Civilization and Culture

INTRODUCTION A current and major difficulty in civilizational studies is how to deal with the concepts of “civilization” and culture.” As these terms are simultaneously distinct and overlap, arose through a historical process that was key to modernity and are also at the root of a variety of disciplinary connections, they constitute a perfect case of semantic entanglement. Confusion has resulted from this entanglement and would be exacerbated should we not attempt to clarify them. Without clarification, the two concepts have already or will further become interchangeable in meaning and the use of both terms will depend to a great extent on what stance or perspective those engaged in this field of study adopt. Understandably, those engaged in civilizational studies feel free or even obliged to make up their own definition of the terms, often confounding them. If the two terms are interchangeable and their meaning confounded, it is difficult to see how we will understand the ubiquitous phenomenon of cultural appropriation or the ever closer interactions that happen daily everywhere in this increasingly globalizing age between the major geopolitical and economic powers such as America, China, Europe, the Arab world, India, Russia, and Japan. Hence, it is necessary to clarify the possible meanings of civilization and contrast them with the various meanings of culture. To achieve this, especially when there is already much confusion, the best procedure is to attempt a description rather than a definition of civilization. We may start simply by asking: What is a civilization? In its traditional sense, a civilization is a way of thinking, a set of beliefs, or a way of life. It is a spatio-temporal continuum and long- term dynamic structure (Kroeber, 1973:1 -27; Chang, 1982:365); it is also the product of human evolution as well as a new phase in this evolution, in which cities emerge. Even at its initial stage, a civilization has a large population andgeographical scope. As it grows, it incorporates a huge numberof ethnic groups or peoples and a variety of customs, habits,languages, and even religions.[1] A civilization possesses aparticular set of values, in most cases embodied in areligion[2] and the behavioral pattern imposed by the particularreligion. A civilization usually develops a complexeconomy[3] along with equally complex sciences andtechnologies. When we speak of a civilization, we denote asophisticated writing system, literatures, arts and music, acoherent legal system, advanced social institutions and politicaland military organizations, with all their corresponding materialmanifestations. A civilization is composed of constituent elements or“cultures” which are interwoven with one another andare in constant interaction with other civilizations and theircultures in the world outside. These elements not only make up acivilization itself but are exactly what distinguishes onecivilization from another. Based on a multiplicity of cultures, acivilization provides identity to those who belong to and arecommitted to it. Through a common geographical locus and acommon set of values and social institutions rooted in thatplace, a particular civilization enables those belonging to it toidentify with one another while differentiating themselvesfrom inhabitants of another civilization. Thus based on acommon geographical locus, common codes of conduct,common social institutions, and a common historical memory, acivilization endows cohesion, coherence, and consistency uponits members. Major civilizations such as China, the West and the Arabworld, which took shape a long time ago and have continued allthe way to the present time, exhibit a profound historico- cultural memory in addition to their vast demographic size and extensive territory. A major civilization may, of course, decline and disappear, but if it survives the vicissitudes of history, it is necessarily growing rather than stagnant, diversified rather than homogeneous, open-minded rather than closed-minded, inclusive and all -encompassing rather than exclusive and restricted.From the above, we can conclude that civilizations are the larger unit from which cultures derive and into which they are subsumed. In this connection, special attention must be paid to the fact that “civilization” in its current usage often denotes a historico-cultural entity or an aggregation of peoples or ethnic groups. When the distinction between the larger unit of civilization and its subsidiary constituent elements such as values and institutions is obliterated, the term “civilization” overlaps with the meaning of the term “culture” (in the sense of “cross-cultural studies”). In other words, apart from denoting a particular set of values, or a particular “culture,” For example, when Samuel Huntington sets forth his “clashes of civilizations” or “civilizational wars” scenario, his argument does not refer to conflicts or hostilities between Islamic, Western, or Confucian value systems as such, but conflicts or wars between the Islamic, Western, and Confucian societies. In fact, he does not take much of an interest in the actual differences between the values, habits and customs of the peoples of these historico-cultural entities, but is perversely fascinated by what he believes to be the imminent wars between major “civilizations” or congeries of peoples sharing common geographic loci and values. Given the advances of technoscience and the accessibility of the means of mass destruction, an argument such as Huntington’s courts the suicide of mankind as a species. The Origins of the Modern Usages of “Civilization” and

