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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: August 1, 2003
Latest Update: August 1, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Talking Culture through Photo Essays

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, August 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Culture is the world we make for ourselves to live in every day. It isn't static; you can't write of a culture, anymore than you can write of a person without understanding that the description you give is tentative, for as soon as you have written, new adventures come along and both person and culture change, for they are interdependent in large measure.

Postmodernism has long opposed the metanarrative, the overall narrative purported to tell everyone's story. Our stories are all different. And when our dominant discourse responds as though we were one and the same, well, it doesn't work too well. Schisms develop in our communities between the haves and the have nots, and between ethnic groups who share different stories, and between old and young who are living different stories. For those reasons, it is important that we each tell our stories, not necessarily in narrative, for some of us do not have the natural gift of spellbinding talk. To this end we must learn to use many forms of expression to tell our stories. And we must learn enough respect to know that there is a story there to tell, whoever you are, and to offer our own skills to help tell the story and end the silence, when the time is right, as indicated by the person whose story it is. This has no relation to pulling teeth. Stories come naturally bubbling to the surface, when they're ready. Some of us may choose to never speak, but find other ways to tell who we are, when we are sure enough to know that we are someone with a story to tell.

One the main concerns of the feminist movement was that women were silenced, silenced literally by males in the household expecting them not to speak, and by excluding them from any agency over their own lives. (Women's Ways of Knowing). So were others silenced. Those without hierarchical power in some social setting, those without the power of position and/or weatlh. Many of us are still silenced today by having learn to be seen, but not heard, by having failed to develop the skills with which to make ourselves heard. Our epistemological objective is to break down the silencing, to break some of the patterns that to this day encourage silencing, to recognize our own stories, to practice sharing those stories in forums where they are appreciated, encouraged, and can serve as examples to others who need to break the silence..

The women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s used consciousness raising groups for that purpose. They met together and told their stories, and supported one another in their efforts to deal with the unrest so much silencing had caused many women. Some of these women broke free and followed careers and broke new grounds for the women who came after them, who found, as times changed, that they had to work. Most of those stories were about the oppression of women and their difficulty in breaking through the glass ceiling which prevented their rising above the lowliest and least powerful jobs.

Today, the changes wrought in society have been swift and disruptive. Women are today one of many overlapping groups who are being silenced, being forced to live their daily lives in social settings in which they are silenced by the monologic non-answerability of hierarchical authority. The effects are the same as those feminists fought in the 1960s, as those Blacks fought in the Civil Rights Movement, as those workers fight today. Habermas speaks of the dialog of emancipation. We'll talk about that. But for now, I'll settle for an understanding that strong communities are founded through the aesthetic process of answerability. And for now, the simple definition of answerability as the concept that "I have my perspective, my story, too. And you need to include me." That process includes us all, and would give us all a share in community governance. It's aesthetic in that it is open-ended and together, through our interactions, we are creating this thing that will be the world we live in.

To this end we will seek out, discuss, and try the many ways that others have found to break their silence. Music, of course, comes to mind first. Art, paintings, sculpture, creations like the Watts Towers, photography as we see in the examples below. We would like you to come to see all these means of expression as story talking tools. Polish the tools. The stories will come. For we each have many to tell.

Story talking brings with it a different kind of knowledge from that we traditionally consider academic knowledge. Myth, legend, literature are recognized in our academic curriculum, but only in restricted areas of given disciplines. The trend, even in academia today is to recognize that the stories we create as we go matter to all of us and should not be relegated to a single course on mythology. To this end the academic world is beginning to recognize the importance of collecting and documenting the stories of ordinary folks, for the stories clothe and bring humanity to the numbers of positivism. The stories are a crucial part of our collective story.

Professor Brian's tour of his campus is one such story. I chose it because it's not your typical story. Not one we often think to tell. Just a walk around the paths we take in our everyday life, almost without thinking about them. Artists do that you know, make you see things differently, point out the beauty you pass by unthinkingly. I think that's terribly Zen, living in the moment.

Professor Brian's Tour of Washington State University A beautifully done photo essay, of the kind I wish one of you would try with our own local campuses.

Patrick Sommerville's page offers a more traditional kind of story. A portion of his travel and living photos from Mongolia. This is what I mean by each of us having many stories. But just this one brief glimpse of Mongolia taught me more than I had ever known about a place in the world where real people live. I followed through on some of the links, on which Mongolia sounds no different from every other modern country. Were that the only story I had seen, I'd have a very different picture of that land. I don't have time for several books and a course in geography. But here the Internet puts at my disposal another way to learn, another way to "know."

Patrick's Page on Mongolia This is a delightful set of photos with Patrick's descriptions. This is another example of how much you can learn by playing on the web. I don't remember how I landed at Patrick's Mongolia Page. But that often happens when you wander the Internet. Stop occasionally, and enjoy the experience.Backup

• Genghis Khan On National Geogrphic.
• Mongolian Myths and Legends Beautiful colors. Stories to share.
  
  Uliger - Why things are the way they are