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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)