Culture and Story
How do our stories get told? They might take the form of song, dances, word pictures, images, rituals, etc. If I am not doing this myself, then I am relying on others to do it. Because the United States is so danged big, however, it is unlikely that the most widely shared "stories" (mainstream or even independent film, television, magazines, radio, newspapers) are going to be "mine." Much of our "culture" happens at this national level, and it seems that less and less of it feels very direct or relevant. For that matter, it rarely has the specificity that will illuminate to me another "culture" that I might not be a part of.
"Culture" is, in my opinion, "story." If we aren't in this process (fairly regularly!) of telling our own stories (in lots of different forms) then the "culture" process is being left to others. Can we trust them?
An important value of InterPlay is to help us reclaim our ability to use a variety of forms to tell our stories. In InterPlay, we learn to not fear, and to actually love, telling our stories. And as we do this regularly, the cultural process remains lively and current. It may not seep into the "big" culture in the ways we might hope, but perhaps it is at this smaller community level that the most effective culture-making happens.
posted by Phil Porter, InterPlay Co-founder at 10:27 AM
1 Comments:
So right, Phil! "Culture" - among the people who study and expound on it - has often been perceived as something you can see, identify, and comment on as a "thing." This is very much the kind of "national culture" you speak of that is getting defined by those who choose the images and stories that will go out over mass communications. But Renato Rosaldo comments in "Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis" that culture is really "loosely-tied bundles of informal practices." And these practices are more likely to be fluid, changing and improvised rather than set, defined, and static. In fact, he points out that what is most interesting about cultures is the improvisation. Rather than being something outside of the real practices of people, Interplay is, in my estimation, the embodiment of what is most real in cultures... people finding ways to tell/make/live their stories and to recognize them AS their stories. Bravo!
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