Quotes About Culture

The Egyptians claimed the god Thoth (usually depicted as an ibis-headed man or dog-faced baboon) invented gambling.

When Europeans "discovered" Australia in 1522, the native inhabitants had no recognizable gambling, but the gambling spirit has found a welcome home on the continent in the years since.

When we fail to see that our culture, even our Christian expression of our culture, is not the same thing as the gospel, we may identify those who practice their Christian faith differently than we do as aliens and enemies.

If this is the Information Age, what are we so informed about?

Our where determines our who," Reg Saner once wrote.

Wallace Stegner was impatient with the remnants of romanticism in the West, particularly with those who wrapped themselves in the cloak of the western myth so they could continue their agenda of destroying western land. He wrote: "I grew up in a cowboy culture, and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling ever since.

What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there's nothing for them to do, they still can't admit it openly.

Everyday we wake up and collectively make a world together; but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?

Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one's shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others —all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock 'n' roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state.

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

I have dwelt on the Lele in such detail in part because I wanted to convey some sense of why I was using the term "human economy," what life is like inside one, what sort of dramas fill people's days, and how money typically operates in the midst of all this.

Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.

As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it's quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.

Violence and care, in the Wendat case, were to be entirely separated.

indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones.

Human nature does not drive us to "truck and barter." Rather, it ensures that we are always creating symbols—such as money itself.

One historian who went through fifty years of police reports about knife-fights in nineteenth-century Ionia discovered that virtually every one of them began when one party publicly suggested that the other's wife or sister was a whore.

we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions—all of this we learned from other people, most of them long dead.

It's not that we owe "society." If there is any notion of "society" here—and it's not clear that there is—society is our debts.

What social forms would still exist, even among people who had no recognizable form of law or government? Would marriage exist? What forms might it take? Would Natural Man tend to be naturally gregarious, or would people tend to avoid one another? Was there such a thing as natural religion?

If 'national character' can really be said to exist, it can only be asa. result of such schismogenetic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. if nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another.

We owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in , our habits and opinions , the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions. All of this we learned from other people , most of them long dead. Does it make sense to think of all this as debt we we to others ?