The difference between civilization and culture and an incorrect definition of civilization that confounds it with its subsidiary elements should, I hope, be relatively clear at this point. So why, one may ask, has the confusion between the two terms persisted? To a great extent, this has to do with the historical origins of the two terms, that is, how, when, where, and why they arose and the semantic confusion that has always been and remains a feature of current use. For instance, when the specific thinking and behavioral modes of a people or an aggregation of peoples or ethnic groups are discussed, both “culture” and “civilization” are frequently used interchangeably and this usage is perfectly acceptable. We see this today when writers or scholars talk about both “Indian Culture” and “Indian Civilization,” so that both culture and civilization denote exactly the same geographic and historico-cultural entities. And we find precisely the same confusion historically, as when Hegel, the philosopher of world history who may be considered the founder of civilizational studies, used the two wordsinterchangeably in his lectures in the 1830s (Braudel, 1994:5). According to the French historian Fernand Braudel,“civilization” in its modern sense was first used in 1752 by theFrench scholar Anne- Robert-Jacques Turgot, who was thenwriting a history of mankind. Prior to this, expressions like“civilized” and “to civilize” can be found as far back as the16th century. These words came into use during theRenaissance in the Romance languages, “probably French andderived from the verb civiliser, meaning to achieve or impartrefined manners, urbanization, and improvement” (Kroeber andKluckhohn, 1952:145, cited by Schäfer,2001:305). In itsreceived sense at the time, a “civilized man” was the diametricalopposite of savages. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, twoEnlightenment scholars in the middle of the 18th century –Honoré Mirabeau and Adam Ferguson – began to use“civilization” and “civilized” in comparison with and contrast to“savagery” and “savage” (1994:216). Indeed, this apposition ofcivilization and savagery had become so deeply rooted in theminds of the French at the time that not even the “savages,” ofwhom Jean-Jacques Rousseau was so enthusiastic in his praise,were seen as “civilized” (Wallerstein, 1994:3-4). At the sametime, the word “culture,” which was semantically almostequivalent with “civilization,” was circulating together with thelatter, despite the fact that in Roman times Cicero, the republicanpolitician and philosopher and an essential author in theeighteenth-century educational canon, had used “culture” in thesense of cultura animi or cultivation of the soul (Wallerstein,1994:5). To complicate things further, around 1819 the hithertosingular “civilization” began to be used in the plural as“civilizations.” Though this usage was inconspicuous at the time,it marks a major semantic shift. “Civilization” in the singularimplied propriety and elegance of manners considered as theresult of one’s upbringing and cultivation, whereas “civilization”in the plural could mean the specific way of life of a specificnation or nations at a specific time (Bagby, 1963:74-75; Braudel,1994:6 -7). It is exactly this usage of civilizations thatconstitutes a key concept in civilizational studies at present,and which can be found in theories advanced by importantthinkers like Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, FernandBraudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, Philip Bagby, SamuelHuntington, etc. Using this concept, it became perfectly allright to speak of “civilizations” when discussing not onlyChinese, Indian, and Arab civilizations, but those of Cyrus’Persia or Medieval Europe. One of the founders of anthropology, Edward BurnettTylor, published his Primitive Cultures in 1874 in which hemakes no distinction between “civilization” and “culture”and is heavily dependent upon “culture” for his argument,because “his concept of civilization would not have allowed himto construct a progressive historical narrative from simplebeginnings to higher forms of development” and because“civilization would have implied too high a stage of human society in the beginning” (Schäfer, 2001:306). Ever since, anthropologists and ethnographers in the West have used “culture” in discussing the primitive societies they study, while “civilization” has to a large extent been reserved for describing modern society. Hence the current situation in which it is unproblematic to say “Western Civilization” and “Western Culture” and, to some extent, even “primitive culture” or “primitive cultures,” but unacceptable to speak of “primitive civilization” or “primitive civilizations” (Braudel, 1994:6; Bagby, 1963:74-76). The Overlapping of “Civilization” and “Culture” In general, words remain relatively stable in meaning or pick up new meanings, yet semantic change or stasis relating to the entangled word pair “civilization” and “culture” remains puzzling. For instance, it is perfectly all right to say that a “civilization” is the sum total of “cultures” it contains; that the geographic locus of a “civilization” is the territory of its “cultural” domain; that the history of a “civilization” is the history of its “cultures;” and that elements of one “civilization” that manage to diffuse into another are its “cultural” heritage. However, in contrast to such changes in meaning, the German adjective “kulturell,” which originated in the 