Hmmmm ...Culture Who Has One?

Whew... What a Class today.

Today was interesting to say the least. It is amazing how emotional people can get when discussing culture. I do not ask you to debate, I ask you to express what you believe and why you believe what you do. I ask you to discuss productively and in harmony with each other. Harmony does not necessarily mean agreeing but listening to each other. You may have special insight to take us to places we never imagined. I am not here to simply teach "at" you. I am here to challenge you to think critically, express you opinions, values and beliefs, help you develop tools and skills for your future, and to become active listeners by really hearing what each other has to say. Although our goal is to always be in peace with each other, that is not realistic. Coming forward with what you think, why you think what you do, and being able to support it gives you power. At the end of the day, you may not accept what each other has to say, but you have heard their message and at least entertained the idea that they have presented. Pondered over what others believe, feel and think and perhaps later in your life, it will be useful to you in ways you never imagined.

So many excellent points where brought up in class. I neither agreed nor disagreed, I only asked you to think about things, I brought up hard questions to answer and I pushed you to see them from all different angles. You may be wondering what I actually believe, because I did not state it in class. Do I believe that all cultures must have language? Yes, I do. But when I say this, I do not mean that they have an entirely different language with a complete set of rules, structure, and syntax. What I mean is that they use special language that is unique to them, that unless you socialize with them regularly you will not understand. For example in the LGBT community, Lesbians will comment, "Which color bandana?" This has a specific meanings to lesbians that other cultures may or may not be aware of. Deaf people sign, "Train go sorry,". If you are not a part of this culture, you will not be able to understand what this means. Teenagers use words today that I find completely foreign!

So what is culture? It depends. Some cultures are easier to define than others but that does not mean that they do not exist nor does it mean we should not accept them as cultures. I have included articles that I have found that have interesting messages. I do believe they will give you some closure to our discussion today. But I want you to push ahead and keep an open mind. I want to hear what you have to say and why you feel what you do. Your voice is important. All of you. To question is to be human. Embrace it. The ride is well worth it.



What is Culture?
http://anthro.palomar.edu/culture/culture_1.htm


Edward B. Tylor
(1832-1917)

The word culture has many different meanings. For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food. For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish. However, for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871. Tylor said that culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor's time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology.

Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists can not dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns--they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.


Layers of Culture

There are very likely three layers or levels of culture that are part of your learned behavior patterns and perceptions. Most obviously is the body of cultural traditions that distinguish your specific society. When people speak of Italian, Samoan, or Japanese culture, they are referring to the shared language, traditions, and beliefs that set each of these peoples apart from others. In most cases, those who share your culture do so because they acquired it as they were raised by parents and other family members who have it.



The second layer of culture that may be part of your identity is a subculture . In complex, diverse societies in which people have come from many different parts of the world, they often retain much of their original cultural traditions. As a result, they are likely to be part of an identifiable subculture in their new society. The shared cultural traits of subcultures set them apart from the rest of their society. Examples of easily identifiable subcultures in the United States include ethnic groups such as Vietnamese Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Members of each of these subcultures share a common identity, food tradition, dialect or language, and other cultural traits that come from their common ancestral background and experience. As the cultural differences between members of a subculture and the dominant national culture blur and eventually disappear, the subculture ceases to exist except as a group of people who claim a common ancestry. That is generally the case with German Americans and Irish Americans in the United States today. Most of them identify themselves as Americans first. They also see themselves as being part of the cultural mainstream of the nation.These Cuban American women in Miami, Florida have a shared subculture identity that is reinforced
through their language food, and other traditions.


The third layer of culture consists of cultural universals. These are learned behavior patterns that are shared by all of humanity collectively. No matter where people live in the world, they share these universal traits. Examples of such "human cultural" traits include:

1.

communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences

2.

using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)

3.

classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms to refer to
them (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)

4.

raising children in some sort of family setting

5.

having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men's work versus women's work)

6.

having a concept of privacy

7.

having rules to regulate sexual behavior

8.

distinguishing between good and bad behavior

9.

having some sort of body ornamentation

10.

making jokes and playing games

11.

having art

12.

having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions

While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own specific ways of carrying out or expressing them. For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language. However, sign languages have grammatical rules just as verbal ones do.


Culture and Society

Culture and society are not the same thing. While cultures are complexes of learned behavior patterns and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms. People are not the only animals that have societies. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies. In the case of humans, however, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other. People in human societies also generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations.

While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are inextricably connected because culture is created and transmitted to others in a society. Cultures are not the product of lone individuals. They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other. Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people. If you were the only human on earth, there would be no need for language or government.


Is Culture Limited to Humans?

Non-human culture? This orangutan mother isusing a specially prepared
stick to "fish out" food from a crevice. She learned thisskill and is now teaching it to her child who is hanging
on her shoulder and intently watching.

