STARTING POINT
From: Prof. Noam Chomsky
Date: Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: Culture-analysis Institute...
To: Moji Agha <moji.agha@gmail.com>
Dear Moji,
[Despite the difficulties you have faced] I hope you won’t abandon this [culture-analysis] endeavor, which is a promising one, because of my inability to participate in any useful way, the consequence of extremely intense demands, which prevent me from doing a fraction of what I would like...These are imaginative ideas, and I hope they can be pursued.
Noam
---------------------------------------
A SUMMARY
Excerpted from the culture-analysis Institute (culture and conflict) project email for Prof. Chomsky:
...My culture-analytic definition of lived Culture:
Lived culture consists of the integrated characteristics of the world(s) within which the evolving movement of an entity, from immediate experience, through intention [and meaning-formation], expression, and communication, all the way through action and consequence is lived as...internally coherent, as the entity moves from even one moment of its existence to the next.
The word "entity" in this unified interdisciplinary definition of lived culture refers to human individuals, societies, organizations or systems. Entity here also refers to relationships or conflicts that are considered to have evolved to a stage in their development as to have formed "a life of their own."
... In other words and most simply, lived culture may be defined (hereby) as shared human experiences that have left distinct coherent-making meaning imprints on the continued experiences and behaviors of their respective individual and collective entities.
...At the level of individual human persons psychologically, lived culture may be viewed (by way of an analogy) as “personality” -- while in the context of psychological understanding (and treatment) of couples and families, such as in family therapy, that which is called “family script” may be considered the family’s unique lived culture.
In the intercultural sphere, according to this definition of lived culture, cross-cultural communication occurs when an entity (per above), with its own distinct discernible culture, comprehends the culture of another, whether such comprehension is mutual or not, or whether the comprehension leads to any interactional communication (and/or collaboration) or not.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
| |||
April 25, 2018 |
Dear Prof. Chomsky,
...Tonight I watched you and Dr. Daniel Ellsberg live on the Intercept [https://theintercept.com/
...Last November, following our last brief meeting (at The Loft Cinema in Tucson, Arizona) and in subsequent email exchanges, you kindly assessed my Culture-analysis Institute project as "imaginative ideas [that you and certainly I hoped] can be pursued" SOMEHOW...
...The hard fact [is] that "lived culture" is so profoundly unobvious (deeply hidden in plain sight--hence "definitionally unconscious") that it has not been "discovered" so far, because:
a) The universal psychological fact that ordinary consciousness (and especially collective consciousness) RESISTS becoming aware of the "unconscious,"
and
b) Such an "earth-shaking" awareness would potentially threaten many cherished foundations of natural and human sciences AND (therefore) the established SOCIO-ECONOMIC-POLITICAL-ECOLOGICAL order...
...As you know (in part)...in my activism pursuits in the years since 9/11 (all of which you have kindly endorsed) I have seen, deeply painfully, the crying need for paying systematic and DEEP scholarly [and praxis] attention to the profoundly important (unobvious / "unconscious") role of "lived culture" (hence the methodology of culture-analysis--namely a form of hermeneutics); and given who you are, I see no need to explain the depth of the dire problems our Mother Earth is facing due [in major part] to humanity's conflict-causing profound ignorance/neglect of this "invisible cement" (of lived culture) which if it were not so deeply hidden in plain sight, it would have been "discovered" long ago...
-------------------------------------
Another Example of the Hidden Lived Culture--per Culture-analysis:
From: Moji Agha <moji.agha@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 26, 2017
Dear Prof. Chomsky,
Greetings...Below, please find yet another (self-explanatory) example, again in another of your rich interviews, of lived culture, this amazing phenomenon:
The profound UN-obviousness (hence the "unconsciousness," as invisible "cement") of lived culture -- i.e., it being hidden deeply in plain sight -- in this case coming to light in the process of language acquisition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky) Interviewed in 1989 at the University of Washington in Seattle:
NOAM CHOMSKY -- On the relationship between language and culture:
"[...Children] will "unconsciously"] pick up the language of their culture...typically the language of their peers...[i.e.,] what they hear in the streets...Overwhelmingly [they] pick up the peer culture...Why this happens? and how? Nobody knows...There is something about humans, about children, that gets them to grow the language that's roughly that of their peers. And...[this process] is an extremely rich system; They don't try, they can't prevent themselves from doing it, they can't MAKE it happen...
"What actually happens...is really astonishing...[For a child] to learn a new word by just one [or two exposures...is] an amazing achievement...[because] what we call the [dictionary] definition of a word...like table...[is] far from an [actual] definition [of table]...
"[Such] definitions [of words]...are just a few HINTS that [help] persons who ["unconsciously"] already know the concept [of a word] understand what is going on -- [i.e., understand the word's meaning]...The child is not learning...[such a meaning]...from the Oxford Dictionary, but from seeing it used [only] once or twice.
"That can only mean one thing: The concept itself, in all of its richness and complexity, is SOMEHOW ["unconsciously"] sitting there, waiting to have a sound [become] associated with it...
"That's why you and I...[can] essentially have the same concept of table, the same concept of person...of nation, of thing, etc...We [as unrelated adults] have that [shared "unconscious"] understanding of concepts [expressed via words], although we have very limited experience...[with these concepts when] we start [learning them as children]..."
-------------------------------------
...Given the above-mentioned...question of "What is it about our [human] culture that allows us to behave [so madly] ???...in addition to the previously mentioned Culture-analysis Institute dream's "Phase 1" Introduction and Methodology courses...please see in the following list...10 of the project's proposed 25 "Phase 2" (advanced) courses:
1- Culture-analysis of Conflict, Peace, Nonviolence, and Interdependence
2- Culture-analysis of Values, Civility, Ethics, and Proper behavior
3- Culture-analysis of Politics, Governance, Development, and Rights
4- Culture-analysis of Organizations, Corporations, Systems, and Management
5- Culture-analysis of Ideology, Revolutionary change, Social Engineering, and Propaganda
6- Culture-analysis of Force, Military, Discipline, and Social Control
7- Culture-analysis of Religion, Spirituality, Morality, and Transcendence
8- Culture-analysis of Authenticity, Trust, Doubt, and Anxiety
9- Culture-analysis of Philosophy, Wisdom, Truth, and Happiness
10- Culture-analysis of History, Temporality, Societal Evolution, and Change
**************************
Moji Agha's mini-bio (somewhat dated)
**************************
Culture-analysis is the scientific basis for this initiative:
Compassion and Coexistence National Coalition of Iran
Democratic, Non-ideological, Pluralistic, Justice-oriented, Nonviolent
*********************
Continued on the "Introduction--Part 2" Page...
No comments:
Post a Comment