Topic
Culture — the shared meanings, practices, artifacts, and values that a community creates and transmits across generations — is both the medium in which human beings live and one of the things they most frequently argue about. The quotes gathered here approach culture with the complexity it deserves. They examine culture as a resource (the accumulated wisdom that each generation inherits) and as a constraint (the inherited assumptions that limit what any single generation can easily see or question). The relationship between culture and identity is a major theme: who gets to define a culture, whose contributions are recognized, whose are erased, and what happens when cultures encounter each other under unequal conditions of power. Several voices here probe what "high" and "low" culture mean and whether those distinctions illuminate or merely serve to exclude. Whether you are thinking about cultural preservation, cultural change, or your own relationship to the culture you were shaped by, this collection offers rich and searching material.