O que é "cultura"?

A palavra "cultura" foi uma das mais procuradas no dicionário Merriam-Webster em 2014.

Joshua Rotman traça, na revista New Yorker, a evolução do termo, as suas múltiplas interpretações, conforme contexto, época e corrente de pensamento. Mas porque tantas pessoas querem, hoje, compreender o que significa a palavra cultura? O que é inquietante, actualmente, neste conceito? A que fenómenos está associado? Podemos manter uma única palavra para designar tamanha diversidade?

Here’s my theory: more people looked up “culture” this year because it’s become an unsettling word. “Culture” used to be a good thing. Now it’s not. That isn’t to say that American culture has gotten worse. (It has gotten worse in some ways, and better in others.) It’s to say that the word “culture” has taken on a negative cast. The most positive aspect of “culture”—the idea of personal, humane enrichment—now seems especially remote. In its place, the idea of culture as unconscious groupthink is ascendent.

In the postwar decades, “culture” was associated with the quest for personal growth: even if you rejected “establishment” culture, you could turn to “the counterculture.” In the eighties, nineties, and aughts, it was a source of pride: the multiculturalist ethos had us identitying with our cultures. But today, “culture” has a furtive, shady, ridiculous aspect. Often, when we attach the word “culture” to something, it’s to suggest that it has a pervasive, pernicious influence (as in “celebrity culture”). At other times, “culture” is used in an aspirational way that’s obviously counterfactual: institutions that drone on about their “culture of transparency” or “culture of accountability” often have neither. On all sides, “culture” is used in a trivializing way: there’s no real culture in “coffee culture” (although the coffee at Culture, a coffee shop near my office, is excellent). But, at the same time, it’s hard to imagine applying the word “culture” to even the most bona-fide “cultural institutions.” We don’t say thatMOMA fosters “art culture,” because to describe art as a “culture” is, subtly, to denigrate it. In 1954, when the magazine Film Culture was founded, its name made movie lovers sound glamorous. Today, it sounds vaguely condescending.

This year, there was the rise of the powerful term “rape culture.” (It was coined a long time ago, in a 1975 documentary film called “Rape Culture” that focussed, in part, on an organization called Prisoners Against Rape; Ariel Levy, in arecent piece for this magazine, defines it as “a value system in which women are currency, and sex is something that men get—or take—from them.”) The spread of the idea of “rape culture” hasn’t just changed how we think about rape; it’s changed how we think about culture. Among other things, “rape culture” uses the word “culture” in a way that doesn’t involve, on any level, the idea of personal enrichment. Instead, the term’s weight is placed, fully and specifically, on Williams’s other two aspects of culture: on the subterranean, group-defining norms (misogyny, privilege) that encourage violence against women, and on the cultural institutions (movies, fraternities) that propagate those norms. The term works, in part, because of its dissonance. You can’t see the word “culture” next to the word “rape” without revising your ideas about what “culture” means.

No comparable “culture” term has been invoked in relation to the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the other African-Americans killed, recently, in encounters with the police. But those events have also pushed us to think about “culture” as an inhumane, malevolent force. And I suspect that many of us have also been keeping our own inner ledgers, where we track the ways in which “culture” has seemed, more and more, like the kind of thing you’d want “civilization” to overrule.

O artigo completo em The Meaning of Culture