Full Description
The common saying is that people have a culture. This book argues that people live a culture - which may explain why they are so affectively attached to it. By considering cultural interactions on a global scale, this book investigates how cultures can be understood in terms of conflict and cooperation, in relation to the nation-state, a multiplicity of worlds, society, civilization and community. It considers how culture is at the basis of the construction of individual and collective selves; how they can come to be alienated; are defined in relation to others; are perhaps in-comparable; when they are considered to be dis-abled; and whether we can speak of animal cultural selves and mechanical cultural selves. Its twelve chapters consists of two parts each that both start with a piece of music. The pieces are taken from different cultures and all connote that getting to understand cultures depends on listening, first and foremost.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preamble: On a Musical Note
Part 1 Cultural Realms
1. Culture in Terms of Representation and as Form-of-life
1.1. In what senses is culture a matter of life and death?
1.2. What is the definition of culture?
2. Culture and Politics: The Paradox of Self-Determination and the Nation-state
2.1. Self-determination: Self-evident or a paradox?
2.2. Why is the nation-state culturally determined?
3. Culture and the Political: A Multiplicity of Worlds
3.1. What is the connection between culture and world?
3.2. How does culture connote a multiplicity of worlds?
4. Culture and Economies: Society
4.1. Society: How is value determined economically and culturally?
4.2. How are economies determined by culture and can culture be used economically?
5. Culture and Affective Economies: Civilization
5.1. Civilization: How are cultural hierarchies always affectively charged?
5.2. How are the interests of people defined by affects and emotions?
6. Culture and Religion: Community
6.1. What is the relation between culture, religion, and communities?
6.2. How can separate domains of life infiltrate one another?
Part 2 Cultural Selves
7. Culture and Self: Individuality
7.1. Why do people want to lose their selves, or sacrifice themselves?
7.2. How can people become alienated from their culture?
8. Culture and 'Other': Affiliation
8.1. Why do cultures construct an 'other' and what are the consequences?
8.2. How are selves defined in intensified urban situations of cultural interactis?
9. Self and Other: In-comparability
9.1. Translation: What is needed to understand other cultures?
9.2. Does cross-cultural understanding have its limits?
10. Culture and Dis-abled Selves: Normality
10.1. How is disability historically and culturally determined?
10.2. What are the cultural affordances in disabilities?
11. Culture and Animal Selves: Relationality
11.1. How do tropes anthropomorphize animals, and animalize humans?
11.2. Do people have sufficient understanding of animal culture?
12. Culture and Machinic Selves: Artificiality
12.1. Mixtures of being: Have humans always been artificial?
12.2. What are the multiple relations between culture and technology?
Postscript: On a Note of Justice
Bibliography
Index of terms
Index of names
