The fundamental problem is that culture is not just the “most complicated” word in English but perhaps the worst. We shouldn't blame this on academic incompetence. No singular definition has emerged since. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s 1950 work Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definition listed out over 150 definitions that were in circulation. Langness’ The Study of Culture, only to discover in the glossary: There is “no standard, commonly accepted definition.” To this point, anthropologists Alfred L. Some make a living in the “culture industry,” and an increasingly large number engage in “cultural politics.” Even with such ubiquity, no one quite knows how to exactly to define “culture.” Early into writing my new book Status and Culture, I naively thought I could lift a basic definition from L.L. We all communicate through culture and spend our leisure time on culture. I have become more aware of its difficulties, not less, as I have gone on.”īut the complexity of the word “culture” isn’t only problematic for anthropologists and sociologists. The Welsh literary critic and cultural theorist Raymond Williams battled Nazis during World War II as a tank commander, but his lifelong foe may have been a single unit of vocabulary: “culture.” Despite penning books like Culture and Society, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, and The Sociology of Culture, Williams called “culture,” “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” Towards the end of his life, he grew even more exasperated: “You know the number of times I’ve wished that I had never heard of the damned word. In the first part of a seven-part limited series, we examine the four main ways we use 'culture,' which may be the worst word in the English language

Ts eliot definition of culture