Roland Posner in a paper entitled “What is Culture?” identifies three types of culture: social culture (institutions and rituals transmitted from one generation to another); material culture (artefacts and skills transmitted in like manner); and mental culture (mentifacts and conventions also transmitted from one generation to another) (254). A looser definition is given by Edward S. Tylor in his book Primitive Culture. Tylor takes culture “in its widest ethnographic sense as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1).

The second definition is more pertinent to this essay, as we want to view culture as a complex whole comprising of many different parts. It is our belief that the boundaries of culture shift with time and space, and that a phenomenon that is core in one epoch can become periphery in another or even go into extinction. The fluidity of culture is such that this process of phenomena shifting from core position to boundary – and from thence perhaps into extinction – is ceaseless. Another way of looking at it is in terms of cultural disintegration. Seen from this angle, phenomena that are alive in one place and time can be virtually abandoned in another, and as these phenomena fall into disuse the result is akin to when they are marginalized - - cultural demise. It is interesting to see how this theme is treated in two familiar novels: Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. Both novelists are concerned with the demise of a culture and both their portrayals revolve around two words: “marginalization” and “disintegration”. Admittedly, the process is much slower in Hardy than in Achebe, but it is recognizable nonetheless, and it is exploited through an iconic relationship between the artist’s mental creation and the reality of the world depicted.