This is the third in a series of notes to lectures for my class ITSF4010 "Cultural & Social Bases of Education" ( )

• Abu-Lughod, Lila "Writing against culture." in Recapturing Anthropology. Edited by R. Fox. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. pp. 137-154. 1991

• McDermott, Ray & Hervé Varenne  "Reconstructing culture in educational research." in Innovations in educational ethnography. Edited by G. Spindler and L. Hammond, 3-31. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 2006

1. What else have anthropologists pointed to? From body techniques and Santa Claus to:
   1. family (marriage, love, etc.)
   2. technology (from irrigation to the social media)
   3. education and schooling
   4. religion
      1. Ethnographic reports on the organization and practices of religion in the United States by someone from Egypt, someone from Bangladesh, and someone from France
      2. The question that anthropologists (and some sociologists, historians, psychologists, etc.) keep asking: what is it that makes the peculiar organization of American religious performance so stable over the centuries, focusing particularly on the multiplicity of (for the foreign observer) small churches (with buildings, ministers, associations, etc.) with very similar theologies and ritual expressions?

4 of the 15+ churches in the town

4 of the 15+ churches in the town

Four of the 13 (or 15, or more)churches in a town of about 3,500 people, or 1 church per 300 people ("Trinity Lutheran, First Methodist, First Presbyterian, Full Gospel Pentecostal, Church of Christ, Church of God, St. Mark's Epis­copal, Seventh-day Adventist, Assembly of God, St. Mary's Catholic, Jehovah's Witnesses, First Baptist, Church of the Nazarene (rural)." )

 

 

2. The simple answer: Culture and the fish do know about the water (things that appear "normal" or "natural," prejudices, habitus

   It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water. (Kluckhohn [1949] 1965)

   1. Definitions most classical and generally taught for the following half century:

      Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action. (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 357)

   2. and in other words, from the most famous anthropologist of the period:

   [the culture concept] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. (Geertz 1966)

3. A reaction again the simple answer:
   what migh be made of the students' origins and languages in the Fall 25 version of this class?
   Abu-Lughod's argument against culture that is is made up by anthropologists
   1. "Halfies" and "women"
   2. hierarchy
   3. othering

   "Culture does not act surreptitiously behind the actor's back. This most sublime production is manufactured at specific places and institutions, be it the messy office of the house [of a famous cultural anthropologist] on the Chicago University campus or the thick Area Files kept at the Pitts River museum in Oxford." (Latour 2005: 175)

4. Why 'culture' remains a concept we cannot live without when considering the fate of human beings on earth as they keep producing their means of survival, often in conflict with others
   1. how to deal with something as obvious as the multiplicity of churchers in small towns, USA
   2. how to understand the "systemic" matters that Abu-Lughod precisely refers to given that the fate of women (and everyone else) is controlled differently, here and there, then and now, with differing consequences
   3. from 'culture' to 'culturing'
      "Shared agreement" refers to various social methods for accomplishing the member's recognition that something was said-according-to-a-rule and not the demonstrable matching of substantive matters. The appropriate message of a common understanding is therefore an operation rather than a common intersection of overlapping sets. (author's italics. Garfinkel 1967: 30)
   4. In brief:
      1. As I have put it sometime: CULTURE HAS MORE TO DO WITH THE HOUSES WE INHABIT THAN WITH THE HABITS WE ACQUIRE
      2. and again: "Culture is not a past cause to a current self. Culture is the current challenge to possible future selves. Specifically, in tje context of the United States, America is not what makes Americans. America is the current challenge to the future of all those who cannot escape being caught by the institutions of its State in their many incarnations, wherever, and dare we say whenever, they build their lives." (McDermott & Varenne 2006)
         some thing that is "multi-spatio-ethno-fragmented-scapes/scopes--as-processually-practiced-and-agentively-reinvented-contestatorally" (Boon, 1999, p. 2)---in one word: culture.