Definition of Culture
Marshall Soules
ããIn 1871 E.B. Taylor defined culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and many other capabilities and habits [members] of society."
"Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society and transmitted from generation to generation. It thus refers to the norms, values, standards by which people act, and it includes the ways distinctive in each society of ordering the world and rendering it intelligible. a t of mechanisms for survival, but it provides us also with a definition of reality. It is the matrix into which we are born, it is the anvil upon which our persons and destinies are forged." (Robert Murphy. Culture and Social Anthropology: An Overture. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986: 14)
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The Predicament of Culture
In the opening chapter of his influential book on the practices of anthropology, James Clifford claims that the modernist age is marked by a n that "all the beautiful, primitive places are ruined," that there is a kind of "cultural incest, a n of runaway history" haunting us, and giving us the feeling that cultural authenticity has been lost. (4)
Traditionally, change has been interpreted as disorder, as chaos, as loss of authenticity. But in the global intermixture of cultures that we have witnesd in this century, the authenticity of former cultures may not be lost in quite the ways we imagine them to be: "local authenticites meet and merge in transient urban and suburban ttings," according to Clifford. This complex process of acculturation, of meeting and merging, pos a predicament for the contemporary student of culture: the student of culture must consider both "local attachments"--regional dialects and traditions, for example--and "general possibilities."
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This predicament is bad on the obrvation that "there is no going back, no esnce to redeem" once authentic traditions yield to the attractions of global culture. Clifford's book
does not e the world as populated by "endangered authenticities." Instead, the world "makes space for specific paths through modernity." He concludes from this that "the time is past when privileged authorities could routinely 'give voice' (or history) to others without fear of contradiction" (7).
Clifford propos that the student of culture is faced with a ries of important questions which challenge traditional assumptions of "ethnographic authority":
案例分析论文Who has the authority to speak for a group's identity or authenticity? What are the esntial elements and boundaries of a culture? How do lf and other clash and conver in the encounters ? What narratives of development, loss, and innovation can account for the prent range of local oppositional movements? (8)
A question that Clifford does not ask: Who will document and publish the narratives of "local oppositional movements" when the status quo is the first order of the media's business? While we wait for the media to tell our stories accurately, local cultures attempt to find ways of living with invasive cultures without abandoning all their traditional ways.
Ethnography, which cannot be parated in practice from anthropology, is the "systematic description of a culture bad on firsthand obrvation" (Haviland 1989), requiring "participant obrvation." For Clifford, the predicament of culture involves the difficulty of being in a culture while looking at it, "a form of personal and collective lf-fashioning." (Anthropologist Ted Carpenter was fond of quoting John Culkin's remark: "We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish.") A modern ethnographer must move between cultures: "[Ethnography] is perpetually displaced, both regionally focud and broadly comparative, a form both of dwelling and of travel in a world where the two experiences are less and less distinct" (9).
In The Predicament of Culture, Clifford approaches ethnographic texts as "structed domains of truth, rious fictions" (10). As such, in many ways they remble tho art forms which make u of collage, juxtaposition, and other forms of extended comparison.
In defining culture, then, it is important that we locate ourlves (and our beliefs, ethics, a
nd assumptions) in relation to the culture we are studying, since culture is context-specific. It is also important to keep in mind, according to Clifford, that local cultures (sub-cultures) are often established in opposition to what might be termed the official culture--the status quo--defined by tho with significant access to the media. In many cas, this opposition is between the individual, or small group, and the larger cultural body ud as a sign of social cohesion and control. While popular culture is often defined as mass culture--the culture of the majority--it can also be en as a site of continual change, adaptation, and subversion.
(James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.)
Fish Out of Water
"We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish."
John Culkin (qtd. in Edmund Carpenter's本命年生日祝福
They Became What They Beheld )
顺流而东也We've been born into a world where most of what pass for reality is mediated for us. Ev
en before television, radio, newspapers, computers, and books begin telling us stories about what is happening out there, our parents or caregivers speak to us about the perils and joys of the world. As human beings we intuit that there is something out there that exists, undeniably, apart from us and our perceptions.
Who in North America doubts that media play a significant role in our lives? Think of politics, commerce, education, recreation, art and culture, or social interaction--it would be difficult, if not impossible, to discuss any of the activities without some acknowledgement of the medium through which we "know" about the things.
