o How do you define your culture?

My culture is dynamic. The more I grow and learn of myself as a person, and gain knowledge of other cultures, I integrate them into my life.

I grew up in the north, but with strong southern roots, so I have a bit of both traditions in me. For example I'm still fairly blunt. But I'll never call an elder by a first name unless invited to do so. My family is broken, so we do not celebrate things how we did before, but adjust to meet our needs. My music tastes are a celebration of different styles. My choice in literature is also aimed at expanding myself as a person. Much of the "culture" I was surrounded in growing up centered around food. I'm trying to change that for my family. We get out and enjoy nature, and public offerings like parks, library and museums. Or dance under the moon at harvest time, or make an art project to celebrate another event. Anyway, pretty wordy way to describe dynamic.

For me it is easy to define what my culture is. I was born and raised in the country of my ancestors, I read, write and speak the language and I hold the passport of that country as well. And ethnically I belong to the clear majority of the country. But I am learning things from other cultures too, and I don't believe that things are done the right way only in my country... We all have heard expressions such as " you have to respect your culture" and " you must stick to your roots" etc. Now the question is :HOw do you define "your culture" ?

Let's consider this scenario: An Asian American boy was born in USA. His Chinese name is Ma Ying Lo. His parents migrated from China to USA. Therefore they speak Chinese as their first language and can't get rid of their Chinese accent while speaking English. Everybody knows Ma Ying Lo as the Chinese boy. However......both of his parents belong to the ethnic minority "SALAR", which are DiREcTlyRelaTed to TURKS from Turkey back hundred years ago and somehow have managed to retain their Turkish dialect. Even his grandparents still speak it. however, his parents were born and grew up in Beijing so they become indistinguishable to other Han Chinese. The question is..Which cultural roots should Ma Ying Lou, the Asian American boy, get back to? CHinEse or Turkish Cultural root ???? What is "his culture" ? The boy's culture will be a mix of American and Chinese/Turkish. I define my culture as an African West Indian American.

My mom is a 2nd generation Montserratian and my dad moved from Trinidad to America. But technically he is half Trinidadian half Bajan since his mother was fam was originally from barbados. African wise I know I am mixed ethnically since the enslaved people from that continent came from various regions, more so in West Africa, so its hard to say which country my ancestors are from. And being from the West Indies there is a 90% chance you are also racially mixed which could be carib indigenous/East Indian/White/East Asian/Africa/Middle Eastern/Hispanic. But the only closest thing I do in terms of the Irish and East Indian said to be in my family tree is our last names, I'am catholic, and eating rottihaha. But if I was raised in Montserrat I would really...celebrate St.Patrick's day. Growing up in America i was surrounded by both cultures, so I feel I am both to a certain degree.

y y

Culture is generally regarded as a complex collection of values, beliefs, behaviours, and material objects shared by a group and passed on from one generation to the next There is nothing good or bad about culture it just is what it is

Origins of Culture and Its Defining Features y No one can really determine when culture began, for two primary reasons. First, very little material evidence survives from thousands of years ago. Second, much of culture is nonmaterial and so cannot be preserved for future consideration Sociologists suggest that culture has five defining features: Culture is learned Culture is shared Culture is transmitted Culture is cumulative Culture is human These five defining features of culture are important in understanding both the complexity of culture and how groups maintain their uniqueness over time Culture can be divided into two major segments: material culture, which includes tangible artefacts, physical objects, and items found in a society; and non-material culture, which includes a societys intangible and abstract components, such as values and norms

y y y y y y y y

Values, Norms, Folkways, Mores, Laws, and Sanctions y y y y y y Values are beliefs about ideal goals and behaviours that serve as standards for social life EX: Canadians viewed government-sponsored health care as on of the most important defining features of their society Norms are culturally defined rules that outline appropriate behaviours EX: A Canadian norm is our belief that it is rude to speak while your mouth is full Folkways are informal norms that suggest customary ways of behaving EX: walking on the left side of a busy sidewalk Mores are norms that carry a strong sense of social importance and necessity EX: extramarital affairs Laws are a type of norm that is formally defined and enacted in legislation EX: In Canada, it is illegal to steal your neighbours lawnmower or to cheat on your taxes Sanction is a penalty for norm violation or a reward for norm adherence EX: Getting an A on an test is a reward because you studied and answered all the questions, getting and F on a test is a penalty because you never studied and only answered 5 of the 25 questions

Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism y y y y Ethnocentrism a tendency to view ones own culture as superior to all others Cultural relativism appreciation that all cultures have intrinsic worth and should be evaluated and understood on their own terms Cultural shock a feeling of disorientation, alienation, depression, and loneliness experienced when entering a culture very different from ones own Oberg listed a four-stage model to understand a persons progression through feelings culture shock: o Honeymoon o Crisis o Recovery o Adjustment Obergs research demonstrates that although people need time to adjust to new cultural standards, they will adjust

Language and Culture y y All human beings communicate through symbols a symbol is something that stands for or represents something else A language is a shared symbol system of rules and meanings that governs the production and interpretation of speech

