Matthew Arnold, Culture is "High Culture" 
From Culture and Anarchy, 1869

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was a preeminent poet of the Victorian era, a lifelong educator, a pioneer in the field of literary criticism, a government official (Inspector of Schools), and an influential public figure. But one of his most enduring legacies is his extensive body of writing on the topic of culture. Arnold saw high culture --"contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world"-- as the crucial component of a healthy democratic state.  Arnold's view of culture as involving such characteristicsas "beauty," "intelligence," and "perfection" is a Neoplatonic one tending to assume that these values exist in the abstract and are the same for all human societies. His argument, then, is openly political: he feels that if more people will share and pursue his notions of beauty, truth, and perfection --of culture-- that the world will be a better place. 

Raymond Williams argues that culture isn't just the "best that has been thought and said," but rather that "culture is ordinary" -- and with the anthropological perspectives of John Bodley and Clifford Geertz, which attempt to view culture more descriptively and to approach the study of human societies with an assumption that values, behaviors, and ideologies are different from people to people. Taken together, this group of excerpts illustrates the general move away from the Arnoldian conception of culture. 
 

"The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would consider all this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. 

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it, come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As in the first view of it [ie. the view associated with science/curiosity], we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words: "To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the second view of it [ie. Arnold's view], there is no better motto which it can have than 
these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God prevail!" 

The moment culture is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn about the universal order, but as the endeavor, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest."

John H. Bodley, An Anthropological Perspective 
From Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System, 1994

John H. Bodley is Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University. In this excerpt from his textbook on cultural anthropology, Bodley discusses the history of anthropological conceptions of culture. Bodley's own definition, similar in many ways to the baseline definition offered here, is a good example of contemporary anthropological views about culture; that is, it is descriptive, inclusive, and relativistic. Compare Bodley's definition with that of Matthew Arnold for perspective on the great transition which has taken place regarding the concept "culture" in Western thought over the past century; Raymond Williams's perspective might be taken as a middle ground  in this transition. An interesting comparison can be made, too, between anthropological arguments (like Bodley's and Geertz's) and the voices in the U.S. culture debate. 

"I use the term culture to refer collectively to a society and its way of life or in reference to human culture as a whole. The Modern technical definition of culture, as socially patterned human thought and behavior, was originally proposed by the nineteenth-century British anthropologist, Edward Tylor. This definition is an open-ended list, which has been extended considerably since Tylor first proposed it. Some researchers have attempted to create exhaustive universal lists of the content of culture, usually as guides for further research. Others have listed and mapped all the culture traits of particular geographic areas. 

The first inventory of cultural categories was undertaken in 1872 by a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was assisted by Tylor. The committee prepared an anthropological field manual that listed seventy-six culture topics, in no particular order, including such diverse items as cannibalism and language. The most exhaustive such list is the "Outline of Cultural Materials," first published in 1938 and still used as a guide for cataloging great masses of worldwide cultural data for cross-cultural surveys. Like the table of contents of a giant encyclopedia, the outline lists 79 major divisions and 637 subdivisions. For example, "Food Quest" is a major division with such subdivisions as collecting, hunting, and fishing. 

There has been considerable theoretical debate by anthropologists since Tylor over the most useful attributes that a technical concept of culture should stress. For example, in 1952 Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, American anthropologists, published a list of 160 different definitions of culture. Although simplified in the brief table below, their list indicates the diversity of the anthropological concept of culture. The specific culture concept that particular anthropologists work with is an important matter because it may influence the research problems they investigate, their methods and interpretations, and the positions they take on public policy issues. 
 

The shared aspect of culture means that it is a social phenomenon; idiosyncratic behavior is not cultural. Culture is learned, not biologically inherited, and involves arbitrarily assigned, symbolic meanings. For example, Americans are not born knowing that the color white means purity, and indeed this is not a universal cultural symbol. The human ability to assign arbitrary meaning to any object, behavior or condition makes people enormously creative and readily distinguishes culture from animal behavior. People can teach animals to respond to cultural symbols, but animals do not create their own symbols. Furthermore, animals have the capability of limited tool manufacture and use, but human tool use is extensive enough to rank as qualitatively different and human tools often carry heavy symbolic meanings. The symbolic element of human language, especially speech, is again a vast qualitative expansion over animal communication systems. Speech is infinitely more productive and allows people to communicate about things that are remote in time and space. 

The cross-generational aspect of culture has led some anthropologists, especially Kroeber (1917) and Leslie White (1949), to treat culture as a superorganic entity, existing beyond its individual human carriers. Individuals are born into and are shaped by a preexisting culture that continues to exist after they die. Kroeber and White argued that the influence that specific individuals might have over culture would itself be largely determined by culture. Thus, in a sense, culture exists as a different order of phenomena that can best be explained in terms of itself. 

Some researchers believe that such an extreme superorganic interpretation of culture is a dehumanizing denial of "free will," the human ability to create and change culture. They would argue that culture is merely an abstraction, not a real entity. This is a serious issue because treating culture as an abstraction may lead one to deny the basic human rights of small-scale societies and ethnic minorities to maintain their cultural heritage in the face of threats from dominant societies. I treat culture as an objective reality. I depart from the superorganic approach in that I insist that culture includes its human carriers. At the same time, people can be deprived of their culture against their will. Many humanistic anthropologists would agree that culture is an observable phenomenon, and a people's unique possession." 

Clifford Geertz, Emphasizing Interpretation 
From The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973

In attempting to lay out the various meanings attached to the word "culture," Clifford Geertz refers to the important 
anthropological work, Clyde Kluckhohn's Mirror for Man, in which the following meanings are suggested: 
 

"The concept of culture I espouse. . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after. . . ."

"sorting out the structures of signification. . . and determining their social ground and import. . . . Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct a reading of') a manuscript. . . . 
Once human behavior is seen as . . . symbolic action--action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies--the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense. The thing to ask [of actions] is what their import is"

Alice Walker  (1944-present) 
"In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"

"What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood. 

Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer's lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets, or the rain falling on the green and peaceful pasturelands? or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold away from her)--eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children--when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of rebellion, in stone or clay? 

How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist. Consider, if you can bear to imagine it, what might have been the result if singing, too, had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our "crazy," "Sainted" mothers and grandmothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short-Story Writers (over a period of centuries), who died with their real gifts stifled within them."

Raymond Williams, Moving from High Culture to Ordinary Culture 
Originally published in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions, 1958

Raymond Williams was an early pioneer in the field of "cultural studies" -- in fact, he was doing cultural studies before the term was even coined. This excerpt is from an essay Williams wrote in 1958, entitled "Culture is Ordinary." According to one of his editors, Williams here  "forced the first important shift into a new way of thinking  about the symbolic dimensions of our lives. Thus, 'culture' and specialist knowledge [eg. "high culture"] , into the  lived  experience of the everyday" (Gray and McGuigan 1). 
 

"Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind."