CAN CULTURE BE READ LIKE A TEXT? Vol.1© 2019 ISBN 978-976-96336-5-0

https://www.academia.edu/39087719/CAN_CULTURE_BE_READ_LIKE_A_TEXT_VOL_1

Extract : Can Culture Be Read Like A text

Language and culture

Understanding the nature of the relationship between language and culture is central to the process of learning another language. In actual language use, it is not the case that it is only the forms of language that convey meaning. It is language in its cultural context that creates meaning: creating and interpreting meaning is done within a cultural framework.

In language learning classrooms, learners need to engage with the ways in which context affects what is communicated and how.

Both the learner’s culture and the culture in which meaning is created or communicated have an influence on the ways in which possible meanings are understood.

This context is not a single culture as both the target language and culture and the learner’s own language and culture are simultaneously present and can be simultaneously engaged. Learning to communicate

in an additional language involves developing an awareness of the ways in which culture interrelates with language whenever it is used (Liddicoat, Papademetre, Scarino, & Kohler, 2003).

A professional stance that understands language as a social practice requires students to engage in tasks in which they create and interpret meaning, and in which they communicate their own personal meanings and develop personal connections with the new language.

If language is a social practice of meaning-making and interpretation, then it is not enough

for language learners just to know grammar and vocabulary.

They also need to know how that language is used to create and represent meanings and how to communicate with others and to engage with the communication of others.

This requires the development of awareness of the nature of language and its impact on the world (Svalberg, 2007).

The way in which we understand culture, just as the way we understand language, affects the way we teach culture in language learning.

In developing our stance, there are two fundamentally connected issues to consider:

what we understand culture to be

how we understand the place of culture within language learning.

Knowledge of cultures is important for facilitating communication with people.

Therefore learners of languages need to learn about and understand cultures.

Understanding culture as practices

with which people engage becomes centrally important.

This ‘cultural’ pole implies the development of knowledge about culture which remains external

to the learner and is not intended to confront or transform the learner’s existing identity, practices, values, attitudes, beliefs and worldview.

Learning involves making new meanings which are generally expressed through language. In this way learning, language, meaning and thinking are closely related.

Within this perspective, beyond the accumulation and restructuring of information, developing knowledge involves developing processes of self-monitoring and awareness that we refer to as metacognition.

Diverse cultural understanding and experiences need to be taken into account.

Interpretations

Historians use facts gathered from primary sources of evidence and then shape them so that their audience can understand and make sense of them.

This process whereby the historian makes sense of the past is called an interpretation.

In order to study interpretations students need to be able to recognise different types of interpretations, know why they might differ, and how to critically evaluate them.

Students need to be able to recognise how and why interpretations change over time.

It is important that students grasp the idea of history as a construct otherwise they will be unable to make sense of conflicting and competing accounts of the past which present themselves in their daily lives.

Teaching young children about interpretations involves them in reflecting about different versions of the past.

Children can find this concept difficult as it challenges their notion that there is one certain version of history.

When using interpretations with young children teachers need to ensure that the children are given just the right amount of uncertainty to challenge them.

Teaching children about historical interpretations tells them something about the people who created them and the societies in which they lived.

A good rule of thumb for interpretation would be to

Use as many different forms of interpretation as possible for example film, music and art, so that students see the different views which are held on an issue.

Use examples of interpretations which show issues about which people held really strong views.

Offer a good range of contrasting views on a topic and try to include one or two which will present an interesting or new standpoint.

Use interpretations only when the students are well grounded with background information and have some knowledge of the issues.

Use strategies which will help students to see the limitations of some interpretations and how the facts of history can be distorted or over simplified for a particular purpose.

Use criteria with students to show what makes a good answer on interpretations.

“to comprehend, analyse and evaluate how the past has been interpreted and represented in different ways, for example in historians’ debates and through a range of media such as paintings, films, reconstructions, museum displays and the internet.”

“Contemporary evidence should be evaluated for reliability and utility and used to support or underpin their answers.

Later interpretations too should be explored and used to inform the debate.”

For example, The argument that the new corpus will improve originalist methodology is straightforward: if scholars want to investigate how the public likely understood the Constitution’s words, then scholars would benefit from examining the data contained in a large corpus of English from that era rather than only examining the snapshot that a lexicographer took—a method for which Justice Scalia’s originalism received substantial criticism.

Furthermore, COFEA will likely come with its own software that permits not only searches of individual words, but also searches of words that co-occur in proximity to one another.

This tool makes it possible to take into account syntactic and semantic structures larger than single words.

Yet a tool is only a tool, and the authors acknowledge some of COFEA’s limitations. First, the authors acknowledge that a general corpus is not very helpful when defining legal terms of art.

For these terms, legal sources are superior. Second, even after using the corpus, originalists must still exercise judgment to determine how the various occurrences of words or phrases should inform their meaning in the Constitution.

Third, and most importantly, the authors recognize that originalism is under-theorized in the sense that it typically chooses the most typical meaning as the target but does not adequately defend that choice.

The second and third caveats are closely related and merit further discussion.

The words and phrases used during the Founding do not necessarily have the same meaning that they have today, just as the meanings of the words in Shakespeare’s plays are not always the same as the meanings of those same words today.

Otherwise, there would be no reason to resort to earlier texts. We could instead use COCA, or Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Of course, we may discover in our research that eighteenth-century English and twenty-first-century English have a lot of vocabulary in common. Scholars must first assume, however, that the meanings of words may have changed over time.

Lawrence Solum, a leading theorist of new originalism, makes this point in his description of the originalist method:

If we want to know what a text means and the text was not written very recently, we need to be aware of the possibility that it uses language somewhat differently than we do now.

