And it starts with a definition.
The 2026-27 Federal Budget invested $1.1 billion in what it called Australia’s arts and cultural sector. Arts got the billion. Culture got the word. The distinction between the two has been established in the scholarly record since 1871. It has been confirmed by every major theorist of culture and society since. It has been institutionalised in Japan since 1950. And it has been ignored in Australian policy through every budget cycle since the first arts funding body opened its doors. This is not a funding argument. It is a classification argument. And it starts with a definition.
Somewhere between the nineteenth century and the establishment of the first arts funding bodies, a word that described the entire fabric of human civilisation was quietly reassigned to mean something considerably narrower. Culture — the system within which law, knowledge, belief, custom, morality, and artistic practice all operate as coordinate elements — became, in the language of policy, funding, and public discourse, a synonym for the arts. The swap was so complete, so thoroughly embedded in institutions and budgets and ministerial portfolios, that it now requires a history lesson to explain why it is wrong. It has always been wrong. The scholars said so at the time. Nobody in a policy room was listening.
The original definition is not ambiguous. Edward Tylor, in Primitive Culture (1871), established culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” On Tylor’s taxonomy, the arts sit alongside law, custom, and knowledge as coordinate elements of a governing whole. Culture is the system. The arts are one component of it — no more or less primary than any other. A weaver transmitting a textile tradition to the next generation is performing a cultural act of equivalent standing to a painter producing a canvas. A farmer whose land carries two hundred years of agricultural knowledge is a cultural practitioner in the most precise sense of the term. Neither of them, under Tylor’s definition, is more or less cultural than a musician performing to an audience. The policy frameworks that followed managed to fund the musician and forget everyone else.
The mechanism by which this happened is traceable. Raymond Williams spent the better part of his intellectual career documenting it. In Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), and Keywords (1976), he traced how the word culture was progressively narrowed — from its original sense as the cultivation of human faculties and social life, to a restricted association with arts and aesthetic production. Williams was unambiguous: this narrowing was historically contingent, not definitionally correct. It was a consequence of Matthew Arnold’s enormously influential argument, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), that the arts — particularly literature — should be positioned as instruments of cultural elevation. Arnold’s framework was pedagogical and hierarchical. The arts were to be used to cultivate cultural life. They were enlisted to do culture’s work. In doing so, they appropriated culture’s name. And the categorical distinction between the governing system and one of its component domains was progressively obscured — until the two were treated, in policy, as interchangeable.
Clifford Geertz defined culture, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), as “the webs of significance” that human beings have themselves spun — the inherited systems of meaning within which social action takes place. The arts are one set of practices through which cultural meaning is expressed. They are not coextensive with culture itself. Bourdieu’s field theory establishes art as a structured social space with its own logic — a field defined by the relationship between practitioner and audience, where value is created through reception. This is a precise and useful framework for governing the arts. It describes a domain in which a practitioner produces a work and an audience receives it. What it cannot describe — and what it was never designed to describe — is the cultural practitioner whose output requires no audience, whose value is not created through reception, and whose practice will cease to exist if the transmission chain is broken. The weaver. The elder. The dyer. The farmer whose land encodes generational knowledge. These practitioners are not failed artists. They are cultural workers in the original and governing sense of the term — and the policy framework built around Bourdieu’s arts field has structurally no place for them.
Japan recognised this in 1950, establishing the Agency for Cultural Affairs with an explicit mandate to govern intangible cultural properties, traditional craft designation, and the Living National Treasure system — formally, the designation of Holders of Important Intangible Cultural Properties. Japan did not call this an arts program. It called it what it was: heritage sector governance, backed by legislation, administered by a statutory authority. The distinction between the arts agency and the cultural affairs agency was institutional, legislative, and deliberate. Japan has maintained it for seventy-five years. UNESCO made the same distinction in 2003, when it drafted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage — the international instrument that governs exactly the category of living cultural practice that arts policy cannot reach. One hundred and seventy-eight countries have ratified. Australia has not — because Australia has not yet identified the sector that safeguarding is required to govern. It is still calling culture and the arts the same thing, investing $1.1 billion in one while the other disappears.
The consultation on Australia’s next National Cultural Policy closes in ten days. The question it has not yet asked — the one that Tylor asked in 1871, that Williams answered in 1958, that Japan answered institutionally in 1950 — is whether Australia is prepared to govern culture as the system it actually is, rather than the arts program it has been mistaken for. One hundred and seventy-eight countries have ratified the UNESCO Convention that makes the distinction legally binding. The budget invested $1.1 billion and called it culture. It was arts. The difference is not semantic. It is a sector.
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Raymond Williams on Culture and Education — David Buckingham
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