From: Mikael Raaterova (ginijji@telia.com)
Date: Thu 27 Jan 2000 - 00:55:45 EET
Gian wrote:
>I assume that human cultures (I am no socyologist, you know, but I studied
>some manuals back at the University) are similar, in some respects, to the
>human ages of an individual.
As a metaphor it might be useful, depending on what you want to
>There are childish, young, adult, elder and ancient human cultures. I recall
The problem is that the 'age' of a culture is a perception in the
>How can you define a human culture? By two dimensions, I assume.
illustrate thereby. It doesn't have much to do with reality though.
Incidentally, i am a sociologist and wrote my master's thesis on the
problems of conceptualizing and defining the mental bellybutton lint
notion of 'society', a concept that is plagued by exactly the same
problems as 'culture'. The paper with summary in english can be found
at:
http://www.soc.uu.se/publications/workpap.html
>someone stated that human cultures can be male or female, so I suppose I am
>not completely mad. I am at least farther from the red line than Greg is and
>I am content of this.
present projected into the past. Cultural continuity is an empty
concept, since all cultures change constantly. Deciding what elements
to base the perceived continuity on is always subjective opinion.
>Geography and Language.
You can of course declare that culture is defined by those two
>If you can define a human aggregation by meaning of both a geographical
dimensions, but it results in a highly artificial definition that
fails to recognize some 'cultures' like diaspora jews and most nomad
cultures. Also, if two speakers of the same national language (which
is sometimes the case with swedish) can't understand each other, is
language really a good tool for defining culture. And, combined with
the fact of non-communication _within_ swedish, what to make of the
fact that speakers of Norwegian, Danish and Swedish can understand
each other?
>specification AND a linguistical one, you have a human culture, in my own
>humble assumption.
The problem is not to judge whether a human aggregation is a culture
or not, since all human aggregations be definition have culture (man
being a social animal and all that); the problem is to distinguish
_between_ cultures. If you can't define where swedish culture ends
and finnish culture begins using your method (which you can't BTW),
then your method is non-productive when it comes to identifying
cultures.
The perception that there exists such a thing as 'an Italian/
British/ Swedish culture' is merely a perception. It comes apart when
you try to distinguish between cultures.
As a poetic metaphor your theory might have meaning, as an
observation of reality it has not.
- --
- -
Mikael Raaterova [.sig omitted on legal advice]
------------------------------
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #327
***********************************
To unsubscribe from the Glorantha Digest, send an "unsubscribe"
command to glorantha-digest-request@chaosium.com. Glorantha is a
Trademark of Issaries Inc. With the exception of previously
copyrighted material, unless specified otherwise all text in this
digest is copyright by the author or authors, with rights granted to
copy for personal use, to excerpt in reviews and replies, and to
archive unchanged for electronic retrieval.
Official WWW at http://www.glorantha.com
Archives at http://www.kondalski.org/brian/Glorantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 13 Jun 2003 - 20:54:43 EEST