Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

I have to start with The Meaning of Culture by John Cowper Powys, because it explains something about my relationship to literature (and the other arts). Powys makes the point that the difference between education and culture is that culture is the incorporation of music, art, literature, and philosophy not just into your library or your CV but int

Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience. They are adaptive responses, just as feathers are for birds and fur is for mammals. Cultures prescribe norms, evolve goals, build beliefs that help us tackle the challenges of existence. In so doing they must rule out many alternative goal

A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour. Thus the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline and the appreciation of a g

Freud seemed to assume that culture could be seen as a bound whole, believing that there is such a thing as a culture. And because there is this singular culture, it can be jammed, disrupted, and replaced with its counter.