Cross-Cultural

Posted in: Cross-Cultural
Greg Urban – Metaculture, How Culture Moves through the World
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17 Aug. 2004 - 11:34:00 AM

Greg Urban – Metaculture, How Culture Moves through the World – pub. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2001

I found this book interesting and it illuminated some issues relating to culture for me. The following are just some brief notes, but I found that concept of metaculture useful and like Urban's focus on the importance of "newness" in contemporary Western culture. This book is written for a specialized audience and I think that it needs wider exposure.

Notes:

Culture is necessarily characterized by its “oneness”.  It has been. But culture is also on its way somewhere – whether or not it gets there – and hence, it is also characterized by its futurity.

Culture passes from one individual to another and carries values and JUDGEMENTS!

The judgement will be encoded in another material entity, a story or some other transmitting vehicle.

“One aspect of culture … is not only its inherent dynamism, its built-in propensity for change, but also its ability to generate self-interpretations or self-understandings that help to define what change or sameness is.”

[metacultural tools]

“I propose to take care to distinguish the metaculture of modernity from the cultural processes that the metaculture seeks to define.”

Page 237 – “But I also believe that the metaculture of newness has assumed unprecedented significance in the West during the past five hundred years – we are at the flood stage.  The flood is a factor – perhaps even the key factor – in the organization of social space in the United States, western Europe, and elsewhere.  A retreat from this organization would involve a major tidal shift in the history of cultural motion.”

See pages 254 and 255 for a discussion of the nature of national cultures.

Page 272-

Culture consists of two parts: one cuts pathways through the cloud chamber of sensuous experience (the cultural part); the other etches an image of those objects and pathways onto the diaphanous membrane of intelligible understanding (the metacultural part).  Between the two,  the palpable realm of things and the numinous realm of meanings, an improbable passage takes place.  Culture ratifies, and then, suddenly, as if riding some great electrical arc into the heavens, ascends from object to reflection, and then back again. In the process, matter gets converted into meaning, meaning back into matter.