1850s, has remained immune to the semantic transformations affecting corresponding adjectives in other major European languages (Braudel, 1994:6). One of the reasons for the semantic entanglement of “civilization” and “culture” is that when theorists try to define “civilization,” they consciously or unconsciously envisage “culture.” It is true, to be sure, that some part of the semantic content of “culture” coincides with that of “civilization,” but the former cannot be used to define the latter. What is ignored here is that the use of “culture” to explain “civilization” would entail the necessity to define “culture” itself, which would seem impossible without defining “civilization” first. Thus, when Huntington offers his definition, he not only places the two terms on a par, but defines one with the other: “Civilization is culture writ large” (1998:22-23; Schäfer, 2001:303). Similarly, Wallerstein uses “culture” to define “civilization” and believes that a civilization is “a combination of world outlooks, customs, structures and cultures” (Wallerstein, 1994: 215). Braudel, too, regards culture as a specific stage in the overall evolution of mankind, which is lower than civilization. As a matter of fact, he even believes that culture could be seen as a “semi-civilization” (Braudel, 1979:114-116). Even though the content of “civilization” heavily overlaps with that of “culture,” there are some theorists for whom the differences between the terms are too conspicuous to be dismissed. Apart from an almost unanimous preference for “civilization” when representing modern societies while favoring “culture” when reporting primitive societies, these theorists tend to distinguish the meanings of the terms in another sense: to place “civilization” above “culture” in a kind of conceptual hierarchy. Simply put, these theorists tend to include the semantic content of “culture” in that of“civilization,” rather than the other way round. The Dichotomy of “Civilization” and “Culture” The conceptual hierarchy between “civilization” and “culture”that Dawson establishes is important and useful; it is the keydistinction that highlights the difference between the two termsand asserts both the encompassing nature of “civilization”and the subsidiary character of “culture.” NonethelessWallerstein disagrees with Dawson’s view and reverses hishierarchy. Wallerstein maintains that in certain non -Englishusages, “civilization” refers to quotidian affairs, whereas“culture” indicates whatever is refined and elegant (Wallerstein,1994:202). In making this point, Wallerstein recalls anotherhistorical conceptual hierarchy, the 18th - and 19th -centuryGerman antithesis of culture and civilization in which theformer enjoys the prestigious position of higher moral goals,whereas the latter indicates mere proper behavior (Schäfer,2001:307). Philip Bagby’s Definition of “Civilization” The most provocative distinction between “culture” and“civilization” is that proposed by the American anthropologistPhilip Bagby. His approach is etymological. He believes thatcivilization is the kind of culture found in cities,[6] or that“culture” is rooted in places where cities arise (1963:162f.). Ifthis definition were to be adopted, the essential characteristicsof civilization would be the urban built environment anddense urban demography. Meaningful and useful as thisdefinition may be to civilizational studies, one questionimmediately arises: what is a city? Obviously, a village or asmall town cannot be considered a city since its population is toosmall. If this is the case, then how large a population could meetthe criterion for a city? Shall we take 5,000, 10,000, 20,000,30,000, or 100,000 to be the tipping point that indicates theexistence of an urban environment? There is also the matter ofpopulation density, for if a certain number of people, say 30,000,are scattered over too wide an area, it would be difficult todetermine if a city has emerged or whether we are mistakinga principally rural area with only a few small villages orsettlements scattered around as a city. In addition, dearth ofarchaeological and written evidence precludes a feasiblecriterion to estimate if what we see is a bona fide city or merelya cluster of settlements. To solve the aforementioned dilemma, Bagby proposes that ifthe majority of the inhabitants of an area are not directly engagedin the production of food, the essential criterion of a city is met.According to him, in pre-historical times it was of paramountimportance to be liberated from the time -consuming task ofacquiring or producing food. The desired liberation was achievedthrough division of labor which,However elementary at first,would yield increased productivity. In turn, increasedproductivity would in one way or another and sooner orlater lead to greater refinement and sophistication of life.The newly-acquired freedom and leisure would enable the inhabitants of a certain area to travel around, conduct commercial, technological, military, religious, or intellectual activities, and thus disseminate their ways of thinking and living or “values” to a much broader area. This process culminated in the emergence of civilization. Although writing could possibly have been invented outside a city, it could be improved upon and perfected only by experts within it, people who did not have to spend their time and energy finding or growing food. Cities were also necessary to sustained and systematic rational thought; thinking required that those so engaged not be subject to the changing moods of nature. In short, the culture of