Culture is... Hall of World Cultures, university museum

4 dimensions of culture: diverse, adaptive, dynamic, symbolic [click photo for larger view]

A quiet Saturday afternoon late in January was a chance to return for a visit to the Michigan State University Museum after several years. Some wide ranging reflections on the presentation of artifacts appears in this blog about museums following this day's brief visit. Part of the permanent exhibition is the Hall of World Cultures, above. Several of the glass cases go beyond the region-specific presentations and address the anthropological uses for the concept of culture. Among trained professionals in scholarly settings or in private sector social analysis the range of meanings for this term is wide, each person emphasizing the facets they know best: culture's integral place in language and thought, culture as extension of physical interface with the Earth's habitats and other creatures and resources there, culture as secondary to political economy, culture as source of meaning, culture as learned and shared and partly flexible but partly conservative and long-lasting, and so on.

In this photo the analytical overview of culture divides into the four facets (displayed from right to left): culture is symbolic, dynamic, adaptive, diverse. Synonyms are many but could restate these four as culture is: meaningful, flexible, reactive to circumstances, and multi-form. The display case illustrates each of the facets with material culture drawn from many different parts of the world to show that the assertion indeed fits all these contrasting examples. Other display cases focus on just one of the facets, such as "culture is adaptive" in the illustration of teapots of China from various locations, materials, and eras.

illustration for "culture is adaptive" [click photo for bigger view]

Perhaps the widest definition that encompasses the four facets in this permanent display, along with many others, is to say that "culture is what gives shape to your life." Much like the philosophers of design who say that "everything around you has a specific shape; many times it was a person or group of people who determined that form." So, too, of culture informing and shaping your thinking, speaking, actions, life plans, daily habits, procedures to solve problems - indeed, the ways to identify what counts as a "problem," all these things stem from the system of meanings and methods inherited, adapted, expressed, and handed down.

As someone who studied anthropology at college and went on to graduate school for more of the same, eventually teaching and writing anthropology, participating in conferences, conversations, and committee work, the idea of culture is like an old family friend. But to see it here in the Hall of World Cultures at first gave the feeling of seeing it with fresh eyes. After all, when you swim in these waters it so easily is taken for granted. But when you are a fish out of the water for a moment, then you see it from a little distance and are granted a moment with which to look at it plainly. In this instance at the MSU Museum, what does it mean to show the visitors that culture is diverse in the many channels and forms it takes; that it is adaptive to circumstances that come and go; that it is dynamic in changing moment by moment as a living thing; and that it is symbolic and carries meanings tied to other themes in the society and land and seasons that comprise the context for living?

The collection of meanings, practices, and organizing themes bequeathed by elders and lived out in the current generations is vast and multifarious: vague perceptions, articulated ideas, verbalized patterns and responses to cues, social relationships and structures of status, technologies that put knowledge and sometimes wisdom into functional physical form, and relationships with landscape and seascape by which livelihoods are made and lifetimes are made meaningful. So each of the four declarations, above, offer separate organizing standpoints to look at the vastness of a single culture or to look comparatively across boundaries and over the span of generations.

Thinking about some possible reactions by visitors to the "culture is..." descriptions, the authoritative language could put the reader into the framework of looking up something in an encyclopedia: it is no-nonsense language, leaves little room for doubt of the meaning, and may bear traces of lecturing to the ear of someone ignorant of the scholarly (technical term and) meaning of 'culture'. Furthermore, unless the reader can somehow see what is being pointed out in the display case or by considering personal experiences with living in the society just outside the museum walls, then the explanations will ring empty; not true or urgent. Hopefully, though, at least a few visitors will embrace some of the meanings being expressed and then go out into the light of day outside the museum and start to notice things about the built landscape, social interactions, the natural landscape and people's livelihoods, the many ways that language is used to create meaning, and the ways that a person's mindset colors the world around them.

In conclusion, seeing the label text and artifacts to illustrate "culture is..." here in the MSU Museum, the directness of the explanation (culture is diverse, dynamic, adaptive, and symbolic) and the physical examples of each concept do effectively express the kinds of things that social scientists mean by 'culture'. But since the lens is turned toward 'exotic' other people or historical societies from which artifacts were obtained, it is probably difficult for many visitors to make the mental leap and look in the mirror (turning the lens around to study one's own ways of doing things) to see culture in personal, interpersonal, and society-scale patterns and relationships. In other words, the display at the museum shines a light on the presence and significance of documenting and understanding the structures of people's culture. But it does not go so far as to operationalize the concept for the visitors to examine their own day-in, day-out experiences using this term. And yet, to demonstrate the importance and insight of culture for understanding others AND equally to understand one's own line of family, community, and ideas is a worthwhile step and unifies one's own familiar society with all those unfamiliar people around the world and the societies of other centuries, too. By putting all ways of life onto an even playing field, the common humanity is expressed: exotic is de-exoticized and familiar is de-familiarized.  Each lived experience has meaning and value.