Language Extinction y y y y y y y y When language is lost, the culture to which it belonged loses one of its most important survival mechanisms Languages die out when dominant language groups are adopted by young people whose parents speak a traditional language In central Siberia, the language of the Tofa people is spoken by only 30 individuals, and all of them are elderly According to K. David Harrison approximately 7000 languages exist in the world today and fully half of these are in danger of extinction within the next 100 years Harrison suggests that there are at least three reasons why we should be concerned about losing languages As human collective, each time we lose a language we lose knowledge, because each language serves as a vast source of information about the past and about how we adapted to our environments When a language dies, so do its related cultural myths, folk songs, legends, poetry, and belief systems The demise of the worlds languages hinders our exploration for the mysteries of the human mind

Does Language Define Thought? y y Two early researchers who investigated the potential for language to influence how we interpret our world were Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf Their approach, commonly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, suggests that language does in fact determine thought a position referred to as linguistic determinism

Non-Verbal Communication y y y y y y y y y Body language Proximity Haptics uses personal contact (touching) to convey meaning Oculesics uses eye contact to convey meaning Chronemics uses time to convey meaning Olfactics uses smell to convey meaning Vocalics uses voice to convey meaning Sound systems (mmm, er, ah) Adornment uses accessories (types of clothing, jewellery, hairstyles, tattoos) to convey meaning

Locomotion using movement (walking, running, staggering, limping) to convey meaning

Cultural Diversity Subcultures: Maintaining Uniqueness y Subculture a group within a population whose values, norms, folkways, or mores set them apart from the mainstream culture

Countercultures: Challenging Conformity y y Counterculture a type of subculture that strongly opposed the widely held cultural patterns of the larger population Hippies from the 1960s challenged the dominant definitions

Defining Features of Canadian Culture Canadian Values y y y y y y y y Seven core Canadian values Belief in equality and fairness in a democratic society Belief in consultation and dialogue Importance of accommodation and tolerance Support for diversity Compassion and generosity Attachment to Canadas natural beauty Our world image: Commitment to freedom, peace, and non-violent change

Global Value Changes, 1981 to 2006 y y y Christian Welzel variance can be summarized in two dimensions: secular-rational and self-expression Secular-rational values vary along a continuum from strong to weak; low-importance on religion, low levels of national pride, low levels of respect for authority figures, promote personal independence, and be accepting of divorce Self-expression values also vary along a continuum; support individual autonomy and political participation, be accepting of homosexuality, and promote a strong sense of self-direction and the expression of trust in others

Cultural Change y y y y Cultures are always changing to address new social and technological challenges Discovery occurs when something previously unrecognized or understood is found to have social or cultural applications Invention/innovation occurs when existing cultural items are manipulation or modified Diffusion occurs when cultural items or practices are transmitted from one group to another

Sociological Approaches to Culture and Culture Change Functionalism y Functionalism approaches the value of culture from the premise that, since every society must meet basic needs, culture can best be understood as playing a role in helping to meet those needs

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Yet within this diversity are common features that all known societies are believed to share, referred to as cultural universals Functionalists argue that unique cultural traditions and customs develop and persist because they are adaptive and improve a peoples chance of survival Cultural adaptation is the process by which environmental pressures are addressed through changes in practices, traditions, and behaviours as a way of maintaining stability and equilibrium

Conflict Theory y y y y Conflict theories assert that those who hold power define and perpetuate a cultures ideology, and create a value system that defines social inequality as just and proper Conflict theorists would certainly approach the slavery example we used above from a very different perspective: Slavery was allowed to exist because it benefited rich white people Conflict theories view the link between money and success as an expression of the ruling elites power and influence According to Karl Marx, the dominant culture eventually becomes part of the value system of an oppressed group

Symbolic Interactionism y y y One of the most famous symbolic interactionists, Herbert Blumer, suggested that people do not respond directly to the world around them, but instead to the meanings they collectively apply to it Investigates how culture is actively created and recreated through social- interaction Thus as people go about their everyday lives, they create and modify culture as they engage in the negotiation of reality based on shared meaning grounded in cultural symbols

any people have struggled to define culture, and I have struggled in my current project on cultural environmentalism to come up with a workable definition. Below are some thoughts; I welcome comments and suggestions on additional sources or perspectives that might help in my attempt to describe the cultural environment. (Of course, wikipedia has a nice entry with many useful sources for me to explore.) Anthropologist Edward B. Taylor offered a broad definition, stating that culture is 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] However, [c]ulture has also been described as one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. There is no shortage of proposed definitions150, according to one study. The definition of culture remains elusive and contested.[2] Or as another scholar put it, [c]ulture is one of the [most] basic theoretical sociological terms, and yet it is inherently indefinable. Both in terms of its specific meaning and broad content, the understanding of culture has defied consensus among sociologists.[3] The definitional ambiguity stems at least in part from the difficulties in defining meaningful boundaries and deciding what resources to include/exclude. Culture captures the contextual, contingent, and social/relational aspects of resources that are resources vis--vis their meaning to and among people. As Benkler suggests, [Culture] is a frame of meaning from within which we must inevitably function and speak to each other, and whose terms, constraints, and affordances we always negotiate. There is no point outside of culture from which to do otherwise. In a sense, culture itself is an environmental concept. Yet, because culture is (socially) constructed, it must be understood, if not defined,

