Quotes About Culture

In a country so steeped in the myth of classlessness, in a culture where we are often at a loss to explain or understand poverty, the white trash stereotype serves as a useful way of blaming the poor for being poor.

Like the Marxist structuralist approach to subjectivity, psychoanalysis makes culturally available a narrative that complicates the assumption that an identity is the natural property of any individual.

Although Semper, an amateur ethnographer, may have been influenced by primitivist and Orientalist imaginations, he also came to see the history of ornament as the breakdown of ethnography, by understanding ornaments not as pristine cultural or national signifiers but instead as "portable ecology

Orientalism is a critique, ornamentalism a theory of being.

From the divergence between black flesh and yellow ornament, we have arrived at this convergence: flesh that passes through objecthood needs ornament to get back to itself.

R. John Williams calls the ongoing life of Orientalism in contemporary tech and corporate culture "Asia-as-technê," which he defines as "a compelling fantasy that would posit Eastern aesthetics as both antidote to and the perfection of machine cultures.

Dress designates civility and quotidian order, as Watt insightfully observes, but ornament designates a category of dress that is marginal, excessive, and nonutilitarian (that is, unlike dress that is required by civil society).

Nuestra época es de hecho la época de la organización intelectual de los odios políticos. Este será uno de sus principales rasgos a destacar en la historia moral de la humanidad. JULIEN BENDA, La trahison des clercs, 1927

A traveler can meet a man born in Poland, brought up in the Soviet Union, who now lives in Belarus – and he has never left his village.

When Mel told his Jewish mother he was marrying an Italian girl, she said: "Bring her over. I'll be in the kitchen with my head in the oven".

French women seem less confused, less tired, less aggressive, less angry than American women. She sums them up in one word: happier. Ms.

Swearwords were one of the best things humans had invented...

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. (Richard Rorty, philosopher)

I love the simplicity, the ingredients, the culture, the history and the seasonality of Italian cuisine. In Italy people do not travel. They cook the way grandma did, using fresh ingredients and what is available in season.

There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.

In ancient Greek you use the verb ????????, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapper, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape—words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world.

What is a culture? A culture is what approves or disapproves of the actions in its midst. Yet how rare for approval to be unanimous.

But if one says: I cannot come because it is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice.

Somewhere along the line, I had bought into the idea, so pervasive in evangelical culture, that reading the right books and listening to the right music will make you ("inspire you to be") a better Christian. Somehow, I had confused the trappings of faith with faith itself.

If you can't see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else's culture?

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

Male and female babies may be born. But those complex, gender-loaded individuals we call men and women are produced. The complex assembly line includes all of our socialization processes, of which the acquisition of scientific knowledge is but one. Since our culture offers a privileged place to science, however, it is an especially important one.

Russians are trying to figure out who they are and where they fit into the world.

Irina harbors a resentment, almost an outright hatred of the West. She is a proud Russian