Raymond Williams - Keywords - A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

Fourth Estate • London

Title Page Keywords A vocabulary of culture and society Raymond Williams Fourth Estate • London

Introduction

Preface to the Second Edition

Abbreviations

A

AESTHETIC

ALIENATION

ANARCHISM

ANTHROPOLOGY

ART

B

BEHAVIOUR

BOURGEOIS

BUREAUCRACY

C

CAPITALISM

CAREER

CHARITY

CITY

CIVILIZATION

CLASS

COLLECTIVE

COMMERCIALISM

COMMON

COMMUNICATION

COMMUNISM

COMMUNITY

CONSENSUS

CONSUMER

CONVENTIONAL

COUNTRY

CREATIVE

CRITICISM

CULTURE

D

DEMOCRACY

DETERMINE

DEVELOPMENT

DIALECT

DIALECTIC

DOCTRINAIRE

DRAMATIC

E

ECOLOGY

EDUCATED

ELITE

EMPIRICAL

EQUALITY

ETHNIC

EVOLUTION

EXISTENTIAL

EXPERIENCE

EXPERT

EXPLOITATION

F

FOLK

FAMILY

FICTION

FORMALIST

G

GENERATION

GENETIC

GENIUS

H

HEGEMONY

HISTORY

HUMANITY

I

IDEALISM

IDEOLOGY

IMAGE

IMPERIALISM

IMPROVE

INDIVIDUAL

INDUSTRY

INSTITUTION

INTELLECTUAL

INTEREST

ISMS

J

JARGON

L

LABOUR

LIBERAL

LIBERATION

LITERATURE

M

MAN

MANAGEMENT

MASSES

MATERIALISM

MECHANICAL

MEDIA

MEDIATION

MEDIEVAL

MODERN

MONOPOLY

MYTH

N

NATIONALIST

NATIVE

NATURALISM

NATURE

O

ORDINARY

ORGANIC

ORIGINALITY

P

PEASANT

PERSONALITY

PHILOSOPHY

POPULAR

POSITIVIST

PRAGMATIC

PRIVATE

PROGRESSIVE

PSYCHOLOGICAL

R

RACIAL

RADICAL

RATIONAL

REACTIONARY

REALISM

REFORM

REGIONAL

REPRESENTATIVE

REVOLUTION

ROMANTIC

S

SCIENCE

SENSIBILITY

SEX

SOCIALIST

SOCIETY

SOCIOLOGY

STANDARDS

STATUS

STRUCTURAL

SUBJECTIVE

T

TASTE

TECHNOLOGY

THEORY

TRADITION

U

UNCONSCIOUS

UNDERPRIVILEGED

UNEMPLOYMENT

UTILITARIAN

V

VIOLENCE

W

WEALTH

WELFARE

WESTERN

WORK

References and Select Bibliography

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

In 1945, after the ending of the wars with Germany and Japan, I was released from the Army to return to Cambridge. University term had already begun, and many relationships and groups had been formed. It was in any case strange to travel from an artillery regiment on the Kiel Canal to a Cambridge college. I had been away only four and a half years, but in the movements of war had lost touch with all my university friends. Then, after many strange days, I met a man I had worked with in the first year of the war, when the formations of the 1930s, though under pressure, were still active. He too had just come out of the Army. We talked eagerly, but not about the past. We were too much preoccupied with this new and strange world around us. Then we both said, in effect simultaneously: ‘the fact is, they just don’t speak the same language’.

It is a common phrase. It is often used between successive generations, and even between parents and children. I had used it myself, just six years earlier, when I had come to Cambridge from a working-class family in Wales. In many of the fields in which language is used it is of course not true. Within our common language, in a particular country, we can be conscious of social differences, or of differences of age, but in the main we use the same words for most everyday things and activities, though with obvious variations of rhythm and accent and tone. Some of the variable words, say lunch and supper and dinner , may be highlighted but the differences are not particularly important. When we come to say ‘we just don’t speak the same language’ we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. In such a case, each group is speaking its native language, but its uses are significantly different, and especially when strong feelings or important ideas are in question. No single group is ‘wrong’ by any linguistic criterion, though a temporarily dominant group may try to enforce its own uses as ‘correct’. What is really happening through these critical encounters, which may be very conscious or may be felt only as a certain strangeness and unease, is a process quite central in the development of a language when, in certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed. In some situations this is a very slow process indeed; it needs the passage of centuries to show itself actively, by results, at anything like its full weight. In other situations the process can be rapid, especially in certain key areas. In a large and active university, and in a period of change as important as a war, the process can seem unusually rapid and conscious.

Yet it had been, we both said, only four or five years. Could it really have changed that much? Searching for examples we found that some general attitudes in politics and religion had altered, and agreed that these were important changes. But I found myself preoccupied by a single word, culture , which it seemed I was hearing very much more often: not only, obviously, by comparison with the talk of an artillery regiment or of my own family, but by direct comparison within the university over just those few years. I had heard it previously in two senses: one at the fringes, in teashops and places like that, where it seemed the preferred word for a kind of social superiority, not in ideas or learning, and not only in money or position, but in a more intangible area, relating to behaviour; yet also, secondly, among my own friends, where it was an active word for writing poems and novels, making films and paintings, working in theatres. What I was now hearing were two different senses, which I could not really get clear: first, in the study of literature, a use of the word to indicate, powerfully but not explicitly, some central formation of values (and literature itself had the same kind of emphasis); secondly, in more general discussion, but with what seemed to me very different implications, a use which made it almost equivalent to society : a particular way of life – ‘American culture’, ‘Japanese culture’.