Culture

The popular understanding of culture in mid-twentieth-century America and Europe was arguably the symphony orchestra, the ballet, the art museum, and a “national” white, elite etiquette dictating, and explaining, how people should behave. Since the mid-1960s, we have witnessed the production and recognition of a proliferation of “cultures” and “multiculturalisms” within popular culture and informal political and economic institutions. Current usage is replete with compound cultures: counterculture; pop culture; office culture; indigenous culture; urban culture; peasant culture; global culture; “mainstream” culture; and “other-cultures.”