What is Culture?

“Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.”

This quote by Malcolm Bradbury is the best way to initiate you to the module on Culture and Media.

In the upcoming video, Dr Ritu Sen will explain to you the concept of culture in detail.

In this video, you learnt about the different definitions of culture as put forth by various theorists such as Jesse Prinz, C. Geertz and D. Sperber.

You also understood the difference between culture and a fad. Culture is long-lasting and widely distributed, whereas a fad is an activity, style, object or idea that quickly becomes very popular and is short-lived.

Now, let's understand from where the word culture has been derived: its etymology or roots. Watch the following video to learn more about this.

In this video, you learnt about the history of the word culture as discussed in the following books by renowned theorists: 

• Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869)
• Raymond William’s Culture and Society (1958)

Matthew Arnold presented the 19th-century Western interpretation of culture by differentiating between a cultured and uncultured person. On the other hand, Raymond Williams outlined the three general categories while defining culture, namely, ideal, documentary and social.

In the following video, you will learn about the idea of multiculturalism propagated by the renowned cultural theorist Stuart Hall.

In the above video, you learnt about multiculturalism, which refers to the coexistence of different cultures.

As defined by Eagan Jennifer, "Multiculturalism, the view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgement of their differences within a dominant political culture.”

Dr Sen also elaborated on the ideas of the following three significant postmodernist thinkers:

• Jean Francois Lyotard (challenging metanarratives)
• Jean Baudrillard (creation of simulated reality)
• Fredrich Jameson (Multinational capitalism and consumerism)

In the next segment, you will learn about the constituents of culture.