Meeting Four (Saturday, May 23, 10:00-12:00)
The third opposition: public/collective versus individual levels
One of the oldest and most complex debates on culture concerns its ontological status: is
it a phenomenon properly belonging to the individual level (attitudes), or at least
reducible to individual attitudes, or is it a reality sui generis? If “culture” refers to both
individual and collective phenomena, how should we think about this concept and its dual
“location” in order to make it useful in research? The unit introduces a very productive
way of conceptualizing culture on those two levels. This facilitates an analysis of culture
on both levels separately and helps to conceptualize and theorize their interrelationship.
Required readings:
Hannerz, Ulf. 1992. Cultural Complexity. Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning.
New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 3-36.
Strauss, Claudia and Naomi Quinn. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. pp. 3-61.
Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning, pp. 3-54
1. Crisis in the theory of culture:
1.1. rejection of the old definition (e.g., bounded whole)
1.2. centrality of meaning
2. Definitions of meaning:
2.1. referent (thing or situation in the world “meaning” stands for);
2.2. symbols are expressions of “ideas in people’s heads” (John Locke);
2.3. stimulus and response in an individual (behaviorism, operational definition);
2.4. meaning-is-use (Wittgenstein);
2.5. meaning-is-place-in-a-system-of-signs (structuralism: de Saussure  Claude
Levi-Strauss);
2.6. meanings-are-endlessly-deferred (post-structuralism, Derrida)
3. Strauss and Quinn propose:
3.1. behaviorism (meanings are defined by their stimuli and responses);
3.2. ideational approach (meanings are ideas in people’s heads).
3.3. interaction between intrapersonal and extra-personal realms
4. “A cultural meaning is the typical (frequently recurring and widely shared aspects of
the) interpretation of some type of object or event evoked in people as a result of their
similar life experiences” (6).
5. Traditional distinctions in semiotics:
5.1. semantic
5.2. syntactic
5.3. pragmatic
6. Main ideas of the schema theory and connectionism:
6.1. Bourdieu's idea of habitus: most useful;
6.2. A new theory of cultural meaning: priority to the way people’s experiences are
internalized;
6.3. Schema Theory and Connectionism: schemas – existing sets of meanings
(assumptions) based on previous experiences that people use (activate) once
exposed to a new cultural content.
Hannertz:
1. “The cultural flow thus consists of the externalization of meaning which individuals
produce through arrangements of overt forms, and the interpretations which individuals
make of such displays – those of others as well as their own” (4).
2. “As a whole, it is endless; externalizations depend on previous interpretations,
depending on previous externalizations. Yet in details there are differences, as some of
the externalizations are constantly present, some occur again and again, /…/ and some
seldom or only once.” (4)
POINTS:
1. Study of externalizations must be a study of social communication. Thus you need an
ontology of the social: (a) holistic or (b) individualistic or ?
2. Study of internalizations is not the same as an “individualistic study” of
externalizations. Thus, three domains:
2.1. “interior” – psychology
2.2. “exterior” conceived collectivistically/holistically
2.3. “exterior” conceived individualistically
3. “Whenever a culture is understood to be a collective phenomenon, it needs sociology.
When this sociology is left implicit, the danger is that it is a weak sociology.” (10)
4. Dominant site of cultural production.
5. Cultural sharing: “the replication of uniformity” versus “the organization of
diversity.”
6. “… it is in part a consequence of the cultural flow through a population that a social
system is created and recreated. As people make their contributions to that flow, they
are themselves becoming constructed as individuals and social beings.” (14)
7. "As people make their contribution to the flow of culture they are themselves
becoming constructed as individuals and social beings" (14):
7.1. At the beginning of the game an individual possesses a set of characteristics;
7.2. They can go thru the game and at the end they have different, altered sets of
characteristics;
7.3. Identities evolve/change in the process of the game
8. Interactionist approach: something between holism and individualism
9. Culturalism: mentalism. Over-cultured conception of the human being because it
assumes we are products rather than producers of culture. Solution: Laitin's Janus
face of culture.
10. Culturology: "knowledge, beliefs, norms and values seem to be just there, timelessly
present doing things on its own or "through" people. Solution: the distributive view
of culture.
10.1.
Cultural management (fits into cultural politics box)
10.2.
Cultural management vs. cultural engineering (anti-Foucault?)
10.2.1. Important distinction
10.2.2. Foucault tends to mesh institutions and meaning together as enslaving
people.
10.2.3. We all manage culture and how it affects us and how we affect it
(although to various degrees: concepts of infrapolitics, hidden resistance,
subalternity)
10.2.4. Engineering is systemic and extreme.