

...But American life in the late 20th century is much too fluid and mixed for ancestral cultures to persist in any pure form...

...It would be folly for such a society either to resist the continuing enrichment of its heritage from a plurality of old and new sources, or to delude itself with the romantic notion of abiding multiple cultures that can be preserved like fossils in a museum...

...In that case, the author obviously thinks it should be, as do those writers who complain about the "cultures" of the Pentagon, the Navy, Congress...

...The "cultural demand for heterosexuality" carries deeper implications and brings us to the point where the concept of culture becomes ideological and controversial...

...Culture in the narrow sense of the word??the arts and their intellectual context??derived in turn from this total way of life...

...makes opera a special art form...

...Suppressing dissidents, the argument went, may violate European and American norms, but the ancient civilizations of the East are entitled to follow their own cultural traditions...

...The same day, book reviewer William Connolly refers to "the cultural demand for heterosexuality," while David McClintick describes "the seemingly intractable clash of cultures between Warner and Time" when they merged...

...In these partly anthropological, partly ethical senses, Western or white male heterosexual "culture" is often attacked today from the first perspective (as a collection of prejudices to be overcome), while non-Western or minority "culture" is often defended from the second (as a folk inheritance that should be immune to criticism...

...Likewise, if heterosexuality is a "cultural demand," it is not a matter of biology, merely of prejudice, and can be changed...

...There is nothing inherently contradictory about appreciating the value of non-Western cultures??believing, for example, that some of the achievements of Indian philosophy or Japanese landscape architecture are unequaled in the West...

...otherwise their culture is being discriminated against...

...worth some attention...

...At the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights last year, China, Iraq and other Asian dictatorships contended that Western complaints about human rights represented a form of cultural imperialism...

...David Remnick writes in the New Yorker that, according to Boris Yeltsin, Russia needs "a new economic culture...

...The word culture has been lazily accepted into these contexts partly because it inflates the phenomenon in question, but mostly because it's there, a buzzword that everyone uses because everyone uses it...

...Here is a phenomenon??inevitably one has to call it a cultural phenomenon...

...On the other hand, "culture" can equally be an excuse, a rhetorical device to place some taste or practice beyond criticism...

...Eliot observed usefully that "The term culture has different associations according to whether we have in mind the development of an individual, of a group or class, or of a whole society...

...Not surprisingly the Clinton Administration has a "political culture" of its own, according to the environmental economist Michael Silverstein...

...Few American multiculturalists are enthusiastic about the treatment of women in Saudi Arabian culture (the fact that they are not allowed to drive led to outrage in the media during the Gulf War), and female circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa has lately illuminated another boundary of cultural relativism in the West...

...The latest edition contains two full tiny-type columns of works entitled The Culture of Biomedicine, The Cultureof Capitalism, The Culture of Childhood...

...Between the whole way of life of a people and the artistic expressions of a highly cultured individual, there were the intermediate subcultures of classes or groups within the society...

...As these examples suggest, the term has come to be used indiscriminately for the very large ("Western culture"), the very small (the "culture" of Warner), and the merely silly ("the culture of booing...

...Well, yes and no...

...Cultural" is not used here with the implication that carrying spears is a vestige of less enlightened times and should be discontinued...

...First, whatever is cultural is presumed not to be biologically determined, despite the occasional sloppy equation of culture with race...

...Cultural determinism is an entrenched academic doctrine in the humanities and social sciences, popularized by such widely read anthropologists as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict...

...Former Congressman Vin Weber says of Minority Whip Newt Gingrich's recent doings in the House, "He's been slowly transforming the culture...

...the way of life of a nation or society"??what is one to say about The Culture of Policy Deliberations or The Culture of the State Mental Hospital...

...It is clear that in a majority of the above quotations a more specific word would convey the intended meaning better...

...Back in South Africa, Times correspondent Bill Keller assures us that the large Zion Church has a "culture of nonviolence, hard work and respect for authority" that will be an asset as the country tries to become a successful, in fact a multicultural, democracy...

...GQ declares that "the culture of booing...