Reading Assignment #4:What is Culture?

Reading Assignment #4:What is Culture?

Just a note about length of responses: This class has both a minimum writing requirement (in words) and minimum coursework requirement (in hours) required for its award of units and university transferability. The lines on these forms are meant to correspond to word length and time expended as if they were handwritten. Please complete these exercises in their entirety to receive credit. If you are typing your responses, you’ll need to gauge the length of your answers appropriately.

4. Consider the list you’ve made in number three above. Please circle the three most dominant roles that you play. Select those three which you believe most color your world-view and affect your behavior on a day-to-day basis.

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5. Now, consider the three primary roles you have selected. Re-write those roles on the spaces below and then list the traits that are required by that role. If you’ve listed “student,” for example, list the characteristics that are necessary to being a good student (for example: dedication, curiosity, a good work ethic, punctuality).
6. Next, please consider the lists you’ve made in number five. How were the necessary characteristics of the sub-cultural roles you’ve chosen transmitted to you? In other words, where did you learn “how” to be a “good student.” Did you learn through trial and error, by watching your friends, from your parents, from television? Who are our cultural models for these roles? How do you know—who tells you—how to behave?

Discovery:

In the groundwork section, you explored the sub-cultures to which you belong and the roles you play in each of those cultures. You

also selected those roles which most affect your daily behavior and considered how you have been educated to play best those roles. Below, please discuss the cultural obligations you live up to and the manner in which you have been prepared to execute the functions essential to these obligations. Have you voluntarily accepted all of your roles? Have any been foisted on you? Are you well-prepared for all of your responsibilities? Do you have realistic or unrealistic role-models to emulate or expectations to live up to? And how is your “role-playing” going? Are you getting rave reviews?

Fieldwork:

1. Using your dictionary, please define the following words:

1. Perpetuate

1. Pervasive

1. Subvert

1. Marginalize

1. Coerce

2. Please also tell me about:

1. Dominant Culture

1. Minority Culture

3. Next, read Richard Pearce’s article, “What is Culture?” It is a short discussion of the fundamental concepts of cultural studies. It takes for granted that culture is an artificial construction that works

silently and invisibly to instill within us values and ideology.

What is Culture?

Very generally, “culture” is a shared set of knowledge, beliefs, art forms, morals, laws, customs, and habits that holds a society together.

But most important: culture needs to perpetuate itself, pass itself on from one generation to the next as a means of preserving the group and its identity. As a result the knowledge, beliefs, art forms, morals, laws, customs, and habits–are all shaped to perpetuate a particular way of seeing, feeling about, and understanding the world that seems natural and universal.

Because they seem natural, our particular ways of seeing, feeling about, and understanding the world are hard to think and talk about. As one sociologist puts it, imagine trying to explain to a fish that it was living in water? How could you prove to the fish the it was surrounded by this invisible medium?[unique_solution]

We live in our culture as fish live in water: it’s all around us, it’s invisible, and it seems natural. So it’s hard to explain and even harder to understand. For to do so we need a language that is deliberately unnatural and abstract—and therefore hard to understand.

Cultural Institutions

Stephen Greenblatt defines culture as “the ensemble of beliefs and practices that form a given culture function as a pervasive technology of control, a set of limits within which social behavior must be contained, a repertoire of models to which individuals must conform.”

One of these controls is through the nation, which Benedict Anderson explains, is “an imagined community.” But despite being imagined, it presents itself as real, through various forms of socialization–education, patriotic songs, parades, stories, pledges of allegiance, calls to sacrifice, etc. And it demands an allegiance very much like that of a religion. The power of the imagined community is so strong that it overcomes what might otherwise be rational resistance by groups whose real interests are contrary to those of national policy. And the very idea of the nation is becoming outmoded in our age of global capitalism: what does it mean to buy American products when they are made by poor people of other countries and where the profits go to multinational organizations?

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Beginning with 16th century European exploration and expansion, culture became more complex, and in the 20th century, especially in America, we have come to understand that culture is really multicultural. The United States includes American Indians, African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans–as well as European Americans, who have assimilated into what we, the dominant culture, came to call Americans.

