ABSTRACT
In 1871 the English anthropologist Edward B.Tylor defined culture as the ‘complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, laws, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’.1 That was two years after Matthew Arnold had argued that on the ground of ‘the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it’,2 culture is, or ought to be, ‘a study and pursuit of perfection’,3
which entailed getting to know ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’.4 For Tylor, culture was a documentary concept, objectively descr ibing ‘what is’, while Arnold refer red to a normative concept, describing in terms of aesthetic and moral values ‘what ought to be’. It is this latter concept of culture that has prevailed in English intellectual life since the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it was not until 1933 that the OED added Tylor’s definition to Arnold’s.