the city is how Bagby defines “civilization.” As an anthropologist, Bagby believes that there is sufficient evidence to prove that the historical rise of the city coincided with the rise of the new “cultures” or the epoch-breaking new values and institutional practices usually associated with the “Axial Age” hypothesis. Cities and civilization are thus synonymous (1963:63). “secondary civilizations” as Europe, America, Russia and Latin America; below them, there are the “tertiary civilizations” such as France, Britain, Germany; again, below these, there is an even lower order, that is, the “civilizations” of Scotland, Ireland, Catalonia etc. (1994:12). Yet obviously, even when such a complicated and tedious classification system is adopted, it is insufficient for the purpose of representing “civilization.” Some further consideration demonstrates the unyielding nature of the task. For instance, Russia is the most important successor to the Byzantine Eastern Orthodox society, and the latter shares a close family resemblance to the Occidental Christian Civilization of the late Roman Empire (West Rome), which in turn is the predecessor of the Western civilization of today, to which both West European and American civilizations are successors. Taking all this into consideration, is it not justified to put the Byzantine Eastern Orthodox civilization and Western civilization in a common category, i.e., Christian civilization? If so, is it not reasonable as well to put a mainly Christian country like the Philippines in this super civilization? Again, by the same logic, should we not argue that there was once a Nestorian Civilization in the Middle East and Central Asia in the sense that other major Christian denominations formed in ancient times like the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church are seen as closely associated with the Western and Eastern Orthodox civilizations? (Bagby, 1963:167) Another way to get at the complexity and richness of civilization relates to globalization and technoscience. As Wolf Schäfer suggests, it might be useful to distinguish between one civilization and many cultures and categorize all civilizations that we traditionally describe as “pre-global” and subsume them under one singular “global civilization” ruled by technoscience (Schäfer, 2001:310-312). Schäfer maintains that “the fact that technoscience is on a global romp means that civilization is progressing from a local to a planetary scale.We can situate the emerging global civilization in thepluriverse of local cultures, and all local cultures in the universeof a global civilization” (310). This globality hypothesis isvalid to the extent that civilizations on this planet are allundergoing a profound technoscientific revolution, which isundeniable and will change the future of mankind in a way asnever experienced before. Cultural Appropriation And Civilizational Hybridization Dawson’s distinction between the terms “civilization” and“culture” is more explicit than what is found elsewhere. Hedepicts “civilization” as the largest and highest socio-historical phenomenon, whereas “culture” is something smaller,lower and subsumed under “civilization.” Dawson’s distinctionaids the search for a meaningful explanation of the manifoldinteraction between civilizations and the appropriation by onecivilization of the cultures of another without jeopardy to its ownidentity. To illustrate the point, we may consider China’s import ofBuddhism.China’s adoption of Buddhism is the appropriationnot merely of a religion but of Indian cultures viareligion. Ancient Indian civilization had no other way ofdisseminating its cultures to other parts of Asia than throughBuddhism. If we examine the Buddhist doctrines in China, wewill find abundant evidence of Indian cultural elements. Theseelements are not limited to Buddhism, inasmuch as Buddhismitself is influenced by other religions of ancient India:Brahmanism, Lokayata, Ajivakism, and Jainism (Warder,1980:14); and it is clear that key concepts like dharma, atman,and vimoksa and a variety of mythologies, legends and customsare not confined to Buddhism, but are found in Indiancivilization as a whole. On the other hand, after Buddhism andits accompanying Indian cultures had gained a foothold in China,it would eventually be sinicized as it happened with Zen,which is a sinicized Buddhist denomination. Thus, theintroduction of Indian cultures enriched Chinese civilization,without making it any less Chinese in character.Similarly, Buddhismized Confucianism and Daoism kepttheir integrity as Confucianism and Daoism. Christianityintegrated two ancient civilizations to form a new religionfrom whence a new civilization derived. Christianity isgenerally seen as arising out of two earlier civilizations, oneGreco- Roman and the other Hebrew orSyriac(Toynbee,1934-1961,everywhere Christianity in itsformative years likewise incorporated a plethora of cultural(and/or religious) elements that for centuries had been evolvingin the West Asian and Mediterranean World, which is often seenas a cultural “cauldron” in antiquity and where, beforeChristianity arose, there were more cultural encounters,engagements, conflicts and integrations between various culturesor civilizations than anywhere else in the ancient world.Thus it can be assumed that if a civilization has survived thevagaries of history and is still alive and active today, it isinvariably a hybrid, a product of cultural hybridization, or indeed an offspring of civilizational hybridization.

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