This assignment will help you to construct your own understanding of material that you're learning. Begin by reading the What is Culture? module carefully and weighing all the separate
notions of culture presented there. As you examine these notions, evaluate
them carefully. Write down what you believe to be their strengths and
weaknesses (but you don't need to submit these notes). Also, review the
paragraph below on Complex Definitions before you begin to write the
assignment.
Complex Definitions
One of the most fundamental skills for you to learn in college is
how to think in definitions. For the most part, thinking in definitions
involves committing yourself to only the most important aspects of a term
or concept. This will be your baseline definition; you always need a short,
working definition on which to build your understanding of a concept and
its complex relationships with other concepts. For instance, if you were to
define philosophy, you could easily produce pages and pages of a
definition. You need, however, to distill those pages and pages into a
single sentence or two. What would it be? If you were to define philosophy, what's its most important characteristic? What single sentence definition
would be able to describe everything you might say about philosophy? That
is your beginning definition, the one that you commit yourself to knowing
by heart.
However, you can't take complex ideas and walk around understanding
them only in their most simple form: that's simplistic or reductionist
thinking. Concepts such as "philosophy," "culture," "science," "the self,"
"freedom," "subjectivity," and so on, are extremely complex concepts. They
are applied to a variety of phenomena and the meanings of these concepts
change when they are applied to different phenomena. Let me give you a
simple instance: the term "culture" means something different when you
apply it first to an opera and then apply it to a hunting-gathering tribe
in New Guinea and then apply it to bacteria on a petri dish ("culturing").
So the concept changes radically as you apply it to different
phenomena.
Not only that, the concept changes as you move from speaker to speaker.
One person's definition of "culture" will be different from another
person's. This is especially true between cultures: a concept that you define one way may be defined completely differently within another
culture. Not only that, within your own culture, concepts change radically
over time. For instance, when an ancient Roman talked about "freedom," she
or he meant something absolutely and completely different than the concept
Martin Luther, the German theologian, was discussing when he talked about
"freedom" in the 16th century. The contemporary American notion of
"freedom," which is derived from Luther's, is not even close to what Luther
had in mind. In fact, it's not even close to what the American rebels
thought freedom was when they put it in the Declaration of Independence.
Complex concepts, then, involve several different factors:
Diverse phenomena: Complex concepts change meaning as they are
applied to different phenomena.
Cross-cultural definitions: Complex concepts change meaning as one
moves across different cultures or sub-cultures within a dominant culture.
Historical change: Complex concepts change meaning over time, that is, they evolve. This evolution is mainly due to applying the concepts to
new phenomena.
Your job as a student is to use complex concepts across a diversity of
meanings. You need to recognize, for instance, that the word "freedom" does
not mean one thing, but many things, and all those things are "freedom"
even if they don't appear to be such to you. So, in part, your
understanding of complex concepts is an evolutionary process, that is, you
will through your career as a student and throughout your lifetime learn
more and more ways of understanding these concepts and integrate these into
your own understanding of the concept.
For this assignment you will use Speakeasy Café, a
program that allows you to discuss ideas in World Civilizations with other
students, past and present. You should begin by reading several of the
responses to this assignment by other participants in the class.
Your internet essay
will consist of two parts:
You are to construct your own definition of culture by using elements from several definitions of culture that you encounter in
the module and in the responses of other students. Your definition of
culture will comprise the first part (1-2 paragraphs) of your
assignment.
Apply your definition of culture to a cultural phenomenon that you are
familiar with (e.g. the Super Bowl, Michael Jordan, Olympic National Park,
"E.R.", Monster Trucks, Martha Stewart, barbecued ribs, Santa Claus). In
this part of the essay, you will interpret the phenomenon using your
definition of culture. The application of your definition to a cultural
phenomenon will comprise the second part (1-2 paragraphs) of your
essay.
Grading
This assignment asks you to link a complex definition with the
application or use of that definition. Your job in the first part of the
essay is to make decisions about a complex subject by choosing among different and contrary definitions and discussions. The second part of the
essay is about applying your decision to a specific problem. You
will be graded based on how well you unify your essay, that is, how well
you employ the definition you develop in the first part of your essay to
its application in the second part. The ideal response will clearly base
your interpretation of the cultural phenomenon upon your definition of
culture.
You should submit
your assignment
using The Speakeasy Café
at http://morrison.wsu.edu/studio/