as a reflection of that which we want, or as John Breen puts it, culture can be understood as a societys answer to a series of fundamental questions about what it values.[5] [1] Edward B. Taylor, Primitive Culture 1 (3d ed. 1889). [2] Ilhyung Lee, Culturally-Based Copyright Systems?: The U.S. and Korea in Conflict, 79 Wash. U. L.Q. 1103, 1109 (2001) (footnotes omitted). [3] Shubhankar Dam, Legal Systems as Cultural Rights: A Rights Based Approach to Traditional Legal Systems Under the Indian Constitution, 16 Ind. Intl & Comp. L. Rev. 295, 311 (2006) (footnotes omitted). [5] John M. Breen, Modesty and Moralism: John Paul II, the Structures of Sin and the Limits of Law A Reply to Skeel&Stuntz, Working Paper, 29-30 (Dec. 2006) (on file with the author) ([E]very culture is, in essence, a normative and didactic enterprise. It indicates what is desirable and permissible within a given society. It instructs both the observer and the participant as to how they ought to act. [A] culture is a societal answer to the question of value. Every culture renders a whole series of judgments as to what is truly important in life. In the norms implicit in the practices it supports and encourages, every culture identifies what is really worth valuing, what is worth the sacrifice and effort necessary to pursue and possess that which is most prized. Thus, in ways which are sometimes subtle and sometimes express, but which are always readily understood, a given culture defines that which is truly deserving of worship as the highest good to be attained.).

A few ideas: 1) Raymond Williams Keywords may round up contrasting definitions nicely. Heres his definition of culture: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~dml3/880williams.htm 2) Rather than specifying the essence of culture, think about the function it plays in different social sciences. What is the role of culture in Geertzs account of, say, the autonomy of anthropology from more monistic or individualistic accounts of human action? What is its place in the sociology of a Weber or Durkheim? For some time in political science (and perhaps to this day), there was a big divide between more monistic, individualistic thinkers who had a basically economistic/psychological view of motivation, and a more cultural or holistic school. I think this debate is chronicled in some accounts of the history of the philosophy of social science. Julie Cohens work on culture and creativity in copyright (in UC Davis, I think) traces this tension; she ultimately suggests it may merely be a methodological anxiety best resolved by a both/and approach. 3) Breens definition of culture maps, I think, onto Philip Rieffs in the Triumph of the Therapeutic. I admire both authors, but I might worry that such a definition may suggest an array of ideological commitments not necessary to your discussion. 4) Finally, some consolation re the contestability of culture: one of Geertzs signal contributions to social science is to insist that we may not be seeking consensus in interpretationrather, we may only be seeking to sharpen our understanding of our differences. A cultural analysis may well have to take seriously each of utterly irreconcilable views, and may never be resolved in any way approaching the finality of technical solutions. Some closing thoughts, from Geertz: The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong. There are enormous difficulties in such an enterprise, methodological pitfalls to make a Freudian quake, and some moral perplexities as well. Nor is it the only way that symbolic forms can be sociologically handled. Functionalism lives, and so doespsychologism. But to regard such forms as saying something of something, and saying it to somebody, is at least to open up the possibility of an analysis which attends to their substance rather than to reductive formulas professing to account for them.

http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/deep.html 5) Does your definition of culture include both science & art? Fact & fiction? 6) I think Habermass concept of the lifeworld may get you out of the nomenclatural thicket here. It basically refers to everything that influences/informs conduct that is not driven by money or power. PS: both Rieff and Habermas are cited in this piece of mine: http://law.shu.edu/faculty/fulltime_faculty/pasquafa/pasquale_stem_cell.pdf a) If we follow Phillip Rieff and define culture as a set of common understandings consecrat[ing] those purposes alone in which the self can be real-ized and satisfied, b) Schutz and Luckmann define the lifeworld as that province of reality which the wide-awake and normal adult simply takes for granted in the attitude of common sense. [It is the] unquestioned ground of everything given in my experience, and the unquestionable frame in which all the problems I have to deal with are located. JRGEN HABERMAS, 1 THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 129-30 (Thomas McCarthy trans., 1987) (quoting A. SCHUTZ & T. LUCKMANN, THE STRUCTURES OF THE LIFEWORLD 3-4 (1993)).Habermas explains that only the context directly spoken to on a given occasion can fall into the whirl of problematization associated with communicative action; by contrast, the lifeworld always remains in the background. Id. at 130.

