The Concept of Culture: A History and Reappraisal

While the term ‘culture’ has come to be very widely used in both popular and academic discourse, it has a variety of meanings, and the differences among these have not been given sufficient attention. This book explores these meanings, and identifies some of the problems associated with them, as well as examining the role that values should play in cultural analysis.

The development of four, very different, conceptions of culture is traced from the nineteenth century onwards: a notion of a...