lecture #4 anatomy of culture (1)

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Anatomy of Culture
Lecture #4

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Johannes Lubbe

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1. Global culture
2. Effective Personal culture
3. Personal Theory of Culture
4. Group Cultures and Traditions

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Global Culture
all that is publicly displayed and articulated by all living humans across the globe, en mass or individually. In
reality, it also includes all the diverse behaviors, good, bad or indifferent, and all products and possessions,
including tools and technologies, of all presently existing humans. Also includes, rules, habits, addictions,
(mis)understandings, (mis)classifications, (im)moralities, trades, disciplines, etc, etc It also includes all
the currently accessed stores of historical information about what has been believed, thought, taught,
observed, produced and evinced by humanity as a whole: physical and electronic records, books, articles; historic,
archeologic and fossil artifacts. It also includes all the recognized features of nature in the different localities
where humans operate, now extending to the bottom of the ocean, miles underground, and to the outer limits of
the solar system. Trillions of galaxies have very recently become ‘visible’ outside of our own. This intricate,
indescribable whole constantly changes from moment to moment, in ways and at a pace that far exceed our
individual or collective faculties of apprehension and comprehension. (v) While people, their behaviors,
statements, artifacts and environments are real, the corresponding vast body of information and knowledge that
is physically transmitted is virtual – i.e., strictly speaking, transmitted signals do not constitute knowledge. If
and when such signals are captured by the sense organs of a person, they are processed in the body of that person,
mostly within the brain, recreating a real representation of knowledge and awareness in a mind, albeit as an
indirect, unique, approximate representation. So, while culture, like language, is public, its meaning is private – a
fundamental dualism that affects all our interactions. There are also many physical limitations to our ability to
capture signals. The statement that neutrinos are passing through my body is an interesting shareable thought, a
phenomenon, a publicly signaled statement, that we can discuss. Actual neutrinos that routinely pass through my
body without any interaction, are undetectable signals, not phenomena.

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Effective Personal Culture
• The set of all those specific phenomena of global culture that a person, due to
their unique situation, has been exposed to and has interacted with, learned from,
and responded to, up until the present moment of their life. This represents our
small view of a vast panoramic whole, a small evolving slice of the totality of
global culture. We directly learn from it and are continuously shaped by it in a
seamless dynamic process that to varying degrees becomes somewhat more selfdirected and selective with the passage of time (wisdom). Even just observing the
routine activities of people passing by teaches us something about the community
in which we happen to be. Most importantly, in terms of our personal
development, each child starts learning from the moment of their first breath,
directly from a completely new and strange sensory and phenomenal world
composed mostly of family and its social circle, including teachers. This
represents an extraordinary diverse and unpredictable source of information; a
private source of diverse signals and stimuli.

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Personal Theory of Culture
• Each person has their own incomplete, mind-view, intuition or narrative ‘theory’
of what culture is, whether they call it that or not. (Prior to the 19th century it was
usually called by another name.) This is often what is being referred to when one
talks about ‘our culture’. It is an individual intuitive synthesis and understanding
of the milieu in which they act out their biological and social imperatives. It is
based on our personal effective culture (personal and social history) and shaped
by our own unique biological features A theory/intuition/concept is automatically
conjured up in our minds when confronting the thought of society, or related
questions such as morals, duties, expectations, choices, actions, meanings,
purposes, rewards, punishments, pleasures, and what individuals and groups are
up to. This mental construct is a more or less coherent product of all personal
experience and can therefore be expected to change with time or situation. It is
always personal and subjective, and variably but incompletely corresponds with
that held by others, most closely with family and friends.

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Group Cultures and Traditions
• From a distance groups of people from various localities looked, dressed, spoke
and behaved in a recognizably different way. This was referred to as ‘their
culture’. But the world is changing rapidly and what once seemed to be stable
communities are now seen to be rapidly transforming everywhere. They may still
communicate in their own language and still have characteristic shared beliefs.
Such ‘local culture’ leads to a certain predictability and confidence in interactions
with members of such a traditional community or group: locality thus tends to
homogenize the effective cultural experiences of local inhabitants, whose theories
of culture would then also have more shared features, leading to similar
behaviors. This is a powerful source of learning – enculturation. Even very
isolated population groups learn from other communities with which they
intermittently come into contact with, and so none are, nor were, ever completely
isolated. Furthermore, individual biological and psychodynamic variation within
such traditional communities may be wide and there would always be subgroups,
exceptions and outliers.