Culture: One Word, Multiple Meanings

Abstract

The word culture today occupies a privileged place in academic, political, and media vocabularies, yet this centrality is far from accompanied by conceptual clarity. Culture is a word with many meanings, and not all academics or people who use it understand it in the same way. Its widespread use often rests on a misleading familiarity that presents it as an obvious, almost self-explanatory term, when in fact it condenses a multiplicity of meanings that are frequently contradictory. This article seeks to make visible some of these different meanings of culture. Some of them naturalize hierarchies, others displace structural conflicts into moral diagnoses, and still others freeze difference in the form of administrable or patrimonial identities. The problem does not lie in the existence of multiple meanings as such, but in the fact that they often circulate without being made explicit, frequently juxtaposed, thereby enabling practices of subjection through a vocabulary that is assumed to be innocent.