From: Carrol Cox
:
Over 50 years and a couple of major changes of world view, I've never quite understood what we mean when we use the word "culture"? I'm perfectly content with a word being used in a number of distinct senses, but almost all the different senses of this term seem to be rather fuzzy.
Louis Kampf (I can't remember whether in something he wrote or in private discussion) once defined "culture" as the organization of daily life. This makes some sense, and could be glossed as "how people allocate their time" (not quite acceptable wording, but it's a gesture in the right direction I think). Fredy Perlman, in his Introduction to Rubin, _Essays on Marx's Theory of Value_, claims that culture is the subject matter of political economy:
**** According to Rubin, "Political economy deals with human working activity,not from the standpoint of its technical methods and instruments of labor, but from the standpoint of its social form. It deals with _production relations_ which are established among people in the process of production." In terms of this definition, political economy is not the study of prices or of scarce resources, it is a study of social relations, of culture.***
This is compatible with Kampf's defintion. Note that if we were to accept it we would have to reject the question of how to link economics and culture, for this question (a) ignores that economics is not political economy and (b) separates what is a unity from get-go.
Anyhow, anyone have any comments.
Carrol
^^^^^^
CB: Funny , just a couple of days ago I was thinking the same thing about "culture" having too many uses and becoming meaningless. Of course, anthropology appropriated it. There it is something only humans have, and it designates what is beyond our "natural" (cf. recent thread on competition and human nature), our socio-historical. The unique concept anthro has added is that culture is in the form of the symbolic. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20031025/ebe21417/attachment.htm>