Social capital - Essay Example

42) and intricacy and complexity associated with the word has not been reduced since then. But William Sewell (2008, p. 42) goes on to explain that culture is that part of the social life that needs to be separated from the actual human existence constituting economics, biology or politics. The concept culture has itself intrigued our lives and is the most crucial component of human existence yet its constituting elements are different for the people living in the different areas of the world.

We are all identified and recognized by our culture we have adopted while living in our own family, society and even our country. Mathew Arnold, the nineteenth century poet and essayist, used the term culture to speak about as model of individual human refinement as he opined that culture means, “the best that has been thought and said in the world” (1999, p. 190). This conceptual analysis of this culture is quite similar to the German concept of the term bildung (Arnold 1999, p. 190). In other words it is an attempt to achieve total precision and a way of knowing others on the matters which are of deep concern to us.

Yet the word itself is shrouded in the most debacle position as different propounders, anthropologists and even socialists are explaining the term in different contexts. They go on to the extent of explaining culture as a part of a science as it is associated with the human evolution, while others suggest that it germinates in the minds of the individuals who are more and more linked to their ancestral roots. Cultural socialists felt the necessity to show that culture has an impact on the upbringing of the children and to gain their identity and recognition in the society.

This allowed many to formulate the culture as assortment of different items whose impact on the behavior can be scrupulously compared to that of standard sociological variables like class, gender, ethnicity, economic interest and level of education (Sewell 2008, p. 45). It was thus assumed that culture as a system of symbols and meanings defined by Weberian, Parsonian and Durkheimian as ambiguous rather metaphorically it’s a collection of tools understood as a way of carrying out combined activities in the society (Sewell 2008, p. 45). In the United Kingdom, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and other scholars as well as sociologists greatly influenced by Marxism formed cultural studies, and connected the culture with consumer goods and services and leisure activities like music, film, art, food, sports etc.

It is the various means of production that determine the class relations and how the goods and services are consumed by the large number of people. The term “cultural studies” was first coined in 1964 by Richard Hoggart when Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was founded by him in Birmingham. Since then it has been associated with Stuart Hall as he became the next director after Hoggart (Munt 2000, p.4). In United States of America, the terms culture and cultural studies connote the study of the popular culture (Munt 2000, p. 6), in other words, it is the way people feel themselves associated and share voices and ideas and about the things we make use of in the daily life.

Today what constitutes culture is the way we live, eat, wear, behave in the