Quotes About Culture

It is rare in today's turbulent world to find a city that so harmoniously mixes tradition and modernity, without enslaving itself to either one.

For westerners, the tattoo has always been a metaphor of difference.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.

I call it Negroland because I still find "Negro" a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures

We sing more colored than the Africans," boasted John Lennon, and few Americans were inclined to dispute him.

mingled love and shame for our people, a mingled love and terror of white culture. And then (as if the result of these others), despair and a furious will to extinguish the self. My people's enemies have done this to me. But so have my own loved ones. My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much.

mingled love and shame for our people, a mingled love and terror of white culture. And then (as if the result of these others), despair and a furious will to extinguish the self. My people's enemies have done this to me. But so have my own loved ones. My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much. Let me say with care that the blame is not symmetrical: my enemies forced my loved ones to ask too much of me.

Quite often, the consequence of gaining literacy or critical consciousness is alienation not just from the values of the dominant culture, but from the ways of knowing and being that characterize one's own immediate family and community.

Sarah Pomeroy, in her careful study, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves

Espaniole was most likely a kohota, or festival chief, who was responsible for receiving captives, planning dances, and overseeing celebrations.

For these galas, the Mohaves came together wearing bark masks and face paint or mud-slathered hair, marched upriver to the feasting area, built a fire, and danced until midnight. The next day they ate. The women arrived carrying soup, cakes, or boiled vegetables in dishes and baskets on their heads. Their cakes were made of ground wheat and boiled pumpkin rolled into a dough that was placed in the sand, covered with a leaf, and baked.

Adult Mohaves encouraged the young to indulge themselves sexually while they could, so that by their mid-teens, they were jaded

She gave her name as "Olivino," recalled her father's surname as "Oatman" and said she'd had six siblings, mentioning Lucy and Lorenzo by name. She identified her abductors as Apaches. Asked if they had treated her well, she said, "No. They whipped me." In response to the same question about the Mohaves, she "seemed pleased," noted Burke, and answered, "Very well.

Kultur und Todeswissen sind eng miteinander verflochten, wir wissen um die Kurzfristigkeit, um die Begrenztheit des Lebens. Das Gewahrwerden des eigenen Todes ist entscheidende Bedingung für die kulturelle Schöpferkraft. Kultur verspricht Dauer, Kultur schöpft Sinn, Kultur handelt mit Transzendenz. Ihr implizites Ziel ist es, das, was vorgegeben ist, zu überschreiten und ihm so Dauer zu verleihen.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

History calls them a defeated people, but the Metis do not feel defeated, and that is what is important. Today, as in the old days, they play their fiddles, sing, dance, and tell their children the old stories. They work hard, as they have always done. They do not mind when they are called Metis, halfbreeds, mixed bloods, Canadians or bois-brules. They know who they are: 'Ka tip aim soot chic' -- the people who own themselves" (40).

We soon got the idea that 'Italian' meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents. This was the accepted process of Americanization," Covello reflected in his memoir The Heart Is the Teacher. "We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents.

Becoming American meant rejecting one of the two worlds. It meant trying to hide the grease stains saturating the paper in which your school lunch of a fried potato and egg sandwich on crusty bread was wrapped, while the rest of your classmates ate ham on white bread with mayonnaise.

At the heart of being a second-generation American meant feeling the shame of your heritage and the sting of family betrayal, creating an inner turmoil from which one never fully escaped.

Now, after the material resources of the colonies have been looted, their spiritual and cultural resources are being transformed into commodities for the world market.

Maleness and femaleness are not biological givens, but rather the results of a long historical process. In each historic epoch maleness and femaleness are differently defined. The definition depends on the principle mode of production in these epochs.

That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.

We travel to learn and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own.

What school worries about the kind of civilization the children are forced to live in? The only thing officialdom is bothered about is whether or not the syllabus has been followed.