INTRODUCTION

"culture uses and transforms life to realise a synthesis of a higher order"
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1949: 4)

This neighborhood in my site brings together various ways of approaching CULTURE as a core process in human life. The guiding idea is my understanding of the statement by Lévi-Strauss I use as epigraph.

It is also composed in the spirit of Boas writing about the "InterpretationS of culture" ([1911] 1938) (where the word 'culture' is written in the singular). It stands against Geertz who wrote (1973) about the "Interpretation of cultureS" (where the word is written in the plural).

check an illustrative example.

Specifically, human action within some collectivity builds, with physical, biological and historical conditions and resources, new conditions and resources for all future action by all those collected.

This applies to intellectual practice. Thus this site is about transforming further the theory of culture through a reconstruction of traditions of controversies about convention, arbitrariness, elaboration, education, hegemony, authority, agency, etc.

The site is organized into three main areas:

• a direct confrontation with all attempts to define "culture" that, together, reflect a paradigm of concerns.
  
  
• an exploration of various ways through which discourses of culture interact with other discourses:
  • consciousness
  • anthropology
    
    
• pointers to various related discourses
  • Arbitrariness (in classifications of object and experiences, in the labeling of persons, in the organizational processes)
  • Community and polity
  • Consciousness
  • Gestalt
  • Hegemony
  • History and pattern
  • Identification and action
  • (In)determination
  • Inscription
  • Models
  • Patterns and experience
  • Syntagmatic relations in and across utterances
• with some further musings on
  • thought, maps, classifications, and instructions.
  • from my blog

These pages are very much a work in progress. I give priority to finding different ways of stating current understandings over the more careful editing that many of these pages might need. The text should be treated more as jottings, semi-improvised drafts or 'brouillons', than as statements closed at the time of 'publication'.

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