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Lecture notes of 86 pages for the course Cultural Interaction: Conflict And Cooperation at UL (lecture 1-12)
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Andrea salazar2021-2022
CULTURAL INTERACTIONS:
CONFLICT & COOPERATION
Professor G. Van Engelenhoven
, Andrea salazar
2021-2022
PART I: CULTURAL REALMS (WEEKS 1-6) 3
Introduction: Culture as a Matter of Life and Death 3
The Nation-State 10
World(s) 22
Society 30
Civilization 39
Community 47
PART II: CULTURAL SELVES (WEEKS 7-12) 56
Selves 56
Others 64
(Mis)communication(s) between Selves and Others 71
(Dis-)abled Selves 79
Animal Selves 83
, Andrea salazar
2021-2022
PART I: CULTURAL REALMS (WEEKS 1-6)
1. Introduction: Culture as a Matter of Life and Death
Reading: Frans-Willem Korsten. Cultural Interactions: Conflict and Cooperation.
Preamble & Chapter 1: pp. 1-6; 7-15.
● Anthropomorphism → people give names to things so as to place them in their own
lifeworld, or to ‘morph’ them according to a human logic.
● The study of cultures implies the study of expression.
● If we come to consider cultural interactions in relation to human beings first, and then
to animal cultures and technological ones, this can only be done systematically on the
basis of a definition of culture that makes the transition between the three possible.
○ Notoriously difficult to formulate an adequate definition of such a common
thing as culture.
○ Culture may not be associated with a specific society, as a society can have
different cultures within it.
○ 1) Culture indicates the entire set of practices, expressions and artefacts by
which people organise their life-worlds.
○ 2) Culture is often used to indicate the entire set of artistic expressions
produced by people in fields such as architecture, sculpture, music, literature,
cinema, games, and so forth.
● c/Culture is considered to be a positive matter that brings people together. This is for
instance what the website on culture of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization – UNESCO tells us.
● Conflict is different from friction here. → Even open, inclusive and pluralistic
societies will brim with frictions. Such frictions can be productive, positive even.
They can also be annoying. They may lead to conflict but not necessarily so.
● Cooperation, historically speaking, has been much more intercultural cooperation
than conflict. The reason is simple: people may wage war at times, but they always
trade and exchange things, even in times of war. War is temporary, that is; trade and
exchange are continuous. → Etymologically, cooperation means ‘to work together’.
In what senses is culture a matter of life and death?
● Representation and form-of-life to answer:
○ The chapter’s title, why culture and cultural interactions matter
○ What is the definition of culture
, Andrea salazar
2021-2022
● Culture is a matter of life and death and a matter of representation, a form-of-life.
● All cultures make people aware that life is confined within the limits of birth and
death.
○ In general, or fundamentally, human life depends on culture, since it contains
the entire set of practices, attitudes, technologies, and artefacts by means of
which human beings are able to organise themselves in conflict and
cooperation with the living environment.
○ Human beings would die if they were not able to culturally transmit their
knowledge to one another and across generations (cultivating, speaking,
communicating and teaching species.
● Concepts with regard to birth, life, and death vary considerably across cultures.
○ ‘Necropolitics’ to indicate that the organisation of life and death is not only a
cultural concern, but a governmental and legal issue as well.
● Life without culture is not possible for human beings:
○ One of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade was not just that human
beings were enslaved, but that they were robbed of their culture and
meaningful lifeworld. → They started to reshape their lives culturally, in the
new, enforced circumstances.
● As the prefix re- suggests, representation is a manifestation of something else, then.
Yet the question with culture is, what this ‘something else’ is.
○ Any culture uses multiple sets of representations, but at the same time the
entire set of representations also embodies that culture. It is not the case that
there is some entity of ‘culture’ that comes first, and is then represented.
○ Culture is ‘present’ only through representations. This is why the struggle
about what is being represented is so immensely charged.
● This does not mean they desire to die, although this can also happen, but that they are
willing to risk their life in a struggle or battle for their own culture.
○ E.g. Mahatma Gandhi
● Culture cannot be held, rather it is a form-of-life; people live it, and this is why they
are so attached to it.
○ Culture is always related to collectives, from relatively small to bigger ones.
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