There is a difference of opinion in the behavioral sciences about whether or not we are the only animal that creates and uses culture. The answer to this question depends on how narrow culture is defined. If it is used broadly to refer to a complex of learned behavior patterns, then it is clear that we are not alone in creating and using culture. Many other animal species teach their young what they themselves learned in order to survive. This is especially true of the chimpanzees and other relatively intelligent apes and monkeys. Wild chimpanzee mothers typically teach their children about several hundred food and medicinal plants. Their children also have to learn about the dominance hierarchy and the social rules within their communities. As males become teenagers, they acquire hunting skills from adults. Females have to learn how to nurse and care for their babies. Chimpanzees even have to learn such basic skills as how to perform sexual intercourse. This knowledge is not hardwired into their brains at birth. They are all learned patterns of behavior just as they are for humans.

Editorial: What is Disability Culture?
http://www.independentliving.org/newsletter/12-01.html

I cannot begin to count the number of times I've been asked this question in the past decade or so. Some people desired a one-sentence response, others a one-paragraph answer and still others just wanted to argue about or mull over the idea. In the past five years or so, there have been hundreds of documents discussing disability culture being distributed. Don't believe me? Well, for the first time in a year or so I just did a couple of searches. Entering the keywords, "disability culture," Yahoo returned 2020 web page matches; Google 2600 matches; and Alta Vista delivered 1272 matches.

Why such interest in the idea of a disability culture. From the international perspective the word "disability" has different connotations to diverse cultures, just as the word "culture" does. The definition of disability that may have become the most known is that of someone who has a major life impairment preventing them from participating easily in a major activity, such as walking, seeing, hearing, thinking. But that definition is one of only dozens in the United States alone. Worldwide there may be hundreds, if not thousands of definitions of disability and I would venture the same applies to the idea of culture. Any word that has such historical and contemporaneous significance will create controversy and interest. Put two such words together and the interest is magnified. This is what's happened with disability culture.

To return to a definition, here's my one paragraph definition, the shortest I can come up with, published in a 1996 issue of MAINSTREAM magazine that I still use:

People with disabilities have forged a group identity. We share a common history of oppression and a common bond of resilience. We generate art, music, literature, and other expressions of our lives and our culture, infused from our experience of disability. Most importantly, we are proud of ourselves as people with disabilities. We claim our disabilities with pride as part of our identity. We are who we are: we are people with disabilities.

Those of us working the field of disability culture probably all agree on several basic points. First, disability culture is not the same as how different cultures treat different disabilities. Instead disability culture is a set of artifacts, beliefs, expressions created by disabled people ourselves to describe our own life experiences. It is not primarily how we are treated, but what we have created. Second, we recognize that disability culture is not the only culture most of us belong to. We are also members of different nationalities, religions, colors, professional groups, and so on. Disability culture is no more exclusive than any other cultural tag. Third, no matter what the disability or location of the person with the disability we have all encountered oppression because of our disabilities. Fourth, disability culture in the southwest of the U.S. may be very different than in the northeast U.S. or Europe or Africa, but all of us have the similarities described in the first three points. Finally, we who have worked, researched, studied and written about disability culture have most often begun in the arena of cross-disability culture, meaning all disabilities and cultures. We're aware they're may be nuances, or even larger differences between some of us, but we've had to start somewhere. If we consider all the possibilities of all disabilities and all cultures it's probably more accurate to say that there are "cultures of disabilities."

Why is any of this important? I believe there are two significant factors. First, how will we or anyone else know how to relate to us if none of us are aware of our cultural background. For example, most disabilities come with some sort of pain and/or fatigue. How will mainstream society ever be able to incorporate us into itself if neither we nor it recognize pain and/or fatigue as part of who we are. Secondly, and maybe even more importantly, for years we have discussed integration like it was our business to fit in with mainstream society. As we become more aware of our own unique gifts some of us have also become more convinced that this is a backwards perspective. It is absolutely not our job it fit into mainstream society. Rather it is our destiny to demonstrate to mainstream society that it is to their benefit to figure out that we come attached to our wheelchairs; our ventilators; our canes; our hearing aids; etc. and to receive the benefit of our knowledge and experience mainstream society needs to figure not how we fit in, but how we can be of benefit exactly the way we are.

That's disability culture, at least from one person's perspective.

Steven E. Brown, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, Institute on Disability Culture
http://anthro.palomar.edu/culture/culture_1.htm

Breast Cancer Culture
http://cancerculturenow.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-do-you-want.html

What Do You Want?
I feel like someone has removed my brain, stomped on it and reinserted it into my head. So might you if you've been following the debates raging on Facebook and the breast cancer blogosphere over the last week or so. From critically analyzing the societal worth of campaigns like "I <3 Boobies" and "Feel Your Boobies", to a blog post improbably titled, Breast Cancer: Let’s Fight The Disease – Not Each Other, which actually seemed to tacitly disparage the National Breast Cancer Coalition's mission to stop breast cancer by 2020, and then ironically erupted into a war of words in the comments section; I feel exhausted yet also emboldened and motivated.

On one hand it was disheartening to see the blatant ignorance that still exists in considering the breast cancer culture, and indeed the censorship that went on with one incident when confronted with breast cancer truth. But on the other hand, I saw spirited discussion, energy for new ideas and deep questioning of the breast cancer status quo which gives me hope that change might be coming to the breast cancer movement.

