[A] 4

What is culture? What does it do? What should it do?

[B]Introduction
The concept of culture is deeply contested. Between 1920 and 1950 alone, at least one
hundred and fifty seven definitions were presented (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952,
149). Having undergone dramatic transformation over the course of at least two
centuries, the notion of culture is ubiquitous in political discourse yet conceptually
elusive. Core debates revolve around the content of culture, its relationship to society
and civilization as well as its function and role in the human condition. Having
deliberately dealt vaguely with the term thus far, the aim of this chapter is to examine
three related questions: of what does culture consist?; what does culture do?, and what
should culture do? Using eudaimonia and the normative account of social goods
developed so far as reference points, I examine symbolic, functionalist and
structurationalist approaches to culture in order to develop an account suitable for
present analytical purposes. The account I develop is fairly sweeping and the
examination of the field somewhat cursory. However, consideration of the
relationship between the content of culture, its purpose, its association with society
and the wholeness of ‘cultures’ suffices to open up key concerns about its current
treatment by culturalists, in particular. The conclusions I draw, are that talk of
‘cultures’ should be replaced by talk of ‘culture’, with recognition of the mass of
complexities which enter into our cultural lives, that culture should serve particular
ends, that the culture of relevance to political discussion is that which shapes basic
institutions and that these institutions should be guided by three core values. In
essence, I defend a normative functionalist account in which culture should serve
certain ends. I begin by examining the history of the concept of culture.

[B] Background and history

Historically, the notion of culture was explicitly normative; representing, more often
that not, eighteenth and nineteenth-century understandings of socio-psychological
sophistication. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy epitomized this belief. Arnold
(1993, 190) held that culture is ‘a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to
know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and
said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free
thought upon our stock notions and habits’; ‘the culture we recommend is, above all,
an inward operation’. For Arnold (1993, 192), culture was a remedy to such human
failings as ‘the want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right
reason, the dislike of authority’. The goal of culture was, therefore, to overcome
barbarity and realize higher goods, such as intellectual conscience, reason and
deference to authority, encapsulated in a broad, neo-classical understanding of civility
and civilization. Culture became, therefore, associated with products which were seen
to embody these goods – classical music, opera, literature and haute cuisine.
Obviously, this idealized account of culture carried with it both ethnocentric
and elitist connotations. If it were restricted to elite, Western social circles, then the
vast majority of human beings were bereft of culture. In this sense, culture was
afforded a similar meaning and value to normative invocations of civilization seen in
the conflict between Hobbes’ defence of Leviathan and Rousseau’s affirmation of the

1
noble savage. The development of anthropology towards the end of the nineteenth-
century checked this particular normative trend.
While anthropology’s antipathy towards this stance is now well established,
the account of culture which was to form the basis for modern understandings was
actually part of a socio-evolutionary account of religion. In trying to explain the shift
from polytheism to monotheism, Edward Tylor suggested that culture amounted to
‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and
any other capabilities and habits acquired... as a member of society’ (Tylor 1871, 1).
This totalizing description of culture, which has long been employed in both academic
(see Malinowski) and non-academic circles, removed the explicit normative
dimension of the concept. By this definition, any member of any society has a culture,
with any normative discussion shifting from the presence to the content of culture.
While this was certainly a step forward, the totalizing nature of the definition proved
problematic, providing, in the first instance, too great a number of interpretations.
This is indicated, as Geertz (2000a, 4-5) notes, by Clyde Kluckhohn’s account of
culture as

(1) “the total way of life of a people”; (2) “the social legacy the individual
acquires from his group”; (3) “a way of thinking, feeling, and believing”; (4)
“an abstraction from behaviour”; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist
about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a “storehouse of
pooled learning”; (7) “a set of standardized orientations to recurrent
problems”; (8) “learned behaviour”; (9) a mechanism for the normative
regulation of behaviour; (10) “a set of techniques for adjusting both the
external environment and to other men”; (11) “a precipitate of history”; and
turning, perhaps in desperation, to similes, as a map, as a sieve, and as a
matrix.

These disparate definitions raise several concerns about Tylor’s account: firstly, that it
makes no distinction between mental and material processes; secondly, that it does
not ascribe a function, purpose or telos to culture; thirdly, that it does not distinguish
between the beliefs or behaviours of people within a society and the collective beliefs
and behaviours of that society, and fourthly, that it suggests that cultures are wholes.

[B] Meaning and ideas

According to Tylor, the idea, say, of wage labour, the behaviour or practice of factory
work and the products, cars, are each part of a holistic culture of laissez faire, Western
capitalism. Intuitively, this may be appealing. Each of these aspects is subject to
‘cultural’ variation and each of them is seen to be a defining characteristic of Western
culture – perhaps ‘economic’, ‘social’ and ‘material’ culture. Walter Taylor (1948)
sought, however, to challenge this intuition. For Taylor, culture is a ‘mental
phenomenon, consisting of the contents of minds, not of material objects or
observable behaviour’ (Taylor 1948, 96). Behaviour and produce are secondary and
tertiary phenomena, constituting physical enactments and objectifications of the
primary phenomenon of culture, which is both ‘unobservable and non-material’
(Taylor 1948, 100). This account has been challenged, in part, by those, such as
Geertz, who emphasize much more the intersubjective, visible shape of culture.
As noted in Chapter 1, throughout the twentieth-century, anthropologists were
drawn to the conclusion that culture is, in a very real way, meaning transmitted
through language, and that meaning differs so significantly from society to society

2
that, without understanding particular forms of meaning, it is impossible to
understand people. This is epitomized by Geertz’s (2000a, 5) notion of humans as
being ‘suspended in webs of significance’. This symbolic account of the human
condition holds that culture separates us as a species from other species and us as part
of a cultural group from those of a different group. Though of significance to certain
ethical approaches, such as Singer’s (see Singer 1975 and Singer and Cavalieri 1994)
utilitarianism, I shall not dwell on the first claim, except to say that there have been
invocations of culture in other species (see Laland and Hopitt 2003). Of more
importance, here, is the claim that culture in some way shapes us and separates us
from other humans. The point is articulated effectively by Ludwig Wittgenstein. For
Wittgenstein (2001, 190) some people

are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that
one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we
come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more,
even given a mastery of the country’s language. We do not understand the
people… We cannot find our feet with them… If a lion could talk, we could
not understand him.

In order to understand the lion or any group of enigmatic humans, we have to be party
to their set of meanings. Geertz (2000a, 6-7) deals with this through his account of
‘thick description’. In his example, three boys contract their eyelids, but for radically
different reasons, expressing radically different meanings intelligible only to those
with knowledge of the culturally specific nuances of blinking. He then demonstrates
the real world complexities of culture and its interpretation through his engagement
with the story of Cohen, a Jewish trader in the highlands of central Morocco during
French colonial expansion in 1912. Each of the participants, Cohen, the Berbers, and
the French enters into the conflict with particular codes. In order to understand the
confusion, Geertz (2000a, 9) argues that we have to sort

out the structures of signification… and [determine] their social ground and
import. Here,… such sorting would begin by distinguishing the three unlike
frames of interpretation ingredient in the situation, Jewish, Berber, and French,
and would then move on to show how (and why) at that time, in that place,
their copresence produced a situation in which systematic misunderstanding
reduced traditional form to social farce. What tripped Cohen up, and with him
the whole, ancient pattern of social and economic relationships within which
he functioned, was a confusion of tongues.

With regard to Taylor’s account of culture as mental phenomenon, Geertz is clear that
what is required is comprehension, which must always be social, rather than the more
automaton-like notion of internalization:

To say that culture consists of socially established structures of meaning in

terms of which people do such things as signal conspiracies and join them or
perceive insults and answer them, is no more to say that it is a psychological
phenomenon, a characteristic of someone’s mind, personality, cognitive
structure, or whatever, than to say that Tantrism, genetics, the progressive
form of the verb, the classification of wines, the Common Law, or the notion
of a “conditional curse” (as Westermarck defined the concept of “ar” in terms

3
 of which Cohen pressed his claim to damages) is. What, in a place like
Morocco, most prevents those of us who grew up winking other winks or
attending other sheep from grasping what people are up to is not ignorance as
to how cognition works (though, especially as, one assumes, it works the same
among them as it does among us, it would greatly help to have less of that too)
as a lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts
are signs. (Geertz 2000a, 13)

This account of culture as ‘interworked systems of construable signs’ means that

‘culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or
processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can
be intelligibly – that is, thickly – described’ (Geertz 2000a, 14). In this respect, it is
‘best seen not as complexes of concrete behaviour patterns – customs, usages,
traditions, habit clusters’, but ‘as a set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules,
instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) – for the governing of
behaviour (Geertz 2000a, 44).
This ‘control mechanism’ account of culture makes the claim that our thinking
is, fundamentally, social and public, produced by the words, ideas, symbols, noises
and images with which we are confronted in our daily existence. Culture is the
meaning placed upon experience – the means by which we orient and navigate
ourselves through events (Geertz 2000a, 45) – such that, the dysfunction of Cohen,
the Berbers and the French was the result of the different interpretative schema and
programmes of behaviour experienced and applied by the different parties. In this
respect, we can see Gray’s multiply realizable values as symbolic reference points
within which people navigate their social existence. This, though, begs the question of
why we need culture and why we develop different cultures.

[B] Purpose and function

The second ontological claim invoked by Geertz is the notion that the importance of
culture to humans lies in the evolution of the species.1 Returning to one of the key
topics in Chapter 1, for Geertz, humans lack the instinctual governing and focusing of
behaviour found in other species:

For man, what are innately given are extremely general response capacities,
which, although they make possible far greater plasticity, complexity, and, on
the scattered occasions when everything works as it should, effectiveness of
behaviour, leave it much less precisely regulated… Undirected by culture
patterns – organized systems of significant symbols – man’s behaviour would
be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding
emotions, his experience virtually shapeless. Culture, the accumulated totality
of such patterns, is not just an ornament of human existence but – the principal
basis of its specificity – an essential condition for it. (Geertz 2000a, 45-46)

This position is, I suppose, supported by the various examples of ‘feral

children’ who, finding themselves without meaningful human company, fail to
develop linguistically and often adopt the behaviour of other species within their
environment. From this, Geertz (2000a, 50) argues that humans without culture would
not recognizably be human – that being Icelandic or Aztec or Roman is an essential
precondition of being human – and that culture is the key determinant in human
behaviour, such that ‘men build dams or shelters, locate food, organize their social

4
groups, or find sexual partners under the guidance of instructions encoded in flow
charts and blueprints, hunting lore, moral systems and aesthetic judgments:
conceptual structures moulding formless talents’. While Geertz emphasizes, more
clearly, the definitional role of the particular than the universal in outlining his
account of the distinctive feature of the species, there remain implicit features which
are compatible with the thread developed thus far in the eudaimonic account of
wellbeing and the normative theory of social goods. In particular, there is the notion
that culture, itself, is a means by which humans realize their intrinsic features:

When seen as a set of symbolic devices for controlling behaviour,

extrasomatic sources of information, culture provides the link between what
men are intrinsically capable of becoming and what they actually, one by one,
in fact become. Becoming human is becoming individual, and we become
individual under the guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems
of meaning in terms of which we give form, order, point, and direction to our
lives. And the cultural patterns involved are not general but specific – not just
“marriage” but a particular set of notions about what men and women are like,
how spouses should treat one another, or who should properly marry whom;
not just “religion” but belief in the wheel of karma, the observance of a month
of fasting, or the practice of cattle sacrifice. Man is to be defined neither by his
innate capacities alone, as the Enlightenment sought to do, nor by his actual
behaviours alone, as much of contemporary social science seeks to do, but
rather by the link between them, by the way in which the first is transformed
into the second, his generic potentialities focused into his specific
performances. It is in man’s career, in its characteristic course, that we discern,
however simply, his nature, and though culture is but one element in
determining that course, it is hardly the least important. As culture shaped us
as a single species – and is no doubt still shaping us – so too it shapes us as
separate individuals. This, neither an unchanging subcultural self nor an
established cross-cultural consensus, is what we really have in common.
(Geertz 2000a, 52)

This is in keeping with Gray’s notion of culture as the realization of value and
wellbeing and, at least in part, with the notion, outlined in the capabilities approach,
of the essential part played by society in the development of our most distinctive
features. While there is certainly scope for individual differences explicable through
neurological and genetic diversity, it seems reasonable to suggest that, as humans, it is
our social life which gives great substance to the shape we take as particular human
beings. While this may appear to grant support to anti-foundationalist attempts to
disavow the possibility of any evaluation of culture, examination of the reasons for
our need for culture leads us back to evaluative possibility.
For Geertz (2000a, 49), echoing Gray’s concern for adaptation to
circumstance, culture played an integral role in enabling humans to deal with a
number of problems in a number of environments. Unlike many other species, human
beings are able to exist in a great multitude of environments due to their capacity to
shift from genetic to cultural means of adaptation and alloplasty. As Norbert Elias
(1978b, 108-109) puts it, ‘Animals of the same species always form societies of the
same type, except for very slight local variations… Human societies on the other hand
can change without any change occurring in the species – that is, in the biological
constitution of man’: Human ‘“Behaviour” means adjustment to changing situations’.

5
What is implied is that humans have a set of innate needs, requirements or capabilities
which must be satisfied or realized in order for the species to exist. Culture enables us
to satisfy these in different circumstances.
A crude account of this notion has typically been associated with functionalist
analysis. According to Malinowski, for example, functionalist enquiries are attempts
‘to define the relation between a cultural performance and a human need – For
function can not be defined in any other way than the satisfaction of a need by an
activity in which humans cooperate, use artefacts, and consume goods’ (Malinowski
1944, 38-39). This view takes, at its starting point, not irreducible diversity, as in anti-
foundationalism but, what are seen to be, objective human categories. This suggests
that Geertz’s emphasis on difference and unintelligibility masks a significant aspect of
the human condition, in which, beneath diversity lies ‘a vast apparatus, partly
material, partly human and partly spiritual, by which man is able to cope with the
concrete, specific problems that face him’ (Malinowski 1944, 36). While humans,
unlike other species, have few specific, instinctual responses to environmental
pressures, the general response capacities and the pressing biological needs which
remain, lead humans to broad categories of action. As Malinowski (1944, 36-38) puts
it,

Human beings are an animal species… subject to elemental conditions which

have to be fulfilled so that individuals may survive, the race continue and
organisms one and all be maintained in working order… [Man] has to create
arrangements and carry out activities for feeding, heating, housing, clothing,
or protection from cold, wind, and weather. He has to protect himself and
organize for such protection against external enemies and dangers, physical,
animal, or human. All these primary problems of human beings are solved for
the individual by artefacts, organization into cooperative groups, and also by
the development of knowledge, a sense of value and ethics… In order to
achieve any purpose, reach any end, human beings have to organize…
[Organization] implies a very definite scheme or structure, the main factors of
which are universal in that they are applicable to all organized groups, which
again, in their typical form, are universal throughout mankind. (Malinowski
1944, 37-38)

This means that functionalism is focused on an institutional understanding of

culture, with analysis directed towards the specific forms in which universal social
means of satisfying needs are realized. Through this method, institutions are seen to
be organizations for the collective pursuit of some socially agreed upon purpose in
some socially agreed upon manner. Prima facie, this ties in neatly with the notion,
outlined in the previous two chapters, that human beings are fundamentally social and
have needs which can only be satisfied socially. The belief, here, is that culture is the
means by which humans satisfy their needs in specific circumstances, constituting ‘an
integral composed of partly autonomous, partly co-ordinated institutions’, ‘integrated
on a series of principles such as the community of blood through procreation; the
contiguity in space related to cooperation; the specialization in activities; and last but
not least, the use of power in political organization’, in which ‘Each culture owes its
completeness and self-sufficiency to the fact that it satisfies the whole range of basic,
instrumental and integrative needs’ (Malinowski 1944, 40). In order to understand ‘a
culture’, we have first to analyse, interpret and categorize its institutions and the ways
in which it responds to needs.

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 In dealing with these institutions, Malinowski (1944, 91) begins by outlining a
series of putative basic needs and necessary cultural responses: 1) Metabolism and
Commissariat; 2) Reproduction and Kinship; 3) Bodily Comforts and Shelter; 4)
Safety and Protection; 5) Movement and Activities; 6) Growth and Training, and 7)
Health and Hygiene. The cultural responses are social in nature and are seen as
meeting specific needs. So long as a culture is not ‘on the point of breaking down or
completely disrupted,… we find that need and response are directly related and tuned
up to each other’. People ‘under their conditions of culture wake up with their
morning appetite ready, and also with a breakfast waiting for them or else ready to be
prepared. Both appetite and its satisfaction occur simultaneously’ (Malinowski 1944,
94).
While the notion of culture as a means of promoting fundamental human
interests is appealing, functionalism of the sort developed by Malinowski is extremely
problematic. There is, of course, the issue of identifying and defining accurately
genuine needs at both a biological and social level (see Malinowski 1944, 93), while
the claim that the nature of certain responses to particular needs is uniform is putative
– Malinowski’s (1944, 95) belief, that ‘in any society the act of eating happens within
a definite institution’ and place, being indicative. Perhaps the most significant risk,
analytically, is the assumption that institutions serve some fundamental human end of
importance to each human being. As Sen and Nussbaum have suggested, there are
many cases in which this assumption is false, with certain cultural forms serving
particular, pernicious ends. There is the danger, simply, that functionalist analysis can
be circular, leading to misleading and unfalsifiable accounts of particular institutions
which may actually undermine, say, the satisfaction of needs. Moreover, in
Malinowski’s case, there is simultaneously a neglect of the co-ordinating, explicative
features of culture highlighted by Geertz, and a treatment of ‘cultures’ as integrated,
self-sufficient, almost isolable wholes.
One attempt to deal with elements of these issues is apparent in the shift from
the functionalism of Malinowski into the structural-functionalism of the likes of
Talcott Parsons. In approaches such as this, the focus lies not on the biological but on
the social function of institutions. By this, societies are analogous to individual human
beings, requiring their own stability, equilibrium and self-perpetuation, pursuing
interests which may or may not correspond to those of specific people (Giddens 1976,
127-128; see Durkheim 1993, 45). This view of society as an organism with
independent agency and reality was inherited, in part, from the work of Durkheim
(1981, 66; 1982, 129). Parsons (1982, 113-117), mirroring elements of Gray and
Maslow, believes that people appear to seek certainty of role, expectation and
function. This focus on identity and interaction places emphasis on the role of culture
as a mediator of goods, without specifying the nature or quality of those goods. These
assumptions are both conservative and organicist.
Without controls over ‘anti-social’ belief and behaviour, society is seen to face
the threat of unmanageable expectations and social discord.2 Whereas in my
discussion of zero-sum choices in Nussbaum, the ethical focus lay on the effect of
choices on actual human beings, here, the concern is for the constriction of behaviour
for the end of society as a body almost independent of people. 3 In Freud (Gay 1995,
686-687), of course, there is a clear tension between the atavistic elements of human
instinct and the need of people to live communally. In his The Future of an Illusion he
talks of civilization including

7
 on the one hand all the knowledge and capacity that men have acquired in
order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction
of human needs, and, on the other hand, all the regulations necessary in order
to adjust the relations of men to one another and especially the distribution of
the available wealth. The two trends of civilization are not independent of
each other: firstly, because the mutual relations of men are profoundly
influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth
makes possible; secondly, because an individual man can himself come to
function as wealth in relation to another one, in so far as the other person
makes use of his capacity for work, or chooses him as a sexual object; and
thirdly, moreover, because every individual is virtually an enemy of
civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human
interest. It is remarkable that, little as men are able to exist in isolation, they
should nevertheless feel as a heavy burden the sacrifices which civilization
expects of them in order to make a communal life possible. Thus civilization
has to be defended against the individual, and its regulations, institutions and
commands are directed to that task. They aim not only at effecting a certain
distribution of wealth but at maintaining that distribution; indeed, they have to
protect everything that contributes to the conquest of nature and the
production of wealth against men’s hostile impulses.4

There is some clear logic in this – we cannot do as we please if doing so means that
we cannot live together, since living together is a fundamental aspect of the human
condition. The danger of this sentiment, though, is that it is extended into a
justification for society as an objective good independent of the people within it. If the
perpetuation of society becomes the issue, then many more trade-offs can be
demanded: we might start by preventing people from burning holy books, however
perverse the scriptures may be, for the peace of a broader society; we might then
remove parts of people’s genitalia or enforce gender segregation so that society is
assured of the paternity of offspring, we might then decide that society would function
a lot better if we subjugate an entire race of people in order that disputes over labour
regulations are dismissed and society’s material needs fulfilled. This is one possible
problem with Gray’s almost organic account of flourishing societies. The analytical
focus on the sustenance of the whole can, as I suggested in the previous chapter, lead
to the harm of various elements of its parts.
The likes of Anthony Giddens (1981, 18) have responded to such issues by
suggesting that the notion that societies have needs is simply false, for ‘Not even the
most deeply sedimented institutional features of societies come about, persist, or
disappear because those societies need them to do so’. Rather, ‘They come about
historically, as a result of concrete conditions that have in every case to be directly
analysed; the same holds for their persistence or their dissolution’. Considering the
apparently dysfunctional operation of certain institutions, Giddens (1984, 296)
challenges the method by which functionalists seek to assess and explain cultural
forms, arguing that ‘the term “function” can be misleading because it suggests that the
“has to” refers to some sort of need that is a property of the social system, somehow
generating forces producing an appropriate (functional) response’. When thinking
about deficiencies, a functionalist analysis leaves two alternative explanations:
‘whatever happens does so as a result of social forces as inevitable as laws of nature’
or ‘Whatever happens does so because someone or other designed that it should’. ‘If
the former, the characteristic view of functionalism, is associated with not according

8
enough importance to intentional action, the second derives from failing to see that
the consequences of activities chronically escape their initiators’ (Giddens 1984, 297).
For Giddens, there is significant scope for individuals or groups to work within
structures and change structures for particular ends, without reference to foundational
interests, such as the satisfaction of basic needs. The functionalist approach has the
effect, therefore, of reifying culture by regarding its actions as teleological and
making intentional and rational what may be unintentional or irrational. Giddens’
structuration approach suggests that structures both constrain and enable human
action, meaning that conformity is largely fanciful (Mestrovic 1998, 47). This attack
on functionalism and its method is well summarized by Geertz in the following:

It is not difficult to relate some human institutions to what science (or

common sense) tells us are requirements for human existence, but it is very
much more difficult to state this relationship in an unequivocal form. Not only
does almost any institution serve a multiplicity of social, psychological, and
organic needs (so to say marriage is a mere reflex of the social need to
reproduce, or that dining customs are a reflex of metabolic necessities, is to
court parody), but there is no way to state in any precise and testable way the
interlevel relationships that are conceived to hold. (Geertz 2000a, 42-43)

While there is good reason, therefore, to reject the assumption that institutions are
intended to and do perform some foundational purpose and to treat carefully the
notion that society has a value independent of its effects on human beings, there
remains good reason to seek to reconcile Geertz’s account of culture as programmatic
control mechanism and the institutionalism of functionalism.
Put simply, living together creates problems (Goudsblom 1977, 137-138). As
a species, we deal with these problems through institutions which are, in essence,
cultural. Like capabilities, they do not exist independently of culture – they are
realized through culture and without culture they could not exist. Even Geertz, in
challenging functionalism and emphasizing the analytical importance of the
particular, rather than the universal, admits implicitly of a level of functionalism with
regard to institutions. While, in practice, those institutions may serve any number of
different ends and may or may not satisfy the basic needs identified by Malinowski,
without institutions, no society would be possible and, without society, no satisfaction
of need or development of eudaimonia. In order merely to survive, people need
control mechanisms ‘over what are usually called “natural events”’, ‘over what are
usually called “social relationships”’, and ‘over [the self by the] individual’ (Elias
1978b, 156). In this triad, ‘the first type of control corresponds to what is usually
known as technological development’; the ‘second type… to the development of
social organization’ and the third to the development of super-ego control
mechanisms (Elias 1978b, 157).5 Accordingly, to return to Geertz’s ‘control
mechanism’ account, people need controls over both circumstances and people (Elias
1978a, 201).
Given that the purpose of this monograph is to evaluate culture, the very fact
that these controls are often bent to pernicious ends means simply that functionalist
assumption is folly. While humans are fundamentally social, the need for society
should not be used to exploit, undermine or abuse certain people. Instead of assuming
that institutions are intended to satisfy some need or fulfil some social end, what is
required, instead, is examination of the extent to which culturally realized institutions
promote eudaimonic interests in given circumstances. This implies a normative

9
functionalism in which culture should promote people’s wellbeing, even though, in
practice, it often does not. The relevant site of analysis, here, remains institutional
insofar as it is institutions which are required in order for people to do and be well.
There should be no assumption that, in any given society, they are functional or that
the goods they produce are isolable. These institutions are needed to deal with the
perpetually emerging difficulties that people face in living collectively in often
changing circumstances. They are at least partly interdependent (see Max-Neef 1991,
16-17; 30-31), with the shape of one affecting the shape of others, and are isolable
only insofar as institutions of diverse genesis often co-exist. In this sense, to endorse
my reading of Gray in Chapter 1, the culture of relevance to this project is that which
shapes basic social institutions of the sort associated by Rawls (1971, 7) with the
‘basic structure’ of society.

[B] Seven basic social institutions

I accept that identifying basic social institutions is fraught with difficulty. There is,
inevitably, some form of derivational work by which I proceed circularly from human
wellbeing, through the notion of humans as fundamentally cultural, to the institutions
required for humans to do and be well. Each of the institutions is multiply realizable,
meaning that they can be organized in fundamentally different ways. I will come to
the parameters for multiple realizability in the next chapter. I begin by discussing the
institutional forms which we most often associate with culture: narration and social
interaction.

[C] Narration
Given our relative lack of instinct, we require knowledge of the means by which to
access, acquire and consume resources and predict, react and engage with natural
events (Maslow 1970, 39-43). A system of narration builds upon historical experience
to explain our relationship to the cosmos, and the possibilities and dangers that
activities pose. Without this, people are unable to pursue anything sustainably. 6
People need to know, for example, which resources are edible and which are not,
which water is potable and which is not. They need to know that boiling water burns
skin, falling great distances breaks bones and eating rotten food causes sickness.
As a species, humans seek to ground knowledge within an overall narrative,
seeking causal explanations for events and contingencies (Elias 1978a, 247) which
enables prediction, planning and control. These rules, and their explanation, differ
greatly from society to society, group to group. This is, in part, because circumstances
pose different challenges and questions for humans. The answers to those questions
must be relevant to ‘social conditions and experience’ (Elias 1978a, 244) to be of
instrumental and circumstantial value to, among other things, the satisfaction of
biological needs (Elster 1986, 23). While the explanations may differ, their purpose
and focus on causality remains the same. As Cupitt (2000, 10-11)7 puts it, there are
‘Structural similarities between the way traditional thought explains odd goings-on in
terms of the action of spirits and the way scientific thought seeks to explain the same
events in terms of the operation of impersonal laws’. Animism ‘is not intellectually
arbitrary; it is, after all, a quest for explanation. Once we have a good narrative
explanation, we will have a good chance of being able to take appropriate action’.8
Narration is realized as much in atheist as in deist, monotheist or polytheist forms.

[C] System of social interaction

10
In order for resources to be accumulated, distributed (see Altman 2011) and
exchanged and relationships pursued for eudaimonic ends, people need forums and
networks guided by sets of established terms through which to interact with one
another. We must be able, for example, to make claims for food from others and to
find companions and reproductive partners through an intelligible system of
engagement. A system of social interaction enables us normatively to navigate
through life, pursuing various interests and ends. By shaping, along with narration,
social identity, it provides relational reference points, helping us to predict the
consequences of our social actions. Although this can often lead to various forms of
strife, both within and between groups, without an established and acknowledged
system of social interaction there can be little productive activity, not due simply to
the absence of some Hobbesian central authority but, rather, because of the inability
of people to engage with one another on mutually acceptable and intelligible terms.
For Hume, it is because people are self-interested maximizers, who wish to satisfy
their needs and wants, that they recognize the advantages, and take steps towards the
advancement, of society and sociality (Hume 1998, 28-32):

This can be done after no other manner, than by a convention enter’d into by
all the members of the society to bestow stability on the possession of those
external goods, and leave every one in the peaceable enjoyment of what he
may acquire by his fortune and industry… Instead of departing from our own
interest, or from that of our nearest friends, by abstaining from the possessions
of others, we cannot better consul both these interests, than by such a
convention; because it is by that means we maintain society, which is so
necessary to their well-being and subsistence, as well as to our own. (Hume
1969, 541)

Placing aside the atavistic underpinnings of Hobbes’ and Hume’s accounts of human
nature, there is a need more generally for a normative system in which people are
provided with understanding and expectation of the entitlements, duties and statuses
of people in order to structure their relationships with others. In this sense, the system
of social interaction subsumes, and is required to inform, aspects of each of the other
basic social institutions, directing, for example, productive activities.

