Jan
11
What is culture?
Posted by: Brian | January 11, 2009 | Comments Off on What is culture?
What is Culture?
Honestly I found the first reading “Culture is Ordinary” by Raymond Williams difficult to understand and to follow. The only part that really drew me in was when he started to use his personal anecdotes of his life before becoming an academic. He does however make some points that allowed me to delve into some critical thought. If what he was trying to convey in this article was that the commonly used rhetoric of the “masses” often presents the notion that those outside of London, I presume, are a large homogenous group of people that all share the same mentality and way of life, i.e. culture, is unfair and untruthful assumption to make, I agree. This in a sense ties into what Roger Keesing was, I think, referring to when he suggests that anthropologists and other scholarly members of society try and paint an “otherness” towards different groups that can contrast to Western society, when doing research and other academic works around the world. ( What I found interesting is that as this has actually backfired on anthropologists and other academics, as they have distanced themselves to a level where the people to whom they are referring to as the “others” claim that in fact these anthropologists are presenting a skewed portrayal of their culture, consequently and unfortunately for the anthropologists discrediting their entire work). But going back to the term the “masses”, presented in the first article, I see it as a parallel to the equally exaggerated alterity of the radical “otherness”, presented in the second article. Both allow for generalizations and assumptions to easily manifest in our minds and perpetuate the falsity that those included in these broad terms (the masses and the others,) have a distinct and uniform culture. This is completely untrue everywhere. This is apparent even in our classroom when we did the first exercise regarding popular culture in Canada. How difficult was it to really pin-point what popular culture existed in Canada. What I am trying to get to is that perhaps there is a dominant culture, but within a dominant culture exists sub-culture. And this is true in every sense. Think of a work place where there is a strong culture on the whole, but within each specialized department, the people working in each department have their own culture defined by their tasks and interests. I believe this is true for a society. A nation like Canada may have its general hockey, molson beer, liberal, non-american culture, yet for me personally I don’t relate to this national culture as much. I relate much more to the culture of my specific community and home. I feel this is the same with many people in Vancouver especially as our city is full of immigrants who bring their culture to the culture of the community. This gets me quite confused when I try and define what these people’s culture truly. This is becomes their culture becomes a sort of hybrid mixing infusion of different cultures from heritage to new settlement.
Ok I now realize that I have written too much but that’s what happens when I start relating it to context of my life. I didn’t even go into globalization which has an enormous impact on culture…
