Quotes About Culture

One of the major functions of every culture has been to shield its members from chaos, to reassure them of their importance and ultimate success.

Peasant women in Eastern Europe, for instance, were not judged to be ready for marriage unless they had learned to cook a different soup for each day of the year.

whenever a culture has had a run of good luck and for a while seems indeed to have found a way of controlling the forces of nature. At that point it is logical for it to begin believing that it is a chosen people who need no longer fear any major setback. The

glorify and justify goals in terms of tangible experience. According to Sorokin, sensate culture predominated in Europe from about 440 to about 200 B.C., with a peak between 420 and 400 B.C.; it has become dominant once again in the past century or so, at least in the advanced capitalist democracies.

Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience.

As Freud and many others before and after him have noted, civilization is built on the repression of individual desires.

AT CERTAIN TIMES in history cultures have taken it for granted that a person wasn't fully human unless he or she learned to master thoughts and feelings.

There are no strict formulas, however, for how much time people actually have to work. It seems, for instance, that the early hunter-gatherers, like their present-day descendants living in the inhospitable deserts of Africa and Australia, spent only three to five hours each day on what we would call working—providing for food, shelter, clothing, and tools. They spent the rest of the day in conversation, resting, or dancing.

They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like.

la civilización se construye sobre la represión de los deseos individuales.

true, they abandon faith in everything else they have learned. Deprived of the customary supports that cultural values had given them, they flounder in a morass of anxiety and apathy.

What this life will amount to is in part determined by the chemical processes in our body, by the biological interaction among organs, by the tiny electrical currents jumping between the synapses of the brain, and by the organization of information that the culture imposes on our mind. But the actual quality of life—what we do, and how we feel about it—will be determined by our thoughts and emotions; by the interpretations we give to chemical, biological, and social processes.

In order to survive, cultures must eliminate most of the new ideas their members produce. Cultures are conservative, and for good reason. No culture could assimilate all the novelty people produce without dissolving into chaos.

Yet a culture could not survive long unless all of its members paid attention to at least a few of the same things. In fact it could be said that a culture exists when the majority of people agree that painting X deserves more attention than painting Y, or idea X deserves more thought than idea Y.

creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation

In contemporary preliterate societies this knowledge is so deeply ingrained that a person who likes to be alone is assumed to be a witch, for a normal person would not choose to leave the company of others unless forced to do so.

It also seems true that centers of creativity tend to be at the intersection of different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations of ideas with greater ease. In cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes a greater investment of attention to achieve new ways of thinking. In other words, creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less effort to be perceived.

Most events in consciousness are built from culturally defined contents as well as from personal meanings developed throughout an individual's life. Thus, two persons can never be expected to have the same experience, and the farther apart in time and place they are, the more the details of the two experiences will differ.

Traditionally, men's identity and self-respect have been based on the ability to obtain energy from the environment for their own and their families' use. Whether the satisfaction a man gets from doing a necessary job is partly genetically programmed, or is entirely learned from the culture, the fact is that more or less everywhere a man who is not a provider is to some extent a misfit.

Det var en uppväxt av brist. Inte en materiell sådan, där hade vi så vi klarade oss, utan en identitetsmässig. Vi var inga. Våra föräldrar var inga. Våra förfäder hade betytt noll och intet för den svenska historien. [...] Vi bröt på finska utan att vara finnar, vi bröt på svenska utan att vara svenskar. Vi var ingenting.

?piewanie by?o niegodne m??czyzny.

KtoÅ› inny opowiedziaÅ' ze zgrozÄ… o budowie na Gotlandii, na której pracowaÅ' przez trzy miesiÄ…ce. Ani razu nie mo?na byÅ'o zatroszczy? siÄ™ o swojÄ… higienÄ™, bo kultura saunowa nie dotarÅ'a tam na dóÅ'. Zamiast tego le?y siÄ™ tam i pluska we wÅ'asnej brudnej wodzie w tak zwanej wannie.

Na pocz?tku cz?sto z Niil? dyskutowali?my, czy nasze granie mo?na uzna? za knapsu. S?owo jest tornedalsko-fi?skie i oznacza "babski", zatem co?, czym zajmuj? si? tylko kobiety. Mo?na by powiedzie?, ?e rola m??czyzn w Tornedalen ogranicza si? tylko do jednego: nie by? knapsu.

Christians can influence the world for the better again. But it will mean making a commitment to stand by a worldview that current society often rejects and ridicules.