“Culture”: a user’s guide

-


David de Ugarte 57 ~ April 11th, 2013  http://english.lasindias.com/culture-a-users-guide

What is national culture, really, and how should it be understood when it’s time to travel and deal with people “from outside?”
puerosetvexiliosWhile the word “people” is in ever-greater danger of sliding, the word “culture” was born in a dangerous place, because, in spite of how it might appear, it’s very much a political term, a concept formed and created in the bosom of German romantic nationalism. It carries such amibiguity that Gustavo Bueno, a notable archaeologist of concepts, ended up exclaiming that

"No one understands what Culture is, as no one understood in the days of yesteryear what the Grace of God was. Culture is a myth, and an obscurantist myth, as was the myth of Grace in the Middle Ages or as was the “twentieth-century myth,” the myth of Race, in the first half of that century. In a certain way, it could be said that the myth of Culture incorporates, additionally, through the nationalisms of the end of the century, many of the functions that the myth of Race performed until the end of World War II."
What Bueno is telling us in his book on the topic is that culture, once it ceases to mean the “cultivation” of knowledge itself and begins to refer, as Herder says, to who-knows-what characteristic of “people,” it can’t be anything other than national culture, and as such, the product and central object of the “Culture State,” which is the nation-state.
And what does that mean when I deal with “outsiders?”

The State, the media, and education are creators of national culture. And although 
some people understand that it constitutes them, in reality, they are only the ones who 
choose to be constituted by it. As Foucault describes, from its origins, “biopolitics,”
 the conditioning that the State and large-scale organizations subject people to, works 
“statistically,” which is to say, it is a constraint, but not determinant, on each one. 
And it also varies over time as a function of different capacities and crises. This is 
something that is accentuated with decomposition.

 So, “cultural studies” and trend reports are useless to me.  Statistical matters must 
be understood statistically, which often means that, concretely, they contribute little.
National culture operates as a context that delimits what’s acceptable, but it 
doesn’t tell us anything at all about the person or the real community in front 
of us… which is what matters to us. It doesn’t do me much good to know that 
roast beef is traditional and even part of national identity in Uruguay, and txuletón
 in Biscay, if I don’t know it the person I’m dealing with is a vegetarian. I can have
 good statistics on the most widespread values in China, but in reality, the family 
 business culture of a concrete businessperson probably has nothing to do with them.

 What makes sense, then? Studying ideological frameworks, the evolution of 
consumption patterns, the evolution of social archetypes… and understand them 
as a framework, as a changing space, not as the result of “nature” or
 an “immanent spirit.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The bioecological model

-
Image
An email sent to Kristin Jacobson, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago Medical School Dear Prof. Jacobson, I was just leafing through my University of Chicago Magazine this evening when I came across the article summarizing your new grant. I have to say I was amazed. Though the author tiptoed around the area under investigation, you are entering some very choppy waters. The attempt to identify the genetic and biological contributions to anti social behavior and cognition is normally considered taboo, since it inevitably ventures into racial variables. Though I am familiar with some work reported in press releases and abstracts of journals, as you can see from my weblog, most researchers, considering the downside, tend to avoid such studies, even with the best of intentions. I can't help be reminded of the unfortunate lesson of Chicago's Dr. Bruce Lahn, with whom you undoubtedly have discussed your research interests. As was noted several years ago in the Wall Stre...
Read more

Brain imaging study suggests risk-taking behaviors can be contagious

-
Image
BY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ON APRIL 14, 2016  COGNITION Why do we sometimes decide to take risks and other times choose to play it safe? In a new study, Caltech researchers explored the neural mechanisms of one possible explanation: a contagion effect. The work is described in the March 21 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . In the study led by John O’Doherty, professor of psychology and director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, 24 volunteers repeatedly participated in three types of trials: a “Self” trial, in which the participants were asked to choose between taking a guaranteed $10 or making a risky gamble with a potentially higher payoff; an “Observe” trial, in which the participants observed the risk-taking behavior of a peer (in the trial, this meant a computer algorithm trained to behave like a peer), allowing the participants to learn how often the peer takes a risk; and a “Predict” trial, in which the ...
Read more

Temperamental differences by race

-
Excerpted from: Solving The African IQ Conundrum : "Winning Personality" Masks Low Scores By J. Philippe Rushton VDare August 12, 2004 https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t148855/ Over a century ago, Sir Francis Galton initiated research into individual and race differences in intelligence and temperament. He was the first to propose the study of human twins and of selective breeding in animals to disentangle the effects of heredity and environment. And it was Galton—who spent several years exploring in what is now Namibia as a young man—who first contrasted the talkative impulsivity of Africans with the taciturn reserve of American Indians, and the placidity of the Chinese. Galton further noted that these temperament differences persisted irrespective of climate (from the frozen north through the torrid equator), and religion, language, or political system (whether self-ruled or governed by the Spanish, Portuguese, English or French). Anticipating later studies of tr...
Read more