ATS 3779Cultural Linguistics assignment 代写



Week 2: Culture

1. What is ‘culture’? The historical origin of the word ‘culture’

Conceptualizations of ‘Culture’: East and West
‘The word ‘culture’ first appears as the classical Latin cultura, which had to do with the cultivation of land and care of flora and fauna’ (Risager, 2012, p. 1).  The word has been subject to a number of semantic transformations engendered by the general cultural and social history of Europe. In contrast, the concept of ‘culture’ can be compared to that of ‘near-equivalent East-Asian concepts: the Chinese wen hua(culture) and wen ming(civilization) / and the Japanese bun-ka (culture as opposed to nature) and bun-mei(civilization). The East focuses on the importance of literacy, whereas the West constitutes a metaphor referring to the act of ‘cultivation’ (of the earth, of roots, origins, growth).
The semantic transformations of ‘culture’: from individual to collective to aesthetic.
Cultivating the land – the cultivation of the individual soul or mind (through self-development or via ‘God’s cultivation of the soul): a ‘cultivated’ person (17^th century) – from the end of the 17^th century, ‘a collective concept of culture’: a. what cultivated people have in common (a hierarchical variant); cultivated vs. uncultivated (or savage); b. non-hierarchical variant: all people participate in a gradual, historical process of cultivation, and all people possess culture – from the 19^th century, there was ‘art’, including literature, the visual arts, and music (the aesthetic dimension of ‘culture).  (Risager, 2012, p. 1)
A brief history of ‘culture’
1900s-1950s: an all-embracing, functional concept of culture
1950s-1970s: meaning-oriented concepts of culture
Three main approaches to ‘culture’ or the analysis of culture: 1) cognitive; 2) structuralist; 3) interpretive approach.
1980s: Practice-oriented concepts of culture.
1990s (Hall, 1992, 1996): Cultural studies emphasize ‘capturing differences, heterogeneity, otherness, multiplicity, particularity, complexity, and hybridity’ (Risager, 2012, p. 5)
2000 onwards: Transnational and Global Approaches: Moving on to the new millennium, there have been trends of studying culture with a focus on ‘cultural processes and practices at the global and transnational macrolevels’ (Risager, 2012, p. 5).
Culture as ‘landscape’ (Appadurai, 1996, pp. 45-46): Ethnoscape; Mediascape;Technoscape; Financescape; Ideoscape

2. How do we define ‘culture’?

a.        Culture ... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. (Sir Edward Burnett Tyler, British anthropologist, 1870, p. 1)
b.       [Culture] is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another. (Hofstede 1994, p. 5)
c.        Culture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each member’s behaviour and his/her interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour.’ (Spencer-Oatey 2008, p. 3)
d.       “Culture is more than the superficial triad – foods, fairs, and folklore … it is also different narratives of history and collective ways of remembering the past” (Kramsch, 2013, p. 24)

3. Critiquing ‘culture’

Culture is ‘the dirty little secret’ of the field (Agar, 1994, p. 224)
All cultures are works in progress, moving targets, … (Szalay, 1981, p. 242)
The ‘tragedy of culture’ (German sociologist and philosopher Goerg Simmel,1858-1918): the ‘tension’ between culture as a noun and a fixed product, as opposed to a verb or a social process of meaning construction.
Culture‘is a hypercomplex concept that is very elusive indeed’ (Risager, 2012, p. 7)
‘Culture is a concept that operates to enforce separations that inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy.’
‘The concept of culture is a term for the self-other relationship, and is always a relationship of power’.
Culture can be a ‘unifying’ notion, but it is essentially a ‘divisive’ concept (Xu).
Alternative expressions of culture: e.g., ‘discourse’ (Foucault) and ‘practice’ (Bourdieu)
 ATS 3779Cultural Linguistics assignment 代写

4. Culture and ‘Cultural conceptualizations’

Cultural conceptualizations: An analytical framework to decode or unpack cultural and intercultural communication phenomena. It comprises cultural schema, cultural category, and cultural metaphor (c.f., Sharifian, 2011)
Sharifian (2011, pp. 8-11) interprets ‘culture’ in terms of schemas, including ‘event’, ‘role’, ‘image’ ‘proposition’ and ‘emotion’ schemas.
An example of Cultural Conceptualizations: the Yin and Yang principle
 
References (selected)
Agar, Michael. (1994). The Intercultural Frame. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 18(2), 221-237.
Appadurai, Arjun. (1996). Moernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
Risager, Karen. (2012). Culture. In Carol A  Chapelle (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (pp. 1-8). Chicester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Scollon, Ron, Scollon, Suzanne Wong, & Jones, Rodney H. (2012). Intercultural Commmunication: A Discourse Approach. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2012). What is culture? A compilation of quotations.   Retrieved 15 May 2015, 2015, from http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/globalpad/openhouse/interculturalskills/global_pad_-_what_is_culture.pdf
Szalay, Lorand B. (1981). Intercultural Communication: A Process Model. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 5, 133-146.
 ATS 3779Cultural Linguistics assignment 代写