ABSTRACT
Has culture always been a way of giving meaning and value to sameness and difference? If culture has conventionally been opposed to nature, it has always also laid a conceptual claim to the natural and the organic. Moreover, it is striking that, like Coleridge’s unifying imagination, culture must paradoxically always take part in an antithetical pair or itself be divided into two:
culture versus nature; culture versus civilization; culture versus anarchy; high culture versus low culture (in rough historical sequence: folk/ workingclass/mass/popular culture).
