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“Culture is ordinary” In his 1958 essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’, Raymond Williams gave a condensed statement of his view on culture, one that came to inspire a new way of studying culture in society: “We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life – the common mean-ings, to mean the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative effort” (Williams, 1958, p. 4). Williams not only combined an anthropological notion of culture as everyday life with an artistic view of culture as distinct representational and knowledge-building artifacts and practices; he also insisted on their mutual interdependency. In doing so, he pointed to the necessity of understanding all cultural artifacts and practices – from popular media to the finest art, from everyday rituals to scientific endeavors – in their social and material contexts, without lessening their creative and intellectual dimensions. Raymond Williams did not intend his dictum of “culture is ordinary ” to reduce culture to the humdrum, to everyday life. On the contrary, he wished to insist on the creative and intel-lectual dimensions of ordinary people’s lives and at the same time to suggest a political vision of a common culture in which everyone could participate and fulfill his or her creative and intellectual potential. He resisted the notions of ‘the masses ’ and ‘mass culture’, saying “there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses ” (Williams, 1958, p. 11). His broad conception of culture did not restrain him from taking a critical stance toward aspects of his contemporary culture. He neither respected the use of culture to display traditional status hierarchies nor did he regard as attractive the culture of the new class of commercia