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 * Please read this text. If you want to ask a question highlight the part and make a page for your question. If you can, give definitions of the words you don't know by making a link to a page with a definition on it.**


 * From: Williams, Raymond. ‘Culture’ in //Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society//.** **London****:** **Fontana****, 1983. pp. 91-92.**

Faced by this complex and still active history of the word, it is easy to react by selecting the ‘true’ or ‘proper’ or ‘scientific’ sense and dismissing other senses as loose or confused. There is evidence of this reaction even in the excellent study by Kroeber and Luckhohn, //Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions//, where usage in North American anthropology is in effect taken as norm. It is clear that, within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be clarified. But in general it is the range and overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence. It is especially interesting that in archaeology and in cultural anthropology the reference to **culture** or **a culture** is primarily to //material// production, while in history and cultural studies the reference is primarily to //signifying// or //symbolic// systems. This often confuses but even more often conceals the central question of the relations between ‘material’ and ‘symbolic’ production, which in some recent argument – cf. my own //Culture// – have always to be related rather than contrasted. Within this complex argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as effectively overlapping positions; there are also, understandably, many unresolved questions and confused answers. But these arguments and questions cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of the actual usage. This point is relevant also to uses of forms of the word in languages other than English, where there is considerable variation. The anthropological use is common in the German, Scandinavian and Slavonic language groups, but it is distinctly subordinate to the senses of art and learning, or of a general process of human development in Italian and French. Between languages as within a language, the range and complexity of sense and reference indicate both difference and intellectual position and some blurring or overlapping. These variations, of whatever kind, necessarily involve alternative views of the activities, relationships and processes which this complex word indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate.