Culture is concerned with aspects of the human society, which are learned rather than the aspects, which are inherited. These fundamentals are shared in members of a society and allow an understanding between individuals of a society. They locate share...

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Roll Number @00113059                                Deadline – Monday 17th January 2005

Culture And Power Essay

Karl Dayson 

 

Discuss giving examples, how culture shapes our understandings of the social world

Culture is concerned with aspects of the human society, which are learned rather than the aspects, which are inherited. These fundamentals are shared in members of a society and allow an understanding between individuals of a society. They locate shared context in which people in a society live out their lives. A society’s culture consists of intangible aspects and tangible aspects. The intangible aspects being the beliefs, ideas and values and the tangible aspects being the objects technology or symbols, which correspond to that content. Culture is seen as epiphenomenon.

The mass culture is seen as an ideological system. Ideology is shared beliefs and ideas, which operate to rationalize the interests of groups. Ideologies can be found in all societies in which there are methodical and inbuilt inequalities among groups. The notion of ideology has a close correlation with that of power, since ideological systems assist to legitimise the degree of difference of power held by groups.  The word ideology was first used by a French writer called Destutt De Tracy. He said it meant a ‘science of ideas’. The idea of media is very closely related to ideology. The rise of mass media manipulates our thinking.

Karl Marx was born in Prussia in 1818 and he received his formal education at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, where he discovered the work of Hegel, a philosopher whose ideas influenced Marx’s own intellectual development. Marx's so-called 'materialist conception of history' holds that societies can be understood primarily by looking at the way that mankind organises production of the basic wants and necessities of life, and the social relations arising thereof - 'In order to meet its fundamental material needs, a society develops an economic base and social classes... How it does this conditions the whole social, political, legal, moral and intellectual life' (5, p137). It should be noted, however, that although this economic base provides the main foundation for the 'superstructure' of the wider social system, Marx does not deny the existence of causal factors which operate in the other direction, although these are held to be much less significant. Hence, the most powerful stimulus for social change comes into being when the forces of production develop to the extent that they become incompatible with and are hampered by the existing structure of society, ultimately leading to the eclipse of the latter and the emergence of a new social order. In Marx's view, European civilization had passed through several distinct epochs as defined by the nature of the forces and relations of production, beginning with 'primitive communal' societies and culminating with the current system of capitalism, characterized by the sale of labour power as a commodity. Marx argued that internal contradictions in this system would in turn precipitate its downfall, giving way to a new system which he termed socialism. The most powerful factor in this eventual downfall was held to be that those owning the means of production and distribution (the bourgeoisie) achieved their success and superior status through the economic exploitation of a large class of workers (the proletariat), who would eventually come to understand their subservient position within the system and take steps to destroy it.

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Marx regarded ideology as ‘a false consciousness’’. It wasn’t Marx who coined this term it was in fact Engels who coined the term ‘false consciousness’. Marx sees religion as ideological, it teaches the unfortunate to be satisfied with their lot. The social forecaster should expose the distortions of ideology so as to let the helpless to get an accurate viewpoint on their lives and take actions to develop their conditions of life. Thompson viewed De Tracy’s and Marx’s view as the ‘critical conception of ideology’. Thompson argued that the critical conception is preferred because it links ideology with power. Marx’s ...

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