This book concerns the implications and interrelations of key concepts of culture, defending an updated communicative notion of culture as meaning-making against a series of current challenges. The first part of the book distinguishes four main concepts of culture, presenting their histories, uses, limitations and mutual contradictions, which else often tend to be neglected. The second part scrutinizes neomaterialist and posthumanist critics antihermeneutic efforts to escape the spirals of interpretation and meaning. Learning from such contestations, the third part summarizes the arguments and in five theses reconstructs a contemporary and comprehensive agenda for cultural studies, based on creative imagination and communicative mediation in the dynamic interface between meaning and materiality. This thus provides a survey of fundamental concepts and theories of culture for students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, while simultaneously also serving as an introductory guide to the contemporary debate in this field.

Johan Fornäs is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. He founded the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden and the journalCulture Unbound, and is a member of Academia Europaea. His previous books includeCultural Theory and Late Modernity (1995),Consuming Media (2007),Signifying Europe (2012),Capitalism (2013) andEurope Faces Europe (2017).

Chapter 1. Introduction: Which culture?.- Chapter 2. The ontological concept of culture as cultivation.- Chapter 3. The anthropological concept of culture as lifeform.- Chapter 4. The aesthetic concept of culture as art.- Chapter 5. The hermeneutic concept of culture as meaning making.- Chapter 6. Interpretation.- Chapter 7. Things.- Chapter 8. Media.- Chapter 9. Culture returns.- Chapter 10. Further tasks.- Chapter 11. Conclusion: Cultural crosscurrents.