Pushing our Paradigms; Connecting with Culture

American Anthropologist, 2001

Cultural Studies Review, 1970

A review of Tony Bennett and John Frow (eds), The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis (Sage, 2008).

The culture concept has been severely criticized for its top-down nature in TESOL, leading arguably to its falling out of favor in the field. But what of the fact that people do live culturally ? This article describes a case study of culture from the bottom up-culture as understood and enacted by its individual users. Findings suggest that culture is an emergent phenomenon for the research participant, who actively interprets, resists, and strategically appropriates the cultural materials at her disposal to fashion a cultural identityactions reflecting both the individual nature of culture and the cultural nature of the individual. The researchers briefly discuss the implications of this bottom-up approach to culture for TESOL research and teaching and offer the approach as one solution to the dilemma of being either "for" or "against" culture in TESOL.

Traditionally, all global citizens regardless of their identity consciously and intuitively use their lens figuratively, metaphorically, philosophically, and symbolically to enunciate their testimony within Shades of a Global Culturalspace. William Anderson Gittens ISBN 978-976-96220-7-4 Author, Dip., Com., Arts. B.A. Media Arts Specialists’ Cultural Practitioner, Publisher

2020

The exploration of possible futures of the study of culture is more than a prognostic effort, diagnosis of trends, or progressive elaboration of theories and methods. It also requires the critical consideration of possible future topics, transformations, and potentials within an interdisciplinary and international research field that faces contested futures in a rapidly changing global world. This volume discusses recent developments, emerging directions, and concerns for the study of culture from a wide range of national and disciplinary contexts, while addressing pressing challenges and crucial issues found in contemporary public discourse. The articles in this volume have been written and edited well before there were any signs of the current global Covid-19 pandemic that has rapidly brought death, fear, and unforeseen challenges to individual lives and cultural systems. We, of course, do not know what the future will bring or hold in store for our world, but we sincerely hope that we will find ways to cope with all the challenges resulting from this global pandemic. What the corona crisis shows us already, however, is that we depend not only on political and economic systems, but also on ideas, common values, and cultural practices to shape a common future. We need the perspectives of the humanities and social sciences to understand and to create our society, culture, and global world. We have rarely experienced this fragility of our globalized world and such uncertainty of any future outlook. In times when human lives, economies, and political systems are at stake, we grope our way forward taking very small steps at a time as the very foundations of future expectations seem radically shaken. Yet, although written well before this global crisis, the articles in this volume have approached the topic of 'futures' rather cautiously and with nuance. Instead of generating a global prognostic vision, this collection pursues incipient approaches that try to expand the limits of our established but often ill-suited conceptual settings and disciplinary and institutional arrangements. It aims to open up new horizons for the study of culture by bringing changed conceptual tools and research practices in sight that could perhaps make us better equipped for dealing with urgent concerns and future issues yet unknown. With the generous support of the University Library Giessen, we have made the book available through Open Access to maximize the accessibility and potential of its contributions to spark debates worldwide. Our goal was to produce a collection that is not only multidisciplinary but also multi-voiced, as exemplified by our two-perspective introductions and an interview with Peter L. Galison. Most of the contributions originated at the international symposium held in 2016 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Giessen Graduate Centre for Open Access.

British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2012

Rethinking culture and education begs the question: why? Anyone familiar with Claude Lévi-Strauss' anthropological works might quickly respond, perhaps tautologically: 'Because culture and education are good to think with.' The phrase 'good to think with' is a virtual mantra within schools of anthropology that stress the value of critical scholarship for understandingand changingsocial life. Authors as different as Jean Comaroff (Comaroff and Kim 2011) and Elsie Rockwell (2011) have invoked Lévi-Straussian ideas to call for a more engaged scholarship. Although Lévi-Strauss was a basic not engaged anthropologist, and was speaking of the value of animal categories not social theory for structuring human thought (Lévi-Strauss 1963), his argument that ideas and concepts themselves nourish the human mind points to the very educative qualities of the social sciences and humanities that I wish to focus on and endorse here. In other words, social theorizing, like animal categories, is good to think with. It is educative, it is structuring, and it is constitutive of reality.

Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture

"Culture is a keyword among keywords for Raymond Williams, who contributed to the founding of cultural studies in the 1960s and 1970s. It is among the most common ways to talk about how we talk. In the essay below, one of Williams’ most careful readers, Ted Striphas, offers a sensitive update to Williams and a wide-ranging intellectual history, describing how culture has coevolved with the digital turn since the end of World War II. No longer an antithesis to technology, culture has recently interpenetrated with the computational (e.g., digital humanities, culturomics, and big-data-driven cultural studies). In fascinating conversation with Fred Turner’s prototype and Limor Shifman’s meme, in what sense do aspects of modern-day digital culture challenge and confirm Striphas’ observation about the dynamism and adaptability of culture—or, in Williams’ famous phrase, 'one of two or three most complicated words in the English language?'" [overview by Benjamin Peters]

English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries , 2015

How may culture be defined? Numerous works and important contributions have been answering this crucial question for the past thirty years; yet the problem remains unsolved. When taking a close look at ‘intercultural communication’, we may see that some utterances might not be that cultural at all. If we have a clear definition of ‘intercultural communication’, then what is ‘intra-cultural communication’ (Winch 1997, Ma 2004)? Is there really a sharp difference between these two concepts and is miscommunication necessarily ‘cultural’ when implying individuals or groups from alleged different cultural backgrounds? We will study various examples and try to separate the cultural from the non-cultural by taking a close look at intercultural and intra-cultural miscommunication, insofar as their definitions seem to ultimately cover the same conceptual maps. After this first step, we will deconstruct the concept of culture, as it has been defined by scholars in various research fields over the last decades; we will thus see that culture might not be a set of shared values or behaviours (Knapp & Knapp-Pothoff 1990; Scollon & Wong Scollon 2001): culture may only be a very personal variable of a complex, strangely organized and experimental toolbox (Kay 1999) which would constitute a product of our education, psychology, social encounters and language and would only remain activated through particular contexts. This exploration will eventually be followed by a proposal for a redefinition of ‘culture’ as a concept, based on interactional pragmatics, contextics (Castella 2005) and a triadic declension of this very concept with three notions: bathyculture, dramaculture and osmoculture.