Lesson 2 - What is Culture?

Question 1

What are the 2 traditional understandings of the word “culture”?

Answer 1

1: High art; intellectual pursuits

2: Everyday life, values, ways of life

Question 2

How does Raymond Williams see culture?

Answer 2

-Culture is ordinary, about everyday life’s experiences

-Participation in culture is (theoretically) not limited to an elite

-Culture as a blend of tradition and creativity

Question 3

“We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean ___ - the common meanings; to mean ____ - the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their ___.”

~Raymond Williams

Answer 3

1. a whole way of life
2. the arts and learning
3. conjunction

Question 4

What does culture provide us with? (Stuart Hall)

Answer 4

With Maps of Meaning:

1. A Lens to interpret the world (seeing animals as food or holy)
2. A Blueprint to guide actions

Question 5

“It is thus that each culture establishes its own special vision of the world and thus that it renders the understandings and rules ___”

~McCracken

Answer 5

appropiate to one cultural context preposterously inappropiate in the next.

Question 6

What is Schismogenesis?!

Answer 6

Cultures being born from a rift.