The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

culture

A term used in everyday speech as well as an ambiguous category of academic inquiry, “culture” has a history of contested meanings and usages. The term has been and continues to be used, in a humanistic sense, to refer to any complex of intellectual or aesthetic expression and learned behavior emerging from elite social circles as products of leisure and expressions of identity. Culture, in this sense, refers to a body of refined knowledge and cultivated education based largely on a sense of tradition and canon. Thus one can speak of the culture of the Abbasid court, for example, and intend by this phrase the generation, acquisition, cultivation, inheritance, and perpetuation of a system of learned behaviors (i.e., etiquette, ceremonies, hunting, protocol, patronage, etc.) as well as the products that participate in providing material expression for the very identities constructed through these processes of behavioral cultivation (i.e., patronizing the arts—music, calligraphy, painting, poetry, prose, dance, architecture, fashion, etc.). Often implicit in this conception of culture is the assumption of refinement and progress or increasing excellence; culture, so understood, is an ascendant vector of elite intellectual and aesthetic improvement.

Expanding this rather narrow conception of culture to include a vertical or horizontally concentric spectrum, however, lends breadth and availability to the category. Instead of privileging the culture of the elite as the only “true” culture, a dichotomous model of culture—one that constructs and contrasts a spectrum of “high” and “low” cultures, elite and popular cultures, or cultures of the center and those of the periphery as analytical categories—permits a more socially inclusive and economically diverse model of that which constitutes culture and cultural activity. As a more inclusive approach, sensitive to the differences in the various sectors of a given society or social body, a dichotomous model provides a broader vantage point from which to observe the various expressions of cultural activity at the same time as it gives consideration to the way in which various communities and individuals interact within a larger social framework. Thus one can speak of cultural “contact” or “confluences” occurring between, among, and by means of the members of different social classes, people from unrelated language communities, or practitioners of contesting religious traditions, for example. The internal social divisions that separate high from low and elite from popular are typically intended, however, as value-free heuristic categories—helpful ways of providing a conceptual apparatus or framework for comparing what are actually porous, abstract categories.

More expansive, pluralistic, and relativistic models of culture(s) have emerged from the field of anthropology. Although the history of the culture concept in anthropology (and sociology) is long and complex, in general, anthropological models (i.e., those of Franz Boas, Leslie White, and Clifford Geertz) have tended to posit a holistic conception of culture. The practice in cultural anthropology is to observe distinct human societies and provide detailed descriptions of social phenomena. This is done in order to articulate the ways in which various social systems and networks of human communication and interaction form (and are reciprocally informed by) individual and communal identities. This holistic, pluralistic, and descriptive approach to human activity, while admitting the existence of multiple cultures and subcultures, employs the term “culture” to signify a total system of human action, interaction, and meaning. Thus the anthropological model acknowledges the wide array of different and diverse cultures in the world at the same time as it posits the total and holistic nature of each one. Conceptual categories such as tradition, custom, behavior, action, value, and symbol are important components in such anthropological approaches and have been employed differently in describing and defining cultures as complex, patterned wholes.

Due in part to the fact that the various social processes of human activity in the anthropological conception of culture can be articulated and objectified only in a descriptive and narrative language, the anthropological practice of carefully describing and interpreting each culture as a total system of human interaction necessarily reproduces that complex, patterned whole as a text. Moreover, in the work of White and Geertz, the entire anthropological enterprise is defined by a semiotic conception of culture. Culture is understood as a deeply symbolic and meaning-producing model of and for reality. As a corollary, culture is imagined and presented as a complete object possessing meaning. Consequently, culture, to be comprehensible, becomes that which is always in need of scholarly engagement and interpretation. The critical question then becomes, who has the authority to speak for and about a culture? Because the characteristics attributed to a cohesively identified and contoured culture are always presented by someone, to someone, and for someone, and always from a specific perspective not lacking in agenda or context, the authoritative position from which one can define and describe “culture” has come under scrutiny in postmodern and postcolonial studies of the culture concept.

Given the anthropological acknowledgment of global cultural diversity, the various cultures of the world can be thought of as complex wholes distinguished from one another by the differences observed from any positioned perspective. Deeply entrenched in, and defined by, the observation of differences, the category of culture has become an immediately available and instrumental category of identity construction. As such, it has been consciously employed to establish criteria of cultural inclusion and “purity” and to determine the boundaries of communal and nationalist affiliation. As a tool of identity politics and nationalist discourse, the culture concept has also been deployed as both a defensive and an offensive strategy in an effort to either justify the status quo or call it into question. These general observations describe just some of the political implications of the concept of culture in today’s increasingly globalized world.

Finally, if culture is taken in an anthropological sense to mean a total complex of human activity and interaction, then recognizing religion as an integral element in the development of that total complex becomes a necessity. The historicist tendencies in some anthropological models of culture provide relevant insight into the study of Islam, especially as it relates to the concept of culture. Geertz’s Islam Observed, for example, describes the differences and similarities between the Muslim cultures of Indonesia and Morocco and in so doing demonstrates how Islam, in a sense, is “mediated” differently in different locations and at different times. This serves to demonstrate how the radical diversity of the many particular local histories, customs, languages, cuisines, and family structures of nations or communities that are commonly identified as “Islamic” complicates any notion of a simple association or identification between religion and culture. Such a study calls into question the notion of a pristine or pure Islam that is somehow outside of temporal and terrestrial concerns and agency. At the same time, it places in relief the question of whether “Islam” is a useful organizing principle in the discussion of culture, especially where other more local or historically contingent and less abstract principles of organizing observed phenomena might prove to be useful in the analysis of a culture.