So… what is culture, anyway?

I’m glad we finally tackled the definition of culture. We seem to blithely talk about it and ours and the ones our students come into our classes with, but there is the small matter of discussion what it actually is.

Culture is actually a big deal in the U.S. History and Government and Global Studies and Geography Regents courses, but there is the same lack of definition in the study of culture in my classes. The students focus on “cultural diffusion” which is the sharing and mixing of cultures, and the students learn “barriers to cultural diffusion” which are basically geographical features (like impassable mountains) or belief systems (like fascism). So we talk about spreading culture and block culture, but again, we dance around actually defining it.

My students came up with the same types of definitions as we did in class: music, food, language, heritage, values. My students were significantly hung up on the idea that culture can be either race or ethnicity, but could not decide which. Are all Black people of the same the culture? Yes, some said, what they experience is a byproduct of the color of their skin. No, some students said, skin color does not always mean a shared background; they used the fact that the students in the classroom at the time with the same color skin actually represented more than five nations, and they concluded the national identity was more culture than the color of their skin.

In my grad class, we were hung up a little more the largeness or smallness of culture. Is there an American culture? How large is a cultural group? Are we a culture of one? (Actually, we decided, “culture of one” is identity, and culture requires a shared experience, which automatically involved more than one person.) How much of “language” is just words? Does it include pragmatics? Idiom? Just the ability to name and label the world around us?

We did some history of culture. The first view of culture was pretty holistic, and a lot like how we describe culture. Which is a shame, because it’s a very boxed-in view. The 19th century (Tyler) view is really a way of identifying “peoples,” which immediate removes the humanity of those that make up the culture. The holistic view is also a way of created a bounded static definition, which in many cases was not used to examine the culture of the Western world, but rather to “discover” the peoples of other, less developed nations. There is the inherent assumption that the Western nations are of the same culture, that culture being “civilisation” (British spelling intentional . . . I’m a few sentences away from a White Man’s Burden comment.).

I’m glad that the worlds of anthropology (code for study of the third world cultures) and sociology (code for study of civilization), got called out for identify people as “Other” under the guise of academia. I wonder though if the pendulum swung too far, though, because I when the professor said “The argument was made by Foucault . . . ” I froze. We began to discuss how Foucault’s ideas would affect our teaching. My first questions: What would we teach? From whose point of view? From any point of view? I saw textbooks being thrown onto bonfires.

I needed the clarification that Foucault would not affect our curriculum (much to Foucault’s chagrin, I suppose), but rather the ideas would reflect our pedagogy. Culture is not bounded and static, it is not a study of the Other, is basically (1) Discourse and (2) Practices.

This is a lot less messy form of viewing culture, and allows for the individualization that the “culture of one” people want. For example, the Moll, et. al. reading focused on shared history of the people of the Southwest, but also on their personal histories. There was no boundary between ethnographer and culture studied because the culture in question was in flux and personalizable. The Au reading was very pragmatic and viewed segments of culture. This piece was most tied to the idea that culture is the results of discourse and practice, and even left conclusions up to the reader once questions concerning the culture of school were raised. The Au piece led to the most discussion in our group. We applied the ideas to the definitions of culture we had been studying and to the Department of Education in which we work.

Most disappointing for our group, and possibly for the entire class, was the Ballenger view on Haitian culture. The text is an excellent reflection piece, and Gallas would be proud that she adhered to the principles of teacher reflection and descriptive review, but Ballenger created a static, outsider view of the culture of the students she taught. She lumped the students, families and staff into one group of “HC” and lumped her teaching style and cultural background into one bounded “American” culture. Despite the fact she alone was the only “American” and she was the Other in a setting in which the majority was Haitian, she described their discourse and practices and ascribed them to all. We understand the premise: understand the culture of those you teach before you think they are not learning. We just felt it could have been done in a way that did not so box in the students and their families.

Questions that Remain:

How big/small is culture? Yes there is American culture – Apple Pie and Baseball – but into how many pieces can it be cut? Can’t I be a New Yorker too? I went to the Wisconsin State Fair and I felt like a cultural outsider. Is there Wisconsin culture?

Can the culture of students we teach be studied without making use of the binary culture system? Will it always be me vs. them or me vs. the many thems that make up my class? I’m still making use of the dominant culture (mine) evening out the instruction for the Others.