[C] The mode of production

Given the naturalistic focus on need, humans require a mode of production. By mode
of production, I mean the physical (i.e. technological) means of, and the human
resources, relationships and roles involved in, extracting and producing materials (see,
for example, Marx and Engels 1974, 47-51; Marx 1973, 706). Without a mode of
acquiring the materials by which to satisfy biological need, no society could function
– people would simply starve, dehydrate and suffer from hypo or hyperthermia. The
notion of a ‘mode’ of production implies multiple realizability. As Marx (1976, 472)
puts it, ‘Different communities find different means of production and different means
of subsistence in their natural environment. Hence their modes of production and
living, as well as their products, are different’. 9 Empirically, there exist today, among
other forms, hunter-gatherer, slave, feudal, industrial and post-industrial modes of
production. Although each looks radically different in operation and each may
perform a number of other functions, the point of importance is that they should
create the material goods to satisfy needs (see Max-Neef 1991, 18). As Jones (1994,
154-155) puts it:

11
 Certainly needs may change in character and even become more demanding of
resources, without that necessarily signalling a shift in our underlying notion
of basic need. For example, to live I need to eat; to eat I need money and to
gain money I need to work; to work in a developed society, I may need a car;
but, in this case, the shift to needing a car is simply a shift in a ‘derivative’
need which ultimately connects back to a constant and universal human need –
the need to eat… Changes in need may therefore be circumstantial rather than
fundamental.

Accordingly, a need for a mode of production means a need for the components of the
mode of production – the mechanical and human resources which are essential to the
maintenance of life.

[C] Legal-political system

In order for institutions to be developed, regulated and changed, there must be a legal-
political system. It is the means by which, in part, the basic social institutions are
directed and their principles, particularly of justice, upheld. Traditionally, the likes of
Hume (1998, 28) have regarded the administration of justice as a prudential need,
arguing that ‘Man, born in a family is compelled to maintain society from necessity,
from natural inclination, and from habit’, establishing ‘political society, in order to
administer justice, without which there can be no peace among them, nor safety, nor
mutual intercourse’. For Hume, almost like Hobbes, it is an awareness of the general
capacity of humans to pursue short-term desires through forceful dispossession which
leads humans to recognize the need for law. Legal-political systems are means of
mediating and protecting interests (see Elias 1978b, 156).10 The scope of the legal-
political system can extend beyond the society’s boundaries and the reconciliation of
internal interests. People need the institution to direct the security forces in relations
with potentially aggressive external agents and to oversee trade and other activities
during peaceful times. Obviously, the legal-political system need not take Hobbesian
or ‘Western’ forms. It need neither be centralized nor ubiquitous. 11 Indeed, given the
content of the previous chapters, such forms seem actively unappealing in many
circumstances due to their effect on social goods.

[C] System of security

Without security from social and environmental contingency (either from within the
society or from without), the capacity for wellbeing is much diminished. It is simply a
Hobbesian truism that the chaos of a society such as that of contemporary Somalia is
dysfunctional. In a sense, ‘society’ in a country like Somalia is bereft of a raison
d’être, actively undermining, rather than aiding, eudaimonic processes. In Hobbes’
state of nature, of course, the system of security is grounded in the development of
central authority (see Hobbes 1985, 192, esp. 228), 12 in which the Leviathan secures
society through the threat of, and monopoly on, the use of violent coercion (Hobbes
1985, 190-192, 227) and the resistance of external penetration (Hobbes 1985, 388-
394). This is not to say that police states are of fundamental importance, however –
indeed, they are often as likely to undermine personal security through their
predilection for arbitrariness. What is needed is a system which preserves stable living
conditions while minimizing the capacity for domination. While Hobbes presents a
particularly stark account of the need for security, there seem, throughout history, to
have been few societies without some means of defence against contingency. Some

12
societies have used diplomatic, relational or economic means to procure security.
Some countries, such as Costa Rica and Grenada, for example, have even abolished
their standing armies. Even this, however, can be seen as a security strategy, with
such societies seeking the protection of more powerful states, having deemed use of
their own armies too expensive or too problematic.

[C] System of healthcare

Illness and injury pose an obvious obstacle to human wellbeing. As most people
encounter illness or injury of some sort during the course of their lives, a system of
healthcare is essential to human interests. Healthcare is important socially since the
fundamental interdependence of humans means that the effects of illness and injury
are seldom restricted to the immediate sufferer. Weigner and Akuri (2007, 52-53), for
example, illustrate the effect of ill-health of Cameroonian women on the productive
process, the satisfaction of the biological needs of their children and social life in
general.
Every system of healthcare is associated with a particular form of narration
and social interaction, though this does not mean that its beneficiaries hold either
cultural form. As an institution, it combines an account of the sources of health and
ill-health with a series of remedial or surgical practices by which illness and injury are
treated. While there is evidence to suggest that human physical health can be
influenced by socio-psychological factors, such as the placebo effect (in addition to
peer-pressure to engage in deleterious activities), which lends credence to the claims
of constructivism, Gray (2004, 104; 2004b, 17-18)13 seems justified in asserting the
foundational nature of medicine. Some treatments work independently of cultural
constitution, while the sporadic success of others may be due to collective belief in
remedial benefits. Prior to over-prescription, particular antibiotics, for example, were
able to treat specific infections in any given society. Blood letting and mercury
potions were, on the other hand, ineffective in all societies, save for their effect as
placebos. As in the case of Sittala Devi, as knowledge of physiology, pathology,
injury, medicine and surgery, and the resources with which to employ such
knowledge, increases, so too does the capacity for physical wellbeing. However, this
may not wholly be related to the capacity for psychological or emotional wellbeing,
the sources of which may be ignored by certain healthcare systems. The scope of
healthcare can be broad, dealing not solely with immediate physical threats to life, but
also with psychological and interpersonal problems (see Ozar 1983). It is in this
respect that various traditional health systems, such as those associated with belief in
the socio-spiritual foundation for illness, conflate physical and social sources of harm.
While there are indeed social sources of ill-health which require social means of
resolution, those systems which neglect or reject verifiable physiological sources of
harm are unlikely to be best placed to promote people’s interests.

