Dialogue: When I hear 'culture' I reach for my goat

By JOE BENNETT

If there is one word that gets my goat - and believe me there are many more than one, so many indeed that my goat is now so got as to be unrecognisable - but if I had to choose one, just one, from the lexicon of horrors, the one I would choose, the goat-getter to end goat-getters, the word that ropes my goat to a table, emasculates it without anaesthetic and plays ping pong with the consequences, is "culture."

You would have thought, or I would have thought, and obviously Barry Humphries thought, that he had skewered the fallacy of culture for good and ever with Sir Les Patterson, the Australian cultural attache.

The flab-laden, beer-drenched, ash-spattered ambassador should, you would have thought, have made evident to all but the impaired the extraordinary misuse of the word culture. But it seems that no, the nonsense continues and proliferates.

Let us clear the matter up. Culture derives from the Latin "colere," meaning to till the soil or to worship. Hence the words cultivation and cult. But the plain meaning of culture is how a society lives, the sum of the activities of a society.

If everyone in a country is permanently and delightfully drunk, it is a drunken culture.

If they all go morris dancing, it is a morris-dancing culture.

If they're all as sullen as Swedes or as earnest as the Dutch or as whatever as whatever, that is the nature of the culture.

But in this and other industrial nations culture has done a flip and come to mean almost the opposite of what it should mean. It has been stolen to mean the high arts.

Instead of meaning what people do, it now means what they don't do, or at least what very few of them do, and many of those who do do it only do it because somehow they feel they ought to do it or at least be seen doing it.

Schools, for example, distinguish between sports and cultural activities. If 255 boys play rugby and six of the more earnest ones debate, it is the debaters who are deemed to be the cultural ones.

I applaud debating, and as many of our offspring as possible should be encouraged to throw their throats into it, but to call debating culture and rugby something else is the most evident nonsense.

Culture is what people do. If the entire nation sits down to watch Shortland Street and allows its lower lip to sag and saliva to dribble on to the floral sofa, that, like it or not, is our culture. It isn't about what we would like it to be but about what it is.

And the nonsense that is talked about "cultural imperialism." How some people rant about hamburgers and Coke and the Internet, about the way American corporatism is destroying the traditional way of life of here and of there and of everywhere rich enough to afford it.

Well phooey to that. If people don't like whoppaburgers, they don't have to buy them, but they do like them so they buy them and they become part of the culture.

Coke and hamburgers aren't like opera, of course. Opera is culture. Opera isn't quite my bag, but I am delighted for it to happen and I wish nothing but joy on all those who can suspend their disbelief and gain pleasure from the large women.

But how is it that we all quietly ignore the fact that there is barely one New Zealand opera that anyone has ever voluntarily attended, that every opera is imported from Italy or France or Upper Voltage or wherever? If we're talking cultural imperialism, opera's simply a whoppaburger with songs. But you don't hear that said.

And then we have cultural tourism, which is summed up more neatly than I could hope to sum it up by a scrawl on the wall in the Volcano Cafe saying "rich people pay money to go and look at poor people." Off they toddle to Tuscany to stare at the peasants, or to Tahiti to see the natives dance, and all the while the unspoiled Tuscans and the unspoiled Tahitians are eyeing the tourists' wallets and longing for a Coke.

Traditional customs, subsistence farming and grinning welcomes are what the poor owe us, and we will buzz around the globe on American aeroplanes in search of them.

And if we happen to take a wrong turning in darkest foreignsville and instead of meeting the gladhand of welcome we happen to meet the blunter end of a cosh and part ways with our wallets and passports, that is merely unfortunate. That is not the culture we went to see.

Well, tough. Culture is not what we think people ought to do or like them doing. Culture is what people do. A good mugging is a rich, memorable and indisputably authentic cultural experience.