Defining Culture Cont d I Differences Similarities between human groups II Exoticizing the familiar familiarizing the exotic Miner III Interpretive approaches to culture Geertz 1 HIS CONCEPT OF CULTURE 2 A TWITCH vs A WINK as cultural 3 HOW TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY ARE UP TO 4 WHY IS CULTURE PUBLIC 5 GOAL OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS 6 WHAT ARE YOUR DATA 7 STRATEGIES TO AVOID 8 WHAT WILL CULTURAL ANALYSIS NOT TELL YOU 9 WHERE TO LOOK FOR CULTURE 10 WHY IS IT TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN 11 HOW CAN GEERTZ HELP US STUDY ICC 12 KEY TERMS SEMIOTIC ETHNOGRAPHY THICK DESCRIPTION IV Humor as cultural 1 Where are we with Culture Differences and Similarities between human groups explained through social not biological transmission 2 Who are the Nacirema 3 4 Nacirema Holy Mouth Practitioner 5 Nacirema Shrine 6 What do you think Horace Miner was trying to do by writing this piece 7 Goal Make the exotic familiar and Make the familiar exotic 8 Nacirema What according to Miner is the Nacirema s fundamental belief How do they enact it Is he right 9 Who has performed holy mouth ritual this morning 10 Some of the other equivalents of practices he described women baking their heads men lacerating their faces others 11 Miner s IMPLICIT definition of culture 12 Nacirema video http www youtube com watch v 5DMX51 NmHR4 13 Describe a different Nacirema practice in the style of Horace Miner Groups of no longer than 4 ideas phones school shopping 14 Interpretive Approaches to Culture 15 Clifford Geertz says http www youtube com watch v QJd93BjLy4o 16 Groups of no bigger than 4 Using the text identify 2 key passages where Geertz discusses what Culture is Culture is not 17 Key terms 18 Semiotic The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a semiotic one man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science but an interpretive one in search of meaning p 5 What does this mean 19 Difference between a twitch and a wink 20 How to know what winking can mean https www youtube com watch v a9kxaNU C3QI 21 In class writing Give an example of a sign that is potentially semiotic meaningful to someone in some context 22 Culture Signs in context So culture involves producing and interpreting signs in context 23 According to Geertz how do you figure out what they are up to 24 Participating in and Analyzing Culture Interpretive Process We work with our interpretations of their interpretations p 9 our own constructions of other people s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to most of what we need to comprehend a particular event ritual custom idea or whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined 25 Cohen and the Sheep What was the story about Cohen and the Sheep Why does Geertz use it 26 Thick Description ethnography is thick description 10 multiplicity of complex conceptual structures many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another which are at once strange irregular and inexplicit like trying to read a manuscript foreign faded full of elipses in transient examples of shaped behavior 27 Thick versus Thin Description 28 Culture as involving contexts and meanings As interworked systems of construable signs culture is not a power something to which social events behaviors institutions or processes can be causally attributed it is a context something within which they can be intelligibly that is thickly described 14 29 Where do you find look for culture p 17 it is through the flow of behavior or more precisely social action that cultural forms find articulation Whatever or wherever symbol systems may be we gain empirical access to them by inspecting events In your own words 30 How do you know if your interpretations are right p 20 Cultural analysis is guessing at meanings assessing the guesses and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape 31 Where to look A question of scale 21 it is microscopic the anthropologist characteristically approaches such broader interpretations from the exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters 23 social actions are comments on more than themselves Small facts speak to large issues winks to epistemology or sheep raids to revolution 28 draw large conclusions from small but very densely textured facts to support broad assertions by engaging them exactly with complex specifics What this means Promises and pitfalls 32 Why study other people if we are cultural too p 14 displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with which the mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to one another is concealed from us Understanding a people s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity renders them accessible setting them up in the frame of their own banalities it dissolves their opacity 33 How does this relate to icc Why do we care p 24 the whole point of a semiotic approach to culture is to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can in some extended sense of the term converse with them Your own words 34 Summary video https www youtube com watch v dWeh0b OBuuE warning display of Swastika appears 35 Discuss with your neighbor Pick a group of people that interests you that you would like to study Using Geertz s semiotic interpretive approach write a couple sentences about what you would look for and where you would look for culture How would you go about it 36 Is cultural analysis ever done Why is it turtles all the way down p 29 37 Sentences passages you selected that you did and didn t get Questions for Geertz 38 Geertzian interpretive approaches to culture and humor 39 Geertz style Cultural Analysis of Humor 1 Think of something you find hysterically funny an episode of a tv show a funny movie an episode of Saturday Night Live a YouTube clip or your favorite joke What is it 2 Who else would get it Who wouldn t 3 Go to the funniest part What is the semiotic the signal within a larger code component of it 4 What do you have to know to get your joke What are the underlying cultural premises that makes this funny 40 What is your current understanding of culture Why is it a tricky notion What are some pitfalls What do you still find confusing 41