ABSTRACT
Dumont argues that culture develops through a process of dédoublement. This involves the abstraction from the immediacy of life and from primary culture into new realms of cultural practice, which come to relate to one another within an emergent complex. Contemporary cultural life, according to Dumont, is a matrix of various hermetic cultural worlds that intersect. He gives particular attention to three of these: the culture savante, the constellation of various other institutionalized cultural practices and the culture populaire. The culture savante refers to “a reconstitution of more primary cultures according to specialized, individualized or rationalized perspectives or postulations” (Weinstein 1985, p. 81). The cultural practices of professional groupings within such areas as law, religion, government, business and education draw on the culture savante, but have the specific purpose of emplacing members of society within particular webs of human relations. Finally, “popular culture” is composed of “those who receive the effects of hierarchical organizations and … adapt to them by reworking traditional practices”. In a manner somewhat akin to the approach developed by Karl Mannheim (1959) in Ideology and Utopia, Dumont saw these forms of culture as in dynamic relation with one another. Particular attention was given to how the social sciences, as the key sector of the culture savante, could help bring the other variants of knowledge/culture out of their narrowly conceived particularism, thereby raising the consciousness of members of society under the sway of these forms of cultural practice.
