The Sadness of America

[Bekah]

Reminds me of my senior year in HS (and god knows that's a good memory I have).

The instructor said something about a "culturally deprived"  group of 
people,  Mexican,  I think.   I raised my hand and told him that I 
really didn't think that they were lacking a culture.  They had 
plenty of culture.   He asked me what word I would use instead.   I 
told him these people were "economically deprived."  He smiled.

Bek
interesting article, btw


At 1:31 PM -0700 10/9/05, Dave Monroe wrote:
>My current reading de toilette, by the way ...
>
>Williams, Raymond.  Keywords: A Vocabulary of
>    Culture and Society. Rev. ed.  NY: Oxford UP, 1985.
>
>Culture is one of the two or three most complicated
>words in the English language. This is so partly
>because of its intricate historical development, in
>several European languages, but mainly because it has
>now come to be used for important concepts in several
>distinct intellectual disciplines and in several
>distinct and incompatible systems of thought....
>
>[...]
>
>There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In
>his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History
>of Mankind (1784--9 1) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is
>more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more
>deceptive than its application to all nations and
>periods. He attacked the assumption of the universal
>histories that 'civilization or culture -- the
>historical self-development of humanity -- was what we
>would now call a unilinear process, leading to the
>high and dominant point of C18 European culture.
>Indeed he attacked what be called European subjugation
>and domination of the four quarters of the globe, and
>wrote:
>
>Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have
>perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to
>manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end
>of time your posterity should be made happy by
>European culture. The very thought of a superior
>European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of
>Nature.
>
>It is then necessary, he argued, in a decisive
>innovation, to speak of 'cultures in the plural: the
>specific and variable cultures of different nations
>and periods, but also the specific and variable
>cultures of social and economic groups within a
>nation. This sense was widely developed, in the
>Romantic movement, as an alternative to the orthodox
>and dominant 'civilization. It was first used to
>emphasize national and traditional cultures, including
>the new concept of folk-culture (cf. FOLK). It was
>later used to attack what was seen as the MECHANICAL
>(q.v.) character of the new civilization then
>emerging: both for its abstract rationalism and for
>the 'inhumanity of current Industrial development. It
>was used to distinguish between 'human and 'material
>development. Politically, as so often in this period,
>it veered between radicalism and reaction and very
>often, in the confusion of major social change, fused
>elements of both. (It should also be noted, though it
>adds to the real complication, that the same kind of
>distinction, especially between 'material and
>'spiritual development, was made by von Humboldt and
>others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the
>terms, culture being material and civilization
>spiritual. In general, however, the opposite
>distinction was dominant.)
>
>On the other hand, from the 1840s in Germany, Kultur
>was being used in very much the sense in which
>civilization had been used in C18 universal
>histories.... It is along this line of reference that
>the dominant sense in modern social sciences has to be
>traced.
>
>The complexity of the modern development of the word,
>and of its modern usage, can then be appreciated....
>But once we go beyond the physical reference, we have
>to recognize three broad active categories of usage.
>The sources of two of these we have already discussed:
>(i) the independent and abstract noun which describes
>a general process of intellectual, spiritual and
>aesthetic development, from C18; (ii) the independent
>noun, whether used generally or specifically, which
>indicates a particular way of life, whether of a
>people, a period, a group, or humanity in general,
>from Herder and Klemm. But we have also to recognize
>(iii) the independent and abstract noun which
>describes the works and practices of intellectual and
>especially artistic activity. This seems often now the
>most widespread use: culture is music, literature,
>painting and sculpture, theater and film. A Ministry
>of Culture refers to these specific activities,
>sometimes with the addition of philosophy,
>scholarship, history. This use, (iii), is in fact
>relatively late. It is difficult to date precisely
>because it is in origin an applied form of sense (i):
>the idea of a general process of intellectual,
>spiritual and aesthetic development was applied and
>effectively transferred to the works and practices
>which represent and sustain it. But it also developed
>from the earlier sense of process.... The decisive
>development of sense (iii) in English was in lC19 and
>eC2O.
>
>Faced by this complex and still active history of the
>word, it is easy to react by selecting one 'true or
>'proper or 'scientific sense and dismissing other
>senses as loose or confused.... It is clear that,
>within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be
>clarified. But in general it is the range and overlap
>of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses
>indicates a complex argument about the relations
>between general human development and a particular way
>of life, and between both and the works and practices
>of art and intelligence.... Within this complex
>argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as
>effectively overlapping positions; there are also,
>understandably, many unresolved questions and confused
>answers. But these arguments and questions cannot be
>resolved by reducing the complexity of actual
>usage....
>
>http://pubpages.unh.edu/~dml3/880williams.htm
>
>--- Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>>  Yes,  we can go ahead and eliminate the
>>  distinctions, but we run the risk of "there is no
>>  culture" or "all is culture." It's all equal....
>
>
>
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