Your posts always give me a lot to think about, and it's easy to lose 2-3 hours to looking up a lot of the things you talk about, be it folk instruments or dance styles or languages or a time period in a country's history.
Your journal is like brain sex; always leaves the nerd in a person satisfied, always brings them back for more.
Or I guess that's kind of like brain heroine, but whatever...
The entire notion of culture is something I struggle with constantly. When I first went to a public school (I was homeschooled until jr. high.) I had quite a shock during a conversation among some other students about heritage. Some were from Mexican families, or mixed heritage families, one kid was Korean and in addition to being a fine artist was the first person who told me that Korean Surnames came first, etc... But when I said "My family is mostly of German descent I think, and some Scottish and random Scandinavian I think..." suddenly everybody started telling me I was a Nazi.
So yeah, my relationship with culture has always been... difficult.
But later on I took some sociology classes, which I enjoyed for the most part, despite some pretty heated arguments with the teacher, who's views I generally opposed in some fashion. But the thing that I was continually reminded of, in large part because I was taking a lot of philosophy and psych classes at the same time, was how there's a big difference between how we label things in our minds, and categorize our thoughts, and how things can actually be categorized in an objective sense.
When you apply that to culture it becomes nearly impossible to get any sort of firm grasp on things, because it's almost all conceptual in nature, but at the same time you get huge political ramifications that have a very dramatic and objective effect on the world and population. That's ridiculously complicated just to think about, let alone actually discuss or formulate opinions on.
So at this point I kind of sway back and forth between doing everything I can to strip myself of any cultural affiliation, and this desire to be deeply mired in some sort of all-encompassing tradition of sorts, something that is highly ritualistic and despite being completely arbitrary in nature, feels completely solid and transcendent.
Sometimes I think the biggest difference between people and computers is our ability to continue operating when we are faced with two entirely different sets of operational parameters as though nothing was even wrong.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-05-04 10:25 pm (UTC)Your journal is like brain sex; always leaves the nerd in a person satisfied, always brings them back for more.
Or I guess that's kind of like brain heroine, but whatever...
The entire notion of culture is something I struggle with constantly. When I first went to a public school (I was homeschooled until jr. high.) I had quite a shock during a conversation among some other students about heritage. Some were from Mexican families, or mixed heritage families, one kid was Korean and in addition to being a fine artist was the first person who told me that Korean Surnames came first, etc... But when I said "My family is mostly of German descent I think, and some Scottish and random Scandinavian I think..." suddenly everybody started telling me I was a Nazi.
So yeah, my relationship with culture has always been... difficult.
But later on I took some sociology classes, which I enjoyed for the most part, despite some pretty heated arguments with the teacher, who's views I generally opposed in some fashion. But the thing that I was continually reminded of, in large part because I was taking a lot of philosophy and psych classes at the same time, was how there's a big difference between how we label things in our minds, and categorize our thoughts, and how things can actually be categorized in an objective sense.
When you apply that to culture it becomes nearly impossible to get any sort of firm grasp on things, because it's almost all conceptual in nature, but at the same time you get huge political ramifications that have a very dramatic and objective effect on the world and population. That's ridiculously complicated just to think about, let alone actually discuss or formulate opinions on.
So at this point I kind of sway back and forth between doing everything I can to strip myself of any cultural affiliation, and this desire to be deeply mired in some sort of all-encompassing tradition of sorts, something that is highly ritualistic and despite being completely arbitrary in nature, feels completely solid and transcendent.
Sometimes I think the biggest difference between people and computers is our ability to continue operating when we are faced with two entirely different sets of operational parameters as though nothing was even wrong.