startsection section10mm-.5 Discussion 1 By the way, what is culture?

 

It's been six months since we began our conversation on the ``culture of the here and now.'' We've talked freely about American culture, criticizing aspects of it at the beginning of the year when we read The Great Gatsby and again when we read Rituals of Blood, but finding threads of enduring value when we read The Edges of the Field. Most recently we've begun reading The Mismeasure of Man, which is, in the end, a long argument for Gould's position that science, despite claims to objectivity and independence from outside influence, is a ``socially embedded activity,'' and that culture inevitably ``influences what we see and how we see it.'' In all this time, we have yet to define culture. In this discussion, we'll take a stab at it.

For the first half of class, discuss the following questions in your groups. Once again, one person should serve as scribe (a different person from the last discussion). After about 20 minutes, another person in the group should put your responses on the blackboard in the form of series of bulleted items.

1.

``Would you know one if you saw one?''

(a)

Construct a brief dictionary-like definition of culture that captures your sense of our use of the term.

(b)

More informally, when you think of American culture, French culture, or Japanese culture what characteristics come to mind that allow you to distinguish cultures? (The answer here should not of the form ``the Japanese do that but we do this.'')

(c)

Similarly, when you think of Afro-American culture, Euro-American culture, or Hispanic-American culture, to name three, what characteristics come to mind that allow you to distinguish cultures? (The answer here should not of the form ``Hispanic-Americans do that but Euro-American do this.'')

(d)

Do your categories from (b) and (c) make sense when we think about ``student culture'' on campus?

2.

We often conflate a group of people with the culture in which they participate, but they are not the same thing.

(a)

From the point of view of an individual, what is the point of culture?

(b)

From the point of view of a group of people, what is the purpose of culture?

(c)

From the point of view of a culture, what is the purpose of people?

3.

In part, Gould wrote The Mismeasure of Man to debunk biological determinism. On the opposite side of the issue, we might consider a concept of cultural determinism.

(a)

Construct an informal definition of cultural determinism.

(b)

Does the concept of cultural determinism need debunking in the same way that biological determinism does? Why or why not?

Now that you've grappled with these issues, you should read the two hand-outs on American culture excerpted from Culture Matters: How values shape human progress, edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington. The first excerpt, ``The Culture Concept'' is taken from Chapter 15, ``Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-American Illustration'' by Orlando Patterson. The second excerpt is Chapter 16, ``Disaggregating Culture'' by Nathan Glazer, Professor of Education and Sociology Emeritus at Harvard University and co-editor of The Public Interest.