Construing culture: Plain talk
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
School of Education, University of Haifa (Israel)
Abstract
On the basis of an intuition that in every group there is a particular
'atmosphere' or ambience, academic studies treat culture as a concrete
phenomenon. But there are still lively arguments about what the ambience
consists of, about what should be included under the heading of 'culture,'
about how to determine its boundaries, and how to differentiate one culture
from another. After surveying some of the debates, I will point out
that culture is best thought of as no more, but also no less, than an on-going
construction of ordinary people in everyday life. From an analysis
of a corpus of 'plain talk', recorded in Hebrew and in Arabic, with tools
de-rived from PCT, I will draw some conclusions about how popular culture
is currently being constructed in Israel. The analysis of 'plain
talk', demonstrates that despite the insistence of fundamentalist groups
on segmenting the population according to religions, ordinary people are
creating shared understandings in an Israeli culture that is evolving beyond
the realm of the religious establishments.
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