Interpreting Culture

December 17: Discussion of the nature and meaning of a liberal arts education. The course will culminate in January with a round of student presentations.

Have a good holiday!

December 10: We completed the assigned sections of Madan Sarup’s discussion of Foucault, “Technical rationality” and “Sexuality and power,” and discussed further the Foucauldian understanding of positive power and the ways it differs from more common understandings of power as a constricting or restraining force. We’ll finish our discussions of Foucault in the December 17 seminar. Student presentations will occupy our last seminar meeting, January 7.

December 3: No class.

November 26: Continued discussion of Foucault, particularly the major themes of Discipline and Punish.

November 19: Continued discussion of Sarup’s Foucault (see November 5), including the sections “Reason and unreason,” “ A struggle over meaning,” and the beginning of “Disciplinary power.” We’ll begin next week with a continuation of “Disciplinary power” and from there on to “Technical rationality” and “Sexuality and power.”

November 12: Discussion of the opening pages of Sarup’s introduction to Foucault, with emphasis on the nature of Foucault’s genealogical understanding of history. Questions addressed included these: 1) Why would anyone want to do a geneaological analysis? What is the purpose of such an analysis? 2) If a geneaological analysis demonstrates that present discourses and practices are strange, abnormal, not higher or necessarily better than other discourses and practices, does this mean that all discourses and practices are equal, that we have no mechanism for determining the relative goodness or badness of a discursive construction?

November 5: The Geertz material wasn’t working in the way I had hoped it might, and so we’re shifting persepctives. The seminar today consisted of a brief and mainly biographical and historical overview of Michel Foucault, and the reading for the November 12 seminar is Madan Sarup’s introduction to Foucault in Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (1993). Particular students have been asked to prepare a brief overview of particular parts of the text.

October 22: To facilitate understanding of what Geertz is reacting against, we discussed understandings of culture that precede his work, including pre-modern concepts that identified what we now call “culture” with theological, racialist, and evolutionary ideas, and modern understandings that have turned to the positivist methods of the social sciences in an attempt to analyze and describe culture.

Because of the university festival our next seminar meeting will be November 5. New reading may be assigned before that meeting, and so please check this page again by October 29. If no new reading is assigned by then we shall continue with the Geertz essay on November 5.

October 15: We worked through the first short section of Geertz’s “Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” and discussed some of its implications. Particular students were assigned to give informal presentations on the second and third sections of the essay in the October 22 class.

October 8: In the first meeting of this special seminar the topic was the “worldliness” of texts, writers of texts, and readers of texts, and the ways this worldliness must affect our own writing and reading.

Homework for the October 15 seminar is Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.”