Individuals and Cultures

May 2, 2007

In our discussion of the biblical book of Lamentations I noticed how easily the class could move back and forth between individuals and culture. In the case of Lamentations we encountered a culture whose political capital and cultic center has been destroyed.. its leaders taken captive. We learn how a culture can work through a disaster. They crafted a narrative that makes sense of events: God is like a parent, we have been rebellious, God punishes, but God still loves us and will restore us. A shared narrative frame can provide strength to a culture.. and hope.

Curious to me was the way we seamlessly moved back and forth between individuals and cultures in our discussion. People could understand the way a culture overcame disaster by thinking about the way they would overcome personal disaster. In the case of an individual narrative and meaning again looms large. Even as we were talking I was wondering how far is would be possible to push this relation between individuals and cultures.

Individuals are the basic-level responders to experience. A culture (by which I mean a social group with a shared cognitive frame) obviously has no consciousness or will of its own. A culture only appears to act as a unit because it is made up of a large number of individuals with a shared cognitive framework.. lending a level of coherence to group responses. Since a culture mirrors the shared responses of many individuals, it is fair to talk about it in terms of the experience of an individual. Thus a culture can be in denial.. it can be delusional.. it can even create explanatory narratives.

Last term James Hall came up with a wonderful video project for my class Hajj to Mecca. The full series of videos is available here.. but one segment in particular is useful to analyze:

This is a perfect example of narrative creation. James selects two somewhat vague elements present in the visual culture of Lawrence and converts them into fantastic stories about the past. The video is humorous because it is obvious that he is making it all up. But laugh as we may, the explanations that cultures concoct about the past are often equally absurd. These explanatory stories are not the result of a single individual constructing a narrative.. rather they come about over long periods of time and result from oral patterns of narrative transmission. If we step back and look at the cultural process of narrative creation, it looks a lot like what James is doing in this video.. only completed over a much longer period of time and not attributable to any single conscious individual.

The upshot of this is that we can speak of culture as creative. Human beings as individuals are active meaning constructors.. tying together bits and pieces of narrative into a coherent whole. We all agree that individuals are creative in this way. But culture, as an aggregate of many creative individuals, will create narrative structures that from a distance look like what an individual would create.