Six Theories of culture and how they

relate to Language (Duranti Ch.2)

Premise: Language as cultural Practice

What is Culture?
Critiques: reductive of complexity
- colonial agenda and supremacy
- dichotomies them versus us
Minorities within mainstream
Anthropologies need to be aware of their role
Access to elite academic culture
New explore root metaphors and concepts
Avoid danger of defining
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Agenda Week 2:
Who is who in the class -- student intros
No Bedtime stories
- Engage props: books for children
- Questions/aspects you want to have addressed
- Handout on Mainstream children
- Close reading Trackton and Roadville
- Making the most out of Preschool
BREAK

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Agenda Week 2 (cont)

Six theories of culture (PPP with

handout)
Looking ahead to week 3
new: writ a blog entry
respond to peer response papers
A page of your own

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 Six Theories of Culture
1. as Distinct from Nature
(Goodenough)
2. as Knowledge (Levy Strauss)
3. as Communication (Geertz)

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 6 Theories of Culture (cont)

3 as a system of Mediation (Marx)

4 as a system of Practices (Bordieu)

5 as a system of Participation (Lave)

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1.Culture as distinct from Nature

Evidence of culture as learned

The nature/culture dichotomy
Evidence of crossroad in Language
capacity exists, particulars come from
experience.
Philosophical assumptions: Kant- Boas

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Kants defines Anthropology

What a human being does because of his

free spirit, as opposed to the natural laws
which govern Human physiology
Duranti p. 25

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Hegel

Culture as the process of estrangement or

Entfremdung getting out
Stepping out of ones own limited ways of
seeing things
Buildung as in build and picture I.e.
the image of God (Gadamer)
Struggle to control instinct

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Socialization

Shapes the childs mind and behavior

towards ways of thinking, speaking and
acting accepted by a community beyond
her family.

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Language as part of culture
Rich systems of language specific classification-
Kant mathematics!
Linguistic labels give cues about the types of social
distinctions relevant for a give group (ex. no term for
privacy, or die for people, animals and even
machines!)
-questions addressed by Linguistic relativism
Structuralists carry out componential analysis:
classes of objects, thoughts, actions, relationships,
events, ideas, --
Lexical distinctions (Goodenough, Spradley)
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2. Culture as knowledge

Premise: If culture is learned then much of

is is Knowledge about the world
Re-cognize: objects, places, people ideas
Share common patters of thought, ways of
understanding the world
Ways of making inferences and predictions
In sum, cognitive view of the world

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Goodenough, 1957 quote p. 27
Culture .must consist of the end product of
learning: knowledge in its most general sense.
..Not just things but their ORGANIZATION
The forms people have in mind, their models for
perceiving, relating and otherwise interpreting
them
Linguistic homology know a culture=knowing a
language. Mental. How can we explain that
bias?
Goal of ethnography: describe cultural
grammars.
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Types of knowledge

Propositional
Know-that
Referential function of language is key
Natural kinds- ethosemantics How do people turn into
objects? (p. 29)
Procedural
Know how

Shift toward innativist view (Chomsky)

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Culture as socially distributed
knowledge
How people think is real situations (Lave)
math in weight watchers, math in grocery
shopping
Two assumptions
One, Individual is not endpoint of acquisition
Two, not everyone has access to same
information or uses of techniques
Example Hutchings and navigation as team

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Study of quarter-masters
Quote by Hutchins
Unit of analysis for
talking about cognition
Include human and
environmental
resources
Complex task
involves web of co-
ordination between
media and processes
inside and outside the
individual task
performance

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In sum, Knowledge distributed
amongst
Tools and Participants
Learning from formal instructions is rare
More like cooking: need to be in the task, watch
an expert
Hence apprenticeship is the most
common way to transmit knowledge

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Stereotyping through Language
As a system of classification
As a practice, a way to taking and giving to
the world (p32)
Implication: using the same expression
does not connote the same meaning
Rather capacity for mutual prediction
Wallace 1962
Gumpez (1982) shows how language can be
a barrier to social integration
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3. Culture as communication

3.1 Levy Strauss and the Semiotic approach

Extends Jacobson to The Cooking
example: The raw and the cooked
Binary distinctions

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2.3 Clifford Geertz and the
interpretative approach
Cultural differences are not seen as
variations for universal abstract thought
Interest in method of inquiry never-
ending interpretative process
characteristic of human experience
Following Weber man as animal
suspended in the webs of significance he
himself spun

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Ethnography as Thick description
Thick description of a human behavior is one that
explains not just the behavior, but its context as
well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to
an outsider.
Difference between a blink and a wink the
meaning of a wink depends on the context. As the
context so does the meaning of the wink
Thick description describes the context of the
practices and discourse in the society
Participation produces and reproduces worldviews,
including local notions of Person (or Self)
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2.3.3 Indexicality and meta-
pragmatics
Communicative force of culture entails not just
representing aspects of reality but connecting
individuals, groups and individuals to each other.
Communication as a way to point towards,
bringing into the context beliefs, feelings,
identities, events bringing them into the present=
the indexical meaning of signs
Language through indexicalitiy provides a theory
of action or a meta-pragmatics

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2.3.4 Metaphors as folk theories of
the world
Define metaphor: The use of a word or phrase
to refer to something that it isn't, implying a
similarity between the word or phrase used and
the thing described Wikitionary
metaphors allow us to understand one domain
of experience in terms of another
Time flies like an arrow
She broke the silence
The head of state (states as beings with a head)

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4. Culture as a system of Mediation

Marx

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5. Culture as a system of Practices

Based on Heidegger way of being in the

world
Heath- bedtime routines

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6. Culture as a System of
participation (p.46)
Related to culture as system of practices
Assumes: any action in the world
including verbal communication, is
inherently
Social
Collective
Participatory

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Perspective on Language:
How is language used in the real world?
Speak as way yo participate in a world always
larger than us as individuals
Words carry myriad if possible connections to
humans, beliefs, events, acts and feelings
Reaffirms socio-historical connection
Indexicality of language part of any act of
speaking as participant in a community of
speakers
(Quote p. 46 if the world)
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On Predicting and interpreting (p 47)

1. Social actors need to make predictions

2. Vicissitudes are part of human social life
3. How often something happens is important
4. Types of speech are never the same
1. Particular-general or viceversa. Be critical!
5. Social actors have models
6. Metaphors are good to think with
7. All theories are mortal!
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Conclusion (49)

Read thinking of the

Bedtime stories article

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