NOTION OF LINGUACULTURE

1. Types and elements of culture

2. Unit of culture- meme

Questions for self-examination:

1. Explain the concept of culture.

2. Name the characteristic features of any culture.

3. Define the notion of cultural evolution.

4. Give example on Internet meme.

5. How do memes spread in your community?

Culture is a part of language, just as language is a part of culture and the two partly overlapping realities can intersect in many ways –where the term “linguaculture” may serve. Culture is the sets, associations and cybernetic networks of patterns, regularities, symbols and values (and ideas about them), behavioral, linguistic, and ideological, explicit and implicit, rational and emotional, conscious, unconscious and subconscious, that are differentially shared, transmitted in history, and created (or recreated) by the members, as individual agents or collectively, of a given society si situated in concrete time and space.

Culture is perhaps the most complex and comprehensive category in the history of mankind, which is comparable just to the phenomenon of life in general. Culture (Latin: cultura, lit. "Cultivation") is a modern concept based on a term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman orator Cicero: "cultura animi" (cultivation of the soul). This non-agricultural use of the term "culture" re-appeared in modern Europe in the 17th century referring to the betterment or refinement of individuals, especially through education. During the XVIII and XIX century it came to refer more frequently to the common reference points of whole peoples, and discussion of the term was often connected to national aspirations or ideals. Some scientists such as Edward Tylor used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity. In the 20th century, "culture" emerged as a central concept in Anthropology, encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be directly attributed to genetic inheritance. Specifically, term "culture" in Anthropology had two meanings:

1. Evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and

2. Distinct ways that people, who live differently, classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively.

Culture is described as an integrated system of learned behavior patterns which are characteristic of the members of a society and which are not a result of biological inheritance.

Culture – set of patterns of human activity within a society or social group and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. Customs, laws, dress, architectural style, social standards, religious beliefs, and traditions are all examples of cultural elements.

Elements of culture

The Arts – vast subdivision of culture composed of many creative endeavors and disciplines. The art encompasses visual arts, literary arts and the performing arts.

Gastronomy – the art and science of good eating, including the study of food and culture.

Food preparation – act of preparing foodstuffs for eating. It encompasses a vast range of methods, tools, and combinations of ingredients to improve the flavour and digestibility of food.

Food and drink-

Cuisines – a cuisine is a specific set of cooking traditions and practices, often associated with a specific culture.

Literature – the art of written works.

Children's literature – stories, books, and poems for children.

Fiction – any form of narrative which deals, in part or in whole, with events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary and invented by its author(s). See below.

Non-fiction – form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be factual.

Poetry – literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning.

Critical theory – examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities.

Performing arts – those forms of art that use the artist's own body, face, and presence as a medium.

Dance – art form of movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction, or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.

Film – moving pictures, the art form that records performances visually.

Theatre – collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place.

Music – art form the medium of which is sound and silence.

Music genres

Jazz – musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States, mixing African and European music traditions.

Opera – art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (called a libretto) and musical score.

Musical instruments – devices created or adapted for the purpose of making musical sounds.

Guitars – the guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with either nylon or steel strings.

Stagecraft – technical aspects of theatrical, film, and video production. It includes, but is not limited to, constructing and rigging scenery, hanging and focusing of lighting, design and procurement of costumes, makeup, and procurement of props, stage management, and recording and mixing of sound.

Visual arts – art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature.

Architecture – The art and science of designing and erecting buildings and other physical structures.

Classical architecture – architecture of classical antiquity and later architectural styles influenced by it.

Crafts – recreational activities and hobbies that involve making things with one's hands and skill.

Drawing – visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium.

Film – moving pictures.

Painting – practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface with a brush or other object.

Photography – art, science, and practice of creating pictures by recording radiation on a radiation-sensitive medium, such as a photographic film, or electronic image sensors.

Sculpture – three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials - typically stone such as marble - or metal, glass, or wood.

Entertainment – any activity which provides a diversion or permits people to amuse themselves in their leisure time. Entertainment is generally passive, such as watching opera or a movie.

• Games – structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment, involving goals, rules, challenge, and interaction and presence as a medium.

• Fiction – any form of narrative which deals, in part or in whole, with events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary and invented by its author(s).

• James Bond – fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming. Since then, the character has grown to icon status, featured in many novels, movies, video games and other media.

• Fantasy – genre of fiction using magic and the supernatural as primary elements of plot, theme or setting, often in imaginary worlds, generally avoiding the technical/scientific content typical of Science fiction, but overlapping with it

• Middle-earth – fantasy setting by writer J.R.R. Tolkien, home to hobbits, orcs, and many other mystical races and creatures.

