I cited Ben Highmore’s excellent “Keywords and Keywording” in chapter 4 as a contemporary introduction to Raymond Williams’ classic book Keywords (and I’ve also linked here to the book’s Wikipedia entry in hopes that someone will edit that in accordance with its importance.)
In any case, Highmore is what he calls a cultural theorist “of the ordinary” himself (and here’s a link to his 2012 “Listlessness in the Archive” which could serve in its enumeration of various daily items from the U.K.’s “Mass Observation” archive as a practical complement to Umberto Eco’s 2009 illustrated essay, “The Infinity of Lists,” the result of Eco’s residency at the Louvre, which discusses the “art” of list-making as depicted in painting, literature, and music. While he doesn’t mention Eco, Highmore makes the point that ordinary assemblages of objects are as philosophically germane to “culture” as are museum collections when they are viewed as “archives” themselves, and as likely to generate exhaustion on the part of the audience the more exhaustive they are and the less removed they are from any personal experience or involvement. (The “found grocery list” project in the U.S. is another good example of this; I find that reading the shopping lists of random strangers soon becomes fatiguing. Though Highmore makes his observations on the ensuing “listlessness” far more interesting than I am summarizing here!)
Nevertheless, lists comprise one of the earliest forms of symbolic behavior (while apparently some animals such as crows can count, they can’t list) that, combined with the surrounding concrete material environment, have culminated in human culture. The best-known ancient example of “list culture” is probably the proto-cuneiform clay tablets found in Mesopotamia, which predate even the “Catalogue of Ships” in the Greek oral epic, The Iliad. Athena Kirk of Cornell argues that from the earliest times lists have been “the consistent and continuous means of expressing cultural value” (2021, p.2).
“Culture” (whether seen as ordinary per Highmore or extraordinary per Eco) is essential to Raymond Williams’s theory of “cultural materialism,” which is a fascinating keyword in its own right, as it has two different meanings, both of them diverging in the 1960s and 1970s from classic Marxist theory: one of them developed in the United Kingdom and the other in the United States. The first is Williams’s linguistic/literary version, focusing on the critical importance of language in shaping society’s cultural and symbolic practices which determine its material conditions, and the other being Marvin Harris‘s anthropological/sociological version, focusing on the physical and economic conditions of society that shape its cultural practices, including language. Harris’s model is built from the Marxist ground up: infrastructure (environment), structure (economy), and finally superstructure (ideology as expressed through language and other symbolic means), while Williams’ model reverses the order, with language creating the conditions through which societies build themselves. Neither of these employ much of the presumed essentials 0f Marxian theory such as dialectical materialism but both represent critical theory approaches to understanding society and both were created by iconoclastic “outsiders” with working class backgrounds (Williams was from Pandy, Wales and Harris was from Brooklyn, New York) who eventually became important thinkers in academia.
It is not clear when or whether either may have become aware of the other’s use of the term, as Williams’s 1958 Culture & Society, 1780 to 1950 and his 1976 Keywords and Harris’s 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory and his 1979 Cultural Materialism were published in different countries and (more importantly) within different disciplines, though they may be converging within the larger field of cultural studies as Pamela Sandstrom and Howard White point out in their 2015 “The Impact of Cultural Materialism: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Writing of Marvin Harris“, in which they call this an example of “logically connected but basically noninteractive literature” in the sense that Don Swanson made famous in his 1987 article on medical literature. (And I should point out that bibliometrics itself can be considered list-making of a somewhat specialized kind!)
They note that Harris at least may have been aware, as he “began an encyclopedia article in Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology with this priority claim for the concept: ‘Cultural materialism is a scientific research strategy or paradigm that prioritizes material, behavioral, and etic processes in the explanation of the divergent, convergent, and parallel evolution of human sociocultural systems. Its basic principles were first labeled and described in The Rise of Anthropological Theory [in 1968],’ and furthermore, ‘The cultural materialism of postmodernist literary criticism has no affinity with the anthropological genre’ (Harris, 1996:277). Others also acknowledge that Harris was the first to articulate the theory of cultural materialism (e. g., Simpson, 2000). In fact, very few works co-cite Williams and Harris even ceremonially (e. g., Wilson, 2002), much less engage the two perspectives to explore common ground. The exception is William Jackson’s (1996) extended treatment of the culture concept within institutional economics. He acknowledges that ‘Neither Harris nor Williams cites the other’s work, yet the two versions are broadly compatible; they are converging on the same middle ground’ (Jackson, 1996:234). Raymond Williams’s and Marvin Harris’s convergence on cultural materialism is an excellent example of independent, multiple discoveries in the Mertonian sense” (Sandstrom & White, 2015, pp. 30-31).
My own view is that although Williams didn’t use the term “cultural materialism” in his 1958 book, his chapter on “Marxism and Culture” there certainly indicated the new direction in which he was taking the Marxist “superstructure” view of culture, and had space limitations by his publisher not precluded the inclusion of his planned “appendix” on the cultural keywords critical to the book (which eventually became the foundation for his 1976 Keywords), the question of who was “first” in revising a Marxist view of culture would be more complicated than Harris made it appear. (And, of course, Williams was conveniently dead by the time that Harris made his claim.) I also suspect that Williams, a novelist and literary theorist as well as a cultural critic engaged in serious political activism, probably wouldn’t have considered the issue important at all Harris, famously combative, no doubt did.
Both Harris and Williams left significant, still contested intellectual legacies and they are now probably (and improbably) inextricably “married” in the cultural sphere now thanks to this dual keyword (“cultural materialism”) even though they have both left the material one. And, in the meantime, we still have Ben Highmore and Howard White on our (hopefully “infinite,” for me at least) list of “must reads” by authors who are still here with us.
Keywords In and Out of Context 