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought. The fw is cultura, L, from rw colere, L. Colere had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor with worship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still with occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus 'inhabit developed through colonus, L to colony. 'Honor with worship developed through cultus, L to cult. Cultura took on the main meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in Cicero, cultura animi, though with subsidiary medieval meanings of honor and worship (cf. in English culture as 'worship in Caxton (1483)). The French forms of cultura were couture, OF, which has since developed its own specialized meaning, and

later culture, which by eC15 had passed into English. The primary meaning was then in husbandry, the tending of natural growth. Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals. The subsidiary coulter-- ploughshare, had travelled by a different linguistic route, from culter, L -- ploughshare, culter, OE, to the variant English spellings culter, colter, coulter and as late as eCl7 culture (Webster, Duchess of Malfi, III, ii: 'hot burning cultures). This provided a further basis for the important next stage of meaning, by metaphor. From eCl6 the tending of natural growth was extended to process of human development, and this, alongside the original meaning in husbandry, was the main sense until lC18 and eC19. Thus More: 'to the culture and profit of their minds; Bacon: 'the culture and manurance of minds (1605); Hobbes: 'a culture of their minds (1651); Johnson: 'she neglected the culture of her understanding (1759). At various points in this development two crucial changes occurred: first, a degree of habituation to the metaphor, which made the sense of human tending direct; second, an extension of particular processes to a general process, which the word could abstractly carry. It is of course from the latter development that the independent noun culture began its complicated modern history, but the process of change is so intricate, and the latencies of meaning are at times so close, that it is not possible to give any definite date. Culture as an independent noun, an abstract process or the product of such a process, is not important before 1C18 and is not common before mCl9. But the early stages of this development were not sudden. There is an interesting use in Milton, in the second (revised) edition of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660): 'spread much more Knowledg and Civility, yea, Religion, through all parts of the Land, by communicating the natural heat of Government and Culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie num and neglected. Here the metaphorical sense ('natural heat) still appears to be present, and civility (cf. CIVILIZATION)is still written where in C19 we would normally expect culture. Yet we can also read 'government and culture in a quite modern sense. Milton, from the tenor of his whole argument, is writing about a general social process, and this is a definite stage of development. In C15 England this general process acquired definite class associations though cultivation and cultivated were more commonly used for this. But there is a letter of 1730 (Bishop of Killala, to Mrs Clayton; cit. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century)which has this clear sense: 'it has not been customary

for persons of either birth or culture to breed up their children to the Church. Akenside (Pleasures of Imagination, 1744) wrote: '... nor purple state nor culture can bestow. Wordsworth wrote 'where grace of culture hath been utterly unknown (1805), and Jane Austen (Emma, 1816) 'every advantage of discipline and culture. It is thus clear that culture was developing in English towards some of its modern senses before the decisive effects of a new social and intellectual movement. But to follow the development through this movement, in lC18 and eC19, we have to look also at developments in other languages and especially in German. In French, until C18, culture was always accompanied by a grammatical form indicating the matter being cultivated, as in the English usage already noted. Its occasional use as an independent noun dates from mC18, rather later than similar occasional uses in English. The independent noun civilization also emerged in mC18; its relationship to culture has since been very complicated (cf. CIVILIZATION and discussion below). There was at this point an important development in German: the word was borrowed from French, spelled first (lC18) Cultur and from C19 Kultur. Its main use was still as a synonym forcivilization: first in the abstract sense of a general process of becoming 'civilized or 'cultivated; second, in the sense which had already been established for civilization by the historians of the Enlightenment, in the popular C18 form of the universal histories, as a description of the secular process of human development. There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-9 1) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods. He attacked the assumption of the universal histories that 'civilization or culture - the historical self-development of humanity -- was what we would now call a unilinear process, leading to the high and dominant point of C18 European culture. Indeed he attacked what be called European subjugation and domination of the four quarters of the globe, and wrote: Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of

Nature. It is then necessary, he argued, in a decisive innovation, to speak of 'cultures in the plural: the specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods, but also the specific and variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation. This sense was widely developed, in the Romantic movement, as an alternative to the orthodox and dominant 'civilization. It was first used to emphasize national and traditional cultures, including the new concept of folk-culture (cf. FOLK). It was later used to attack what was seen as the MECHANICAL (q.v.) character of the new civilization then emerging: both for its abstract rationalism and for the 'inhumanity of current Industrial development. It was used to distinguish between 'human and 'material development. Politically, as so often in this period, it veered between radicalism and reaction and very often, in the confusion of major social change, fused elements of both. (It should also be noted, though it adds to the real complication, that the same kind of distinction, especially between 'material and 'spiritual development, was made by von Humboldt and others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the terms, culture being material and civilization spiritual. In general, however, the opposite distinction was dominant.) On the other hand, from the 1840s in Germany, Kultur was being used in very much the sense in which civilization had been used in C18 universal histories. The decisive innovation is G. F. Klemms AllgemeineKulturgeschichte der Menschheit -- 'General Cultural History of Mankind (1843-52)-- which traced human development from savagery through domestication to freedom. Although the American anthropologist Morgan, tracing comparable stages, used 'Ancient Society, with a culmination inCivilization, Klemms sense was sustained, and was directly followed in English by Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870). It is along this line of reference that the dominant sense in modern social sciences has to be traced. The complexity of the modern development of the word, and of its modern usage, can then be appreciated. We can easily distinguish the sense which depends on a literal continuity of physical process as now in 'sugar-beet culture or, in the specialized physical application in bacteriology since the 1880s, 'germ culture. But once we go beyond the physical reference, we have to recognize three broad active categories of usage. The sources of two of

