Culture

Culture is defined by what it does. Rites, objects and ideas hold a national animus together across distance and across time, which makes culture a connective technology rather than a body of content. The mechanism is the capacitor. Rites, anima banks and euphoric objects act as capacitors and link a vastly extended self through many spacetimes, and Marsh identifies that capacity as the true nature of culture. Her etymological point carries the argument. The word cult, nearly synonymous with extreme endogroups, is the root of culture, and is associated with early religious rites for exactly this reason, which places the storage and transmission of anima at the origin of the word rather than at its margin. She rejects the modern usage directly. Treating commercial products or casual norms as collectively owned culture fails to recognize the nature or use of such rites and objects, because something that stores nothing and connects nobody across time is not performing the function the word names. The test is whether the thing links people who are separated, including separated by death, which is why ancestors, spirituality, heirlooms and inherited songs sit inside the category and most consumer goods sit outside it.

Anthropology has spent a century widening the word. Edward Tylor's 1871 definition took in knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and every other capability acquired as a member of society, Clifford Geertz reframed culture as webs of significance to be interpreted and cultural studies after Raymond Williams extended it to ordinary life and mass media, which is the usage now dominant. Marsh moves in the opposite direction and narrows it sharply. What counts is not everything a group does or shares but only the rites, objects and ideas performing a specific job, holding a national animus together across space and time, which excludes most of what cultural studies takes as its subject and treats the extension of the word as the loss of its meaning.