Culture is a field of mutually and unevenly determining forces, not base and superstructure

Evidence

“I came to believe that I had to give up, or at least to leave aside, what I knew as the Marxist tradition: to attempt to develop a theory of social totality; to see the study of culture as the study of relations between elements in a whole way of life; to find ways of studying structure … which could stay in touch with and illuminate particular art works and forms, but also forms and relations of more general social life; to replace the formula of base and superstructure with the more active idea of a field of mutually if also unevenly determining forces.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 187

Categorization

• DEFINE: Williams’s own statement of the central methodological move: ‘a field of mutually if also unevenly determining forces’ replaces the base/superstructure formula.
• XREF: This exact formulation is the theoretical bridge Hall uses to make cultural analysis a serious partner to economic analysis for a lifelong learner. — connects to: Similar technologies in similar environments do not force similar cultural systems. — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 106
• DEEPTHINKING: The phrase ‘mutually if also unevenly determining forces’ is a dense, paradigm-shifting idea about causality in social theory.