The Limits of ‘Culture’

1. The Limits of ‘Culture’ GEOG 301 Wednesday, October 7th

2. Community Events • Girish Karnad Danz Lecture: Entertaining India When: Thursday, Oct 8, 2009 - 6:30 PM Where: Kane 130 Encounters with British colonialism profoundly altered the perception Indians had of themselves. Girish Karnad—a celebrated playwright, actor, and author—will look at how this engagement with the West reshaped the world of Indian entertainment. Until the nineteenth century, entertainment in India was the sole prerogative of communities which had traditionally specialized in specific performing forms and crafts. With colonialism came the notion of entertainment as a business enterprise, open to all castes and subject to the free play of market forces: anyone with the requisite capital (money, talent, or daring) could now invest in it. This development fundamentally reoriented the entire cultural sphere. • Symposium Eugenics and Disability: History and Legacy in Washington When: Friday, Oct 9, 2009 Where: UW Tower Auditorium, 4333 BrooklynAvenue NE In 1909, Washington became the second state to enact a forced sterilization law. This event will provide a forum for dialogue about this eugenic past and its current implications. Panels will feature national and local scholars and advocates. The intended audience includes academics, clinicians, community advocates, individuals with disabilities, service providers, policy makers, and interested members of the general public. Registration is required.

3. Community Events • David Shumway The Revolution Was on Columbia (and Capital, RCA, Warner Brothers, etc.): How Rock and Rock Stars Changed American Culture When: Friday, Oct 9, 2009 - 4:00 PM Where: Communications 202David R. Shumway (English and Literary & Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon) recently finished a book about rock stars as cultural icons—including Elvis Presley, James Brown, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen—to be published by NYU Press. • Girish Karnad Screening and Discussion: A Lamp in the NicheWhen: Saturday, Oct 10, 2009 - 4:00 PM Where: Kane 210 Girish Karnad will screen A Lamp in the Niche, a documentary on Sufism that has won much acclaim, and also will lead a post-screening discussion.

4. Review • What is the legacy of the Enlightenment? • What is positivism and what are the critiques of this approach? • What is a mimetic representation? • What questions does epistemology address?

5. Review • What is the most important thing that postmodernism and hermeneutics are trying to tell us? How do they differ? • What is the question of hegemony? • How is the idea of hegemony different from that of ‘false consciousness’?

6. Post-structuralism • These ideas were linked to French theorists working in the 1970s, they included: Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Lyotard and Kristeva • Main Ideas: • “subjectivity [is] continually in process, as a site of disunity, conflict, and contradictions, and hence potential political change” and thus, “there is no ‘real’ outside of cultural systems” • Focus on the production of knowledge and truth • The idea of situated knowledge • The material and discursive are fully imbricated

7. Poststructuralist Intentions “In their own texts, post-structuralists attempt to instantiate a non-oppressive politics by avoiding characteristics of logocentric texts: they avoid interpretive closure, unsettle categories, resist binary oppositions…and explore new connective modes of theorizing”

8. The ‘New’ Cultural Geography • Move from positivism to postmodernism and post-structuralism • Deconstructing what is seen as culture to reveal the underlying power relations • No longer looking, for example, at race in history but on the cultural representations of race • Feminism and self-reflection on one’s gaze; looking at subalterns and how they would challenge dominant representations

9. Addressing Student Questions • What are the purposes and goals of human geographers? • What do cultural geographers do exactly? • What is culture?

10. Culture in the Enlightenment • culture referring to skilled human activities through which non-human nature is encompassed (agri-culture, horti-culture) • culture to reference difference among other human groups (Carib culture, primitive culture) • Belief in human progress implied that ‘inferior’ groups could be ‘cultured’ • Culture as the activities that could improve humans’ civility, that could release people from inferiority (art, music, literature, etc.)

11. Culture as Opposed to Nature • Challenge from feminists • Challenge from post-structuralists “Theoretically, boundaries between nature and culture cannot be sustained when physical human activities are the materialized outcomes of mental acts which are themselves increasingly explicable neurologically and biologically (undermining any remaining belief in the idea of an immaterial human ‘spirit’ which underpinned the nineteenth-century meaning of culture), and when nature can become known to us only within and through discourse, and thus is always cultural” ---- Dictionary of Human Geography

12. Social Constructionist Approach “in a social constructionist interpretation, the term ‘natural’ has no meaning, if that meaning concerns something that is prior to, and determinate of, or independent of human discourse. Moreover, there is no need to resort to idealist interpretations that divide the world into that which is material and nonmaterial, since the world may be interpreted as material existence with meaning. Again, no part of the material world is without meaning. A social constructionist position is therefore simultaneously relativist, meaning that it is subject to change according to social context, and materialist, meaning that no social construction—including thought itself—occurs as anything except a material act.” ---Kobayashi 2004

13. Culture is Politics • “The cultural is political in the sense that cultural distinctions are rarely made on purely aesthetic grounds but frequently involved conflicting material interests” • “cultural politics refers to the abstract maps of meaning through which people make sense of the world, attaching value and significance to their material and social environment, and to the ways that those abstractions are objectified in concrete social practices and spatial forms”

14. Raymond Williams “As Raymond Williams observes…the important point about culture is not that it escapes a single definition, but that it captures an ongoing conviction among human scientists that understanding behavior necessarily involves accounting for ‘the material’ and ‘the symbolic’” ---Oakes and Price (2008)

15. Abu-Lughod • What about Abu-Lughod’s critique reminds you of our discussion of post-structuralism, particularly with regards to Derrida? • What are some problematic areas of the foundations and practices of anthropology? • How can the concept of culture support and maintain hierarchical notions of difference among people? • How does capitalism depend on the unequal distinctions between groups of people? • What techniques or strategies can help us write against culture?

16. Culture and Chapter 3 • If we take the notion of culture as a system of practices in which value is renewed, created, and contested (p 71) what questions should we begin asking? • How are arguments about moral values often arguments about economic values? • How do commodities relate to ‘culture’? • What does capitalism have to do with ‘culture’? • What are the problems with defining culture as a sphere or realm? (p73) • What is wrong with a theory that defines culture as a ‘way of life’? (p74)

17. Mitchell’s Conclusion • “While culture itself does not exist, the idea of culture as been developed and deployed in the modern (and the postmodern) world as a means of attempting to order, control, and define “others” in the name of power and profit” (p75)

18. Ontology • Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. Further examples of ontological questions include: • What is existence? • Is existence a property? • Which, if any, entities are fundamental? • How do the properties of an object relate to the object itself? • What features are the essential, as opposed to merely accidental, attributes of a given object? • How many levels of existence or ontological levels are there? • What is a physical object? • Can one give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists? • Can one give an account of what it means to say that a non-physical entity exists? • What constitutes the identity of an object? • When does an object go out of existence, as opposed to merely changing? --Wikipedia