3.4 Two Approaches to Culture
Any discussion of multiculturalism must start with a clear understanding of what we mean by "culture" and what roles the humanities play in teaching our students about culture. A classic formulation of culture was offered by the philosopher and poet Matthew Arnold in his 1869 essay, "Culture and Anarchy." Arnold identified a core mission of humanities education:
The major challenge to the Arnold tradition comes from an anthropological perspective that sees culture as the "sum total of human experience." Aspects of our culture are communicated through every act and every artifact no matter how lowly. In this definition, all of us are part of the ongoing production of meaning, not simply by replicating the inherited wisdom of our culture but also by innovating and expressing new concepts through our active engagement with the world around us.
Educators were to assume the mantle of "great men [and women] of culture" whose passion for "diffusing" knowledge would ensure that "the best ideas of their time" would "prevail." Under Arnold, some aspects of human life—the most elevated or perfected aspects, those removed from immediate utilitarian value and from the harshness of a growing machine culture—were worth passing down to the next generation, while others were disposable. Those who embrace Arnold focus on the value they see as intrinsic to "great works,"while those who criticize the tradition focus on what it excludes–including most of what has been written by women, minorities, the developing world, as well as media and popular culture. When classic literary works, such as Moby-Dick, are adopted for the big screen, great effort is often made to ensure they preserve key passages of language (such as the Father Mapple sermon) that have been embedded in the culture over time. In his film version, director John Huston amplifies the significance of these moments through casting. Orson Welles was one of the most respected actors of the 20th century because of his innovative work in stage, radio, and cinema. His casting as Father Mapple gives the character prominence in the film, despite the fact that Welles appears on screen for only a short period of time.The men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light (Arnold 1882).
Finally, the film's script was written by the late Ray Bradbury, a writer noted for his celebration of the power of reading in Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fairenheit 451. Bradbury's novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, is a fictionalized account of his time working on the film. In this short video, produced for the National Endowment for the Arts, Ray Bradbury talks about his life-long fascination with reading.
Bradbury's account mixes references to authors that Arnold would have recognized as "great men of culture" with beloved creators of popular fiction such as L. Frank Baum and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Bradbury describes libraries as repositories of "great works" and as places where people live, work, and pursue their passions. This focus on our everyday use of libraries brings us much closer to the second sense of culture.
The major challenge to the Arnold tradition comes from an anthropological perspective that sees culture as the "sum total of human experience." Aspects of our culture are communicated through every act and every artifact no matter how lowly. In this definition, all of us are part of the ongoing production of meaning, not simply by replicating the inherited wisdom of our culture but also by innovating and expressing new concepts through our active engagement with the world around us.
The British literary and cultural critic Raymond Williams describes this alternative notion:
Your allegiance to preserving great ideas or adding to human culture has implications for how you teach reading. In the Arnold tradition, the individual reader is always inadequate before the greatness of serious literary works; teachers must "labor to divest" these works of their most difficult elements so that they may be grasped by their students. In the Williams tradition, new meanings emerge from the intersection between creative works and creative readers; both high culture and popular culture can be respected on their own terms. At its best, this democratic conception of culture is empowering, inviting us to take seriously the perspectives of those who might not otherwise enjoy a great deal of cultural authority. At its worst, it can be deeply limiting, encouraging us to read literary works as symptoms of something else rather than respecting the craftsmanship, creativity, and wisdom in literary works.
In Flows of Reading, as well as in Reading in a Participatory Culture, we start from very different assumptions—that the tools and insights of media and cultural studies can be meaningfully applied to works that are central to the Western tradition, allowing us new perspectives on how such texts operate in the culture. Classic works have much to contribute to our understanding of contemporary cultural practices. Students still need to grapple with complex texts in the process of acquiring the social skills and cultural competencies required for full participation in our own society.
Williams questions elite assumptions about culture, insisting on broadening the study of literature to include the study of popular culture. The tradition he helped to found, Birmingham Cultural Studies, sought to better understand how meaning gets produced in the context of our everyday lives, including the study of subcultures, reading practices, and participatory culture.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.... 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...The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind (Williams 2001).
Your allegiance to preserving great ideas or adding to human culture has implications for how you teach reading. In the Arnold tradition, the individual reader is always inadequate before the greatness of serious literary works; teachers must "labor to divest" these works of their most difficult elements so that they may be grasped by their students. In the Williams tradition, new meanings emerge from the intersection between creative works and creative readers; both high culture and popular culture can be respected on their own terms. At its best, this democratic conception of culture is empowering, inviting us to take seriously the perspectives of those who might not otherwise enjoy a great deal of cultural authority. At its worst, it can be deeply limiting, encouraging us to read literary works as symptoms of something else rather than respecting the craftsmanship, creativity, and wisdom in literary works.
In Flows of Reading, as well as in Reading in a Participatory Culture, we start from very different assumptions—that the tools and insights of media and cultural studies can be meaningfully applied to works that are central to the Western tradition, allowing us new perspectives on how such texts operate in the culture. Classic works have much to contribute to our understanding of contemporary cultural practices. Students still need to grapple with complex texts in the process of acquiring the social skills and cultural competencies required for full participation in our own society.
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