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Raymond Williams detailed what a complex, polysemic, and ambiguous term "culture" is. It suggests that language has its limits when it comes to describing, recounting, or analyzing something as elusive yet pervasive as culture. Visual anthropologists offer an alternative or supplement to language, images, as another medium or tool for representing, conveying, or analyzing this thing or force or event called "culture." And just as language is always doubled -- both the thing to be analyzed as well as the thing to do the analysis with (i.e. it is [|recursive]) -- so it is with images: they are the embodiment or vehicle of culture, as well as a means for understanding culture.

Abstract, I know. So let's follow a good rule of ethnographic method: when things get abstract and difficult to figure out just by thinking about it, look for concrete examples out in the world and try to describe what you see (or better yet, get other people to describe what they think they see). A simple experiment: if you search Flicker for images that are tagged with the word "culture," here is what you get: http://www.compfight.com/#search_type=tags&query=culture&commit=Search&license=&original=1&safe_search=1

What can you say about culture using these images? -- The Professor

Here's another way to do a post: as you're reading the newspaper, or watching some national or local media news broadcast, just keep an eye or ear out for uses of the word "culture" -- like this one from the New York Times, a double shot of culture about the Department of the Interior's Mineral Management Service and about Louisiana:

"The causes of the spill remain unclear, but a number of the agency’s actions have drawn fire: it shortened safety and environmental reviews; overlooked flaws in the spill response plan; and ignored warnings that crucial pieces of emergency equipment, blowout preventers, were prone to fail. The story has gained a bacchanal gloss because agency employees in Louisiana and Colorado took meals, gifts and sporting trips paid for by the industry, and several Colorado officials had sex and used drugs with industry employees. But the agency’s culture was shaped by forces much bigger than small-time corruption.  For decades, Washington and Louisiana were joined in the quest for red-jacket days, and the minerals agency was expected to provide them. Washington got oil and royalty fees; Louisiana got jobs; and the agency got frequent reminders of the need to keep both happy.  Seldom do regulators work in a place so dependent on the industry they oversee. From the top of Louisiana’s tallest building (One Shell Square) to the bottom of its largest aquarium (with a sunken rig), oil saturated the state’s culture long before it covered its marshes. It is prized as a source of jobs and as a source of tax revenue." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/us/08mms.html

So even if we don't learn exactly what "culture" is -- like the causes of the Gulf oil "spill" (I think the culture of the New York Times makes them use "spill" instead of "spew" or "uncontrolled eruption" or "disastrous puncture"), culture itself "remains unclear" -- we do learn that a government agency can be said to have one; that it can be shaped, by "forces" big and small; that at least some of those forces involve sex and drugs, and other elements of a very old cultural phenomenon, the [|bacchanalia], for which Louisiana is still quite famous; and that both money and gifts circulate within it. You would get Bonus Awesomeness Points if you found the quote from the anthropologist in that NYT article, tracked her down through Teh Google, and discovered that in fact the U.S. Minerals Management Service invested some fair amount of money in applied anthropological research aimed at documenting and understanding the culture of oil in Louisiana (http://gulfoil.bara.arizona.edu/) -- but not the culture of money, sex, and drugs at the agency itself. Sometimes, as we'll see, the anthropological gaze tends to focus in only one direction...

I was reading this over at Inside Higher Ed:

The culture of college needs to evolve, particularly with regard to "perverse institutional incentives" that reward colleges for enrolling and retaining students rather than for educating them. "It's a problem when higher education is driven by a student client model and institutions are chasing after bodies," he said.

the article is [|here]