CSUN Culture and Its Relationship to Language Discussion Yay! You have now read a bit about culture, and you have viewed and read about a performance that

CSUN Culture and Its Relationship to Language Discussion Yay! You have now read a bit about culture, and you have viewed and read about a performance that is a clear example of what scholarship looks like when critical cultural studies is applied to performance. You also read about culture and its relationship to language in the Hall article: “Representation is the production of meaning through language” (28). For this assignment you will combine all of the ideas you read about this week. In doing so, you will extend your knowledge about representation and culture in performance and language to visual culture in an online environment.

Consider the following course materials as you do the activity and as you compose your EA Report, which is worth 50pts per essay:

Course Materials:

All readings available in the module for the week!
#betweenartandquarantine
In this quarantine art challenge, creativity begins at home (Links to an external site.)
#gettymuseumchallenge
https://mymodernmet.com/recreate-art-history-challenge/ (Links to an external site.)

Engagement Activity:

Culture and Representation: Taking inspiration from the hashtags above and from the readings and video for the week, you will take up the challenge offered by the Getty and/or the #betweenartandquarantine originators! Follow these steps to complete your EA, your EA report, and your PowerPoint in which you will showcase your final EA activity image to the class.

The first step is to go online and become familiar with these to hashtag challenges: #betweenartandquarantine and #gettymuseumchallenge.
After you have done so, create a one sentence description that captures the purpose and products of the challenges.
Then, write a second sentence describing what this challenge has to do with culture (or intercultural communication, performance or cultural studies). Use the readings to help you do this.
Finally, get to work: do the challenge.
Choose an art image that speaks to you, it does not have to be from the getty collection or in any of the #betweenartandquarantine catalogs you may find. The only requirement is that the original image must represent a work of visual art. Additionally, you may encounter a similar challenge that takes for inspiration a film of television screen grab. Please do not do this, rather, choose a still artform for this challenge.
Once you have your art inspiration, you will create new meaning through representation. That is, you will attempt to recreate the image and literally re-present it to the world in a new way using items you have on hand. Please do not go buy things for this challenge.
As you plan and create, I really want to to focus your recreation using a critical cultural studies perspective to representation. That is, ask yourself what messages are in the original picture as relates to power:
what does it say about class differences?
is there a racial context?
how is gender depicted?
any commentary on social dynamics?
who holds power and who does not in this image?
what kind or relationships are displayed and why?
etc, etc… ask yourself tough questions about the image you have chosen
After doing the analysis above and forming an educated critical cultural perspective, aim to recreate your own image in such a way that might cause the viewer to understand your perspective on the original piece.
Your recreation should imply a cultural commentary, attitude, critique, or questioning, rather than simply imitating the original as exactly as you are able. For Example, the first image seems to simply recreate the original, whereas the second takes the activity a step further by recreating the image (keeping the original structure and affect), but also suggesting a critical perspective. To me, the second recreation represents the loneliness of quarantine and our longing for connection. What does it mean to you?:
After you have completed the challenges, taken and paired the images, create a PowerPoint.Your PowerPoint should be arranged as follows:
Slide one: your purpose/product statement from step 2 above.
Slide 2: your culture statement from step 3 above
Slide 3: your image for this challenge! Be sure to display your work as two side by side images (original on the left, and your recreation on the right).

What do I do when I complete the creative portion of my EA assignment?

Start a new thread in VT.
Use the title, “EA 4: Betweenartandquarantine”
DO NOT FORGET TO HIT SUBMIT!
Spend the week viewing the images of your classmates. You may comment on any of the videos you like.
*you may comment on both these and the usual VT Journals this week.

To be clear—In your written report this time around, please make connections to the readings very clear. Continue using the DIET formula to guide your essay, but also briefly include the analysis of the artwork (about power relations from step 4 above). You can do this wherever you feel appropriate in your essay, and do not forget to include what message you are attempting to convey through representation in this activity.

Remember, EA reports should be the result of concentrated application of course materials to a specific activity. The report simply illustrates that you understand how and why this activity is important to your growing knowledge of Performance, Language and Cultural Studies.

