Culture - Keywords - A Vocabulary of Culture and Society - Raymond Williams

Sep 28, 2026

A vocabulary-focused study of “Culture” and related terms, drawing on Raymond Williams’ critical framework. The text contrasts specialized meanings of criticism—fault-finding versus judgment—and explains how criticism can mask its consumer position through abstractions like taste, sensibility, cultivation, and discrimination. It then traces the historical development of “culture” from Latin roots (colere/cultura) through evolving meanings in husbandry, human development, and modern intellectual usage across disciplines.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time8 min

AccessFree to download

KEYWORDS

A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

Criticism and Ideology

CULTURE

Etymology and Early Meanings

Metaphor and Generalization

Modern History

KEYWORDS A Vocabulary of Cultureand Society Raymond Williams New YorkOxford University Press Criticism,Culture to authority it has of course been repeatedly challenged,andcritic in the most common form of this specialized sense-as areviewer of plays,films,books and so on-has acquired anunderstandable derogatory sense.But this cannot be resolved bydistinctions of status between critic and reviewer.What is atissue is not only the association between criticism and fault-finding but the more basic association between criticism andjudgment as apparently general and natural processes.As aterm for the social or professionalgeneralization of the processesof reception of any but especially the more formal kinds ofCOMMUNICATION(a.v.).criticism is ideological not only in thesense that it assumes the position of the consumer but also inthe sense that it masks this position by a succession of abstrac-tions of its real terms of response (asjudgment,taste,cultivation,discrimination,sensibility;disinterested,qualified,rigorous andso on).This then actively prevents that understanding of responsewhich does not assume the habit (or right or duty)of judgment.The continuing sense of criticism as fault-finding is the mostuseful linguistic influence against the confidence of this habit,but there are also signs,in the occasional rejection of criticismas a definition of conscious response,of a more significantrejection of the habit itself.The point would then be,not tofind some other term to replace it,while continuing the samekind of activity,but to get rid of the habit,which dependsfundamentally,on the abstraction of response from its realsituation and circumstances:the elevation to judgment,and toan apparently general process,when what always needs to beunderstood is the specificity of the response,which is not ajudgment but a practice,in active and complex relations with thesituation and conditions of the practice,and,necessarily,withall other practices See AESTHETIC,CONSUMER,SENSIBILITY,TASTE CULTURE Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in theEnglish language.This is so partly because of its intricate histori-cal development,in several European languages,but mainlybecause it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinctand incompatible systems of thought. The fw is cultura,L,from rw colere,L.Colere had a range ofmeanings:inhabit,cultivate,protect,honour with worship.Some of these meanings eventually separated,though still withoccasional overlapping,in the derived nouns.Thus ‘inhabit'developed through colonus,L to colony.'Honour with worship’developed through cultus,L to cult.Cultura took on the mainmeaning of cultivation or tending,though with subsidiarymedieval meanings of honour and worship(cf.in Englishculture as 'worship’in Caxton(1483)).The French forms ofcultura were couture,oF,which has since developed its ownspecialized meaning,and later culture,which by eC15 had passedinto English.The primary meaning was then in husbandry,thetending of natural growth. Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process:the tendingof something,basically crops or animals.The subsidiary.coulter-ploughshare,had travelled by a different linguistic route,fromculter,L-ploughshare,culter,oE,to the variant English spellingsculter,colter,coulter and as late as eC17 culture(Webster,Duchess of Malfi,III,ii:'hot burning cultures').This provided afurther basis for the important next stage of meaning,by meta-phor.From eC16 the tending of naturalgrowth was extended to aprocess of human development,and this,alongside the originalmeaning in husbandry,was the main sense until1C18 and eC19.Thus More:'to the culture and profit of their minds';Bacon:'the culture and manurance of minds'(1605);Hobbes:‘a cultureof their minds'(1651);Johnson:'she neglected the culture of herunderstanding’(1759).At various points in this development twocrucial changes occurred:first,a d

FAQs

How does the text distinguish criticism as fault-finding from criticism as judgment?

It argues that the issue is not only criticism as fault-finding but the deeper association of criticism with judgment as a general and natural process.

In what way does the text claim criticism can be ideological?

It states that criticism assumes the position of the consumer and masks this position through successive abstractions of its real terms of response.

How is the word “culture” historically explained in the text?

The text traces “culture” from Latin roots meaning inhabit, cultivate, protect, and honor with worship, then follows its development through cultivation and tending processes, metaphorical human development, and later abstract, modern usage.

Sep 28, 2026

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