Material culture

“ The characteristic pointed base of Woodland pots.
CRAB ORCHARD: A division of the Baumer subculture.
CULTURE: Culture as used in this paper has one of two meanings, each readily understood in its context. In a general sense, it means the significant beliefs, customary activities and social prohibitions peculiar to man (together with the man-made tools, weapons and other material objects that he finds or has found necessary) that modify, limit or enhance in some manner, most of his discernible natural activities due to his physical animal inheritance and organization. ”

“ The next aim is self-culture, and that of a twofold kind—the cultivation at once of an intimate knowledge of the form of art which you select as your groundwork, and of a personal artistic power to work in it. ”

“ The handiwork of Nature and of Man alike are called upon to yield up their secrets to satisfy the universal demand which has arisen from the spread of education and the ever-increasing desire for culture which is one of the characteristics of the present day. ”

“ Of the 300-year period of the Baroque, of the Ionic, of the great mathematics, of Attic sculpture, of mosaic painting, of counterpoint, of Galileian mechanics? What does the ideal life of one millennium for each Culture mean in comparison with the individual man’s "three-score years and ten"? As the plant’s being is brought to expression in form, dress and carriage by leaves, blossoms, twigs and fruit, so also is the being of a Culture manifested by its religious, intellectual, political and economic formations. ”

“ Further, the intellectual condition of the nation in its various grades should be depicted; not only with respect to the kind and amount of education, but with respect to the progress made in science, and the prevailing manner of thinking. The degree of æsthetic culture, as displayed in architecture, sculpture, punting, dress, music, poetry, and fiction, should be described. Nor should there be omitted a sketch of the daily lives of the people—their food, their homes, and their amusements. ”

“ There is a way for the cultured: it is to discover the peasant down beneath their culture, the original elemental soil down under the artificial surface, and to allow the sweetness and richness of that soil to give expression on that surface. True culture is thus achieved ”

“ There never was a more radical misconception of a fundamental process, for culture in the true sense involves, as a process, the highest and truest development of a race, and, as a product, the most enduring spiritual expression of race genius and experience. ”

“ But where works of art can travel, ideas can travel too; and can travel right across the frontiers of race and language and even of religion; meaning at all events by these, the customary observance of each region, and of its endemic population. A few merchants, or craftsmen, or philosophers, work transformations in culture and bring about uniformities, of which language, or cult-edifices give us no indication at all, or at best an aftermath of decadence. ”

“ There remain a great array of culture traits we have not noted, such as machinery, fire-making, lamps, weapons, musical instruments, fermentation, glues and cements, paper, dyes and paints, woodwork, maps, astronomical knowledge, writing, poisons, medicine, surgery and anatomical knowledge, etc. ”

“ If I were called upon to exhibit the chief determinants of human life as a single chain of causes and effects—a simplification of the historical problem, I may say at once, which I should never dream of putting forward except as a convenient fiction, a device for making research easier by providing it with a central line—I should do it thus. Working backwards, I should say that culture depends on social organization; social organization on numbers; numbers on food; and food on invention. ”

“ I believe only in art as the object of production,—art which shall glorify that which we eat, that wherewith we clothe ourselves, those things whereby we are sheltered; art which shall be this and more,—the ultimate expression of all that is spiritual, religious, and divine in the soul of man. I hate material prosperity, I refuse to justify machinery, I cannot pardon public opinion. ”

“ Our real and our ideal are not twins. Never were! I want the books, but the clothes basket wants me. I love nature and figures are my fate. My taste is books and I farm it. My taste is art and I correct exercises. My taste is science and I measure tape. Can it be that this drudgery, not to be escaped, gives 'culture?' Yes, culture of the prime elements of life, of the very fundamentals of all fine manhood and fine womanhood, the fundamentals that underlie all fulness and without which no other culture worth the winning is even possible. ”

“ With unerring judgment they select the right stuffs, the right shapes, and the right colours; the effect they see in their mind's eye, they reproduce to the eyes of others; and it is delicious and satisfying in proportion as, with the boldness of originality, they unite the refinement and taste diffused by culture through the educated classes of society. ”

“ Uncontaminated by contact with the complex conditions of civilized art, it offers the best possible facilities for the study of the fundamental principles of esthetic development.
The laws of evolution correspond closely in all art, and, if once rightly interpreted in the incipient stage of a single, homogeneous culture, are traceable with comparative ease through all the succeeding stages of civilization. ”

“ These are the two main ingredients of human culture; but they do not exhaust the whole of it. There is a third division, which, if subordinate, and owing allegiance to the two others, is barely inferior to them, and not less needful to the completeness of the human being; I mean the aesthetic branch; the culture which comes through poetry and art, and may be described as the education of the feelings, and the cultivation of the beautiful. ”

“ Few men stopped to reflect that while objects of art may be bought by the wholesale, the development of genuine culture is too intimately personal and too chemically blended with the spiritual to be bartered for. ”

“ This in turn became the basis of culture, displacing theology, because in many ways it furnished better ideals and standards—especially in literature, sculpture, and above all in the use of reason. But since the fifteenth century vast new sources of culture have developed—the modern literatures, modern music, modern painting, and above all the great structure of modern science, which gives us ideals and standards of judgment drawn from a new field, the book of Nature herself. The reason why we differ is clear. ”