But there's one point on which I am still very confused.

CBS News recently ran a story called "Breast cancer mommy; Brave, beautiful.....and bald". Essentially it was a fluffy little piece about cancer patients losing their hair, and how they can "rock their baldness" and still be "brave" and "beautiful". Yep heard all this before. I get it. Hair doesn't define you. Hair loss shouldn't affect your self worth. Cancer can't take away the essence of you; yada, yada, yada.

Then I read the author's biography, and I felt my blood pressure beginning to rise to something past a slow simmer;
"Meredith Israel, 37, was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in June, 2009. She says she's in the fight of her life, determined to prevail for the sake of her family, including her 3-year-old daughter, Niomi, and her husband, Gary. Meredith found her breast cancer through self-examination and a mammogram. Since being diagnosed, she has raised more than $100,000 for breast cancer research and has been a vocal proponent of self-exams and early detection."
Now don't me wrong. My heart aches for this woman. I understand only too well the devastation of a Stage IV cancer diagnosis and to throw children into the mix as well? Well, it goes without saying that cancer is never a good news story.

According to the story, Ms Israel "has raised more than $100,000 for breast cancer research and has been a vocal proponent of self-exams and early detection." Now I really hope this story was reported correctly and the $100,000 really did go to research, and if that's the case then I applaud Ms Israel for her efforts. It's a wonderful achievement.

Then my mind started working overtime. I wanted to know what kind of research? The kind that could possibly result in treatments or yield findings that could potentially help Ms Israel with her prognosis? Or did the money go to research that, although might eventually be helpful to others, won't help further knowledge about metastatic breast cancer? Then I wondered why would someone with metastatic cancer openly advertise themselves as a proponent of breast self-exam and early detection? Neither causes are scientifically proven to offer any guarantees as either reliable methods of screening, nor indicators of whether a person will go on to develop metastatic disease. Further, neither of these causes have really been shown to impact mortality rates from breast cancer, which remain barely unchanged in decades.

It is at this point I should clarify where I'm going with all this.

Many of the breast cancer fundraising campaigns we see today are invariably founded, or have involvement at some level, by breast cancer survivors. The "I <3 Boobies" and "Feel Your Boobies" campaigns are good examples, and indeed Susan G. Komen for the Cure's founder, Nancy Brinker is a breast cancer survivor as I'm sure are many of the staff and volunteers.

But here's what I don't get. I have Stage IV breast cancer. It's a bad situation. Right now I'm focused o n trying to get the best treatments and give myself some sort of a fighting chance (whatever that means). I'm well aware that in order to truly survive this disease I need some sort of a miracle. One that might, just might, come out of a research laboratory. But it's going to take time, money and focus by all relevant stakeholders. I've also come to realize that getting research funding to focus on metastatic cancer is a pretty tall order. It's not a popular mission for myriad reasons, and it's a fight to steer money in this direction. So what can I do? I can donate. I can tell my friends and family to donate. And I can use this blog to speak out on the topic and try to get people to think more deeply about this issue.

It all comes down to the fact, that I want something better for myself. There I said it. Selfish me. Wanting to live a long life as well. Wanting to live the dream of the victorious cancer survivor.

And yet, still we throw money at fundraising campaigns whose main priorities are breast cancer education, awareness and so-called early detection programs. Research is treated like the ugly step-sister and invariably gets pushed down in the priority spectrum, or just not even funded at all, in favor of the glitz, sass, sexiness and glamor of more cutesy breast cancer "awareness". How much more awareness do we possibly need? We're stuck in a rut that's not moving the fight forward to end this disease. We're just screening and diagnosing and feeding the cancer machine, with not enough thought as to how we can stop the machine and how we can help the people stuck inside it.

Well, I'm sick of it. Where's the anger people? Why don't we want something better for ourselves? Why not be advocates for research that might actually help those of us currently dealing with this disease AND those still to be diagnosed? What's wrong with being selfish? It's our lives we're talking about here.

And for those selfless people who continue to work so tirelessly to fund raise for these awareness campaigns; I thank you for your efforts, but I implore you to ask yourselves who all this awareness is helping. Consider the questions raised by Gayle Sulik where she asks "What Good Is Awareness If...."

We're stuck in a dangerous rut that values breast cancer awareness and early detection as some kind of holy grail never to be criticized. Awareness and early detection will not make any difference to my life or my outcome, nor the thousands of others dealing with this disease and the 40,000 women or so statistically slated to die from breast cancer this year alone. Sure, awareness and early detection campaigns might help get someone diagnosed, but then what? Successful treatment? Maybe, maybe not. The bottom line is this. Science still can't tell us who's going to draw the short straw. It could happen to anyone at anytime. Regardless of early detection, breast-self exams and no matter how much more money we throw at breast cancer awareness.

We can and should be doing better.

Awareness DOES NOT EQUAL Breast Cancer Cure.

Ask yourself, if you were me, what would you want?



*****Discussion******

What did you hear today? Were you listening? What did your classmates say? What was their message? What article did you connect with best? Why? What inspired you? Is your mind open? Really? Prove it!