Asking a bureaucrat in any manifestation of governance, what ‘culture’ is, nowadays and it will earn you looks of bewilderment most likely. It’s the kind of thing everyone knows the answer to but when push comes to shove nobody, it seems, has a ready answer for you – at least not one that fits some convenient bureaucratic paradigm.
Culture is the central concept, the corner stone, upon which the study of anthropology is founded. Anthropology encompasses that range of phenomena that are transmitted through social interaction in human societies.
Cultural universals are found in all human societies. They include expressive forms like art making, music masking, dance, ritual, religious expression, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, modes of shelter, and clothing.
As humans, we are driven by three fundamental and compelling imperatives:
• To survive – to have the air to breath and the sustenance needed to sustain life
• To identify within the group – ranking, prowess, role, etc.; and
• To procreate – to survive beyond the grave.
All three are intertwined and are with us all the time and always and they effect everything we do as individuals and a society. There is no escaping this!
Material culture covers the physical expressions of these things in action. Such things as:
• Technology – tool making, etc.;
• Placemaking – architecture, landscaping, placescaping etc.; and
• Cultural production – art making, design practices etc.
These are the physical manifestations of a culture in a ‘place’ – the place it belongs to and with, the expressions of ‘placedness’. Here we very quickly bump against the quandary, and the questioning, to do with pondering whether or not it is ‘place’ that shapes culture or is it ‘culture’ that shapes place.
On the other hand, the ‘immaterial aspects of culture’ involves such concerns as the principles of social organization – the practices of political organization and social institutions, mythology, philosophy, written and oral literature, and the sciences, all of which comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society ... its deep histories, its story telling, the local factors that make places distinctive.
In the humanities, culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which an individual, a family group, a ‘tribe’ indeed, have developed/cultivated a particular level of sophistication/intricacy/erudition in their ‘cultural expressions’ – the arts, the sciences, education and/or protocols.
So-called ‘cultural sophistication’ has been used to distinguish some ‘civilizations’ from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives in regard to culture can also found in class ridden distinctions between ‘high culture’ and ‘the elite’.
So-called ‘low culture’, or popular culture, or folk culture, perceived as belonging to ‘the lower classes’ is distinguished by the layering of, the stratification of, a community’s access to ‘cultural capital’ – an individual’s ranking and identity.
In the vernacular, culture is typically used as the ‘markers’ used by ethnic groups to visibly distinguish themselves from each other. 'Identity markers' such as body modification and adornment, clothing and cultural dress and/or jewellery carry powerful messages relative to identity and most often place as well.
Mass culture talks about mass produced and mass mediated forms of consumerism that has emerged in the globalisation that in so many ways defines the 20th century.
Schools of thought found in say Marxism and critical theory, argue that culture is a political tool used by ‘the elite’ to manipulate, disempower even, the so-called lower classes in order to create a false or constructed cultural consciousness – a politically constructed placedness, an ideological cultural reality, an alternatively ranked social system.
In the academic disciplines relative to cultural studies hierarchal perspectives are common. More broadly, a wider social science perspective, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life.
Humans create the conditions for physical survival, and upon that basis culture is founded and has evolved relative to biological dispositions and geographic positioning.
When used as a noun, a "culture" is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society, a community – such as those found in an ethnic group or nation.
Culture is the set of knowledge bases, belief systems and technologies acquired over time by 'a people' in their 'place'. Thus, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultural realities inhabiting the same place, the same cultural landscape – a collaborative and cooperative ‘cultural reality’.
"Culture" is typically used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture, a counterculture. Its that throw away idea used to explain difference and 'otherness'.
Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated given that evaluation is by necessity located within the value system of a given culture, a given place, a cultural landscape.
A cultural landscape, as defined by the World Heritage Committee, is the "cultural properties [that] represent the combined works of nature and of man".
• "A landscape designed and created intentionally by mankind";
• An "organically evolved landscape" which may be either a "relict landscape" or a "continuing landscape"
• An "associative cultural landscape" may be valued because of the "religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural elements."
Local governance is all to do with ‘placemaking’ – nothing more nothing less. When politicians, elected representatives, set out on an attempt to ‘construct’ a cultural reality they need to be very mindful of the ‘cultural imperatives’ held “near and dear” by their constituencies.
Moreover, when the bureaucracies that serve them start to assemble ‘their perceptions’ of what that reality, those realities, should and could look like they are treading upon very tender ground.
Indeed, they need to be able to either convincingly articulate ‘their world view’ or quite simply get out of the way.
Without personal expertise in the field of cultural geography their role is to facilitate consultation processes that meaningfully engages with the community they are employed to be in service of rather than deem their convenient bureaucratic ‘vision’.
In the Australian vernacular, ‘blowins’, whoever they are, wherever they come from, need to either step back or ‘know their place’.
Quite simply, they, the public servants and their underlings, might well have much to offer if they are indeed ‘placemakers’ and not there telling the time in a place on a watch handed to them by a bureaucrat looking for her/his vision of time and one that suits her/his aspirations as an incumbent in residence of some fiefdom or other.
21st Century Placescaping
The notion that 'placescaping' in the 21st C is fundamentally different, and more now than it ever has been, misinterprets the process – and fundamentally so. it is a process that humanity has been engaged in since the dawning of their time on the planet.
As Homo sapiens we are social beings and we need to negotiate our place in the world and navigate our way to it collaboratively and cooperatively. We must do so in order to survive, in order to identify, in order to maintain ourselves as a species.
Thus, we need to placescape our worlds in accord with our geographic circumstances. That is how cultural landscapes come about.
Click on an image to enlarge
Writing as I am in Launceston Tasmania, rather on Trevallyn, rather from 41º26"12'S/147º07"12'E, I look out upon an intensely modified cultural landscape. Its 'home', well for about 35 years it has been and if one is landliterate, and its is March, there is much to be read in it – indeed into it.
The proposition that this cultural landscape in 2020 is 'more sophisticated' than it might have been in 1800 say is an assessment done in ignorance. This assertion stands given that pre European colonisation the 'place' was not measured and assessed relative to itself at that time.
Sure, there was some European 'geographic mapping' going on but there was no 'cultural mapping' and no anthropology being done to speak of. And, the convenient colonial concept of 'Terra nullius' was in play subliminally if not yet overtly. However, there was placescaping going on even if it bore no resemblance to anything people 'from elsewhere' could or wold recognise or even acknowledge.
For the most part humanity only needs to take a different view of 'placescaping' because, on the evidence the world is changing all around uu and in order to survive we need navigate another way to become a part of the cultural landscaping that we're a part of – that we belong to.
Ray Norman, Trevallyn March 2020
