Culture and Anonymity
The Other Voice of Los pasos perdidos
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3873797 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen D Gingerich (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 229-255 |
| Publication date | 2001-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | CR The New Centennial Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1532-687X • E-ISSN: 1539-6630 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/ncr.2003.0038 |
| OpenAlex | W2074545074 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 2 |
OUR USE OF THE WORD CULTURE BETRAYS AN AMBIGUITY THAT, WE MIGHT SAY, belongs to us, to what we call our "culture." On the one hand we use it to refer to a communal unit defined variously by language, customs, politics, to some extent even geography or physiology. On the other hand, we use the word to refer to art, literature, and learning, to what Germans call "das Geistliche," as in Geisteswissenschaften, what we in the United States call the Liberal Arts. This second sense tends to ignore the boundaries of the first: a cultured German has exposure to more or less the same things as a cultured Spaniard or a cultured American. That this access differs in selection and judgment according to the country or even the region alerts us to the tension embodied in our usage of the word. One sense excludes through its drawing together of a particular community among other communities and the other sense creates a rift in each community's self-containment, introducing it into what it otherwise excludes and providing entrée for others to intervene in it. One can speak, for example, of a French reception of Faulkner, or of the German encounter with Greece. "Cultures" are concerned with their own internal coherence while "culture" lets in and addresses what lies [End Page 229] outside individual cultures. In a temporal dimension, cultures concern themselves with their own present, where the past is understood as a history from which the present has stepped, and the future is understood as the provisional aim of present actions. "Culture" in the other sense hearkens to the past and projects itself into the future, opening the present to what might seem in danger of being lost or to the range of future possibilities
Aesthetics · Anonymity · Art · Embodied cognition · German · Linguistics · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Computer Science · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious and Theological Studies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |