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College aantekeningen (Lectures) Cultural Interaction: Conflict and Cooperation (5182V9CI)
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College aantekeningen (Lectures) Cultural Interaction: Conflict and Cooperation (5182V9CI)
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Cultural interactionContents
Lecture 1 – 7-9 – representation and culture as a form-of-life...............................................................2
Lecture 2 – 14-9 – culture and politics and the cultural and political...................................................10
Lecture 3 – 21-9 – cultures and the political: the splitting of worlds and the multiplicity of worlds....17
Lecture 4 – 28-9 – culture and economics: value and what connects or divides a society and economy
determined by culture and culture used economically........................................................................26
Lecture 5 – 5-10 – hierarchies of exchange and interests defined by affects and emotions: civilization
..............................................................................................................................................................35
Lecture 6 – 12-10 – culture and religion: the force of communities and of religious infiltration..........43
Lecture 7 – 26-10 – self, self-less and identity: loss of ego and sacrifice and identity and self-forms of
alienation..............................................................................................................................................51
Lecture 8 – 4-11 – self, stranger and other: intermingling (sub-)cultures and the issue of hierarchies
and affiliation in times of hyperdiversity..............................................................................................59
Lecture 9 – 10-11 – translation and the issues of communication and understanding and
understanding by means of comparison: incomparable selves............................................................69
Lecture 10 – 16-11 – cultures of dis-abled selves: the cultural variance in the definition of dis-ability
and the force and idiocy of normality...................................................................................................81
Lecture 11 – 23-11 – cultures of animals (and other selves): the issue of animality, cultivation and
representation, and the many cultures of living beings.......................................................................90
Lecture 12 – 30-11 – cultures of technology: artificial selves mixtures of being – epistemologies and
ontologies, technologizations of culture, culturalisation of technologies, technological cultures.......99
1
,Lecture 1 – 7-9 – representation and culture as a form-of-life
Music: the world es mi familia
In what senses is culture a matter of life and death?
What is the definition of culture?
Pivotal concepts: representation and form-of-life
Everyday things are hard to define with scholarly approval
For example: weather and culture
In this course we focus on:
- The fact that culture is not something people simply have, but that drives them and that
shapes their life worlds
o For example: we will focus on the affective powers in culture, in terms of collectives
and of individual selves
- Global, national, regional and local interactions between cultures
- The dynamics between culture and for example politics/economics/religion and the ways in
which culture may supersede these, or the ways in which these may use culture
- The fact that cultural interactions may enrich peoples and environments but may also have a
limit in the sense that beings (like people) may seriously and unavoidably misunderstand one
another because of cultural differences that connote different worlds
- The fact that cultures are often at the basis of conflict and cooperation
o Or the coincidence of both
- The fact that there are many more cultures than just human ones
In this course the collective aim is to train ourselves in
- Broadening cultural sensibilities
- Formulating a research question that does not serve a power to know but that is provoked by
a need or desire to sense and to understand
Why is it difficult to define culture?
- One reason: because of the difference between culture and Culture
o Culture is dealt with on the basis of two different manifestations
o culture (small c) indicates the entire set of practices, expressions, and artifacts by
which people organize their life-worlds
For example: Japanese culture
For example: Taripapei culture
Indigenous people in Brazil
‘Culture Day Parade’
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Culture_Day_Parade_(Nag
oya,_Japan).jpg
o Culture is often used (capital C) to indicate the entire set of artistic expressions
produced by a group of people
Such as architecture, sculpture, music, literature
- Implies hierarchy
o This has come to be questioned in recent years
2
, o Pop vs classical music
o Art vs TV
Culture based on the difference between human beings and animals
- The first would have culture, the second wouldn’t
see session 11 for a rebuttal of this position
- Humans have a culturally determined knowledge of life and death, whereas animals have a
sense of the present only
- Humans are aware of their mortality and can express their feelings about it
o Martin Heidegger
- All cultures make people aware that life is confined within the limits of birth and death
- Culture is not merely about expression and awareness, as human life depends on culture
since it contains the entire set of practices, attitudes, technologies, and artefacts by means of
which they are able to organize themselves in conflict and cooperation with the living
environment
For example: finding, preparing, and eating food
o Roland Barthes: food is a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of
usages, situations, and behaviour
For example: Which mushroom would you eat? How do you know it is safe? Or how do
people know?
o Because someone tried it out
o And taught others
o Or could no longer teach others
- Human beings are not only a cultivating species but also a speaking, communicating and
teaching one: human beings would die if they were not able to transfer/pass on knowledge
- ‘What it is that people teach one another with regard to birth, life, and death will vary
considerably.
The conceptualisation of death, the rituals surrounding birth and death, and the practices of
dealing with death and the dead will differ substantially between, say, Mexican to Maori.’
o Differences between cultures and between communities within cultures
For example: Muslims vs secularists
The organisation of life and death: biopolitics vs necropolitics
- ‘Death has come to be dealt with differently with the arrival of consumer culture
and it has come to be dealt with differently in the current phase of global capitalism, in the
context of which some speak of a ‘necropolitics’, as Cameroonian political theorist Achille
Mbembe did in an article from 2003.’
o Necropolitics: the organization of life and death is not only a cultural issue but also a
governmental or legal issue
- Necropolitics concerns the supposed might or right to expose beings (also ordinary citizens)
to life or to death
The value of life and death
- Humans organize themselves culturally on the basis of values
o Inevitably hierarchical
3
, - ‘In most cases, life will be valued more than death, although in many cultures there may also
be situations in which death is valued more than life, whether for spiritual reasons or
because of shame.’
o Politics and legality: Who is allowed to live? Who will take responsibility?
o Politics and culture are distinct but connected
The flexibility of cultural identity
- The value people attach to their culture can itself be a matter of life and death
- ‘There is ample evidence of how irreverent, or how flexible people can be in their dealing
with culture.
They assimilate into another culture, or they combine elements from different cultures to
come up with a new mixture that feels like their own.’
For example: Russians are proud to be Russian, but their name is adopted from the Vikings
o Vikings were called al-Rus
For example: Vikings were opposed to Christianity and then assimilated to Christian culture
o Christianization of Kievan Rus
- There is also ample evidence of how culture might be quintessential to human beings
o How it is the thing they claim to as if it is life itself
For example: slaves in the transatlantic slave trade were not only robbed of their freedom
and sometimes life, they were robbed of their culture, yet they reshaped their new situation
culturally, as life without culture is impossible/unbearable and the culture of origin held a
palpable attraction for decades/centuries
bell hooks (1952)
- Lower case name
- Teaching one another how to survive and live, culturally
- Teaching to Transgress (1994) and Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2004)
o Pedagogics and didactics
- She feels herself to be part of a long tradition of people who had to teach themselves how to
organize their own culture against oppressive forces in such a way that they felt
alive/valuable/meaningful
- Powers residing in representation
- Representation: how is something being presented, shown, made concrete, as the
representation of a ‘something else’
The powers in representation
- Aspect of culture: How do you think you recognize where someone is coming from
o And are you right?
o Representation as an aspect of culture
Everything people do expresses their culture
How they walk, talk, eat, have sex, etc.
- A separate realm of cultural expression: How are people being represented in any kind of
cultural expression
o For example: how many women do you see in advertisements that are ‘experts’? Or
how many women are being shown who are CEO’s?
o And a separate realm of cultural expression
The explicit ways in which people show or represent something
4
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