An exercise before embarking: write down on a piece
of paper your definition of culture without looking in a
dictionary and then ask a friend, colleague or complete
stranger (assuming they are not one and the same) to
do the same.
As long as I can remember dictionaries have held a special fascination for me and I have never understood people’s reluctance to use them.
To me, understanding has always been about more than regurgitating facts and figures learned many half moons ago and taken as truth from the bank of memory.
Understanding, much like life, is about dragging yourself out of bed every morning and defining yourself to the world you find yourself in…and everyday that world is very different.
Reason, truth, meaning, all of these words, little ideas, have definitions in dictionaries, and each dictionary, depending on age and publisher will havea slightly different definition, a different truth. Our task is to use these definitions as the building blocks for our own definitions of self, the object, emotion and people we encounter. Meaning, as has been observed by countless others before me is in a state of flux depending upon circumstance and you.
When I’m faced with an idea such as “New Cultural Imperialism” it seems easy, almost default to think of the negative things in society that the vast majority of people do, think or like and tear them to pieces, belittle them and frame them in these words such is my feeling toward Imperialism being a nasty, dirty word. But by doing this, by taking the easy option I negate the scale of the ideas that are actually being presented to me.These words, clustered together, seeking to manifest themselves as one; they rely both independently and together on the idea of the other, something opposite, inferior or different in order for them to be defined.
Culture is perhaps the biggest idea within this cluster.
Two examples of attitudes towards the word are best summed up by quotes, and fortunately they are from both sides of the political spectrum.
“When I hear the word culture I reach for my wallet”
Marx (Groucho not Karl) .
“When I hear the word culture I reach for my gun”
Goering (Herman, the Nazi, not Munster)
Culture is something that has as many definitions as meanings and in the course of exploring definitions it becomes apparent that to define culture is to declare war on understanding, a war on notions of self and place that will be constantly waged, because to begin to comprehend why we assert some ideas above others begins to answer the larger, far more complex questions of existence.
Looking at the argument of defining culture going on within the anthropological community* we get an idea of how distinct and separate ways of thinking about culture can lead to very different ways of being, existing and thinking about who we are within relationships, communities and the world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his work Phenomenology of Perception was not the first philosopher to consider the idea of Phenomenology; he has not been the last, but his idea that meaning and our relation to objects are individual, personal and only defineable within each of us at a given moment in time, in a given place and a given day has been a revelation to me.
Could the idea of phenomenology also be prescribed to words?
In my experience, (I would also hope from the exercise above to be able to have some
form of proof or evidence) culture, like all words, is defined first and foremost by the person defining
based on personal experience of an idea (in this case the idea of culture), rather than a dictionary definition.
This becomes increasingly dangerous when ideas like culture are used to defend or justify other ideas suchas imperialism.
Regardless of how we define, and we ultimately always will, we are left in the ominous position of knowing that just as we define something as being we have also defined something as not being; for something to becultured, something invariably must be uncultured.
Nature, above all, is what we seek to define ourselves from when we talk about culture. We have learned, we have evolved and think, we control our environment, we build, we pass our knowledge on.
Nature no longercontrols us, we control it.
The notion that that which we understand can not harm us is perhaps the principle idea that has given man the confidence and will to explore and put into practice other ideas, such as
imperialism.
“The more you know the less you understand”-
(Tao le Ching)
"Imperialism - the policy of extending the rule or authorityof an empire or nation over foreign countries, or of acquiring and holding colonies and dependencies."
Where do we begin?
How to comprehend and define?
To justify (and we all feel that need to justify).
To start...we must try.
Imperialism is the one word out of the three clustered that depends so much on words to justify our need for it. Terror is the latest word used to justify imperialism; it is spoken by leaders pointing fingers and speaking rehearsed speeches into TV cameras. A word that seeks to define a feeling now used to justify again and again in some other place and toward some other people and given different words for the same act;liberation, freedom, democratic, controlled explosion.
People speak of terror it as if it is something they do not deserve, that it is unjust, an unnatural condition to live under rather than accepting fear, in any form, as a part of us, part of our survival.
Previously the word uncultured has been used to justify the occupation of other countries, the taking
of resources and the exploitation of the people within them justified by words that we still struggle to
comprehend, define or even put into practice. Here we get into the murky waters of humanity our need to define and classify, to differentiate ourselves from each other. To classify is to protect, to define is to understand and what we understand can not harm us. What we understand that others don’t, we can use against them, make them appear to be the lesser that requires our guidance, our way of seeing.
We sit ourselves on a pedestal, clutching a dictionary, whose contents will write letters, bills, laws, treaties, contracts, and declarations.
We speak...
We speak words whose meaning morph into other meanings like a game of Chinese Whispers…
*www.anthrobase.com/Dic
