This article was the most the most useful and interesting of anything we have read thus far. I was constantly starring passages that stood out ideas that I wanted to remember. Here are some of the quotes that I found most compelling and why:
"Culture is not a past cause to a current self. Culture is the current challenge to possible future selves" (8). Culture is so often named as the cause for action, identity, thoughts, etc, and this statement seems to both support and deny that. How can culture not be a past cause and also be a challenge to future selves? Wouldn't that then make it a past cause at some point? Perhaps the authors are trying to say that the variant nature of culture keeps makes this true. I am still thinking about this one.
(There is also a great Dewey quote about social institutions on this page.)
"Educational reseachers rarely consider how unlikely it is tha a culture formulating a problem of type X could also produce a solution that would not recreate the circumstances that originally brought the problem to attention" (12). AAaaaaa--frustration. This makes efforts to inact change seem doomed.
"Individuals are not special. They are general" (17). Beautifully stated, but is this really true? Don't the authors want to empower individuals with their "cutlure is not fate" talk, implying there must be something individuals have to offer beyond the general. Obviously, I don't quite get this one yet.
"We have no choice but to study that which we also make" (23). This is why we immerse ourselves in another cutlure. Is that right? Of course, by being there, we also participating in making that group's history or culture.
**I have about 20 more passages and quotes I could record, but I am out of time.
Writing Fieldnotes
14 years ago
1 comment:
Well, I think culture is a past cause in the sense that it is the amalgam of past interaction and attitudes which form the current status of a group of people and the way they live. It is a challenge to future selves in the sense that it contributes to the formation of the future selves of a given group of people as, being a verb, it evolves and takes different manifestations which leaves a print on the future identity of people.
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