Anthropology of culture 4018-CW3

1. Patterns of culture
Topics: cultural diversity, its anthropological and biological interpretation; cultural integration, its configuration; the concept of a pattern of culture and examples: the “Apollonian” (the Zuni) and “Dionysian” (the Kwakiutl) pattern; the individual and the group versus the cultural pattern; patterns of culture in developed societies, ideological systems as patterns of culture; models, norms and actions, axionormative order.
2. Time
Topics: lay time and holy time, the reversibility and cyclic nature of holy time, re-actualisation of myths - ontophanic and pattern-building function; the anthropomorphism and local nature of cyclic time, Christianisation of time: from “a world without history” to “sacred history”, from holy time to the liturgical year, rural time and urban time - “Church time” and “merchant time”; theological and teleological models of time - overcoming them: laicisation, mechanization, quantification, clocks as a figure of experiencing time, the Darwinist opening of linear time; time as movement and time as a separate quantity, organic and functional understanding of time; concepts of hypothetical universal time: the mathematical, absolute time of Newton, cosmic time; Einstein: time versus movement and gravity, a new vision of the cosmos, relativity of time.
3. Space
Topics: establishing the world and holy space, “our world” and “the other world”, cosmos and chaos, settlement as sanctification, constant point - point of support, the centre of the world and its symbolism; the body and the pattern of spatial orientation: “up - down”, “back - front”, “right - left”, the body and measures of space, personal pronouns and space; space as an extension of the body, categorization of space, distances: intimate, personal, social, public.
4. Body
Topics: human beings as a physio-psycho-sociological whole; the body - the first tool of humans, body techniques - traditional effective actions, classification of body techniques, transfer of body techniques: prestige and training; the role of the face in social contacts: mimic mask versus “naked face”; the creative and communicative function of the hands; historical changeability of cultural attitudes to nakedness, openness, and intimacy; “naïve” and “sentimental” cultural attitudes to nakedness.
5. Person - personality - social character
Topics: the notion of the person and its evolution: from identification with a mask, through the legal, moral and spiritual person, to philosophical category; psyche versus personality in a psychoanalytical approach, the role of the Oedipus complex in developing the superego, prohibition of incest - culture as the effect of the “self’s” defence against drives, the influence of social interactions on the development of personality; intercultural and intracultural diversity of character, social character as an internalisation of tasks set by the social system, the dynamics of the relations between the social character and the social process, economic situation and ideology, personality - between determination and freedom.
6. Marriage - family - kinship
Topics: marriage - its sexual, procreative, economic, legal and ritual aspects; social conditioning of marriage: prohibition of incest, exogamy, endogamy; forms of marriage: polyandry, polygyny, monogamy; the family and the system of kinship: clans, halves and classes of relatives, criticism of the hypothesis on primeval promiscuity and group marriage; the distinctive features of a family, prohibition of incest and elementary social organization, marriage as a group bond, the relation between family and global society.
7. Primary and secondary social ties
Topics: community and association - the main types of bonding and patterns of social groups, constitutive features of a community and an association and their main forms; the notion of a primary group and examples thereof, the primary group as a moral unity and the ideal of moral unity, group and awareness of the group; personal and ideological bonds, primary groups versus social structure; negative and positive identification, group identity versus civic duties, characteristics of the sense of being a member of a group.
8. Traditional culture
Topics: the primary mind as a pre-logical mind, the mystical character of collective ideas (picture, likeness, people’s names, names of things, shadow, dream), the right to participation, totemic relations; orality, the authority of tradition - the authority of old age, conformism; folklore, communal memory, family memory, the value of “old truth” and autochthonous tradition.
9. Knightly culture, gentry culture
Topics: the emergence of European feudalism; personal relations between people in a feudal society: the role of fiefdom and vassalage; the idea of the contract and knighthood and nobility; homage and knighting - the symbolism of feudal ties; being a knight as an occupation and being a nobleman as an indicator of social status; the transformation of knighthood into gentry; the knighthood as an institution and the knighthood as a myth, the sacralization of knighthood - the birth of the ideal, honour as the supreme value of the knightly ethos; courtly love as an initiation; chivalry today; class brotherhood and ancestral responsibility; the knighthood and the gentry as a culture of passions and emotions.
10. Bourgeois culture
Topics: bourgeois - a social type and a pattern of culture, personal merit, ownership and freedom, economic and political individualism, business dealing versus emotional ties and interpersonal relations, instrumentalization of interpersonal relations, the notion of homo oeconomicus; utilitarianism, methodical life, diligence and thriftiness, Protestant ethics and the Puritan attitude, the religious nature of the source of capitalist attitudes, irrational-speculative and rational capitalism - based on the rational organization of free [non-slave] labour and the rational structure of law and administration, the emergence of the capitalist bourgeoisie and the proletariat as two classes linked to the rational organization of paid labour; from the Puritan attitude to the consumer attitude, from bourgeois culture to mass culture.
11. Mass culture
Topics: the phenomenon of the conurbation, the mass - its objective and subjective aspects, the notion of “mass” versus “crowd”, the mass person’s mentality and attitude; mass culture - produced, standardized, homogenized; infantilization of the vision of the world, corruption of creativity, depersonalisation of interpersonal relations; mass culture - the culture of free time, entertainment as a value in itself, the omnipresence of the spectacle, the fun concept of life.
12. Alternatives
Topics: alternativeness as an attempt to move out of society: contestation of proposed models of life, direct experience, contact with nature; alternativeness as an attempt to reform society: creating new and direct interpersonal relations, transforming oneself and transforming one’s environment; transcendental experience as fulfilment of an internal transformation; the festival as the fulfilment and transcending of art; the utopia of universal creativity.