ARTH 200 | Assignments | Glossary

Culture

Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminity, Feminism, and Histories of Art, p. 20: Culture can be defined as those social practices whose prime aim is signification, i.e. the production of sense of making orders of "sense" for the world we live in. Culture is the social level in which are produced those images of the world and definitions of reality which can be ideologically mobilized to legitimize the existing order of relations of domination and subordination between classes, races, and sexes.

John Gould, "On Making Sense of Greek Religion," in Greek Religion and Society , ed P. E. Easterling and J.V. Muir, p.4: For the truth is that systems of religious beliefs, in any culture in which they are living things, are not only self-justifying ( and thus impossible to disprove by empirical observation...), but also all pervasive within the culture, so that there is no corner of life that is not lived in their terms: it is not possible to be a member of the society and think in wholly different categories. If we want an analogy to help us understand religion, one that will direct our attention positively to what is imporant in religious systems, we should turn not to the concept of a pseudo-technology and a pseudo-science, but to language. Like language, religion is a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon of the group (there are no 'private' religions, no more than there are 'private' languages), and like language, a religion is a system of signs enabling communication both between members of the group in interpreting and responding to experience of the external world and in the individual's inner discourse with himself and to his own behaviour, emotional and private.

See also Ideology, Language

ARTH 200 | Assignments | Glossary