Moreover, meaning is in part a function of context—and context is time-bound.

So if we want to know what a text means, we need to investigate the context in which the text was produced.

A nuanced way to approach the problem is to become lexicographers of the moment, constructing definitions from a large corpus of this foreign language, using the tools of corpus linguistics to determine which terms are typically used together, which senses of a word predominate, and so on

Studying commemorations in all its forms enables global citizens to further develop their skills to analyse and evaluate interpretations of the past and to explore historians interpretations both contemporary and past to inform their arguments.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analysing language form, language meaning, and language in context.The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇiniwho wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī

Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning.Phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds, and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties. The study of language meaning, on the other hand, deals with how languages encode relations between entities, properties, and other aspects of the world to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as manage and resolve ambiguity While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth conditions, pragmatics deals with how situational context influences the production of meaning.

Semiotics is a method for interpretation of signs. Signs are present in our daily life; everything we come in contact with is a sign that needs to be decoded because it is more meaningful than it appears Signs are dynamic and hence the history of the sign must also be considered while interpreting what it means.

A sign has two aspects to it: its denotative meaning and connotative meaning.

The denotative meaning of a sign is simply what it appears to be or its face value.

The connotative meaning is deeper; it is what the sign implies. Signs can be decoded by abduction.

Cultural texts are those objects, actions, and behaviors that reveal cultural meanings.

A photo is an image, but is also a cultural text, a picture with cultural information beyond just the picture itself.

Food and clothing also suggest cultural information, and it doesn’t stop there.

The entire place and space, all of the people and interaction, all of the rituals and rules and the various forms in which they manifest themselves, are “readable” texts, suitable for observation and analysis by the ethnographer and writer – namely by you.

Interpreting is a translational activity in which one produces a first and final translation on the basis of a one-time exposure to an expression in a source language.

The most common two modes of interpreting are simultaneous interpreting, which is done at the time of the exposure to the source language, and consecutive interpreting, which is done at breaks to this exposure.

Interpreting is an ancient human activity which predates the invention of writing.

However, the origins of the profession of interpreting date back to less than a century ago.

William Anderson Gittens

Author, Cinematographer Dip.Com., Arts. B.A. Media Arts Specialists’ License Cultural Practitioner, Publisher, Doctoral Student of Divinity, D.D. CEO,Editor in Chief of Devgro Media Arts Services Publishing®2015

ISBN 978-976-96336-5-0

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1 Stephen Tyler: “Zum ‘Be- / Abschreiben’ als ‘Sprechen für’: Ein Kommentar” in: Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text: die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsen-tation, ed. Eberhard Berg & Martin Fuchs (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), p288/9; my translation.

10 Cf. Manfred Frank: “Die Dichtung als ‘Neue My-thologie’” in: Mythos und Moderne, ed. Karl-Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 15-40.

11 Jean Baudrillard: “The Precession of Simulacra” (1983) in: Art after Modernism: Rethinking Represen-tation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), p257.

12 Maurice Blanchot: La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p312.

13 Johann Gottfried Herder: “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit” (1774) in: Herders Sämmtliche Werke 5, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: 1891), p508.

14 See, paradigmatically, Mike Bal: Kulturanalyse (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999).

15 Cf. Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer: Die souveräne Macht und das nackte Leben (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhr-kamp, 2002). [Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Torino: 1995).]

16 Cf. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: “Was sich nicht wegkommunizieren läßt” in: Kommunikation, Medien, Macht, ed. Rudolf Maresch and Niels Werber (Frank-furt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 329-341. Cf. p331: “Macht ist die Möglichkeit, Räume mit Körpern (ein-schließlich seines eigenen Körpers) zu besetzen, und das heißt auch: Körper aus Räumen verdrängen und Körpern den Zugang zu Räumen versperren zu kön-nen.”

17 André Kieserling: Kommunikation unter An-wesenden: Studien über Interaktionssysteme (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), p216.

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2 Cf. Martin Fuchs: “Textualising Culture: Hermeneu-tics of Distanciation” in: The Contemporary Study of Culture, ed. Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Verkehr & Internationales Forschungszentrum Kul-turwissenschaft (Wien: Turia & Kant, 1999), pp. 145-156.

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5 Cf. Martin Fuchs and Eberhard Berg: “Phänomenol-ogie der Differenz: Reflexionsstufen ethnographischer Repräsentation” in: Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text: die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsentation, ed. Eber-hard Berg & Martin Fuchs (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), p57.

6 Jean-Pierre Vernant: Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p207. [Mythe et société en Grèce ancienne (Paris: 1974).]

7 Niklas Luhmann: “The Form of Writing,” Stanford Literary Review 9 (1992), p36.

8 Cf. Dirk Baecker: Kultur, begrifflich (Witten: Wit-tener Diskussionspapiere, 1999).

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These are the tools available as part of COCA and COHA, COFEA’s sister cor-pora. See The Corpus of Contemporary American English, supra note 5; The Corpus of Historical American English, supra note 6. Moreover, apart from the BYU corpora, the field of corpus linguistics has developed a host of tools designed specifically to make such tasks possible with either corpora that have already been developed by linguists and other scholars, or with corpora developed by scholars for particular research projects. See, e.g., Tony McEnery, Richard Xiao & Yukio Tono, Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book (2006); Graeme Kennedy, An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics (1998).

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CAN CULTURE BE READ LIKE A TEXT? Vol.1© 2019 ISBN 978-976-96336-5-0

Dr. William Anderson Gittens D.D.

CEO & Managing Director, Author -Devgro Media Arts Services Publishing®2015

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