these we have already discussed: (i) the independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, from C18; (ii) the independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general, from Herder and Klemm. But we have also to recognize (iii) the independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity. This seems often now the most widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theater and film. A Ministry of Culture refers to these specific activities, sometimes with the addition of philosophy, scholarship, history. This use, (iii), is in fact relatively late. It is difficult to date precisely because it is in origin an applied form of sense (i): the idea of a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development was applied and effectively transferred to the works and practices which represent and sustain it. But it also developed from the earlier sense of process; cf. 'progressive culture of fine arts, Millar, Historical View of the English Government, IV, 314 (1812). In English (i) and (iii) are still close; at times, for internal reasons, they are indistinguishable as in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1867); while sense (ii) was decisively introduced into English by Tylor, Primitive Culture (1870), following Klemm. The decisive development of sense (iii) in English was in lC19 and eC2O. Faced by this complex and still active history of the word, it is easy to react by selecting one 'true or 'proper or 'scientific sense and dismissing other senses as loose or confused. There is evidence of this reaction even in the excellent study by Kroeber and Kluckhohn, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, where usage in North American anthropology is in effect taken as a norm. It is clear that, within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be clarified. But in general it is the range and overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence. It is especially interesting that in archaeology and in cultural anthropology the reference to culture or a culture isprimarily to materialproduction, while in history and cultural studies the reference is primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. This often confuses but even more often conceals the central question of the relations between 'material and 'symbolic production, which in some recent argument -- cf. my own Culture -- have

always to be related rather than contrasted. Within this complex argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as effectively overlapping positions; there are also, understandably, many unresolved questions and confused answers. But these arguments and questions cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of actual usage. This point is relevant also to uses of forms of the word in languages other than English, where there is considerable variation. The anthropological use is common in the German, Scandinavian and Slavonic language groups, but it is distinctly subordinate to the senses of art and learning, or of a general process of human development, in Italian and French. Between languages as within a language, the range and complexity of sense and reference indicate both difference of intellectual position and some blurring or overlapping. These variations, of whatever kind, necessarily involve alternative views of the activities, relationships and processes which this complex word indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate. It is necessary to look also at some associated and derived words. Cultivation and cultivated went through the same metaphorical extension from a physical to a social or educational sense in C17, and were especially significant words in C18. Coleridge, making a classical eC19 distinction between civilization and culture, wrote (1830): 'the permanent distinction, and occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization. The noun in this sense has effectively disappeared but the adjective is still quite common, especially in relation to manners and tastes. The important adjective cultural appears to date from the 1870s; it became common by the 1890s. The word is only available, in its modern sense, when the independent noun, in the artistic and intellectual or anthropological senses, has become familiar. Hostility to the word culture in English appears to date from the controversy around Arnolds views. It gathered force in lC19 and eC20, in association with a comparable hostility toaesthete and AESTHETIC (q.v.). Its association with class distinction produced the mime-word culchah. There was also an area of hostility associated with anti-German feeling, during and after the 1914-18 War, in relation to propaganda about Kultur. The central area of hostility has lasted, and one element of it has been emphasized by the recent American phrase culture-vulture. It is significant that virtually all the hostility (with the sole exception of the temporary anti-German association) has been connected with uses involving claims to superior knowledge (cf. the noun INTELLECTUAL),refinement (culchah) and distinctions between 'high art

(culture) and popular art and entertainment. It thus records a real social history and a very difficult and confused phase of social and cultural development. It is interesting that the steadily extending social and anthropological use of culture and cultural and such formations as subculture (the culture of a distinguishable smaller group) has, except in certain areas (notably popular entertainment), either bypassed or effectively diminished the hostility and its associated unease and embarrassment. The recent use of culturalism, to indicate a methodological contrast with structuralism in social analysis, retains many of the earlier difficulties, and does not always bypass the hostility.

o What does that mean to you? o What do you know now about your culture that you didnt know before this class began?

The last time we defined culture from an etymological stand point. This time well do it from a textbook standpoint. If the analysis from the former is correct then it should correlate perfectly with the textbook definitions.

Well make use of some information from Texas A&M Universitys College of Architecture, Department of Construction Science, on Associate Professor IfteChoudhurys page athttp://www.tamu.edu/classes/cosc/choudhury/culture.html. On this page two of the definitions of culture stated are: Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation. Other definitions of culture are: Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another. Geert Hofstede Culture is the shared set of assumptions, values, and beliefs of a group of people by which they organize their common life. Gary Wederspahn Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting. The essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values. Clyde Kluckhohn Culture consists of concepts, values, and assumptions about life that guide behavior and are widely shared by people. Richard Brislin& Tomoko Yoshida Culture is an integrated system of learned behavior patterns that are characteristic of the members of any given society. Culture refers to the total way of life for a particular group of people. It includes [what] a group of people thinks, says, does and makesits customs, language, material artifacts and shared systems of attitudes and feelings.Robert Kohls OK, these are enough definitions. A cursory look shows that all the above stated definitions use similar words that show the strong correlation between a persons mental persuasion and their culture. In other words, they show that culture is a result of what is cultivated in the human soul (the realm of human will, mind, emotions and intellect) hence we see words like feelings, beliefs, attitudes, values etc re-occurring in almost all the definitions. The modern phrases used in place of Ciceros cultivation of the human mind (cultura anima) are: i. collective programming of the mindHofstede ii. learned behavior patternsKohls iii. patterned ways of thinkingKluckhohn

