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History

• History is disciplined reflection
• on
• what changes,
• what doesnt,
• and why.

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The WAY you look at history matters!

• Your approach is like wearing spectacles
• Different spectacles, youll see different things!

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Spectacles?

• NARRATIVE (story as drama)
• BIOGRAPHY (focus on one life)
• SOCIAL HISTORY (look at groups using social
  science)
• CULTURAL HISTORY
• Military history Womens History Labor History
  African American History

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Even with the same spectacles, you might see
different things!

• YOUR ESSAY
• Select one general approach and look for
  variations
• OR
• Compare/contrast two quite different approaches

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DOES CULTURE HAVE A HISTORY?
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WHATS CULTURE?

• Webster Culture. (from the Latin cultus
  meaning care, that which is cared about
  beliefs). The concepts, habits, skills, arts,
  instruments, institutions, of a given people in a
  given period

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WHATS CULTURE?

• Peter Berger What we call reality is actually
  a social construct we humans invent our
  realities.

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WHATS CULTURE?

• Jacques Barzun Culture is a set of different
  responses to recurring human needs.

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WHATS CULTURE?

• Florian Znaniecki A culture is actually a set of
  multiple relationships among multiple systems

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WHATS CULTURE?

• Sigmund Freud A culture is a kind of collective
  neurosis we humans develop to shape, and control,
  our instinctive drives

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WHATS CULTURE?

• Clifford Geertz The concept of culture I
  espouse is essentially a semiotic one.
  Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal
  suspended in webs of significance he himself has
  spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the
  analysis of it to be therefore not an
  experimental science in search of law but an
  interpretative one in seach of meaning (The
  Interpretation of Cultures, (1977)

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Some Recurring Themes

• Holistic
• Relationships
• Invisible
• Inherited
• Unconscious
• Changeable

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SCIENCE

• describes via the scientific method
  (experiment hypothesis deduction induction),
  science can describe what IS

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Cultural Studies

• HERMENEUTICS

• SEIMOTICS

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Cultural Matrices

• Everythings connected!
• (If theyre not, the culture fractures into
  multiple, separate, cultures)

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DO CULTURES HAVE HISTORIES?

• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
  Revolutions (1962)

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DO CULTURES HAVE HISTORIES?

• A. F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the
  Seneca (1972)

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DO CULTURES HAVE HISTORIES?

• Alvin Toffler, Culture Shock (1984)
• The SHOCK of events can provoke major cultural
  change

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Culture Cultures

• High Culture
• Popular Culture
• Folk Culture
• Mass Culture
• Dominant Culture
• Sub-Culture
• The Two Cultures
• Cultural Continuity (why things DONT change)
• Cultural Change (why things DO change)

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