Participation in Dynamic Cultural Communities
From WikEd
[edit] Culture as a Categorical Property
In this part of chapter 3 Rogoff addresses the second challenge of thinking of cultural processes as dynamic, overlapping communities instead of static social addresses. The predominant tendency of identifying individuals and communities is to categorize them by ethnic background or race. The practice of treating or identifying cultures by categorizing them according to one characteristic of the individual results in what Rogoff calls the “box problem.” To address this problem she suggests “that cultural processes be thought of as practices and traditions of dynamically related cultural communities in which individuals participate and to which they contribute across generations.
Culture as a categorical property assumes that cultural aspects are fixed in “social address” categories like race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. These categories can be important identifiers for research, but the categories alone are not representative culture or cultural practices. Rogoff suggests that focusing on involvement in communities better illustrates the dynamic, generative nature of cultural practices. Instead of asking about one’s identity as culture would ask about their familiar and customary cultural practices. Cultural practices includes, “language(s), religion, government and legal systems, gender roles, and attitudes toward others” (p. 78).
Asking the cultural practices question also addresses problems of multiple identities and overlapping involvement in different communities. For example, years ago there were four options, ‘boxes,’ for race on standardized tests or surveys including White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian. Now there are multiple boxes and the boxes have different names, from White to Caucasian and Black to African-American. Although this example does not illustrate cultural practices, it describes the problem of categories being limiting.
Identity as culture becomes a broad, generalized, categorization of “one’s ancestral nation” (p. 78). As illustrated by the above example, these broad categories do not allow for variation within groups. Within the category of African-American Rogoff mentions the internal distinctions of education and regions of the United States. However, even though a group can see their own internal distinctions, they do not see the distinctions within other groups. Even in increasing the number of choices, and adding multiple categories, race, education, socio-economic status, these are descriptors, not culture.
[edit] Cultural Communities
Rogoff’s Definitions and Characteristics of a community
I. Communities can be defined as groups of people who have some common and continuing organization, values, understanding, history and practices
II. A Community involves people trying to accomplish some things together, with some stability of involvement and attention to the ways they relate to each other
III. Community participants have different roles and responsibilities, and their relations may be comfortable or conflictual or oppressive. Their relations involve personal connections and procedures.
IV. A community involves generations that move through it, with customary ways of handling the transitions of generations.
V. In distal communities, people’s relationships are still multifaceted; individuals are not just thrown together without some common history, future, traditions and goals.
Given these characteristics, Rogoff defines culture as the common ways that participants in a community share. People can participate in more than one community and the cultures of the communities may conflict. The community participants themselves will also vary and have views, backgrounds or goals that may create conflict with the others. However, through these communities; national, local and specific, national origin, religion, they enter the dynamic process of reflecting on their historical understanding of self and come to understand current cultural practices that influence their individual identity.
Participation is very important because it signals engagement in the activities and processes of the community. Further, it is not just a practice or activity, but the patterns of practices that form the cultural community. The identification of similar patterns across cultural communities does not mean that the observed practices can then be generalized to other communities or to a larger community. This is an important perspective for study because it focuses on the practices first and then the community versus beginning with categorizations of communities and then identifying similar practices. Most research has followed the latter, identifying groups by race and then observing practices of community engagement.
[edit] Questions
1. Do you participate in communities that create culture conflicts? If so, how has that conflict affected your level of engagement or participation in that community?
2. As researchers will often seek cultrual communities for study. To what extent do you think the potential for conflict should play in the observatin and analysis of the culture.
