Representing Culture: language, meaning and power

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Lecture 4

• Representing Culture language, meaning and power

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Themes

• 1) Power ideology
• 2) Hegemony and politics of language
• 3) Language and material culture

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The German Ideology

• The ruling ideas are in every epoch the ideas of
  the ruling classes
• Exercised through
• Coercion
• Consent

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Ideology and its effects

• People accept domination. Ideology naturalises
  their position as subordinates
• BUT
• Subordination is not the norm we have ideology
  of equality not hierarchy
• People do contest dominant ideas.

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Who believes in the dominant ideology?

• People see through it
• Further away from the centre people are, the
  less they subscribe to it.

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Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
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Language Power

• systems of thought
• histories of ideas
• Meaning conveyed through language

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Language and Politics

• Language as political object
• Language as political resource
• Language as control
• Ralph Grillo (1989)

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Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

• Relation between language and culture
• No automatic relation between a type of culture
  and their language.
• But social reality constructed through
  language
• the network of cultural patterns of a
  civilisation is indexed in the language which
  expresses that civilisation. (Edward Sapir 1929)

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Benjamin Lee Whorf

• The background linguistic system (in other
  words, the grammar) of each language is not
  merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas
  but rather is itself the shaper of ideasWe
  dissect nature along lines laid down by our
  native languages (Whorf 1940)
• Linguistic determinism
• Linguistic relativity

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Structural Linguistics

• World is organised or structured around signs
  that are arbitrary and only have meaning within a
  system of oppositions.

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Engagement with the world

• Through the senses
• Hierarchy of the senses.

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Language and clothing

• Structuralism and post-structuralism everything
  can be seen or decoded as a language.
• Clothing and language
• Expressive properties of clothing

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How clothing works

• Clothing and cultural categories
• Clothing as expressing cultural principles
• Clothing and cultural processes
• Clothing and social distance
• Clothing and the study of change and history.

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How language works

• Selection principle
• Combination principle
• I like people
• You hate work
• They love school

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Language and clothing

• McCracken (1990) Culture and Consumption
  suggests clothing and language are fundamentally
  different kinds of communication.
• Need to study and explore differences between
  material culture and language.

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Representations in Material Culture

• How do language and clothing differ as
  communicative means?
• Clothing a closed conservative code represent
  stable categories, principles Language is a more
  open, flexible code
• Works in a more understated subtle way than
  language
• Different levels of universality diverse
  clothing styles in a relatively homogenous
  linguistic group
• Limited range of expression of clothing