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Faldage #208688 01/03/13 02:35 PM
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My take on culture is that it cleaves to the aesthetic but cleaves from the religious (I do not know whether moral and religious are one and the same). I feel culture is expression of the experiences of life. If the mode of expression is common then culture can bind people together like nothing can ( case in point India and Pakistan). If expressing problems/experiences of life is culture then the extension of that - finding answers or solutions to the problems goes into the realms of religion. And nothing can divide people like religion. Those are just my thoughts on the subject.
Ps: and now I'm all talked out on the issue. Gasping for breathe.

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what culture is, is the output of human thought and endeavor (even including frippery or frivolity, I suppose).

tsuwm #208694 01/03/13 06:36 PM
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Sure thing, tsuwm, and the output of all of our endeavors has a singular function.
My bold font definition of Culture wasn't pomp. It was meant to delimit the term in a manner suitable for an informative discussion. As it were I failed to get purchase.

Hey, wait! I got another good idea! Be back in a minute...

Drat, I can't pull up the particulars so I'll just wing it:

(Continued on next box.)

Last edited by jenny jenny; 01/03/13 07:49 PM. Reason: To look up information
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Originally Posted By: Buffalo Shrdlu

Heh... -|) < <(never found out how you made that)

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:¬ )

¬ = Option - l (That's Alt and a lowercase L)


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In September a visiting professor at the University of Alabama anthropology department gave a talk on his digs in the Great Rift Valley in Africa with the immodest objective of assigning the few footprints and even fewer bones found there to the group Homo sapiens. A bold assertion in that the volcanic ash matrix they were in dated 1.3 million years BP.

But were they really our direct line ancestors? Much taller than the famous Lucy, and with brains almost as big as our own, a clincher was found in the physical evidence which showed that they had a Culture.

In the form of crude knives.


Sorry: Continued on next rock because this damn page won't scroll down so I can see exactly what I am saying.


Last edited by jenny jenny; 01/04/13 01:39 AM.
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While crude knives alone do not necessarily prove the exisitance of Culture (some monkeys are said to sharpen rocks to throw) these knives were relatively heavy and were found at three sites over thirty miles distant from the place of quarrying.

And Culture, either by language or gestures, selected a female (most likely) individual to carry the cutters and scrapers to the site of the kill.

An early manifestation of Culture.

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Crows have been known to drop rocks on nuts to crack them.


----please, draw me a sheep----
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I would say culture is all that which is not nature. This is wonderful! And accurate, I think.

Having taken several Sociology courses, my thinking turns to that def. first. There are so many different levels! (She said, going in the opposite direction from Branny's succinct generalization.) There is "British culture" and "American culture", for example. But wait! Is there really? Do all Britons have the same culture? No! (And, did I get you to think that I was going to leave that sweeping statement as a perfect target? wink )
Everywhere, I think, there are sweeping likenesses (gender, religion, skin color, rural, urban, etc.) And also less-wide ones (education level, single parent households, homes with a person who requires constant care). But we can narrow cultures down, too: people who play clarinet, people who read King Lear smile.
Every one in these (and other) cultural groups has at least something in common with the others in that group.
But can we take culture, like language, as specific to an individual? Not an idiolect but an idioculture?

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