*I will be deducting 5pts from essays with no correctly formatted MLA Works Cited page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv26tDDsuA8&feature=youtu.be

Describe the activity in your own words (what transpired?)
Interpret the activity (why was it assigned, what did you learn?)
Evaluate the activity (how did you do? What went well or not so well?)
Theorize the activity (what are the larger, overarching lessons or cultural implications? How can you expand or explore the issues in a different context?) 05-Bell-45471.qxd
1/11/2008
3:56 PM
CHAPTER
Page 115
5
Performing Culture
Theory in Perspective:
How Do Cultures Perform?
A
nthropology, sociology, and even psychology in the mid-nineteenth century took “the study of man” as their central concern. The guiding
method for these new academic areas was positivism, the belief that covering laws of human organization could be discovered through direct observation.
This perspective maintains that the universe is orderly, and the job of scientific
inquiry is to discover this order and classify it in systematic ways. Charles Darwin’s
work on evolution was an important model for researchers in the social sciences
who searched for origins in the “evolution” of culture.
Theories of the evolution of culture are interwoven with the study of religion.
Three schools of theory emerged in the nineteenth century—myth and ritual, sociological, and psychological—all asking the question, Did religion originate in myth
or ritual? Mircea Eliade was interested in the phenomenology of religious experience and how myths and rituals are expressions of both the sacred and the profane
in culture that provide unity for people. The sociological school, led by Emile
Durkheim, maintained that religion is a social creation whose function is to preserve the welfare of a society. Sigmund Freud anchored the psychological approach:
taboos of incest and patricide necessitate rituals that appease repressed desires.
Across these approaches, performance was studied for its window into larger
cultural structures, like religion, politics, economics, language, and identity
(Beeman 1993). When specific performance genres were studied (like rites, rituals,
games, contests, dance, and music), performance was often seen as a fixed, static
product, evidence of cross-cultural similarities, and indicative of universal needs
and expressions.
This chapter traces the theories that helped transform the “study of man” into
the study of performance. Arnold van Gennep’s (1909/1960) rites of passage, Johan
115
05-Bell-45471.qxd
1/11/2008
3:56 PM
Page 116
116——THEORIES OF PERFORMANCE
Huizinga’s (1938/1950) play theory, and Milton Singer’s (1972) cultural performance
laid the groundwork for the performance turn in the study of culture. This turn
rejects the view of performances as fixed objects to be studied in the science of positivism and embraces performance as a paradigm for understanding how culture
makes and remakes itself. Performance can be understood as “the embodied
processes that produce and consume culture . . . performance makes things and
does things” (Hamera 2006, 5).
The work of anthropologist Victor Turner, introduced in Chapter Four through
the social drama, is credited for ushering in this performance turn in the study of
culture. Turner rejects concepts of culture as static or deterministic structures that
“imprint” themselves on waxlike, malleable humans. Humans push back in meaningful and efficacious ways on culture, and in turn, change it. Turner argues that a
performance approach to culture (1) reflects dynamic cultural processes,
(2) enables possibilities between and within cultural structures, and (3) provides
opportunities for critique and transformation. Performances are constitutive of
culture, not something added to culture; performances are epistemic, the way cultural members “know” and enact the possibilities in their worlds; and performances are critical lenses for looking at and reshaping cultural forms.
This chapter surveys theories that help us answer these questions: What is culture? How do people move in and through culture? What is ritual? How is culture
performed individually and collectively, especially as a vehicle of history, public
memory, and institutions? What are our ethical responsibilities toward cultures
other than our own?
What Is Culture?
Dictionary definitions of “culture” have changed through time. From the Latin cultura, meaning “cultivation” or “tending,” the growing of plants, crops, or animals is
a very early meaning of the word. Most of us think of culture in two different ways
based on definitions more than one hundred years old.
In 1882, British poet and social theorist Matthew Arnold proposed culture as
the refinement of tastes and sensibilities. He maintained that culture is “the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know . . . the best which has
been thought and said in the world.” Arnold held Western music, art, architecture, and literature as his standard for civilization and for “high culture.” English
anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1871/1958) expanded the definition of
culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society.”
Raymond Williams (1958/1983) was the first to propose that culture is ordinary, the “common meanings and directions” of a society. These meanings are
learned, made, and remade by individuals. Culture is at once traditional, a whole
way of life passed on through generations, and creative, the processes of discovery
that lead to new ways of thinking and doing.
05-Bell-45471.qxd
1/11/2008
3:56 PM
Page 117
Chapter 5: Performing Culture——117
Clifford Geertz (1973) argues that culture is semiotic: Systems of meaning, signification, and symbol use are central to both patterned conduct and individual
frames of mind. Culture is a symbolic system unique to humans in which meanings
are publicly shared and the collective property of a group. Drawing from Kenneth
Burke, Geertz (1973, 9–10) argues that “human behavior is symbolic action—
action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or
sonance in music, signifies.”
John Bodley (1994) lists three components of culture: what people think, what
they do, and the material products they produce. Bodley summarizes the properties of culture: It is shared, learned, symbolically transmitted cross-generationally,
adaptive to the physical world, and integrated with it.
Wen Shu Lee (2002) defines culture as “the shifting tensions between the
shared and the unshared,” acknowledging that culture is contested within and
across groups. She offers this example of historical and value shifts: “American culture has changed from master/slave, to white only/black only, to antiwar and black
power, to affirmative action/multiculturalism and political correctness, to transnational capital and anti-sweatshop campaigns” (quoted in Martin and Nakayama
2004, 76).
In one hundred years, the concept of culture has developed and shifted. The tensions, however, have remained the same as theorists posit culture as between and
among the individual and the group, high and low, tradition and change, symbol
systems and material products, human biology and human learning, shared and
unshared meanings within and between groups, systems, and power.
Approaches to Studying Culture
Robert Wuthnow (1987) outlines four contemporary approaches to studying culture that are helpful in understanding the above definitions. A subjective approach
to culture focuses on beliefs, attitudes, and values held by individuals. Culture is
conceived as mental constructions expressed in outlooks, anxieties, desires, and subjective states of the individual. Meaning in this approach is “the individual’s interpretation of reality” (1987, 11). Social psychologists and sociologists often take this
approach when they measure people’s attitudes, values, and beliefs with surveys,
focus groups, participant observation, and interviews.
A structural approach to culture seeks out the patterns and rules that hold a culture together. This approach looks for the symbolic boundaries evident within a culture created in language and how these boundaries among cultural elements are
maintained and changed. A structural approach differs from a subjective approach:
Culture is the object to be studied and observed, not the subjective states of individual members. Culture is characterized by its boundaries, categories, and elements that can be seen, read, recorded, and classified. Kinship systems are a good
example of boundaries that maintain and change culture.
Wuthnow’s third category is a dramaturgical approach to culture which
“focuses on the expressive or communicative properties of culture. . . . Culture is
05-Bell-45471.qxd
1/11/2008
3:56 PM
Page 118
118——THEORIES OF PERFORMANCE
approached in interaction with social structure” (1987, 13). Like structural
approaches, a dramaturgical approach maintains that culture is observable, but
classifies these observations as “utterances, acts, objects, and events” (13). Most
important, this approach seeks to explore the dramatic ordering of social life not as
information, but for the ways that rituals, ideologies, and other symbolic acts “dramatize the nature of social relations” (13). Chapter Four, “Performing Drama,” featured Kenneth Burke and Victor Turner. Chapter Six features Erving Goffman. All
are considered “fathers” of this approach to culture.
An institutional approach to culture adds the elements of culture as studied by
structuralists to the moral order studied by dramaturgists to explore the organizations that constitute culture. These organizations necessarily require resources and
influence the distribution of these resources across members of their culture.
Institutional approaches most often feature the interplay between culture and state.
Marxist, socialist, and systems theorists utilize this approach. “Follow the money”
