summary of the text and according the text answer question
Please follow below requirement and question to write this paper
You are required to write a one-page essay about one of the texts we’ve read in the first section of the course “Culture Matters”. Provides a short review of the texts assigned on “Culture Matters,” which should include a brief summary of its contents and a comment on its relation to the overall subject of the course
Text: Amartya Sen, “Civilizational Imprisonments: How To Misunderstand Everybody in the World”
(I will upload the text on additional materials.)
Your essay should be a summary of the text, focusing on:
1. the main argument of the text;
2. followed by some of the main points through which the author is demonstrating their argument;
3. and, finally, concluding by relating the text to the larger goals of the course (which we have discussed in sections – look once again to the course description!).
Here are some guiding questions for you:
1. What is the main argument of the author in the text you have chosen? (Present in your own words the main thesis of the text!)
2. What kinds of evidence, examples or illustrations are presented by the author to demonstrate the argument?
3. What are some of the crucial concepts employed that contribute to the main argument?
4. What is at stake in the text? What do you think the goals of the author are?
5. How does the text relate to the general goals of the course?
** Don’t copy any viewpoint from website, please use your own words to interpretations and analysis.
Course Description:
This course examines the relationship between the conception and articulation of culture in this particular moment of global history and the quest for normative values. It is premised on the belief that many people throughout the world have been forced by current history to rethink the cultural meaning of difference (social, sexual, religious, moral, ethnic, political, gender, etc.), that is, to reflect more deeply on how the category of difference is constructed, empowered, evaluated, appropriated, and deployed in specific contexts. This new thinking not only about, but from, difference has also raised fresh questions about what binds human beings together, whether they share anything in common, how they are to be differentiated from one another, and what prevents these recognitions from occurring.
Acknowledging the worldwide fact of diversity has inevitably thrown into bold relief the issue as to whether there is anything that can rightly be claimed to be universally human. But this has raised further issues:
• Should that common or general human element be considered an essence or an aptitude, a set of traits or a practice, a disposition or a feeling?
• Can it be defined in any other than universalized forms?
• Do we actually need answers to such questions to live an acceptable human life?
• Is it possible to discover, define, or establish what might be called “fundamental values” capable of being shared across cultural divides without succumbing to solutions that are absolutist, totalizing or essentialist?
This course is divided into five sections, all taking up a different aspect of the relationship suggested by the title of the course and each leading from one to the next. There will thus be a kind of cumulative logic to our discussions, which will begin with a consideration how and why culture matters both in general and in this specific historical moment in the 21st century; next explore ways in which culture has been employed ideologically as an instrument of emancipation and oppression under regimes of colonialism; move on to explore ways that culture has been employed as a form of resistance in these and other partriarchal regimes by women; address the crucial connection in our time between culture and violence in general; proceed to consider the pain and suffering this so often brings to others and whether that pain is sharable; and finally tackle the question of whether any ethic of human solidarity can be built on the fact of global difference.
Global studies notes
Culture and Globalization
• Definitions and discrimination:
– Global as interconnectedness: expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness cross world-time, world-space.
• Dating of globalization determines its meaning ( thanks to creation of technology)
• Starts with small ways different peoples/ cultures become important to each
• Based not only on material factors but spiritual ones: symbolic capacity to create and inhabit universes of shared meanings.
Historicizing the global: When began?
• Postmodernist (post WW2): Begins with technologies that compress space/time
• Modernist (mid19th): Begins with industrial capitalism and social reorganization
• Early Modernist (16th): Begins with formation of world capitalist system of centers, peripheries and semi-peripheries
• Ancient (2,000BCE): Begins with formation of Afro-Eurasian zone of civilization
The Afro-Eurasian Zone (span of territories)
• Core area of Afro-Eurasian Zone
-Northern shores of Mediterranean (Spain to Greece)
-Fertile Crescent in Middle East
-Indus-Kush Range and Valleys of Indus and Ganges Rivers
-Hoang Ho and Yangtze valleys in China
-Four areas developed not in isolation but through linguistic commercial, military, religious bonds.
-Pilling up of small changes increase number of points where various cultures become important to one another(connections then stimulate them slowly to expand, interpenetrate, and re-define their conceptions of others and of themselves.)
Bringing the Global into Focus
• Abandon division between social sciences and humanities, between study of facts and values.
• Also thinking in terms only of stable entities rather than practices, processes, flows
• Also conceiving cultures as pure, unchanging
• Also measuring time in periods, space in territorial terms
• Also of confusing imagination with fantasy ( make belief, superstition)
Per-history of Globalizing of Culture
• Long distance interactions: trade, war, conversions migrations
• Rise of civilizations: cities to regional kingdom to regional civilizations to overlapping global orders ( euro-colonial)
• Era of nationalisms: colonial orders reinforce nationalism spread by print capitalism
• Print capitalism precursor to informational and transportation explosion.
New ideas about the Globe and Humanity
• Emergence and diffusion, since 18th C of new ideas about the globe itself and humanity
• Few cultures before enlightenment thought of world as one whole, or of the people in it belonging to the single species
• Is from (within that discourse) that new form of globalization of culture comes
• Provide new resources for the construction of imagined selves and imagines worlds.
Early innovations in communications and Transportation
• Open channels that cross national borders
• That increase information to which regions have access
• That diminish costs of transmission and transport
• Early 20th C (telegraph, telephone, radio)
• Later 20th C ( digitalization of information, cable and fibre optic tech, satellite broadcasting)
Intensity of images and practices
• Imaged and practice now move farther and at great velocity across national boundaries
• Radio broadcasting, commercial advertising, film exports, book and magazine ad)
New systems of communication and transport
• Systems used for business and commerce also used for production/ transmission of popular culture
• Boundaries between elite and popular culture dissolve: celebrity cult, Oprah
• International tourism since 1945 explodes 1.1 bilion in 2014
• The business of culture competes with the cult of business
New Agents of Cultural Diffusion
• No longer states and intellectuals primarily
• Now media industries and flows of individuals and groups
• Multinational corporations at heart of these developments
• Also publicly owned TV, radio and telecommunications
• But as these are private and deregulated, the field becomes more transnational zed
• Most popular TV shows in the world because of China is “House”!
Stratification of Globalization Changes
• Us replace Europe in the west
• Flow also move from S to N, E to W Bollywood comes to Hollywood
• Reversal due to migration of people and ideas
New role/ work of the Imagination
• Broken out of special expressive spaces of art myth, ritual
• Taken on new kinds of cultural fantasy work
• Complicates relationship between individual and collective experience: Salmon Rushdie Fatwa, Princess Diana phenomenon
Salman Rushdie and the Fatwa (The satanic Verses 1988 describes the birth of a religion resembling Islam)
Led to Fatwa banning book in most Muslim countries and death sentence against Rushdie
Debating about The Satanic Verses
• About the politics of reading
• The cultural relevance of censorship
• The dignity of religion
• The right of others to judge authors without an independent knowledge of the text
• The right of the world to establish and enforce universal standards of taste and aesthetics
Debate about the “Rushdie Affair”
• A text in motion ( isn’t confine)
• Its trajectory brought it outside the safe haven of Western notions about artistic freedom and aesthetic rights
• Places book in transnational space of religious rage and the authority of religious leaders
The Princess Diana Affair
• Whatever she was in person, she was an icon of the media in public
• This means everyone wanted to claim her: her wedding drew 250 M, her funeral 2.5 B
• Cinderella: innocent girl marrying prince
• Wronged women: betrayed spouse raising two children alone
• Global citizen: advocate of socially approved causes like AIDS and land mines
Meaning of Princess Diana’s meanings
• She lived out a different fantasy for people in each of these three phases
• Because of her cultural availability, people could participate vicarisily in them
• Through she changed little, her changing image filled a deep void in many lives across many cultures
• What she was in her own person remains a mystery
• She was not an icon but a brand
New Global Cultural Economy
• New Global Economy makes older binary models obsolete:
-Center/periphery
-Superstructure/base
-Consumer/producer
• Newer models reflect global flows
-peripheral constructs
-Mapping “imagined worlds”
-“imagined world constitute “scapes”
Theory of 5 Disjunctive Scapes
• Ethnoscapes: Landscape of persons constituting world in motion
• Technoscapes: technology in motion across previously impervious boundaries
• Financescapes: instantaneous flow of capital
• Mediascapes: information technology and images in them
• Ideoscapes: families of images that map socio/political world and graph possible ways of moving around in them
Deterritorialization and the Global
• Deterritorialization = populations living at distance from home country/culture: laboring classes invading spaces of relatively wealthy
• Creates new markets for invented, accessible ” homeland” broad
• Global system now composed of nation-states and deterritorialized ” globalist-localisms”
• Operates below and above nation-state
• World System no longer unitary but heterogeneous
Theory of Global Cultural Process
• Fractal ( Math) = Nonlinear, irregular, infinitely complex like clouds, mountain ranges, coastlines
• Polythetic (biology)= overlapping characteristics which occur commonly in members of a group but are not essential for membership of that group
• Chaos Theory (physics) =uncertain, random, effected by butterfly effect=sensitive dependence on initial conditions, whereby small disturbances many cascade catastrophically into great ones.