[C] System of education

Education performs two interrelated functions: it reproduces the social world and
provides the basis for the development of people’s capabilities, specifically with
regard to practical reason. While we all, in our daily lives, learn from an extremely
young age from mere observation and participation, education as an institution is
directed specifically at training, self-development, and maturation. Recognizing the
fundamental interdependence of humans, people need different and specific forms of
education in order to identify avenues by which to do and be well (see Elias 1978a,
247-248; Mennell 1996, 105). This knowledge must be of some relevance to the

13
particular society, basic social institutions and circumstances in which people find
themselves. Often, basic needs and development theorists have ignored the
importance of specificity in education. While development theorists, such as Streeten
et al (1981, 3), regard education as a ‘basic need’ alongside ‘adequate standards of
nutrition, health, shelter, water and sanitation… and other essentials’ (Streeten et al
1981, 3), they often refer to a Victorian, classroom form of education focused
pedagogically upon literacy and numeracy. Literacy and numeracy are seen,
normatively, to constitute the basis of any adequate form of education. However, the
promotion of this system of education in developing nations by development theorists
may mark a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of education. While
education is essential to the promotion of practical reason, an abstract series of lessons
may do little to enable people to flourish. Practical reason is practical because of its
relevance to everyday existence. As such, vocational, participatory education systems
perhaps comparable with apprenticeship may often be much more useful than those
promoted by certain development theorists and agents.14

[B] Wholes, integration and the relationship between society and culture
One of the key problems which an institutional account of culture can remedy is the
notion of wholeness. It is all too common to talk of ‘cultures’ as isolable, identifiable,
genetically distinct actors synonymous with societies or groups. A vague culturalist
tendency can lead, sometimes, to the thought that cultures which are more
homogenous are, in some way, more effective or pure since they provide for people
more stable, secure and predictable paths through life. Such an intuition is apparent in
the following passage from Ruth Benedict (1989, 46):

The significance of cultural behaviour is not exhausted when we have clearly

understood that it is local and man-made and hugely variable. It tends to be
integrated. A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of
thought and action. Within each culture there come into being characteristic
purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society. In obedience to their
purposes, each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in
proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogeneous items of behaviour
take more and more congruous shape. Taken up by a well-integrated culture,
the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its particular goals, often by
the most unlikely metamorphoses.

In terms of certain needs theories, without the integration of institutions, the

satisfaction of biological needs, and whichever other interests humans may have, will
suffer (see Kamenetzky 1992, 194). An institutional focus combined with Geertz’s
notion of culture as programmatic context rejects this notion.
Each of the institutions provides a context within which people develop.
Often, the genesis of each of the institutions is diverse, meaning that the relationship
between society and culture is far from fixed. Throughout history, people have
developed with narratives and systems of social interaction of different geneses to
their mode of production or legal-political system. This is not always associated with
imperial or colonial societies. People, through inter-group trade, have to develop
shared forms of existence which accommodate difference, harking back to Gray’s
defence of modus vivendi. To give one recent example, Coptic Christians can, at
various points in their life, proceed through a Christian system of narration, an Islamic
system of social interaction, a capitalist mode of production, a legal–political system

14
combining elements of representative democracy and Islamic jurisprudence, an
autocratic system of security, a scientific system of healthcare, and a Victorian system
of education. Institutions can reach beyond societal boundaries, meaning that people
divided by geography can share cultural contexts of ‘alien’ genesis.
Increasingly, we live within many different contexts, deploying the cultural
resources we accumulate in each to pursue our ends. In a sense, there are similarities
to Chandran Kukathas’ archipelago, in which we live within a range of associations
and institutions either simultaneously or in different parts of our lives (Kukathas
2003, 265). While it may be true that it is our identity derived from our narrative and
system of social interaction which may be of importance in shaping the conscience by
which we approach other institutions (Kukathas 2003, 71), it is misleading to say that
a person’s culture can be reduced to the particular way in which those institutions are
realized or the way in which that person engages with those contexts to develop their
particular form of identity. In a sense, ownership, putative or otherwise, is less
relevant than the effects of each of the different culturally realized institutions on
wellbeing. An identity can provide for us goods associated with love and esteem, but
it can also deprive us of those very goods by cutting us off from others. Restricting
analysis, either to ‘external’ forces with which people do not identify, as in the case of
culturalism, or to ‘internal’ forces with which people do identify, as in chauvinist
approaches, is unhelpful. What is needed is assessment of the shape, relationship
between and effects of each of the institutions.
Of course, institutions which are utterly at odds with one another may create
serious obstacles to wellbeing. However, as Gray suggests, humans have a remarkable
capacity to work within different contexts to achieve certain ends – and not always in
a deleteriously instrumental fashion. Radically diverse peoples of the early Roman
Empire, for example, came together within the context of a broadly similar,
overarching legal-political and security system, each pursuing different ends in
different ways. So long as those systems were not fundamentalist and so long as
people did not have aspirations shaped in fundamentalist contexts, the vast diversity
of institutions provided people with opportunities for wellbeing that would otherwise
not have been available. Indeed, within the overarching context of the legal-political
system emerged smaller, group-specific legal-political systems, in which context
existed within context. While this is in no way to endorse the harms of slavery, war
and punitive suppression which marked various periods of the Empire’s history or to
endorse abstractly the value of contexts within contexts, it is to challenge the
assumption that wholly ‘integrated’, homogenous institutions are of intrinsic superior
value.
The notion of working within contexts also lends some prima facie credence
to Gray’s notion that the apparent rejection of particular institutions is, in fact, the
inward expression of them. Thinking, in particular of fundamentalist identity, it is
often the case that people’s attempt to secure ‘traditional’ or ‘pure’ cultural forms are,
actually, marked by the broader context of particular systems of social interaction and
modes of production which create space for existential entrepreneurship. In such
circumstances, people seeking to resolve contextual conflicts which pose obstacles to
wellbeing, such as deficits in safety and esteem due, say, to perceived inter-
civilizational angst or the inherited expectations of family and the failure adequately
to secure them in other institutions, actually approach problems in ways which are
marked by the context they themselves reject. The film, Four Lions, illustrates this
nicely, with various utterly ‘modern’ people pursuing a range of actions purportedly
inspired by idealized history, but conceived and conducted in very ‘English’ form.

