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Studying Culture: Reflective Essay on Raymond Williams, Matthew Arnold and James Clifford
During the first session of the seminar How to study culture, I was expecting to do the usual assignments and maybe prepare texts in order to be able to participate actively in the next session, but I was taught better. I quickly realized that the seminar was completely different to my initial prospects and could was much more interesting compared to other seminars which I had already attended during my master program at Giessen University. I still remember quite well the day when Prof. D. Rostek presented the pill scene from one of most amazing movies, namely Matrix. The movie stands for artifacts that we see and create, or actions we do or experience in our everyday life. This specific scene we were seeing can be referred to one of the best and most important scenes in the whole movie. It not about who plays the role, but what matters is the message behind that pill scene. In this scene Neo, the main character, is offered to decide between the blue pill and continuing to live in a synthesized, fictional and computer-generated world or to take the red pill and joining the real world and escape from the matrix. For a while, I was not able to detect the overall coherence between the movie and our topic culture and I was wondering how we will relate the scene back to our seminar topic. Prof. D. Rostek then asked us, which pill we would choose. I chose the red pill, because I wanted to see the real world and experience it. However, there was another story behind the blue pill, which is the ability to know everything and being expert in life and about other cultures, so there would not be any problem in understanding and communicating with various people from different cultures. It was exactly this moment where I started to realize how interesting this seminar will become and how much knowledge I could gain from the seminar. Especially also in terms of reflecting my personal experiences of the German culture as someone who has another cultural background.
Within the reading process of the first chapter of the book, Studying Culture 1999 by Giles and Middleton, I would like to refer the red pill scene and pills capabilities to the idea of perfection and the concept of culture which defined by Matthew Arnold.
Culture carries with it the idea of perfection or according to the British poet Matthew Arnold The pursuit of perfection (Arnold 1965). Arnold seeks to point out that, culture is a study of perfection, in making things much better than they are. Hence, for Arnold is like a journey to achieve perfection, which is not merely restricted to elite minority, but has to be available to the raw and unkindled masses of humanity (ibid).
After analyzing the opening quotation by Tyler1870, I would argue that, culture can be described as the way we live in a particular society. Culture can be the clothes we dress, the food we eat, the language we speak, and the variety of social celebrations. Culture is the gate into our roots, beliefs, identities, values, and imaginations that are based on art, music, and other social artifacts. My purpose within this diary is to focus on two chapters that we have discussed in the seminar. In the first chapter Defining Culture, I would like to take into consideration the following two main questions. First of all, how would cultural critics such as Raymond Williams, Matthew Arnold and James Clifford define the concept of culture, and how may I define culture according to my personal attitude towards culture. In the second chapter, the paper will shed the light on the topic consumption and how culture influences our consumption behaviors. Afterwards, in the third chapter, the paper discusses the workshop on Studying Climate Change which was held within the seminar. Finally, the fourth chapter illustrates my personal reflection on the seminar Studying Culture, and on the activities that took place inside the seminar room.
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