What are cultures and what are they for

I was invited to give the keynote address at the Global Round Table conference in Budapest, on the 21 October. The theme was “The sustainability of cultures”. This is a written and somewhat expanded version of what I had to say.


What do we mean by cultures exactly? The word has many, possibly too many meanings. So, for example, we speak of high culture, of popular culture, of corporate cultures or a specific set of rule-governed activity like safety culture. However, I am using it in the broadest sense, the one favoured by sociology and anthropology, namely a web of shared meanings, forms of collective knowledge, much of which is internalised and naturalised. This is the world of common sense, the propositions that we take for granted, and can be said to be apodictic.

What, then, are cultures for, what are they there to do? In simple terms, they make the world explicable and legible, they create cosmos out of chaos, establish an ordering. However, this is invariably a particular ordering, the world is too diverse, too charged with inputs for any culture to be able to integrate them all, hence a range of sensations will be screened out, will be excluded from view by the norms of the particular culture that we are looking at. By the same token, there is no single universal human culture, one that encompasses the entirety of the world. The Enlightenment legacy, on the other hand, made a universalist truth claim and asserted that there existed a single universal human reason; in reality this was the imposition of the thinking of a particular epoch in European thought and was diverse in itself (French Enlightenment, English, Scottish, Dutch etc.).

What a culture establishes is a moral order. It regulates right and wrong, lays down what attracts reward and what attracts punishment, it offers a model of the good life and establishes a complex web of obligations, rights and duties.

However, every culture will be affected by the phenomenon of occlusion. Certain meanings, certain propositions will be screened out, made dangerous or appear irrelevant. Similarly, aspects of other cultures will appear impenetrable to us or perplexing or repellent and vice-versa.

Cultures are sustained by a series of interlocking social mechanisms, the significance of which may be occluded. The myth-symbol complex is probably the most important of these. Every culture will have its supraspatial and supratemporal narratives of the collective self and collectively shared memory; these should not be confused with history, though they may well refer to historical events. Myth in this context is not to do with fabulation or the opposite of logos, an untruth, but refers to shared narratives.

The myth-symbol complex will be accompanied by collective rituals, which are a way of celebrating the collective self and are a means establishing solidarity without consensus; note that we are seldom fully conscious of the significance of this mechanism, though we can see those of other collectivities.

Every culture will have boundaries, boundary filters, boundary markers. These mark out the time and space that the collectivity has constructed and will ensure that external messages are interpreted and filtered in ways that the collectivity regards as usable or appropriate. Thus anniversaries, special days, vistas, buildings, artefacts can all fall into this category – these are not some kind of empty navel gazing, but are closely and causally linked to cultural reproduction. Institutions are established to act as frameworks for these meanings and to help sustain them.

Once a culture in the sense of web of meanings is brought into being, it is extremely difficult to erase it, but it can change and be changed, though this requires time. All cultures undergo a continuous metamorphosis, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, as new experiences – whether from the outside or the inside – impact on it; innovation, like technological change affects the way in which we decode meanings. All cultures seek to preserve the appearance of unchanging continuity

Finally, there is the transfer of meanings a continuous process that has accelerated in late modernity with the impact of globalisation. Thus every culture is involved in a continuous process of translation (in the widest sense), interpretation and in the screening out of “unwanted” elements. Those who do this have a special role, they are bearers of knowledge, the creators of value and at the same time as they are active in translating, they are also reconstructing the moral order and, therefore, are involved in moral legislation.

Without wanting to overestimate their role, it may be worth thinking about erecting a statue to the “unknown interpreter”, whose role is frequently underestimated, (a suggestion that was made once by Gyula Décsy).

Sch. Gy.