We can conclude therefore that the textbook definitions are in agreement with that which we derived from the etymology discussion. Again culture is important because how we think i.e. the going ons in our mind determines our actions, what we value, what we worship and how we govern in any segment of society. If we have a culture in any segment of society that is immoral and adversarial to positive development, the good news is that it can change. culture is not static. It is dynamic. Cultures can shift from being immoral to being moral depending on what is cultivated in the souls of the critical mass of the populace

One thing that really stood out to me was that other people are the mirror in which we see ourselves. (39 B. Tatum). This really made me think about the way I see myself and the way I think others see me. This was interesting to me, because I never really thought of that before and I believe its true. Ive always wanted people to think of me or look at me a certain way and I never really thought about it until after reading the article, The Complexity of Identity:Who Am I?. Now I understand why Ive always wanted people to look at me in a certain way and think of me a certain way, because these are the ways that I want to be able to look at myself and think of myself. I also never really thought about the quote, Youre defined by the people you hang out with. My mom used to tell me that all the time, but I never actually believed her until reading that, The adolescent capacity for self reflection (and resulting self-consciousness) allows one to ask, Who am I now? Who was I before? Who will I become? The answers to these questions will influence choices about who ones romantic partners will be, what type of work one will do, where one will live, and what belief system one will embrace. Choices made in adolescence ripple throughout the lifespan. (10 B. Tatum). This was interesting to me because the more that I thought about it, the more everything made sense to me. In middle school I used to be the type of person who cared so much about what other people thought of me that I pretended to be someone that I wasnt. I was so self conscious about the person I was, that I looked at the way other people were and tried to be just like them. I wouldnt say or do things I thought were right, because I was so afraid of doing them wrong and being rejected. In order to avoid this I thought that if I pretended to be just like the popular people, then Id fit in with everyone and that people would like me, because of this I agreed with things I thought were wrong and did things I knew I shouldnt be doing. I never really felt like I fit in with half the people I hung out with in middle school and the beginning of high school and its because I didnt. As high school went on, I found myself disagreeing with more and more of what my so called friends thought, but still pretended to be someone I wasnt. I let people walk all over me and I acted like I didnt care. If someone didnt like me, it would bother me for days on end and Id try to find a way to make them like me. I didnt hang out with certain people I thought would make me less popular, because I cared way too much about what other people thought of me. By the time my junior year of high school came around, I started asking myself the same questions that were in the reading, Who am I now? and Who will I become? I started asking myself if pretending to be someone I wasnt was really the way I wanted to live the rest of my life. Did I really want others to love me for someone I wasnt or love me for the person I was? I decided I was done pretending and it was time to be myself. I started to turn away from the people I thought werent good friends to me and I started making more positive decisions in my life. I was never really a bad kid, but I knew I wasnt living up to my full potential, because I was so caught up in what other people thought of me. I started working out more and started trying harder in school. I wasnt afraid to be who I really was anymore and my confidence grew a lot. This was because I finally learned that being myself is the only person I can be and that what other people think of me shouldnt matter half as much as what I thought of myself. By the end of my Junior year of high school my grades had improved, I was doing better in cheerleading, Id lost thirty-five pounds and I had a boyfriend. I was a lot more confident and I was a whole lot happier with the person I was. I lost a few friends and gained some, but all in all I realized that no matter how many