“ The works of Nature though infinite are strictly analogous, and human reason is produced by the same laws as every other natural product. The culture of the mind, by which human reason is produced, bears a strict analogy to the culture of the soil, by which we subsist In each Nature will produce to a certain degree, but the aid of art is necessary to produce a sufficiency, and to reach refinement and perfection. ”

“ Unless culture be a superficial polish, a veneering of mahogany over common wood, it surely is this—the growth of the imagination in flexibility, in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the individual lives is informed with the life of nature and of society. ”

“ When the cultural dominates, the sign or language experience becomes an interpretation, i.e., a continuation of the semiotic experience. Interpretation of any kind corresponds to the never-ending differentiation from the biological and is representative of the constitution of culture. Under the name culture as used above, we understand human nature and its objectification in products, organizations, ideas, attitudes, values, artifacts. ”

“ We shall find, firstly, that the forms of their implements, instead of showing evidence of having been derived from higher and more complex forms, will, in proportion to the low state of their civilization, show evidence of being derived from natural forms, such as might have been employed by man before he had learnt the art of modifying them to his uses; and secondly, we shall find that the persistency of the forms is proportioned to the low state of their culture. ”

“ With the growth of culture the art was expanded and perfected, its wonderful capacity for expression leading from mere bindings to pretentious borders, to patterns, to the introduction of ideographs, to the representation of symbols and mythologic subjects, and from these to the delineation of nature, the presentation of historical and purely pictorial scenes. ”

“ The line of gradual development in ceramic decorations, especially of the symbolic element, treated as a subject, is wider in its applicability to the study of primitive man, because more clearly illustrative of the growth of culture. ”

“ The present chapter will contain notices of such matters as lie much more upon the surface of native life, and are open to the observation of the visitor and traveller; the arts, namely, in which the culture of the people expresses itself, by which they build and decorate canoes and houses, plant and cultivate their gardens, furnish themselves with weapons and implements for war and work, catch fish, prepare their food, furnish themselves with clothing and ornaments, make and use money as a medium of exchange. ”

“ But I am not sure but that at this point the "practical" man, scotched but not slain, may ask what all this talk about culture has to do with an institution whose object is defined to be "to promote the prosperity of the manufactures and the industry of the country," He may suggest that what is wanted for this end is not culture, nor even a purely scientific discipline, but simply a knowledge of applied science. ”

“ We can scarcely conceive of art without society or society without art. The development of society has been the development of art, and human civilization has advanced through all the stages of culture into which ethnologists subdivide it as the result of successive advances in the perfection of the arts. ”

“ The tone, the habits, the tastes, the pleasures, and, in a large sense, the morals of society depend upon its culture. I use the word culture with the meaning which is commonly given to it in the conversational language of this country, signifying not merely that training of the mental faculties by which useful knowledge is acquired, but the knowledge, appreciation and enjoyment of the beautiful in nature, literature and art, and of the noble, elevated and refined in sentiment and feeling. ”

“ To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture.' Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it ”

“ When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers. ”

“ A revolutionary movement within the societies under consideration. In each experiment with civilization the culture pattern was transformed from pastoral and/or agricultural to a culture based on trade, commerce and finance ”

“ All the above definitions of culture lack a most notable point—its development. Development is necessarily “part and parcel” of the very idea of culture and, thus, must be reflected in its definition. For example, “culture is the development of the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group” or “culture is the development of the attitudes and behavior that are characteristic of a particular social group or organization” or “culture is the development of a particular society at a particular time and place,” and so forth. ”

“ Yet it is not necessary to give primitive art a considerable place in a general aesthetics. As a normative science, it is to be remembered, this is much more immediately concerned with the higher stages of aesthetic culture. In seeking to establish norms or regulative principles, we must, it is evident, make a special study of objects of art which belong to our own level of culture. ”

“ The admirable height of culture which mankind in the nineteenth century has attained, the astonishing progress of science and its practical applications in technology, industry, medicine, etc., gives grounds for expecting a still greater development of culture in the twentieth century. ”

“ In the same way as we have elected to distinguish the Soul as the possible and the World as the actual, we can now differentiate between possible and actual culture, i.e., culture as an idea in the (general or individual) existence and culture as the body of that idea, as the total of its visible, tangible and comprehensible expressions—acts and opinions, religion and state, arts and sciences, peoples and cities, economic and social forms, speech, laws, customs, characters, facial lines and costumes. ”

“ Nay, rather, human energy would have been wholly devoted to useful inventions and would have been concentrated on praiseworthy discoveries. Material civilization is like a lamp-glass. Divine civilization is the lamp itself and the glass without the light is dark. Material civilization is like the body. ”

“ There are, sometimes, certain superficial resemblances between the works of imaginative writers that are outside the province and beyond the charge of plagiarism. An age produces a culture, a culture produces works of art, and all the while the individual consciousness, or sub-consciousness, feeds upon and is nourished by the raw materials and the basic elements of the culture. ”