Nomos and Physis, ancient tools to separate meaning from mass

One of the enduring lessons from a college freshman course on Western Civilization (fall semester, Ancient Greece; spring semester Ancient Rome) is the distinction made by Thucydides and philosophers of the time between the meaning of an event in the eyes of the participants (the insider perspective) and the cold, hard facts of the matter - things like mass, friction, destruction or creation, and so on. The humanized meaning of the situation is nomos, while the interpretation stripped of local significance and bias and historical context is physis. The line from Shakespeare comes to mind, "A rose by any other name smells so sweet." Whatever you may call it, or attach symbolic or other meaning and memories to it, still there is the unfiltered sensory impression of its perfume. Looking at the subjects below, this same distinction can be made between what a subject means in everyday recognition of meaning or importance (possibly taken for granted as no urgent significance) on the one hand, and the physis way of seeing it, stripped of those common, familiar and unexamined meanings.

click the image for full-size display

display case at nature center, Hemlock Crossing (Ottawa Co. parks) 4/2019

 In the days before electric or gas-powered tools, this collection of equipment would have comprised much of what was needed to fell trees, strip the branches, and size the body of the tree for transportation out of the forest. The power and know-how of head, hands, and muscle memory was supplied by people and draft animals, mainly during the cold season, when water and marshy ground would be frozen solid and sometimes have a cover of snow or ice to reduce the friction. Each piece of gear had its name and masterful techniques to get the best results from it. Today there are few, if any, people who know these things gained long ago by experience and word of mouth. So the nomos of this scene during the heyday of lumbering is gone, but visitors who glance at the display case of these now static curiosities at least have an inkling of the topic of chopping down tall trees. The reader-friendly display text fills in the many blanks in the minds of people today.  But how does this arrangement of once-loved and coveted gear look from the physis perspective? Removing all user-generated lore and love of the hand tools and ox or horse-harnessed hardware, what remains is a collection of iron implements, possibly forged or hammered into designs that people long ago intended and made from raw materials perhaps mined from the iron fields of northern Minnesota or Michigan's ore fields in the Upper Peninsula. The engineered precision, or lack thereof; the capacity of maximum use before wearing out or breaking; the relative cost of one piece compared to another - all these things fit into the physis way of thinking about things. Then there is the empirical question of what effect or results did these kinds of technology accomplish in the surrounding counties of this modern-day nature center for outdoor education? In other words, how many thousands of mature trees of prized species were 'logged out' (exhausted); how many wages were paid; how many injuries and deaths of workers; how many families were sustained by this enterprise; and so on? This sort of functional, bloodless, empirical, and results-oriented vision is what makes physis free from value, persuasive intent, spin or bias, or any local memory and meaning. By considering both interpretations --the culturally saturated one and the coldly empirical one --it is possible to arrive at a much wider view of a subject than from just one interpretive standpoint.

scrap yard with database of hundreds of junk cars to sell intact or salvage pieces to the public - St. Johns, Michigan

Nomos: each car has a story that begins at its conception in a design team, then manufacture and marketing, dealer and buyer, precipitating accident and disposal in auction for salvage wrecks, and then transportation to this owner and the efforts to sell pieces that together equal or exceed the acquisition cost of auction, transport, and storage here. Physis: each of the steps along the timeline above can be viewed with a cold, hard eye so that things like attractions, hopes or wishes or plans, as well as routines and expectations are all disregarded and only the existential facts of velocity, geo-spatial location, coefficient of friction (tire gripping the road; aerodynamics in all weather conditions), and similar considerations are watched until the moment of collision and what follows. For the purpose of physis interpretation the wrecks assembled at this scrapyard are sets of glass, rubber, plastic and steel, along with fluids and all sorts of oxidation from exposure to month after month of temperature changes and precipitation. The combined picture of physis and nomos presents a scene of so many collision artifacts that communicate the whole arc of human thrill and pride to horror and harm.

cardboard (recycling) collection cages, neighborhood discount store 3/2019

Household recycling at curbside and the recyclable waste from retail (here) or factories have been hugely successful at reducing the mass each day that is collected and stacked in the long-term storage provided by solid waster landfills. Some materials are readily reused or repurposed, but other things depend on companies willing to buy and make use of the stream of sorted recyclables. Ideally the recycling services receive enough income to offset their operational costs, or even better, they contribute to the county or the city general budget. But that does not always come to pass, so taxpayers have to pay something or else reduce local government services to pay for that shortfall. In this photo behind a discount store where much of the low-cost inventory travels from small and large suppliers across the Pacific Ocean around China, there is a daily pile of cardboard packaging, seen in collapsed form here. The nomos point of view attaches meaning to the value of recycling (good for the environment; good for reducing expenses paid to landfill haulers), the work of unboxing and shelving each day's shipments from distribution warehouses, and the overall tidiness or untidiness of the grounds adjacent to the store. The physis point of view includes the great distances the products have traveled and the carbon footprint involved in producing, packaging, delivering, and then disposing of the packing and eventually also discarding the product once consumed, broken, or redundant.