friends I had at least it was because I was being myself. Theyre so many different types of people in the world and just because one person didnt like me, theyre so many others out there who would love me for the real me and not for someone who I pretended to be. I finally felt like I belonged and that was the best feeling in the world to me.
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Now, I completely believe my moms saying that, Youre defined by the people you hang out with, because I am who I am today because of the people I grew up around. Such as, my family and friends who I spent the most time around or even those few who I only hung out with once, but they somehow changed my life in one way or another. I never really understood cultures until reading about them in, Defining Culture: Fieldwork and ethnography. One part of the reading states, We define culture as an invisible web of behaviors, patterns, rules, and rituals, of a group of people who have contact with one another and share common languages. ( 3 Defining Culture: Fieldwork and Ethnography). After reading this I came to the conclusion that the culture I belong to is my family. I believe this because of the way that culture is defined. My family and I share most of the same patterns, rituals, rules, language and behaviors, so obviously this is the culture that I belong to. My family and friends have played a huge role in determining the subcultures that I belong to. For example, one subculture that I belong to is cheerleading. My older sisters were my role models growing up and I wanted to everything that they did. Since they were cheerleaders, I wanted to be a cheerleader too. I learned this behavior from my sisters and thats why Ive been in cheerleading pretty much my entire life. Both of my older sisters have been in cheerleading and my little sister whose three, already dances around and acts like shes a cheerleader. This goes back to what a culture is, my sisters and I were involved in cheerleading and now my little sister wants to be a cheerleader too, notice the pattern thats developed. This is proof that cheerleading is a subculture of my sisters and I and we all belong to the same culture. I was somewhat confused when I read later on, Although we would not classify modern families as subcultures, they do have some of the features of a subculture and prepare us to observe outside our own home territory. (8 Ch. 1 Stepping In and Stepping Out). I didnt understand if the author was trying to say that families are a subculture or culture, but I personally believe that families are cultures and that every family is a part of a separate culture. I noticed a part that said, When you first ate dinner at someones house other than yours, you may have felt like an outsider. You stepped out of your own home and stepping in to a set of routines and rituals different from your own. (7,8 Ch. 1 Stepping In and Stepping Out: Understanding Cultures). This stood out to me the most because it made me think about how awkward and weird it felt for me the first time I ate dinner with my boyfriend and his family. He comes from a family where his parents are still together and they eat dinner together almost every meal. Although, my boyfriend and I practice the same religion, his entire family says grace before eating. I on the other hand come from a divorced family, so Im not used to eating almost every meal together with all of my family members and at the times we do say grace at the table, only one person says it instead of all of us. This is what made me realize that every culture is different no matter how many subcultures they may be involved in to make them similar. Also that, every individual associated with a culture consists of many different subcultures. After reading these papers I realized a lot more about myself than I did before. I realized some things Ive learned from the past, Ive realized some things about my life right now and Ive thought about some things in the future. I realized that no one will ever truly know their full identity until the very last day of their lives. Integrating ones past, present, and future into a cohesive, unified sense of self is a complex task that beings in adolescence and continues for a lifetime...The salience of particular aspects of our identity varies at different moments in our lives. The process of integrating the component parts of our self-definition is indeed a lifelong journey. (10 B. Tatum).

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o o o o o o How do your culture and your perception of it impact your perception of and participation in conflict? After investigating these questions, synthesize your group and individual input into a reflection on cross cultural and intercultural conflict. What did you learn from these interviews? Use reading from class to illustrate the points you are making Please follow the syllabus for further detail and instruction.

You know one of the things that sucks about writing a book on the culture wars? Having to define culture. It's such a loaded term, which people have been trying to define for quite awhile, certainly since the 19th century (when a whole lot of things were getting defined). You've got Matthew Arnold. In Culture and Anarchy, he defines culture as "being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world." In a lot of ways, this is thinking of culture as an object, something out there. The "best" he talks about is what defines canons of art and literature. If you read the best books and study the best art and immerse yourself in the best philosophical thinking, then you can call yourself cultured. Culture becomes an identity. Some would argue that the humanities themselves are borne out of this sense of culture. If you go to a university and study the best, you come out cultured. Of course, this idea has been complicated by those like Stuart Hall. Hall and his peers looked at working class cultures (among other things) with the point of saying that even those whom we would not normally see as cultured have a culture. Just as you can talk about the best poetry, you can talk about the best rock-n-roll. This understanding of culture leads us to the idea of the popular, the label usually ascribed to cultural texts that are widely appreciated and not usually part of high culture. American Idol and Cosi Fan Tutte are both well-known cultural texts in the field of music, but the kinds of culture each represents could not be more different (and the fact that I both hold a PhD in English and had to look up how to spell "tutte" says something about the blurring of lines between high, low, and popular cultures, too). When it comes to studying art, Arnold's definition of culture certainly remains important. Then we get into anthropology, a field that has been deeply criticized yet is foremost in most of our minds when we think of culture. There's Edward Burnett Tylor who worked in the same general place and time as Arnold. In his work on "primitive cultures" (an ugly phrase by our standards today), he says that culture, "taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is 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." This is a much broader definition of culture than Arnold's. Though we now cringe at much work from the nineteenth-century on "the other," this is a pretty important stage in defining culture. Culture is no longer about texts or objects. It's still about knowledge, but it's about the kind of knowledge that we gain throughout our lives. Just as we learn language as we grow, we learn culture over time, too. Also, this broad definition pretty much contains all of what it means to be human, and that means that this definition of culture allows for oppression. If you remove from a person or larger group of people part of what makes people human, then you oppress that person or group. If marriage is part of what defines a culture, and you do not allow a group of people such as lesbians and gays to marry, then you are