So each of us shares a set of cultural values with the subgroup/s of our parents as well as with the overall American culture, which is dominated by white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, upper middle-class Euroamericans, even though they constitute a minority.

Convention

When we answer the telephone we say “Hello,” while at one time in England they said, “Are you there?”

While riding down an elevator, we can tell a person’s occupation, class, and even destination by the way she or he is dressed, We know that he or she is a middle-class business person, a worker, a college student, or someone going to an interview or on a date or to the beach.

Convention is the word used for commonly agreed upon form of behavior, dress, art, literature, film, etc. They form the basis of communication. Communication depends on shared conventions.

Everyone in a culture (or subculture) understands its common conventions, though we may not have formally learned them.

Conventions of the dominant culture tend to dominate conventions of subordinate cultures. So subordinate cultures develop tactics to subvert them in order to speak in their own voices and of their own experiences that are otherwise ignored, marginalized, distorted, or suppressed.

Socialization

The main mechanism a culture uses to perpetuate itself is socialization.

We are socialized to accept our culture’s or subculture’s dominant values as natural, normal, good, and in our best interests.

Children are socialized by their parents or caretakers to postpone immediate gratification, and to channel their desires into what’s socially acceptable–to adults.

Teenagers are socialized by their peer groups to talk,act, and dress like one of the crowd. Women have been socialized–and still are in varying degrees–to think, feel, and act in ways that are in the best interests of men.

Poor people are socialized by society to work hard and be reliable in ways that are in the best interests of those who employ them. They also may be socialized by their subculture to think and act in ways that the dominant culture does not view as relia-ble.

Minority people are socialized to believe that the customs, manners, values of domi-nant, white culture are the best–even when they are in conflict with their own cus-toms, manners, and values.

Socialization is continually reinforced by our major cultural institutions: schools, churches, newspapers, television, the movies, advertising, etc.

Coercion, Socialization, Internalization

Socialization is part of a continuum:

We’re coerced into behaving in certain ways by law and fear of punishment (police, Internal Revenue Service, army, etc.)

We’re socialized by the desire to please our parents, teachers, or peer group.

We’ve internalized society’s values when we act the way we’re supposed to, not be-cause of the law, or because we’re afraid of being punished or losing love, or because we want to please our parents, teachers, or friends, but because we believe that ac-tion is right–because we’ve taken our culture’s values into our own hearts and minds.

This internalization is reinforced by newspapers television, the movies, and advertis-ing.

Though our system of values (ideology) is maintained by socialization, it can be changed to reflect the interests of other than the dominant groups by a variety of strategies and ordinary practices, or tactics.

Coercion, socialization, and internalization are the mechanics by which a culture pre-serves itself. While a description of these mechanics may seem negative and para-noid, it’s important to remember that a culture needs to preserve itself and can only do so by preserving its values and being sure that its members adhere to them.

Beyond the mechanics are the institutions that employ them. Describing these insti-tutions is a way of beginning to make a culture visible.

Excavation:

Please answer the following questions:

1. Following Greenblatt’s basic idea that the collective beliefs of a culture, when forced on the individual, create a “technology of control,” define each of the following in your own words :

4. Why is culture usually “invisible?”

Citation:

Please complete the following:

1. Please use the following to create an MLA style citation (as for a Works Cited Page) for this source.

Research notes to use in citation: This is from a faculty web page published by Richard Pearce on the Wheaton College web page in 1999. Wheaton College is in Norton, Massachusetts. I accessed and copied it from the English department’s faculty web pages on February 5, 2016 at http:// acunix.wheatonma.edu/rpearce. The college’s main page is titled “Wheaton,” and Pearce’s article was titled “Multicultural Web.”

2. What would the parenthetical citation (the one that would appear in the body of your paper) for this source look like?
3. Please select a quote from this source (a strong one that represents its spirit) and integrate it into a sentence here using quotation marks and a parenthetical citation.
4. Please summarize what you believe to be this source’s main point and paraphrase (in your own words) it here using a parenthetical citation.