In the past eight weeks, we have explored different perspectives on culture discussed within political discourse, which we have then sought to link to our broader conversation on the features and characteristics of “global community” (i.e., is there a “global community” and if so, what kind of “global community” exists). The quotes below express some of the perspectives of culture, representing different layers and levels and different contexts and localities. All quotations are from the readings of Module I. Choose one (1) quote and use it as an overarching framework of your analytical essay. The quotation also should help you to develop the main thesis of your paper. The thesis statement should be presented as a concise paragraph encapsulating and introducing the main argument or point of view (main idea or message) of your analytical paper. Whatever your position is, make sure you justify it based on the authors, concepts, and accounts we have learned throughout the Module I of the class. Please use at least five (5) scholarly sources when you work on your research. The use of literature outside the course reading list is encouraged. Remember that Wikipedia is not a valid source.

 

Analytical essays should be double-spaced and should be typed using Times New Roman font size 12 with 1-inch margins. All materials should be properly cited both in-text and in a bibliography (see the Purdue Owl website for formatting instructions). You are free to choose one of the three citation styles listed on the Purdue Owl website, i.e., MLA, APA, or Chicago; however, once you choose ONE citation and format style, you must use it consistently and appropriately throughout your assignment. Your essays will be evaluated based on the following:

• Does your essay include thesis statement and research/problem questions?

• Is your essay properly formatted, including title page, introduction, main body (discussion and analysis), conclusion, and references?

• Does your essay engage substantially with material covered in Module I of the course? That is, do you use concepts and ideas from course material to defend your argument?

• Is your analysis of the subject clear and concise?

• Does your analysis meet the page length requirements?

• Do you cite sources properly, both in-text and in a bibliography?

• Is your paper free from grammatical, spelling, and formatting errors?

 

Quotation Options

 

“The concept of culture . . . is essentially semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973, 5).

 

“In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 1991, 6).

 

“The cultural dimension is becoming an increasingly crucial means of giving effect to policies seeking to foster a union of the European peoples founded on the consciousness of sharing a common heritage of ideas and values” (Barzanti 1992).

 

“Despite the massive transfer of regulatory and decision-making powers from the nation-states to the European Union, there has been no corresponding shift in popular sentiments or political loyalty” (Shore 2000, 18).

 

“UNESCO, like the United Nations itself, exists only as a cooperative venture between nations. Nations become members of international bodies like UNESCO because they believe it is in their self-interest to do so. Any conventions written by UNESCO can only be entered into force if ratified by a sufficient number of national governments. National governments determine the fate of international conventions, both whether or not they come into force and whether or not they are adhered to. A nation can always ignore UNESCO’ s convention” (Cuno 2010, 26).

“It is clearly in the interest of the West . . . to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to western values and interests, to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate western interests and values, and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions” (Huntington 1993, 48).

 

“[T]he fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations” (Huntington 1993, 22).

 

“[H]ow is it that antiquities—as artifacts of cultures no longer extant and in every way different from the culture of the modern nation—are used by the modern nation to substantiate its claim on power? On what bases and for what purposes can a modern nation claim an identity with a nonexistent culture that only happened to have shared (and often only more or less) the same stretch of the earth’s geography? What makes antiquities one nation’s cultural property and not the world’s common artistic and cultural legacy?” (Cuno 2010, 18)

 

“The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements – narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. . . . Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” (Lyotard 1979, xxiv).

 

“. . . knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is and who knows what needs to be decided?” (Lyotard 1979).

 

“Dividing the world into a handful of fundamental units in this way may be convenient, but it does injustice to the complexities of global geography, and it leads to faulty comparisons. When used by those who wield political power, its consequences can be truly tragic” (Lewis 1997, 1).

 

“Our map of the earth is a Procrustean bed, in which the complexities that make real places interesting have been violently deformed to fit a set of standardized shapes” (Lewis 1997, 11).

 

“The Orient and Islam have a kind of extra-real, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself” (Said 1978, 283).

 

“Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. Men make their own history – what they can know is what they have made. Both geographical and cultural entities, to say nothing of historical entities, such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are man-made. Therefore, as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (Said 1978, 13).

 

“Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied” (Said 1978, 5).

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