Quotes About Culture

A certain amount of friction is inevitable whenever peoples of different customs and assumptions meet.... What is miraculous is how often it is possible to work together to sustain joint performances in spite of disparate codes, evoking different belief systems to affirm that possibility.

In the North, he discoverd, courtesy was considered a barometer of genuine esteem; for any decently brought up Southerner, good manners were simply habitual.

Say what you will about Mormons, but they are very fine dancers.

What this book means to impress is that family and faith are the invisible double helix of society—two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.

If family decline didn't exist, reality TV would have to invent it.

It is interesting to note that the overwhelming majority of all human beings who have ever lived were or currently are Pagans.

You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history

Propaganda seeks to destroy art in order to sanitize culture.

Hyperbole often reflects a culture's excesses and savagery or appetite.

café, and dozens of people wandering

our dominant technology shapes our symbolism and thereby our metaphysics, our view about what is real.

In looking for poems and poets, don't dwell on the boundaries of style, or time, or even of countries and cultures. Think of yourself rather as one member of a single, recognizable tribe. Expect to understand poems of other eras and other cultures. Expect to feel intimate with the distant voice. The differences you will find between then and now are interesting. They are not profound. (p. 11)

What do 'civilization' and 'monks' mean?" asked Annie. "I think civilization is when people have books and art and good manners," said Jack.

The Victorian era in England began when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. She ruled for the rest of the century and helped her country become a powerful world empire.

White Buffalo Woman

is the author of many novels, picture books, story collections, and nonfiction books. Her New York Times number one bestselling Magic Tree House series has been translated into numerous languages around the world. Highly recommended by parents and educators everywhere, the series introduces young readers to different cultures and times in history, as well as to the world's legacy

So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery.

To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect of tucking in, the more butchery feels like murder. Pets and primates, wrote Mead, come under the category "unthinkable to eat." The same cultures that eat monkey meat have traditionally drawn the line at apes.

I'd called [Stanley Garn] because he wrote an American Anthropolgist 's paper on the topic of human flesh and its nutritional value. Your cows, he said, are much more efficient. But I am not so much interested in cultures eating the flesh of their captive enemies as I am in cultures eating their own dead, the practical Why not? model of cannibalism, eating the meat of fresh corpses because it's there and it's a nice change from taro root.

By the time children are ten years old, generally speaking, they've learned to eat like the people around them. Once food prejudices are set, it is no simple task to dissolve them. In a separate study, Rozin presented sixty-eight American college students with a grasshopper snack, this time a commercially prepared honey-covered variety sold in Japan. Only 12 percent were willing to try one. So

Nirlungayuk reached a similar conclusion. I tracked him down, seventeen years later, and asked him what the outcome of his country-foods campaign had been. "It didn't really work," he said, from his office in the Nunavut department of wildlife and environment. "Kids eat what parents make for them. That's one thing I didn't do is go to the parents.

Anyone who hunts, the pair told me, eats organs. Though the Inuit (in Canada, the term is preferred over Eskimo) gave up their nomadic existence in the 1950s, most adult men still supplemented the family diet with hunted game, partly to save money. In 1993, when I visited, a small can of Spork, the local Spam, cost $2.69. Produce arrives by plane. A watermelon might set you back $25. Cucumbers were so expensive that the local sex educator did his condom demonstrations on a broomstick. I

The Spanish for 'vacuum' is aspiradora.

Good luck to Deanna Pucciarelli, the woman who seeks to introduce mainstream America to the culinary joys of pig balls. "I am indeed working on a project on pork testicles," said Pucciarelli, director of the Hospitality and Food Management Program at—fill my heart with joy!—Ball State University.