is a common phrase for tracking institutions (the federal, state, and local governments, education, science, even the mass media) as agents that garner and distribute resources in a culture.
How culture is conceptualized—as mental states, structures, social relations, or
institutions—is intimately linked to how culture is studied across academic disciplines and methods. Moving from social scientific models of positivism to critical
models of interpretation and power, Judith N. Martin and Thomas K. Nakayama
(1999, 13) advocate a dialectical approach to studying culture as heterogeneous,
dynamic, and contested. This approach “accepts that human nature is probably both
creative and deterministic; that research goals can be to predict, describe, and
change; that the relationship between culture and communication is, most likely,
both reciprocal and contested.”
The tensions between the individual and the group, high and low, tradition and
change, symbol systems and material products, human biology and human learning, culture and communication will pull especially tight when the study of culture
leaves some members out entirely.
ACT OUT
Class Culture
Think of your classroom as a culture. Divide the class into five groups to
approach this culture subjectively, structurally, dramaturgically, institutionally,
and dialectically. How might this class be described, what elements can be studied, and how might change be advocated when approached in these five different ways?
Perform your discoveries for the class. First, create a “slice of life” in this culture that seeks to highlight your approach’s assumptions about culture, where
it is “located,” and its properties. Second, present your analysis of that performance. What are the benefits of this approach? What are its limitations?
05-Bell-45471.qxd
1/11/2008
3:56 PM
Page 119
Chapter 5: Performing Culture——119
SOURCE: Photograph by Jaclyn Lannon. Copyright © 2007 by Jaclyn Lannon.
READ MORE ABOUT IT
“This Was My Life as an Undergraduate”
Donna Marie Nudd (1998, 152), Professor of Communication at Florida State
University, regularly participates in teaching workshops offered at the beginning
of the fall semester for new teaching assistants. She and her colleague from theatre, Frank Trezza, create and perform scenes of classrooms with the PIE
(Program for Instructional Excellence) Players. The idea is to show, rather than
tell, new teachers classroom dilemmas. They follow the performances with periods of discussion. The following is Nudd’s description of one eight-minute scene
(featuring Terry Galloway) and her analysis of the audience’s reaction.
It’s the third day of class, the teacher is taking role. Terry enters late and slams
the door. Undergraduates mutter comments to themselves or each other:
“Oooh, that’s tough on a hangover,” “God, her student loan must not have
come through,” etc. The teacher continues to call role from the desk. Terry, chatting with a student behind her, misses her name as she is actively engaged in conversation about the price of books. Class begins. The teacher tries to facilitate a
discussion on affirmative action and its effect on women. She writes, “A.A.” and
“Women” on the chalkboard. Class discussion begins. Thinking the topic at hand
is Alcoholics Anonymous, Terry at one point in the group discussion launches into
a seemingly unrelated monologue about her sister who is a member of that organization and her resentment of its religious overtones. The teacher is thrown by
(Continued)
05-Bell-45471.qxd
1/11/2008
3:56 PM
Page 120
120——THEORIES OF PERFORMANCE
(Continued)
Terry’s response, but picks up some lone thread of Terry’s monologue and tries to
weave it back into the topic at hand. Another member of this class makes fun of
Terry and her ridiculous ideas. Terry responds in kind. As the situation becomes
even more heated, the teacher unsuccessfully tries to regain control. The class
degenerates into name-calling. Finally, at her wit’s end, the infuriated teacher calls
an end to the discussion. She tells them, “It’s over!” With her back again toward
Terry, she tells the class to get into their assigned small groups and adds, “You
have exactly ten minutes to summarize all the key points from the textbook in
regard to affirmative action’s effect on women.” Terry, watching the students
stand up and move, and having lip-read “It’s over!” thinks the class has been
dismissed and leaves the classroom muttering snide comments.
That was the scene. In their small group and large group discussions, 200–250
teaching assistants analyzed this scene by noting (1) that the teacher was woefully unprepared; (2) that topics such as “affirmative action” are controversial and
difficult to handle in the classroom; (3) that the rude, not-too-smart, volatile, and
clearly disturbed student, Terry, should be immediately advised to go to the counseling center. After the graduate students expressed their views, the emcee of the
plenary session quietly motioned to Terry. Terry said simply, “I’m deaf; this was my
