ABSTRACT
RaymondWilliams informsus that ‘Culture is oneof the two or threemost complicated words in the English language’1 and while he is never quite good enough to tell us what the other one, or perhaps two,might be I have no principled, let alone experientially based, reasons to demur on this point. The idea of culture embraces a range of topics, processes, differences andevenparadoxes such that only a confident andwise person would begin to pontificate about it and perhaps only a fool would attempt to write a book about it – thus I begin. The concept is at least complex and atmost so divergent in its various applications as to defy the possibility, or indeed the necessity, of any singular designation. It is nevertheless real in its significations both in everyday language and in its increasingly broad currency within the fashionable discourses of the modern academy.
