Professor Paisley Currah
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1. As
you read the article, identify and take notes on the many dichotomies or binary
oppositions that Bauman identifies.
2. What
is culture? How does Bauman define it? (See especially pages
143-144.)
3.
Where does the dividing line between nature and culture fall, according to
Bauman? Does the location of this dividing line move? List an
example of this shifting from Bauman and then come up with an example of your
own. (144)
4. Where
does cultural authority come from? (pp. 145- ) What forms does
cultural authority take?
5. Bauman
describes two types of "human-made elements" (145) in our
lives. What are they? (Hint: you might do a chart to compare the
two types of order.) How does are these two orders related? That
is, how does "the order of the world around us" find its counterpart
"in the orderliness of our own behavior" (147). Give an example
of each type of order, and explain how they are interrelated by referring to
your example.
6. Bauman writes,
"An artificial order is successfully established once what used to be
improbable has been transformed into the necessary or inevitable"
(146). Explain what he means first, with reference to an example of his,
and second, by developing your own illustration of this point.
7. What role do structures
play in making sense of our world (149)? List some kinds of
structures. How do oppositions help structure the world (150)? Give
an example or two (at least one of your own).
8. What is the
cultural code (150)? How is it transmitted?
9. What are signs
and what is their function (150)? Bauman writes, "it is the opposition between signs which is meaningful, not a single sign taken
apart" (154) and "[t]here is neither a causal link nor a similarity
between the signs [or signifier, for those who have done some literary theory]
and what they stand for [or signified]" (155). Rather, he argues,
the meaning a any sign is based on the distinction it makes from another sign.
He then illustrates his example on page 155 by examining the system of signs
that create distinctions between the sexes.
10. Bauman writes
that signs are always arbitrary (156) but that to those of us who have learned
the cultural code very well, "people who can move with facility and
without error through the world shaped by a given cultural code"
(156-157), signs "do not seem to be arbitrary at all" (157).
First, what does arbitrary mean? Second, how is it that what is
artificial, the product of cultural coding, can seem natural, inevitable?
Give an example.
11. "Culture
may pass for nature most successfully, without questions being asked, as long
as the artificiality, the conventional character of the norms it propagates
(the fact that these norms could be different from what they are) is not
exposed. And the artificiality is unlikely to be revealed if anyone within
sight has been subjected to the same type of cultural training"
(158). But in fact people do critique norms all the time. How is
this possible, according to Bauman?
12. For today you
are also to read two legal cases, Bradwell
vs. Illinois (1872) and Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins
(1989). In Bradwell, how does Justice Bradley invoke the cultural code to
deny Bradwell's claim? And second, how does the Price Waterhouse decision show how that
very same cultural code has shifted over time? Be specific.