Like development, culture has no agreed definition and it remains an extremely ambiguous concept which is particularly difficult to define (Fox and King, 2002). It is not simple to pin down ‘culture’ with a precise and singular definition (Schech and Haggis, 2000). Raymond Williams, a leading cultural theorist, pointed out that ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (Williams, 1983: 87). Conceptualising culture, therefore, has proved to be a notoriously difficult task (Daskon and Binns, 2009).
In the same vein, Radcliffe (2006) argues that culture is a ‘slippery’ and confusing concept, while Gerring and Barresi (2003) suggest that culture is a concept that has plagued the social sciences for over a century (Gerring and Barresi, 2003). In fact, many social science disciplines configure culture as a ‘whole way of life’, but as Huntington (2000) argues, ‘if culture includes everything, it explains nothing’ (Huntington, 2000: xv). The concept is also ambiguous in a development context, particularly in the sense of whether it is a ‘means’ to development, or an ‘end’. Is culture, therefore, an aspect or means of ‘development’ (in the sense of material progress) – best reflected in the Asian context in the suggestion that Asian ‘values’ explain the region’s economic success – or is ‘culture’ perhaps the crucial aim of ‘development’, in the form, for example, of creating sustainable and empowering cultural communities (UNESCO, 1995).
Raymond Williams (1977) defines culture as ‘a constitutive social process, creating specific and different ‘ways of life’, which could have been remarkably deepened by the emphasis on a material social process, were for a long time missed, and were often in practice superseded by an abstracting unilinear universalism’ (Williams, 1977: 19); he also attributes significance to structures of feeling, ‘meaning and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or
systematic beliefs are in practice variable, over a range from formal assent with private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experiences’ (Williams, 1977: 132).
Culture can be seen as comprising the material products, patterns of social relations, and structures of feeling produced by multiple actors, who are differentially positioned in power relations, social reproduction, and political economies. It includes not only the letters and arts, but also different modes of life, the fundamental rights of human beings, beliefs, value systems and traditions (Kavaliku, 2000). We can also consider ‘culture as a terrain in which politics, culture and the economic form an inseparable dynamic’ (Lowe and Lloyd, 1997: 1). In addition, a useful definition is offered by Kroeber and Kluckholn (1953):
…Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of ‘traditional’ ideas and especially their attached values (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1953, in Faulkner et al., 2006: xv- xvi).
In addition, culture can be considered as an instrument for decision-making and implementation, and also as something that shapes the outcome of those policies and of decisions implemented as a result. Culture is also a dynamic reality. It changes over time and takes on a different form in different spaces and places. Without a doubt, it is a system and changes with each new idea, each new instance of development, each new generation and each new interaction with other people and other cultures (Kavaliku, 2000).
If we define development as international practices that seek to produce broad-based and sustained change, culture is obviously vital to the implementation and achievement of development. This is because culture represents a way of life, structures of feeling and material products. In recent years culture has been accorded heightened significance as a factor in development projects and programmes. Ever more, development looks to culture as a resource and as a noteworthy variable
explaining the success of development interventions. Development is engaged with various forms of cultural thinking and regional cultures. In this relation, development can be considered in a globalised field of several meanings, practices, and cultural formations, where cultural difference is not an alternative to development but informs the contested relations upon which development is built and policy prescriptions are devised. Culture has certainly not been displaced from development (Watts, 2003), notwithstanding the technocratic approach of some agencies, but how and where it has entered development, both materially and in terms of policies, has changed. It is important, therefore, to see the role of culture varying historically, geographically and culturally (Radcliffe, 2006).
Development analysis has regularly assumed that culture and tradition restrain entrepreneurship and limit development interventions, and there has been a failure to appreciate the complex interaction between culture and economic performance (Jenkins, 2000). Nevertheless, in recent years development and development studies have experienced a ‘cultural turn’, in which culture is belatedly being given greater importance as a vital factor in development processes and strategies (Harrison and Huntington, 2000). Culture is increasingly being seen as a main resource and as an important variable, which can manipulate the success of development interventions (Stephen, 1991; Rao and Walton, 2004). As UNESCO (1995) has identified:
…Unless economic development has a cultural basis it can never lead to truly lasting development. Culture is ‘not’ something ‘to be taken into consideration’. It is fundamental…’ (UNESCO, 1995: 1)
Throsby (2001) sees culture as a form of capital in an economic sense, and argues that, like money, cultural inheritance can be translated into social resources and the cultural capital we gather from birth can be ‘spent’ to accomplish ‘things’ that are considered culturally significant. Bourdieu’s (1986) view of cultural capital, which is simplified in three forms – embodied (such as knowledge, values, attitudes and norms), objectified (cultural goods such as architecture, crafts and instruments) and institutionalised (educational credentials) – presents a valuable explanation for seeing the essential role of culture in community sustainability (also see Throsby, 1999). These forms of capital have become popularised in the term ‘social capital’. Bourdieu
challenges the erroneous belief in culture and the simplification of culture in the development process and suggests giving it more importance (Bourdieu, 1986 cited in Daskon and Binns, 2009).
Culture should be seen as a flexible resource that can present innovative solutions to development problems. There is a risk of being unaware of the richness of cultural factors, and too often rural communities are marginalised as being ‘illiterate’, ‘non- professional’ and ‘backward peasants’ (Escobar, 2000; Harrison and Huntington, 2000, Loomis, 2000). Chambers argues that one of the dangers of the conventional development process is that it invalidates these realities and ignores the customs, knowledge, capabilities and ingenuities which can play a precious role in managing sustainable community development (Chambers, 1997a).