Blog 1: The Analysis Of Culture

Raymond Williams evaluates culture into three categories; the ideal, the documentary and the social. I feel that culture cannot be merely summarised into these three groups, but there is definitely some valuable infomation we can extrapolate from the text. The 'ideal'; that culture is a process of human perfection is something that I do not entirely agree with, yet society is constantly trying to better itself and evolve, by learning new values and new cultures society can try to accomplish this human perfection. At the same time however, if society ever reaches this human perfection, will people cease to learn more, to learn more cultures and therefore grow as a culture?

I don't think of it as human perfection but more like human evolution.

The 'documentary' explores the history and past records of culture, yet I think that this is largely irrelevant, as the culture of 20 years ago is very different from today, you cannot learn of a person's culture from a book unless you have experienced it yourself. The 'social' deals with the interests and beliefs of society rather than the bodies of work, which is more of a by-product. I agree that to understand culture you should try to relate the three groups together, but even then, you may disagree with these ideas or not believe they have anything to do with your culture; your thoughts and feelings. I feel that culture cannot be defined by these groups either alone or together, but by your own experiences and of the experiences of the people around you.