Notes from my Knapsack 12-7-17

Notes from my Knapsack 12-7-17

Jeff Gill

 

A question of culture, and community

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One of my most vivid memories of college was an anthropology class I took in my first year; I entered, and mirabile dictu, departed an anthropology major.

 

So a discussion of what "culture" was certainly makes sense, and our professor, who had recently returned from years above the Artic Circle living among the Sami people, herding reindeer, surely had much to tell us.

 

But maddeningly, at first, she would not tell us what "culture" was. She insisted we define it ourselves as a class. And across a week and a half, five class periods as I recall, we had at it. And found it a very difficult challenge, indeed.

 

My own horseback answer for now, since I'm not an anthropology professor rightly wanting to challenge my students, but a popularizer and columnator in these pages, is this: culture is that set of norms and values, often unspoken let alone unwritten, that frame the reception of experience in the thinking of the participants in that community, and guide them in actions of everyday life, and major life decisions.

 

No, I didn't get that from Wikipedia. I just wrote what I recalled coming to earth with after lots of airy speculation . . . and Myrdene, our teacher, as far as I recall never did choose to award any one definition with the prize of "rightness," she just pointed at various elements of different definitions we'd come up with and walked us through the strengths and weaknesses they each had.

 

Culture is amorphous, mutable, and also scalable, in the computer-based metaphors of today. There is such a thing as "American culture," but are we talking the 1950s or post 2000? Within that construct, you have Midwestern culture, and Eastern or Northeastern culture; inside those matryoshka dolls of meaning, you encounter some unique qualities to Philly culture versus New Yawk culture, and I had the change recently to catch a glimpse of Manhattan, where there may well be a different culture between streets and avenues of that city.

 

What I carry with me still from that class was the realization that culture, however defined, is how we filter experience. Culture tells us what we see, and what we don't see. Have you heard about some powerful men being powerfully brought low recently, in the news? Yes, I was twenty feet from Matt Lauer a few weeks ago, days before he lost his chair on TV. But I recall when men in authority hitting on young women in the office was . . . not seen. Not commented on. Women would warn each other, quietly, but officially, it was invisible. No more.

 

Because culture changes. Granville is wrestling with our own culture. We think of ourselves as a place where education is honored – heck, we put it up on a hill in the middle of town! – and where a certain New England . . . ethos? atmosphere? culture? is part of how we see ourselves.

 

How we celebrate, say, Christmas, and other ethnic or racial cultural observances is still new territory in Our Fair Village. Not long ago, they were invisible. We're starting to see them. And we look at our traditions with new eyes in the culture being contested, struggling to be born, today. And tomorrow.

 

This is not the Granville of 1855, he said all too obviously, and it's not the Brigadoon of 1955, either. What will the norms of 2055 look like, and could we see them from where we stand today? We might, because culture is a lens, not a hood. Well used, our culture helps us improve our focus both near and long-range.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about how you see our community culture in transition at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.