What is Culture?
Culture has always generated controversy for its innate ability to elude any exact meaning. What is culture? Anthropologists have strived to explain and define culture, but as always conflicting ideas arose. An anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, and philosopher, Matthew Arnold, tried to give meaning to culture. With little more than a century between the two thinkers, each person held different definitions of culture. Clifford Geertz has identified culture as "the total way of life of a people." According to Geertz, culture is inhe
In seeing into both Geertz's and Arnold's opinions of culture, we can clearly draw a line between the thinkers. Matthew Arnold's view of culture is focused heavily on the ideal that culture was "contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world. Accordingly, culture was the creation of "beauty", "intelligence", and "perfection" in which only the best could be labeled such. rited, attained and taught from a people like a "storehouse of pooled learning. " Moreover, Arnold assigned characteristics to culture. With a century spanning the two, the drift from "Arnoldian conception of culture" to Geertz's view of culture displays the shift in what culture really was. On the other hand, someone of beauty and perfection was cultured in Arnold's eyes. Geertz saw culture as the way people lived, while Arnold saw culture as a compilation of beauty, intelligence, and perfection. While Arnold focused culture to be a specific thing that only few attained, Geertz claimed that culture can be found in each and every person. " As an anthropologist, Geertz sought not to prove what culture was, but to explain what culture is. More importantly, the two explained culture to be completely different. Culture has never held any permanent meaning and has therefore shifted and changed through centuries. One whom mastered a language such a Greek was certainly not cultured to the opinions of Arnold. Culture as explained by Clifford Geertz and Matthew Arnold shows the ever changing view of culture.
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