April 2, 2019 obituary page, Lansing State Journal

Among news service staff writers of death notices there kudos for especially well-written tributes to a person's life. Not every death results in a newspaper obituary, though. Some are supplied by the bereaved family or friends. Occasionally they are composed by the person's own hand in the time leading up to their own death. In this photo at the top left the compact list of name, age, city of residence, death date, and company providing funeral arrangements sheds some light on the situation during a springtime week in Lansing, Michigan and surrounding towns: most of the ages at death indicate full lifetimes, the mix of men and women can be seen, as well. Knowing more about how come certain people's obituary are published, but others are not would be interesting to find out. Printing requires money, the task of writing and submitting the text, but also involves the survivor's sense of propriety (*should* an obituary be part of the dying process or not) and sense of public versus private information. A few people may take into consideration the genealogists of the future who turn to obituaries to gather the names of kin and kith published in a public record like newspaper (or online archives). The nomos interpretation touches on all of these facets of published death notices. The physis view is simplified and streamlined, focusing on distribution of age, gender, home city, funeral service provider, and so on.

rectory (left), St. Joseph church, and community center in Pewamo, Michigan

For a very small farming town in middle Michigan like this one, the ethnic roots of many residents and family habits connect them actively or passively to this space where religious services and events of the passing years take place. Clergy have come and gone who have occupied the rectory building during their time in residence providing services to parishioners. The life cycle of the worship space at the church has gone from dream to plans to construction and consecration to decades of use up to the present and finally, one day in the future, reconstruction or demolition and rebuilding will also take place. However, the rates of participation in mainline churches has declined in the distracted age of Internet. So the amount of cooperation, concentration of money and intention needed to launch any kind of building project seems less and less likely as time goes on. Maybe this existing building will be maintained for generations to come, rather than rebuild in current technology and energy saving improvements. Years ago when large families and economic boom years created larger populations, the need to expand the indoor seating might have led to changes in the building and grounds. But as numbers stagnate or fall, the need for bigger spaces is not a concern. The nomos perspective on the subject of this stitched panorama scene is centered on the many lives touched by the making and ongoing use of the building and grounds here on formal occasions and for casual uses, too. Things like memories, intentions, credit/blame or accountability, and so on attach to these places and make it meaningful. By contrast, the physis angle is to see buildings (design, construction methods and materials, uses or functions of each room) and the schedule of weekly or yearly uses, along with the range in participants involved, as things to study: ignore the local meanings and intentions to emphasize instead the presence or absence of certain actions and the changes in behavior caused (or catalyzed) by a person's involvement with others and the teachings that take place under the worldview of Christians attending.

radio station transmitter tower, west bank of river in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Like the wind that sometimes whistles through the cables securing the transmission tower the conversations and music coming from this radio station are so ephemeral; they simply exist for an instant and then are quickly followed by something else, leaving little trace in the mind or heart of listeners as the motor down the road, sit in their living room or work desk tuned to the radio station, are busy with dog-walking or dishwashing or house painting, or they are lying awake in bed. And yet the ability to communicate over wide areas offered many benefits over print newspapers when it came to public information, (breaking) news, opinion and entertainment. Nowadays some people are experimenting with home radio stations (ultra low-power signals for neighborhood span of service), and digital radios and signals allow ever more concurrent uses of narrower and narrower wavelengths, even as the wireless spectrum of wavelengths is crowded more and more by cellphone transmissions. The nomos interpretation of radio programs, their stations, and their listeners involves content and what it means, why it appeals or irritates, and the kinds of changes it might bring to some listener's lives or, by extension, to the lives of people that listener is engaged with. On the other hand, the physis view focuses on the technical facts of transmission distance, cost, resilience (able to withstand power loss, etc), and the results to people's lives who tune in: does a song, conversation, or piece of news materially or emotionally alter that person's path in life, or at least in that day or hour?

In summary, all these examples captured in photos can be viewed in many ways. On this page just the contrast of nomos and physis are studied. By considering things like meaning and purpose on the one hand, and things like material change or effects caused by the subject in the picture on the other hand, it is possible to produce an expanded understanding of the significance of the people, places, and things that occupy one's ordinary environment and the routines taken for granted there.