15
While culture can be derived from different sources and societies exist with diverse
institutions, there are some features which would seem to be essential for eudaimonia.

[B] Core values

Working through from eudaimonia to social goods raises significant questions with
regard to Gray’s value pluralism and its relationship to diversity. I suggested, in
Chapter 1, that we might come to regard certain value sets as being essential to any
good life. The work in Chapters 2 and 3 supports this view. There are three values
which appear to be the pre-requisite of any good institution and of the basic structure
of any good society. In order to flourish, we need to recognize that we are social, we
need to be equal and we need to be free from domination or to have security.
Translating these goods into values, I suggest that solidarity, equality and non-
domination are three core values without which institutions will always be deficient.
Solidarity ensures that we recognize interdependence and the effect that we have on
one another. Equality ensures that we are recognized as moral agents with no more or
less need for or entitlement to eudaimonic pursuits. Non-domination ensures that our
interdependence is not abused and that we can pursue our flourishing without the fear
of arbitrary interference. These values can be realized as the value basis for each of
the institutions, with institutions of diverse geneses made more compatible by their
shared commitment to the core values, however else they may be programmed. By
this I mean that consensus on these values, though not necessarily their reconciliation
and realization, can form the basis for the co-existence of different institutions.
Returning to the notion of wholeness and integration, if a set of basic social
institutions is shaped by the core values, then its integration is good. If the integration
undermines the core values, then it is bad.
Berlin’s (2002) critique of positive liberty has, however, highlighted the ease
with which the value of equality, say, has been used to suppress negative forms of
liberty leading, in many historical cases, to the domination and elimination of people.
The history of revolutionary France demonstrates the clash between values of liberty,
equality and fraternity. However, there is reason to believe that solidarity, equality
and non-domination, although potentially in conflict, can be reconciled in different
ways to act broadly as guides for the promotion of eudaimonia through the basic
social institutions. Rather than compounding one another, they can act as checks and
balances, with non-domination inhibiting Stalinist economic models which appeal to
equality, equality inhibiting organic, exploitative hierarchies which appeal to
solidarity, and solidarity inhibiting crass libertarian systems which appeal to non-
domination. These values can be reconciled in a variety of ways, with other values co-
existing. Given the importance of these values to eudaimonic goods, they are of
universal application, ensuring that, whatever else a society does in its particular
circumstances, it does so in conformity with people’s eudaimonic interests. It is the
presence of these values which enable us to distinguish good culture from bad and to
penetrate the
Values are essential, here, since they are symbolic, suffusing the programming
of an institution, shaping a society and acting, effectively, as the pre-requisites of
successful realization of capabilities. I will return to the importance of values in the
next chapter.

[B] Summary
In this chapter, I have considered, cursorily, the content and purpose of culture. The
attempt to reconcile Geertz’s control mechanism and an institutional focus within a

16
normative functionalist approach is, no doubt, controversial and not without issues of
its own. However, for the purposes of this project, the notion of culturally realized
institutions is helpful insofar as it establishes the contexts within which eudaimonia is
developed. It affirms the notion of culture as our formative content and challenges the
popular invocation of ‘cultures’15 as distinct, isolable bodies in correspondence to
societies. This emphasizes the need to remember that, while we do things and are
things as culturally constituted beings, it is not culture, but unavoidably cultural
people, who act. The idea that culture is essential to adaptation and alloplasty is of
importance, not only in substantiating our cultural constitution, but also in placing us
in specific circumstances, identifying the specific challenges that we face in pursuing
wellbeing. Whatever challenges people face, they benefit from a culture imbued with
three core values: solidarity, equality and non-domination. In the next chapter, by
examining, finally, circumstance, I will explore two issues which are implicit in the
notion of culture developed above: change and dysfunction. This will enable the
integration of the eudaimonic account of the good, the normative theory of social
goods, the normative functionalist notion of culture and a ‘possibilist’ view of
circumstance into a theory of cultural evaluation capable of identifying and explaining
cultural deficits.

TY - CHAP
AU - Johnson, Matthew
PY - 2013/01/01
SP - 97
EP - 119
SN - 978-1-349-33376-9
T1 - What Is Culture? What Does It Do? What Should It Do?
DO - 10.1057/9781137313799_5
ER -

17
1
See Geertz’s 2000a, 45-49 account of the effect of culture on evolution and vice-versa.
2
See also, Olson (1965, 2) and Mennell (1989, 102-103).
3
See Edgerton (1965, 443).
4
It is perhaps worth noting Elias’ (1978b, 130) treatment of constraints with regard to civilization. While he rejects the
notion that the individual and society are necessarily antagonistic as well as different, he does argue that the process of the
institutionalization of constraints, whether positive or negative, is part of the process of civilization. By becoming more
civilized, humans have to make greater numbers of trades and accept greater and greater levels of internalized submission to
structure.
5
See also, Mennell (1989, 100) and Goudsblom (1977, 138).
6
See Maslow (1970, 48).
7
See further, Leaves (2005); Spong (1996).
8
See also, Midgley (2002).
9
See further, Redclift (1987); Tolman (1981); Lee (1980).
10
This, of course, coincides with Lasswell’s (1936) pronouncement that politics could be defined by the question, ‘Who
gets what, when and how’.
11
See Turner’s (1969, 98) example of the all encompassing ‘paramount chief among the Ndembu’ who, as the embodiment
of the legal-political system is responsible for almost every aspect of social life.
12
See further, Hampsher-Monk (2001, 23-29).
13
See Gray (1996, 131; 157-158; 1997, 173-174; 178; 2004a, 1-43; 103-119).
14
See Kenyatta (1965, 346-347) and, separately, Turner’s (1969, 103) example of the transmission of knowledge in
Nedembu society through initiation rites.
15
See Kroeber 1948, 261.