• Science fiction – a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible (or at least nonsupernatural) content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities. Exploring the consequences of scientific innovations is one purpose of science fiction, making it a "literature of ideas".

• Sports – organized, competitive, entertaining, and skillful activity requiring commitment, strategy, and fair play, in which a winner can be defined by objective means. Generally speaking, a sport is a game based in physical athleticism. Ball games

• Basketball – team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules.

• Cricket – bat-and-ball team sport, the most popular form played on an oval-shaped outdoor arena known as a cricket field at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard (20.12 m) long pitch that is the focus of the game.

• Tennis – sport usually played between two players (singles) or between two teams of two players each (doubles), using specialized racquets to strike a felt-covered hollow rubber ball over a net into the opponent's court.

• Canoeing and kayaking – two closely related forms of watercraft paddling, involving manually propelling and navigating specialized boats called canoes and kayaks using a blade that is joined to a shaft, known as a paddle, in the water.

• Combat sports

• Fencing – family of combat sports using bladed weapons. It is also known as French swordfighting or French swordfencing.

• Martial arts – extensive systems of codified practices and traditions of combat, practiced for a variety of reasons, including self-defense, competition, physical health and fitness, as well as mental and spiritual development.

• Cycling sport – bicycle racing and track cycling.

• Motorcycling – riding a motorcycle. A variety of subcultures and lifestyles have been built up around motorcycling and motorcycle racing.

• Running – moving rapidly on foot, during which both feet are off the ground at regular intervals (Bronze Age ca. BC 3000 – Late Antiquity ca. AD 300–600); especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.

• Mass media – diversified media technologies and their content that are intended to reach a large audience by mass communication. Includes radio and television programming; mass publishing of books, magazines, and newspapers; web content; and films and audio recordings.

• Tradition - A tradition is a belief or behavior passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes (like lawyer wigs or military officer spurs), but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings. Traditions can persist and evolve for thousands of years—the word "tradition" itself derives from the Latin tradere or traderer literally meaning to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping. While it is commonly assumed that traditions have ancient history, many traditions have been invented on purpose, whether that is political or cultural, over short periods of time.

• Celebration, festivals – entertainment events centering on and celebrating a unique aspect of a community, usually staged by that community.

• Tourism – travel for recreational, leisure, or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes". Tourism is important, and in some cases, vital for many countries.

Cultures by aspect

• Consumer culture – a society based on consumerism

• High context culture – a culture with the tendency use high context messages, resulting in catering towards in-groups

• Low context culture – culture with a tendency not to cater towards in-groups

• Remix culture – a society which allows and encourages derivative works

• Participatory culture – a culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers)

• Permission culture – a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased

• Primitive culture – a community that lacks major signs of economic development or modernity

Cultural cross-sections

• Children's culture – cultural phenomena pertaining to children

• Children's street culture – cumulative culture created by young children

• Coffee culture – social atmosphere or series of associated social behaviors that depends heavily upon coffee –, particularly as a social lubricant –

• Culture of capitalism – the lifestyle of the people living within a capitalist society, and the effects of a global or national capitalist economy on a population

• DIY culture – refers to a wide range of elements in non-mainstream society, such as grassroots political and social activism, independent music, art, and film

• Dominant culture – the established language, religion, behavior, values, rituals, and social customs of a society

• Drinking culture – the customs and practices of people who drink alcoholic beverages

• Folk culture – traditional culture; traditional cultural traits of a community

• Low culture – is a derogatory term for some forms of popular culture that have mass appeal. Its contrast is high culture. (Reality television, popular music)

• High culture –is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture.

• Official culture – is the culture that receives social legitimation or institutional support in a given society. Official culture is usually identified with bourgeoisie culture.

• Political culture – Political culture is defined by the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences as "the set of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behavior in the political system".

• Popular culture – totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that permeate the everyday lives of a given society, especially those heavily influenced by mass media.

• Print culture – is defined by the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences as "the set of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behavior in the political system". It encompasses both the political ideals and operating norms of a polity. Political culture is thus the manifestation in aggregate form of the psychological and subjective dimensions of politics. A political culture is the product of both the collective history of a political system and the life histories of the members of the system and thus it is rooted equally in public events and private experience"

• Safety culture – the way in which safety is managed in the workplace, which often reflects "the attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to safety."

• Tea culture – is defined by the way tea is made and consumed, by the way the people interact with tea, and by the aesthetics surrounding tea drinking, it includes aspects of: tea production, tea brewing, tea arts and ceremony, society, history, health, ethics, education, and communication and media issues.

• Trash culture –is used for labeling the cultural by-products of modernism. These include television, fast-food, mass media, cars, popular music, teenage culture, movies, professional sports, tabloids, comic books, cartoons, shopping malls, amusement parks, carnivals, casinos, supermarkets and the like.

• Urban culture –is the culture of cities. Cities all over the world, past and present, have behaviors and cultural elements that separate them from otherwise comparable rural areas.

• Vernacular culture – s a term used in the modern study of geography and cultural studies. It refers to cultural forms made and organised by ordinary people for their own pleasure, in modern societies. Such culture is almost always engaged in on a non-profit and voluntary basis, and is almost never funded by the state.

Subcultures

• Alternative culture – exists outside or on the fringes of mainstream or popular culture, usually under the domain of one or more subcultures.

• Counterculture – Counterculture (also written counter-culture) is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, orsubculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior deviates from the societal norm.

• Oppositional culture – also known as the ‘’blocked opportunities framework’’ or the “caste theory of education”, is a term most commonly used in studying the sociology of education to explain racial disparities in educational achievement, particularly between white and black Americans. However, the term refers to any subculture's rejection of conformity to prevailing norms and values, not just nonconformity within the educational system. Thus many criminal gangs and religious cults could also be considered oppositional cultures.

• Security culture – is a set of customs shared by a community whose members may engage in illegal or sensitive activities, the practice of which minimizes the risks of such activities being subverted, or targeted for sabotage. The term is used in the context of activist groups and movements, particularly ones that might be involved in direct action, but it is also in use in most corporations, and certain arms of government. The main focus of a security culture is keeping infiltrators and other potentially damaging parties out.

Underground culture (disambiguation) – An underground culture is a subculture or counterculture that exists outside the scope of mainstream mass media and popular culture. It may also refer to:

• Underground comix, small press or self-published alternative comic books

• Underground economy or black market, commerce under the radar of taxes and regulations

• Underground film, cinema outside the commercial mainstream

• Underground music, music with a following despite moderate commercial success

• Underground hip hop, a style of hip hop music

• Underground art, art with a following independent of commercial success

• Underground press, the alternative print media in the late 1960s and early 1970s

• UK underground, a 1960s countercultural movement in the United Kingdom

Cultures by ethnicity or ethnic sphere

• Western culture

• Anglo America

• Latin American culture

• Anglosphere

• African American culture

• Indosphere

• Sinosphere

• Islamic culture

• Arab culture

• Tibetan culture

Cultures of continents and major geopolitical regions

• Culture of Africa

• Culture of Antarctica

• Culture of Asia

• Culture of Europe

• Culture of North America

• Culture of Oceania

• Culture of Australia

• Culture of South America

It should be noted that the concept of "units of culture" itself is relatively new. One of the earliest references (1945) about the "unity of culture" belongs to M. Herskovits, famous American anthropologist, one of the disciples and followers of F.Boas. W. Durham, pondering over what could be a unit of culture, expressed the judgment that it should:

1) to include information that is actually or potentially determines the behavior;

2) to fit variable size, type and ways of organizing the information, which represents a set hierarchy and integration;

3) subdivided into arrays of information that is transmitted in the form of various coherent, functional units.

A meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme (from Ancient Greek mīmēma, "imitated thing") and it was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches. Proponents theorize that memes may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influence a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.

A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behaviour. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.

Memes reproduce by copying from a nervous system to another one, either by communication or imitation. Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behaviour of another individual. Communication may be direct or indirect, where memes transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score. Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":

1. Quantity of parenthood: an idea that influences the number of children one has. Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas that directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.

2. Efficiency of parenthood: an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents. Cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication—because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.

3. Proselytic: ideas generally passed to others beyond one's own children. Ideas that encourage the proselytism of a meme, as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate memes horizontally through a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child meme-transmissions do.

4. Preservational: ideas that influence those that hold them to continue to hold them for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.

5. Adversative: ideas that influence those that hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those that hold them. Adversative replication can give an advantage in meme transmission when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes.

6. Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them. Cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission. Memes spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating.

7. Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.

An Internet meme is an idea, style or action which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet, as with imitating the concept. Some notable examples include posting a photo of people in public places lying down planking and uploading a short video of people dancing to the Harlem Shake.

A meme can be considered a mimicked theme, including simple phrases or gestures. An Internet meme may take the form of an image, hyperlink, video, picture, website, or hashtag. It may be just a word or phrase, including an intentional misspelling. These small movements tend to spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, or news sources.

They may relate to various existing Internet cultures or subcultures, often created or spread on sites and numerous others in our time, or by Usenet boards and other such early-internet communications facilities. Sensations tend to grow rapidly on the Internet, because the instant communication facilitates word-of-mouthtransmission.

LECTURE 9