Quotes About Culture

Aló, ¿con la Casa de la Cultura? - Sí conchetumadre.

To want to die rather than be dependent and helpless; to try to kill the person you love the most because their future seems mere torment: what does this say about our culture?

Each year, news stories reveal the neglect and abuse that goes on behind closed doors - because to be a professional carer is a woefully undervalued and underpaid occupation, and if someone can't remember they can't tell tales; and because as a culture we have infantilized and even dehumanized the old, frail and cognitively impaired.

The fundamental reason is that we each carry within us an evolutionary blueprint for making a good society.

The transmission of knoledge from generation to generation is one of the miracles of civilization.

To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature.

As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

anti-intellectual

Personal memory shapes and sustains the "collective memory" that underpins culture.

Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.

But intellectually, our ancestors' oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own.

What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.

We're still a long way from knowing where our clicks will lead us. But it's clear that two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists—that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding—should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes.

We've reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State's Joe O'Shea—a philosophy major, no less—is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn't read books but that he doesn't see any particular need to read them.

What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges or diminishes us, how, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly.

Ultimately, it's an invention's intellectual ethic that has the most profound effect on us. The intellectual ethic is the message that a medium or other tool transmits into the minds and culture of its users.

This aggressive gendering of creativity renders it highly exclusionary, as reflected in Clara Schumann's belief that women should not even wish to compose. Equally it genders the sense of identification with the composer that was central to the classical star culture.

The historical role of classical music as the taken-for-granted high-cultural expression of Western civilization was built on a network of interlinked ideas that included masculinity, whiteness, greatness, national destiny, the colonial order, and a future understood as firmly grounded on the status quo.

universal features shared by all musics. The very word 'universal' should put us on our guard: as the postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha says, 'universalism…masks ethnocentric norms, values, and interests'.

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it's not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughter's genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination.

This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike. As we said, laws can help, but the greatest challenge is to change these ways of thinking.

Why do foreigners always ask about clothing?" one woman doctor asked. "Why does it matter so much what we wear? Of all the issues in the world, is that really so important?" Another said: "You think we're victims, because we cover our hair and wear modest clothing. But we think that it's Western women who are repressed, because they have to show their bodies—even go through surgery to change their bodies—to please men.

Of all the things that people do in the name of God, killing a girl because she doesn't bleed on her wedding night is among the most cruel. Yet the hymen--fragile, rarely seen, and pretty pointless--remains an object of worship among many religions and societies around the world...it is frequently worth more than a human life.