Download Saturn Devouring His Children

CULTURE 2
What it is that all cultures have in
common?
• Boundary, threshold between nature and
culture
• Prohibitions, taboos: many of them do not
‘make sense’
• Dietary habits (prohibited kinds of meat, days
of fasting)
• Cannibalism
• hunger cannibalism vs cultural cannibalism
(mortuary, sacrificial)
• Incest: symbolic difference (meaning)
• Licence of gods: quod licet Iovi not licet bovi
• Francisco Goya:
• Saturn
Devouring His
Children
• (1819-23)
Meaning and culture
• Let us start as simply as possible. Cultural things are,
in part, made of bodily movements of individuals ...
For instance, people are beating drums, or erecting a
building, or slaughtering an animal. The material
character of these phenomena is, so far,
unproblematic. But we must go further. Is it a
musical exercise, a drummed message, or a ritual? Is
it a house, a shop, or a temple? Is it butchery, or
sacrifice? (Dan Sperber: Explaining Culture)
Meaning as the threshold of culture
• Clifford Geertz (US anthropologist) about the
‘winking boy’
• ‘THICK DESCRIPTION’
• Cultural practices as texts (Balinese cockfight)
• professional wrestling, a duel
Culture and meaning
• Culture is „webs of meaning... woven by us”
(Geertz)
• Texts
• practices
• Institutions
• Objects (including natural objects and places)
Interpreting cultural facts
• CULTURALISM
• coherence of a culture
• Sg common between public schools,
afternoon tea, cricket and the British Empire
Culture and meaning
‘Which is Adam and which is
Eve?’
‘I do not know, but I could
tell if they had their
clothes on.’
(Samuel Butler)
Saudi athlete
wearing hijab in
London 2012
• Nothing is
exhausted by its
use value
• Clothes:
‘culturalising’ the
body
burkini
Male and female peacock
„the great renunciation”
Man: serious labour,
sober clothes
Woman: frivolous
decoration,
flamboyance
Rigaud: Louis XIV
Victorian boy
• Victorian card
Queen Victoria and baby Prince Arthur
William Orpen:
A Bloomsbury
Family (1907)
Botticelli: Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Child
(1490)
Cimabue: The
Virgin and Child
Enthroned with
Two Angels
Mrs. Eisenhower in
pink
(presidential
inauguration,
1953)
Wearing jeans
(the meanings
of jeans)
Marlboro ad
Camel ads
Culture as (a web of) meanings
• Who puts the meanings into them?
• Who is weaving the webs?
• Is there a difference between the web itself and the
meanings?
• Richard Dawkins: the web weaving itself (culture is
about the survival of ‘memes’)
• Culture like gossip?
• What is the stake of this?
• Individual and community: selfhood, identity,
subject(ivity)
Culture and individuality
Liberal views of individual freedom and culture
(Dworkin, Kymlicka, Rawls) individuals have life plans
- culture is “the context of choice”: it is “only through
having a rich and secure cultural structure that
people can become aware, in a vivid way, of the
options available to them, and intelligently examine
their value.”
No conflict between the liberal concern for our freedom
(to judge the value of our life-plans) and cultural
identity
culture “provides the spectacles through which we
identify experiences as valuable”
“familiarity with a culture determines the boundaries of
the imaginable”
What do we buy when we buy a cinema ticket or
a car?
What else is offered with a product?
Ideas and ideology
• Ideology:
• (1) unquestioned, ‘natural’, invisible system of ideas:
(‘false consciousness’)
e.g.: books for boys=books for everyone
• (2) a coherent , systematic set of (political-social) ideas
shared by a group
(green, conservative, liberal, nationalist, religious,
socialist)
serving as a basis for action
• a belief system through which a particular social group
creates the meanings that justify its existence to itself,
How do ideologies work?
•
•
•
•
Louis Althusser
Ideologies address the subject:
offering a view of ourselves and of the world
ideological messages do not simply influence us to
think about the world in certain ways but are
responsible for calling us into being as thinking
individuals and for making us who we are
• e.g. TV news vs mobile phone commercials
Cultural products
• Enter the circulation of meanings and
representations
• acquire ‘added meanings’
Mickey Mouse
• 1935: Intnl symbol of
good will (League of
Nations)
• Loved by Th. Roosevelt,
King George V, and
Mussolini
• 1944: D Day code-name,
US army mascot
• Anti-semitic and antiAmerican ideologies
“Mickey Mouse is the most
atrocious ideal that has ever
been offered to mankind … The
healthy sentiments of every
independent-minded young
man worthy of respect must
suggest that this ugly and dirty
parasite, this greatest bacillus
host of the animal kingdom
cannot be the ideal animal. We
must not allow Jews to degrade
humanity! Down with Mickey
Mouse! Let everybody wear
the swastika!”
Art Spiegelman: Maus (1991)