Defining Culture

oppressing them. If voting is a part of culture, and you do not allow a group to vote (as was very common before a range of voter's rights acts in this country), then you are oppressing them. It's worth noting that both of these definitions try to create a stable understanding of culture during a time when there was a lot of upheaval in the world with wars, revolts, protests, colonization, and other disruptive and often violent acts taking place around the world. Arnold taught us to think of culture as something we can obtain through study. Tylor taught us that culture is something we are born into and learn throughout out lives. Sociology deepened things more. In the twentieth-century in America, we get to Talcott Parsons. I had not heard of him before today, but I can see how he is important in defining culture. He brought structuralism into the mix by trying to uncover what it is in culture that makes us act the way we do. If Tylor defined culture in a broad sense and saw it as something we learned over time, Parsons dealt with what creates culture in the first place and how it maintains itself. He developed what seems to be a pretty complex and abstract theory of social action known as the AGIL Paradigm (AGIL stands for adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency). What I think is important about this is that a lot of the work in cultural studies and in social theory in general (as it is taught and has been taught in graduate schools for a good couple of decades now) can connect to his ideas. I'm thinking in particular of ideology and discipline. I'm not saying that Parsons is the father of theory. People were writing about these things before he was around. I'm just saying I see a connection. Of course, for my work, it's not so important that I define culture coherently or cohesively. It's more important that I examine texts from the time period and see how they define culture, explicitly or implicitly. And it's important to have a firmer grasp on ways of defining culture so I can see where certain people and ideas fit. After all, everyone starts somewhere. I'm auditing a class at NYU this semester called Issues in Arts Politics. I was excited to be allowed to audit because I thought it would help me with my book project, and it certainly looks like it will. It will get me thinking about the larger issues I have to deal with, like defining culture. Today was the first day of class, and I was thinking that I should condense my notes in a way that is relevant for me. So all of this is taken from class lecture and discussion and filtered through my own particular lenses. I'll try to do this each week even if it does mean leaving the house at 5:30 in the morning to get there on time.

This chapter deals with culture. Sociologists are interested in culture because it is a powerful social force that influences a variety of diverse events, such as marriage or war. Differing beliefs and values may be cause for a conflict such as war, or for smaller social cleavages between social groups in the same society. The term culture is used in many ways on a day-to-day basis in this chapter, the author presents a discussion of culture.s most important features as it relates to sociology. * At its most expansive, the term culture can refer to the sum total of human creation. This is the first distinction madeXbetween culture and the .natural world.. However, this notion is a bit bloated, allowing us to call all social life cultural. A more restricted definition sees a division between the cultural and non-cultural. The former is made up of languages, symbols, texts, world views, beliefs, art, music, and other phenomena. Generally, the sociological literature differentiates between culture

and structure on one hand, and the symbolic and non-symbolic on the other. * Culture is also different across place and time. We might think of .Western culture., or .national culture., or the culture of a particular city Torontos urbanism, for instance. Yet all these distinctions may overstate the precision with which we are actually able to tie culture to physical space. Within physical space, culture can vary across age, gender, race, ethnicity, and social class. Thus, culture has social as well as physical boundaries. We should also be careful not to let discussion of cultural differences hide the fact that there are often far greater similarities between rural Alberta and urban Ontario, for example. All culture changes over time as well. * We can further distinguish between culture and structure. For example, Canadian beliefs about politics are cultural; the system of representative democracy is a structure. Similarly, we can distinguish between the symbolic and non-symbolic in culture. That is, those things that convey meaning and understanding versus those things that play instrumental roles. However, this is often a fine line. * Next, the author discusses the role of culture within social theory, discussing five perspectives: Orthodox Marxism and Neo-Marxism, Cultural Functionalism, Symbolic Interactionism and Dramaturgy, the Cultural Studies Tradition, and the Production of Culture approach. These perspectives can be compared across the aspects of culture they focus on or example, as a tool of conflict in neo-Marxist theories. Also, they can be compared via how much autonomy they assign to culture Orthodox Marxism, for example, sees culture as merely a reflection of the economic base. * Next, the chapter gives examples of cultural realms: language and discourse, the mass media, religion, and art. Within each of these realms, the sociology of culture can offer insights, such as highlighting the importance of particular discourses around societal issues. * The author describes two views on the mechanisms of cultural change: one that sees change in culture as related to social-structural changes, and one that emphasizes the interconnected nature of culture. Technology is an especially important example of the former, while Simmels theory of fashion is used to illustrate the latter. * The chapter concludes by discussing Canadian culture in terms of its .distinct societies. (English and French) and multiculturalism. However, American cultural imperialism poses challenges for those who seek to defend a unique Canadian culture. Questions for Consideration 1. One of the first distinctions that are often made when defining culture is that between the human and the .natural. worlds. However, some thinkers, such as the evolutionist and naturalist Charles Darwin, saw human culture as simply a continuation of the evolutionary processes that produced humans and all other organisms. Can you see cultural traits which might be considered adaptive in an evolutionary sense? Are there elements of culture which are non-adaptive or redundant? 2. Why might the word culture be used in a non-academic sense to refer to the .high. arts, such as classical music, opera, and gallery art? What might a neo-Marxist have to say about this privileging of particular forms of culture over others? 3. Canadian law includes some measures designed to promote Canadian culture. These have included enforcing a minimum quota of Canadian artists on radio stations. Do you think these measures have been successful? Are there substantial cultural differences between Canadian musicians and American musicians, or are there greater similarities? Sociologists Online Antonio Gramsci (1891V1937)