Week 3 Seminar Notes

Seminar Outline
1. HOUSEKEEPING (17.30-17.35)

2. INTRODUCTION EXERCISE (17.35-17.50)

3. HOW TO CONTRIBUTE TO DIIGO &amp; WIKI (17.50-18.10)

3A. ESTABLISH PARTICIPATION CRITERIA (18.10-18.20)

4. RE-JIG INTERCULTURAL TEAMS (18.20-18.25)

5. INDIVIDUAL RAT (18.25-18.40)

6. TEAM RAT (18.40-19.00)

7. CHALLENGES (19.10-19.20)

8. LECTURE INPUT – ADDRESS QUESTIONS RE. TEST/READING (19.20-19.45)

9. ACTIVITY – CHINESE NATIONAL IDENTITY (re MIFF article); OZ/SINGAPOREAN NATIONAL IDENTITY

Key Seminar Topics/Questions
Imagined Communities consist of images, ideas, rituals and imaginings marshaled by nations, for example, to encourage national identity.

Culture is linked to collective, intellectual and moral development; to civilisations of which groups may be subjects; to symbolism, the arts, "high culture".

The term "community" has been used to indicate a sense of identity or belonging that may or may not be tied to geographical location. In this sense, a community is formed when people have a reasonably clear idea of who has something in common with them. Communities are, therefore, essentially mental constructs, formed by imagined boundaries between groups. An example of this is the nation as a community. Thus, people will see themselves as a nation united by a set of characteristics and thereby different from other nations even when they could not know personally other members of the imagined community.

Definitions of Culture: Matthew Arnolds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold) defines culture as high vs low; high culture is self evidently elitist and civilized. Raymond Williams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Williams) defined culture as the way of life of people.

This is problematic though, as culture is a complex whole and includes morals, arts, customs etc. Also it makes the basic assumption that culture can be defined as distinct characteristics shared by its members - eg. nationality, national identity. It treats nation as if it is unified even though national cultures are also broken up into "subcultures". However, nation - like knowledge - is always constructed and open to change and contestation.

Culture, therefore, is any identity which is always contestable, never static, constantly evolving. Culture can be understood as providing a "meaning system", models and way of thinking establishing our own identity. Culture is the basis on which thoughts and actions are grounded. Furthermore, culture defines the means of communication, it is integral of the representation of a nation, its people, things and practice. Culture is differentially valued and systematically patterned.

Culture is contrasted with the biological; human behaviour is seen as culturally and not genetically or biologically determined. In addition, culture as way of life, social groups may be differentiated from each other by their differing attitudes, beliefs, language, custom, and convention. Such differentiations may occur at different levels. For example, youth culture may be separated from each other by their different ways of life, as may generations or social classes. It is clear that whole societies have different cultures or ways of life. In these circumstances, it becomes less clear whether or not such societies can be said to have a common culture.

New Asian: people in a country or culture that is very much influenced by Western modernity but remain Asian at the very core. The example of 'New Asian' would be poeple of Singapore. They accommodate the consequences of Western modernity but remain Asian at their very core, as Chinese, Indian and Malay who carry their own long historical memories and tradition. (Second Reading, p. 190)

Glossary
Anyhow, I wanted to add to the definitions here:

Taken from p 34 of "Imagined Communities" : ..."One pound of sugar flows onto the next; each book has its own eremitic self -sufficiency"

Eremitic: characterized by ascetic solitude; "the eremitic element in the life of a religious colony"; "his hermitic existence " (© 2003-2008 Princeton University, Farlex Inc)

This is also taken from p 34 of "Imagined Communities" : "...the newspaper is merely an extreme form of a book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity".

ephemeralAdjective - lasting only for a short time [Greek hēmera day] (Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 © HarperCollins Publishers 2004, 2006)

Communications artefacts refer to anything that communicates such as newspaper.