Culture #1

1. Culture #1 • The act of developing by education, discipline, social experience • The training or refining of the moral and intellectual faculties • The state of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training

2. Culture #2 • The total pattern of human behavior and its products embodied in speech, action and artifacts and dependent upon human capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge • The body of customary beliefs, social forms and material traits constituting a distinct complex of tradition of a racial, religious or social group • A complex of typical behavior peculiar to a specific group, occupation or profession, sex, age, grade or social class.

3. Huh? • What’s the difference between these two definitions of culture? • Which one are you more familiar with? • Which one do we normally use when we’re talking about literature?

4. Matthew Arnold • In 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote a book called Culture and Anarchy. He claimed that culture could be defined as “the best that has been thought and known.” He believed that “culture” needed to be spread from the upper to the lower classes in order for civilization to be maintained and to advance.

5. Issues? • 1. Who gets to pick what’s best? • 2. This is kind of an elite stance, no? • 3. Encourages similarity/conformity of thought, which leads to stagnation, conservatism?

6. Various Cultures • Critics of Arnold observed that in human societies, there was usually more than one culture – there was the dominant culture Arnold recognized, and then there were “minority” cultures. • What are some minority cultures in the US? In Grand Junction?

7. More • Arnold’s critics observed that these other cultures were quite as powerful in people’s lives as the dominant culture. • This lead to a division of culture in to high and low categories. • There is also pop culture, culture of the masses, bourgeois culture, etc.

8. Cultural Studies • attempts to avoid the value judgments Arnold made by focusing on how various cultural beliefs or aesthetic activities reinforce or resist particular social constructs such as race, gender, class, and sexuality. This field contextualizes all of our reading, bringing in historical, sociological, psychological and other disciplinary theories to help us understand how and why we read what we read. It tends to critique how “minority” cultures are shaped by, resist and reshape the dominant culture.

9. Plurality • As in the case of Aesthetics, where we talked about the many ways there are to determine beauty, the evolution of the term culture, has shifted focus away from one idea of “the best that has been thought and known” to the idea that there are a bunch of “bests.” The best for you depends on who you are.

10. Question • Still, critics of Arnold’s call for a single, elite culture, don’t see these multiple cultures as ruling out a common culture. In fact, they insist that it is necessary for the survival of a society or civilization. • What do you think? Do we need a common culture? How do we decide whose or what should be central to that common core of beliefs and behaviors?