Cultural Interaction Most Important Concepts

Alienation

The state of depersonalization or loss of identity where the self seems unreal. This often occurs when individuals feel disconnected from their social or cultural environment, leading to negative feelings of isolation.

Social Alienation

is a condition where individuals feel estranged from society, leading to a feeling os isolation. This is when a loss of self occurs due to existence being alienated from essence. A quest for a sense of self after social alienation can become an affective economy.

Affective Economy

A concept that described how emotions act as a currency in society. Feelings like fear, hope, and sympathy, become attached to ideas and therefore influence power. Eg. an advertisement for charity, “finding yourself” can also be a form of affective economy.

Marxist Alienation Theory

Says that workers under capitalism become disconnected from their work, themselves, and others because they do not own what they produce or control how they work. Labour is done to earn wages, not to express purpose, which makes it feel “forced” as a result, workers are separated from their products, their work, and their being.

Urban Anonymity

When you live in a large city where people are surrounded by others but remain largely unknown to those around them. This can be both a positive loss of self and a negative loss of self. Its positive because the individual is free from judgment and negative because it may inflict a sense of isolation.

Performative

Culture as something you DO.

Form-of-life

Culture as something you LIVE.

Communal

Culture as something you SHARE.

Transferable

Culture as something you RECORD. Off

Affective

Culture as something you FEEL.

Weapon/Shield/Shelter

Culture as something you use to inflict harm/make change (martyrdom), culture can be something you use to protect yourself (“loosing yourself”), and culture can be something you use to confine in.

Martyrdom

A form of voluntary self-sacrifice (often religious based) and is seen as an act to enforce change. Ties into culture as a weapon as it inflicts some sort of change.

To “loose yourself” in cultural studies means

To temporarily let go of fixed identity, routines, or social norms and dissolve into something larger. Can be seen as an act of self protection (shield). Eg. prayers, meditation.

Cognitive Dissonance

A mental discomfort you feel when you hold two conflicting beliefs or when your actions dont match what you believe. Eg. you can believe that smoking is not good for you but you can tell yourself ititss not that bad and continue doing it anyway. This can be tied into Franz Fanon’s “Black Skin White Masks”.

The relationship between Cognitive Dissonance and Franz Fanon

In “Black Skin White Masks” CD explains a clash between one’s internal identity and social identity. The colonized are tough through colonialism that European culture is superior whilst being treated as inferior. This distinction causes physiological stress, resulting in some rejecting their own identities.

Roots vs Routes - Urban Selves and Superdiversity

Roots: Refer to ones cultural heritage, tradition, history and identities you inherent.

Routes: Refer to ones movement, migration, travel, and lived experiences that influence your identity overtime.

The two come together to form a changing sense of self and identity.

The “other”

An automatic consequence of contracting ones “self”. This often results in forms of discrimination and can be used to frame “evil” in good vs evil discourse. (Being othered can also be a positive experience for some). Eg. Reagen’s Evil Empire Speech (The Soviet Union).

Communication

Concerns what we are able to share

Understanding

Concerns being in between things, offering insights into different positions w/o sharing them necessarily.

Miscommunication

When people think they have communicated something but their target audience understood them differently.

Structural miscommunication

Something that may be deemed polite in one culture could also be considered impolite in another.

Translation

The process of diminishing the likelihood of miscommunication. They are necessary to form deeper understandings of human experiences. It is performative and is never neutral. There can be literal translation between languages or there can be broader translation through different systems, norms, and values.

Examples of translations and he miscommunications between self and other

Ethological museums - Eg. Volkenkunde in Leiden. By constructing a museum, there is an attempt to “understand” the people subjected to colonization. A colonial mechanism of power, similar to human zoos in Amsterdam where the “other” was dehumanized to emphasize the humanization of the “self”.

Cultural Affordance

Korstens adaption from biology. Affordance refers to what an environment allows for a body to do (eg. a chair allows for someone to sit). Cultural affordance refers to what culture/society/environment allows a person to be, become, or do. Eg. society becoming more wheelchair friendly.

“cripping up”

Transferable culture; how able bodied people are often cased as disabled people in films (seen in Hollywood a lot)

Models of interpreting disabilities

1. Medical Model → What one is unable to do (daily life)

2. Economic Model → When one is unable to work or be an active member of society.

3. Sociopolitical Model → When one feels a sense of rejection/in acceptance due to their state.

4. Cultural Model → What cultures deem as disabled, and when they are unwilling to reconsider the norm. (someone might be heavily disabled in one culture but then not considered disabled in the other).

Example of disabled self in history

Joseph Merrick (Elephant man) was physically disabled (medical model), he was unable to function normally in society (economic), so he felt a sense of rejection (sociopolitical model). He then however decided to use his disability to reinvent himself by joining a freakshow (performative). This possibility was an option for Merrick because of the affordances of the culture he lived in at the time.

Ableism

Ideologically based hierarchy of ability.

Important tropes

Dehumanization, deanimalization, personification, metaphorization, animalization, anthropomorphism.

Dehumanization

Demanding that humans deal with other creatures in an instrumental or industrial way. This can also be used as a weapon.

Deanimalization

Removing both human and animal traits to portray a person or group as less than living beings. This can be used as a weapon.

Personification

Imagining: applying human traits to non-human living things.

Metaphorization

Comparing: comparing animals symbolically to describe human traits. (lion)

Anthropomorphism/animalization

Treating: attributing specific human traits or behavior to animals. This can be used as a shield.

The meat industry in the Netherlands

poses a paradox: how can we apply human traits to animals but then kill them with such inhumanity? Here, animals serve only a profit motive. This circumstance can be compared to the Holocaust.

2 distinctions between humans and non-humans

1. Cultural → the ability to develop a sense of belonging

2. Consciousness → the ability to develop a sense of self

Technological cultures

the technological entities that are capable of earning & transmitting knowledge to peers. an example of this would be the prosthetic aid of ChatGPT. This however presents a fear of this unknown realm where technology is slowly starting to outdevelop/build us. We are also becoming increasingly dependent on this prosthetic aids.

Culturalization of technology

The same technology operates differently in different cultures.

Technologization of culture

Technology is becoming increasingly cultural it is influencing it more and more.

A cyborg

combining organic capacities with prosthetic add-ons. (cyborgs) → Donna Harraways Cyborg Manifesto.

What does Korsten think of technology and humans?

That humans have always been artificial, living in symbiosis with technology (hard animalistic half artificial), using prosthetic aids of either languages or other tools (phones, legal systems, chatGPT) to survive.

When happens to society as technology continues to advance? (Donna Harraway)

Blurred boundaries between the realms of:

1. humans vs animals

2. organic vs mechanic

3. physical vs non-physical

For Haraway, as technology advances, society becomes hybrid, unstable, and full of both danger and possibility. The question is not whether technology will shape society, but how we choose to live, relate, and resist within it.