catapult magazine

Here’s a question from one of the people out here that CAN’T give you a complete history of Alfred Hitchcock’s works cross referrenced with their Aristotelian influences and linked with the recent string of events in Ghana that are only reported in obscure newspapers printed with Soy Ink, whose environmental impact is clearly much less detrimental than normal ink.

A lot of times when I log on to *cino, I feel like a completely ignorant buffoon. I’m perhaps “moderately cultured,” not “very cultured.” I get up, I go to work, I do my job, I unwind in the evenings, I try to stay up on stuff. But here, I have very little to contribute. I have questions: Since Culture is, indeed, Not Optional, is it my duty to become as cultured as Grant? Feel free to say yes. I’m sure I need more discipline on these things. I’m just wondering if there’s something I’m missing. Since about 4 or 5 years ago, I have had to start training myself to like good music/movies. I grew up liking DC Talk and Jim Carrey was the epitome of funny. Thankfully, I think many of my viewpoints and “aesthetics” have changed dramatically over the past several years. Still, I often feel lost. Where do you get the time to take in all this culture (movies, current events, books)? When I read a book, it takes me a long time. I don’t have the cash to see a movie every week. And aside from the newspaper and the television, there’s so many things in current events that I miss, I wonder if I’ve got my eyes closed and everyone else has them open. It seems like too much to be able to hold down at once.

I’m not making excuses for my lack. I suppose no one’s a perfect angel here. I suspect that the cliquishness that’s perceived in communities like this comes from people not knowing what they’ve done wrong when their version of culture is what they’ve been handed and they don’t understand how a group of people can tell them they’ve gotten it all wrong. I think for some people, this stuff comes naturally. Others of us are having to break old, bad habits. And like with most habits, it’s not easy. Maybe some people can empathize with some of the stuff I’m saying here.

So tell me: what do I need to change? Go ahead, give me the easy answer. Give me the in-depth “zeitgeist” answer. You founders: stop preaching to the choir (throught I’d throw that in to link the Rush Limbaugh thing) and preach to me for a second.

I’m obviously being a little extreme here for the sake of the post.
Come on, just go with it.

Ah! See? My identity crisis has been found out. The HD I was thinking of was Heidegger. I am twisted and torn up inside about where my loyalties are. I’m uncomfortable with Dooeyweerd’s placing of the formative so high on the list. I’m generally uncomfortable with the list as a whole.

Back to Dan’s response: I am not disagreeing that trees might continue to “tree” even if humans were gone (they most likely “tree-ed” before we ourselves came to be), but they will not “exist”, because this is something trees do only when people are around. I know that this seems like semantics, but it’s very important. Human beings have used “existence” as a tool to think of themselves higher than they ought. Thanks to this wonderful invention, we now can even call God’s existence into question. What a power trip! Existence is a human cultural activity that has caused a lot of problems for atheists and Christians alike. I say, let the tree “tree”, let the “I Am”… “I Am”. And maybe the Christian response in today’s culture is to stop our obsession with existence.

All apologies to Adam. I fear all this “tree-talk” is not in keeping with the original pragmatic spirit of the thread. Oh well, you know what they say: “culture is not optional”.

Oh yes, looking back, I realize that I shouldn’t have thrown around the word “know” willy-nilly like that. I agree with you, Dan, that a tree might know how to be a tree, but not in the same way a human knows how a tree is a tree. If we tried to explain the biological processes of a tree to a tree, the tree would have no idea what we’re talking about. Yet, a tree “knows” how to tree(v.) better than anybody else.

Oh, I’m so sorry. If we end up having to start a whole new topic devoted only to trees because of this, you can all blame me for killing a perfectly decent conversation. If only we had more frickin’ trees for members!!!—-the poor shy creatures.

The way you define existance, you might as well toss the word(as you suggest). If existance depends on human existance, then it’s senseless to talk about existance. It makes more sense then to talk about culture. I get the sense that you see the two words as synonyms anyway. Am I right?

PS Yeah sorry everyone about all the tree talk. I do like the darned things though.

Yeah, well. Every philosophical discussion seems to have its object victim. After my first philosophy course I couldn’t sit down at a table without wondering about its “tableness.” Let’s just be thankful it wasn’t a really long word like pheasants. Or cheese graters.

All I was trying to say was that even existence is cultural. It was invented/discovered within a culture (Greek, perhaps) just like numbers, signs etc. This is why I’m not sure about Dooeyweerd’s list. How can we speak about the numerical aspect or the spatial aspect without using math or geometry? Maybe that’s why Dooeyweerd stresses that these aspects must all be in right relation to eachother, but the list gives an impression that culture is one sphere among many, despite the fact that culture seems to be mixed up in all the spheres of human life. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding Dooeyweerd’s intent.

I don’t think culture is everything. I don’t think it’s everything human. And even if every thing/creature does have a cultural aspect, I’d still like to define culture.

It’s a slippery word because we talk about many different things when we talk about culture. One culture is very different than another. There is human culture which concerns all of us. There is American culture, Canadian culture, Senegalese culture, buddhist culture, christian culture, academic culture, Dordt College culture, University of Maine culture, even a sort of *cino culture… We’re talking about groups when we talk about culture aren’t we?

Here’s something I recently read. It seemed quite providencial that I’d read it right now. It’s from a book about theatre by director Anne Bogart:

“What is culture? I believe that culture is shared experience. And it is constantly shifting. Ideas, in fact, are among the most contagious aspects of human culture. Imagine a huge field on a cold winter night. Scattered around the field are blazing fires, each with a group of people huddled close to stay warm. The fires represent shared experience, or the culture, of each group gathered around each fire. Imagine that someone stands and walks across the cold, dark, windy field towards a different group gathered around another fire. This act of strength represents cultural exchange. And this is how ideas scatter.”

Yeah, Bogart is talking about culture in the context of the arts and exchange of ideas, but I do think this gets at something we may have been missing. That culture is something we share. And the “we” can be a lot of different things. So, if culture is an expression of who we are, who we are is our shared experience.

Are we closer? I seriously want to produce a working definition.

I’m taking the word culture from the verb cultivate. Culture is what has been cultivated—which I would say is everything a human does, makes, thinks (but thinking is also a doing and making). It seems like Bogart is merely explaining HOW communities of people form (around shared experiences, the same fire), not WHAT IS culture.

If you want to define culture as a group of people who share common experiences, then we must ask how we come to define such groups of people? Let’s just say with Seerveld that a group can be discerned according to a certain spirit—i.e. German Romanticism of the early 1800’s. How do we come to such a definition? We come to such conclusions by the group’s works: its poetry, philosophy, architecture, crafted tools etc. which we can only examine by looking back historically. But we look back on history from our own “cultural” standpoint. Our own “history of German Romanticism” is cultivated by today’s contemporary ways of looking back on the past. Our contemporary culture can be defined, then, as that group of people who look back on German Romanticism in a certain way. So the culture of a certain group— Germans in the early 1800’s—cannot be defined without our own cultural activity of looking at and interpreting those people as a certain group. Culture, then, is defined by culturing human beings.

If we’re going to be a Christian culture, then, we have to culture Christianly. We have to take into account the process (cultivating) through which our products (those things that define us as a certain group of people) come to be made. How should we define groups Christianly, then? How must we cultivate what God has given us (German poetry from the early 1800’s) in a way that is obedient? So, for me it is still a question of HOW WE OUGHT TO CULTURE. The act of cultivating is integral to the process of being/making culture.

I think that part of the definition of culture is the shared experiences we have. Culture is socially constructed—one person can culture, as a verb, but the way we culture constructs our identity in terms of our society, while our culturing as a society helps to construct our identity as selves—I think it is a reflexive relationship, and that the social construction is more than just something we do together—I think it is part of the definition. I’ve been at school for 14 hours today preparing for the end of the semester, so I’m not sure what I’ve said sounds very eloquent, but I don’t want to lost the social aspect of culture that Jason mentioned.

Bingo! I think you’re right on the mark. In order to produce a useful definition of culture, I think identity and shared experieince (and by experience, I mean thoughts, ideas, language, etc.) has to be in there somewhere. Otherwise what makes a culture?

Grant. You are saying that we cannot define culture as shared experience since there is more to it than that. Is that right? That culture is not JUST our shared experience, but also a part of how we perceive that experience. HOW we pull out the important things to examine when we examine culture, is just as cultural as the things themselves. Is that right? I’m trying to clarify, because it’s getting pretty thick. I couldn’t really follow chunks of your last post. I feel like you think there is an important piece missing in the definitions we’ve been working with. What is that piece?

I think Ryan put his finger on something with his explanation/definition of culture, poetic and nebulous as it is.

Yeah, sorry. I’m trying to work out some things I’ve been thinking about for my own research interests. I agree that groups are identified by their shared experiences, but what brings a group to experience the same event—Christ crucified, for example— similarly or differently? Some kind of spirit or religious perspective. Such a religious perspective is not outside culture, though. A group’s religious perspective is lived out in the books and artifacts of it’s own culture. We couldn’t define the spirit of a group without seeing the spirit working in the culture of that group. Even God Himself is made known to us in a certain cultural context. So maybe there is nothing but culture.

However, if we say there is nothing but culture, there is a temptation to divy up the world into cultural spheres of equal value. One culture, then, has the same “rights” as the next to define truth however they want. According to this perspective, people are often justified by their own cultural heritage. For instance, how could we say the Palestinians are wrong in bombing Israeli civilians? If we lived in their culture long enough, if we really took on their culturally developed perspective, we would understand why some Palestinians do this.

Of course we’d understand things differently if we were in someone else’s skin! But let’s not stop there. The Christian question about culture might ask: How should we go about living as culturing people? This is a question that comes out of a Christian culture, perhaps, but it must apply to all cultures. So we cannot stop at this idea that the world is only made up of several cultures with equally valid feelings (experiences) trying to live amongst eachother. If we are going to define culture, we ought to be careful not to fall into the trap of multiculturalism or pluralism, which tells us to tolerate all differences because everyone has their own culture, their own fires to keep them warm. I’m not saying we’re falling into that trap by talking of culture in terms of shared experience, but if we stop at Bogart’s definition, we might be heading down that road.