life as an undergraduate.” Once the proverbial pin had dropped in the auditorium, Terry spoke briefly about being a deaf college student. After Terry’s autobiographical follow up, the PIE Players replayed the scene. This time, the nine or ten
clues to Terry’s disability that were built into the scene seemed thrown into
relief—her slamming the door, her missing entire sections of the teacher’s lecture
when the teacher was writing on the blackboard, her shifts in volume
level . . . her previously viewed non-sequitur about A.A. . . .
Hundreds of graduate students were made acutely aware of how difficult it
can be to pinpoint a disability even in what might seem to be the most obvious
of circumstances.
SOURCE: Donna Marie Nudd, “Improvising Our Way to the Future.” In The Future of
Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, edited by Sheron J. Dailey, 1998. Used by
permission of the National Communication Association.
From Studying “Man” to
Theorizing Movement and Play
D. Soyini Madison (2005, 149) writes that performance is central “to the meanings
and effects of human behavior, consciousness, and culture. These days, it seems one
can hardly address any subject in the arts, humanities, and social sciences without
encountering the concept of performance.” Performance—as central to the study of
humans across academic disciplines—didn’t take center stage overnight.
Two important theorists in the twentieth century asked new questions of culture
to begin the shift from studying “man” as a “bearer of culture” to studying performance as constitutive of culture. Arnold van Gennep theorized rites of passage and
John Huizinga theorized play as founding moments in and through culture.
05-Bell-45471.qxd
1/11/2008
3:56 PM
Page 121
Chapter 5: Performing Culture——121
Play and rites of passage are central to thinking differently and asking different
questions about what people do, the movement through cultural processes, and the
products they produce. Play and ritual are often conceived as opposite cultural
structures:
[P]lay is understood as the force of uncertainty which counter-balances the
structure provided by ritual. Where ritual depends on repetition, play stresses
innovation and creativity. Where ritual is predictable, play is contingent. But
all performances, even rituals, contain some element of play, some space for
variation. And most forms of play involve pre-established patterns of behavior.
(Bial 2004, 115)
The next two sections trace the development, central concepts, and intertwining
of rites of passage and play that lay the groundwork for a performance approach to
culture.
Rites of Passage: Moving through Culture
In 1909, French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep published a book
entitled Les Rites de Passage (The Rites of Passage). At the time, ethnography as an
academic endeavor was thriving, but van Gennep was critical of the tendency to
“extract data,” the rites, ceremonies, and other practices, from the social settings
and contexts in which they were performed. Van Gennep is interested not only in
the “what” of religious beliefs and practices across the world, but in the “how” and
“why” of those practices (Kimball 1960).
Van Gennep’s central thesis is that all individuals undergo “life crises,” and that
ceremonies exist to assure safe travel through those crises; hence, rites of passage. While
the forms and contents of these rites differ from group to group through time, van
Gennep argues,
For groups, as well as for individuals, life itself means to separate and to be
reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and
to cease, to wait and rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way.
And there are always new thresholds to cross: the thresholds of summer and
winter, of a season or a year, of a month or a night; the thresholds of birth,
adolescence, maturity, and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife—for those who believe in it. (1909/1960, 189–90)
While a number of ethnographers and anthropologists have studied, for
example, “puberty rites” or “marriage rites” in particular cultures, van Gennep
describes and explains their significance in three new ways.
1. Rites of passage are ordered in a typical, recurring pattern: separation, transition, and incorporation. All rites of passage begin by separating the individual
from his or her customary environment; a period of transition is marked by
05-Bell-45471.qxd
1/11/2008
3:56 PM
Page 122
122——THEORIES OF PERFORMANCE
liminality—betwixt and between the two worlds; the third stage is incorporation
into the new group or state and a return to the customary environment.
2. Transition is the stage that orients and enables the other two stages. If the
transition period is lengthy, it will usually repeat within it the separation, transition, and incorporation phases.
3. Rites of passage are territorial passages. That is, they involve physical space,
and these spaces are not just “symbols” of movement. “In fact, the spatia…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment