ITSF5003

From Studyplace

Culture and Communication

Teachers College • Columbia University Class Meetings  Tuesday 7:20-9:00 ITSF5003 Course Overview Class Schedule 1/23 Introduction 1/30 Culture and Anthropology 2/6 Popular (high) Culture: New Developments, Old Controversey 2/13 Intuitions and difficulties in the concept of Culture 2/20 The Act, Others, and the Self 2/27 Language: Pattern and Change 3/6 Speaking Possibilities 3/20 Systematization in Interaction 3/27 Speaking Together: a Joint Construction 4/3 Internal Complexities 4/10 Institutionalizing Pattern 4/17 Generating Difference: Local Construction 4/24 Local Transformation: Culture in Process? 5/1 Popular Possibilities and their Paradoxes 5/8 Culture and Communication: The Dark Side of Human Construction

Professor Hervé Varenne

ITSF5016 Spring 2007

Short Description

Culture has more to do with the houses we inhabit than with the habits we acquire. This course is an advanced and critical introduction to major theories of culture, language, and expression as they have proven relevant to the study of education.

Long Description

John Dewey once suggested that the words "common," "community," and "communication" each illuminated different aspects of one process: the process by which human beings organize themselves to act together in particular historical situations, and thereby to produce (accomplish?) what anthropologists most technically, and now many other disciplines in various ways, know as "(a?) culture."

In this course, I explore some of the implications of this general insight into the human condition. What can we say about the place of "culture" in the transformation of humanity? I address this question from the point of view of a cultural anthropologist who has worked extensively with culture theories to understand everyday life in families, in schools and classrooms, at home and abroad. The course is organized as a critical discussion of the major traditions of work as these have conversed with each other:

1. pragmatist, semiotic and ethnomethodological (from John Dewey to Garfinkel);
2. structuralist (from Bateson to Sacks);
3. structuralist (from Mauss to Lévi-Strauss).
4. culturalist (from Benedict to Geertz)
5. resistant (from Bakhtin to Williams and cultural studies)

The focus will remain on interpersonal processes (rather than the effect of these processes on the constitution of the personality). Of primary interest will be the structuring of face to face interaction, and the organization of larger groupings through symbolic means. In all cases the emphasis will remain on what is done, rather than on what is meant, on exchange (of messages, things, and people) rather than on transmission of information.

Outline

The course is organized in four main parts

1. The first three lectures set the stage for what I consider to be the main issues confronting current thinking about the relationships of culture and communication:
   1. Do theories of sociability and community require assumption of sharing and consensus? what has our traditional concern with sharing and consensus prevented us from understanding about our condition?
   2. What was powerful about the anthropological tradition of understanding "culture" that might still be helpful for us, even as we get to understand their dangers?
   3. How are we to take seriously the idea that all human beings, in all conditions, are always actively involved in cultural production?
2. The following six lectures explore classical statements from the most powerful theorists to sort out what we must keep of intuitions and statements that often led followers and critics astray. In the process I will make my own case for an understanding of culture through systematic communication that does not require assumptions about the mental states of participants.
   1. We first discuss two versions of the fundamental pragmatist intuition about the place of persons within their world: the concern with the self and the concern with culture (community)
      1. Where is the source of meaning? in the act, the response to the act, the field within which the act is performed? Can 'I' escape the self others make for 'Me' at this moment?
      2. What are we to do with the evidence that groups of people evolve different ways of performing both trivial and essential tasks from the way the same tasks are performed by neighbors?
   2. We then explore four ways of attempting to think and study language as a communication tool, that is as something that happens within and among people constructing their life together (community?)
      1. How are we to deal with the fact that the forms of our language are both arbitrary (given how other forms would also be functional) and necessary (we all have to use the forms of our most significant neighbors)? What can 'I' say?
      2. What can be done through language and in language?
      3. How could we talk systematically about our work with others?
      4. How does this work, actually, in face to face interaction?
3. The next four lectures explore the central issues that emerged in the past twenty years and most powerfully challenged the classical statements, though often without providing an encompassing perspective.
   1. Gender (race...) as the embodiment of culture in bodies with consequences.
   2. On the inevitable breaking down of dominant voices in dialogue
   3. On the inevitable deliberate political action that always accompany and reconstruct local dominance.
   4. On the inevitable resistance against hegemony as people use what they cannot escape.
4. The final two lecture recapitulate my own understanding of culture as both playful and fateful.
   1. The play of myth in popular culture
   2. The fate of ideologies in political culture.