Raymond Williams - 'The Analysis of Culture'

Williams, Raymond (1961) ‘The Analysis of Culture’ in Storey (2007) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a Reader, London: Pearson. 

The term ‘culture’ is one of complexity. There is no neat definition for this term, and many people have different definitions of its exact meaning. Raymond Williams starts off his analysis of culture by outlining three main categories of culture: 

• ideal – “culture is the state or process of human perfection”

• documentary – “culture is the body of intellectual or imaginative work”

• social – “culture is a description of a particular way of life”

Williams explains how each of these categories and definitions of ‘culture’ have equal importance when researching culture. It is vital for any media and cultural scholar to consider the ‘ideal’ i.e. where our values and ‘absolute truths’ come from, documentary, which refers to our intellectual and imaginative texts we use to identify ourselves, for example music, films etc., and lastly our social cultures, and this focuses on how we communicate with each other.   

He then recognises that culture is ever-changing. To fully understand someone’s or something’s culture you must first analyse their role in society and how they gained their values. He explains that in order to successfully achieve this we must look at the wider context and discover cultural history, and what caused it to change. This can be seemingly difficult as cultural histories can be subjective and bias.

He describes society’s constant change as ‘the structure of feeling’. Williams suggests that with every generation young people respond towards society, and by doing so they create their own values and own cultural identities. This can be executed through their fashion choices, books they read, music they listen to etc. This theory can be used to explain why many of us hold different cultural texts than that of our grandparents, because with every generation, we control and drive forward cultural change.