Reading for Culture

The older students have started working on a module that is called Reading for Culture. It is made up of the following themes:

What is Culture?

We will be identifying culture through the course, so I do not want to add a big definition here. However, it may be enough to say that culture is how you understand the world around you and how you are understood by those around you. This idea will be developed through background readings and discussion that focus on culture in daily life, what cultures do students experience and witness, do students have a close affinity or participate in any particular cultures?

The major goal of this course is to identifying cultures in texts; this consist of reading and discussions around set texts. We will be reading articles, stories and novels with the goal or focus of identifying culture and cultural elements in a complex text. These cultures are made up of elements that operate under broad headings such as:

Work - how is work represented or referred to in the text? What kinds of jobs are mentioned or represented in the text? Is work connected to gender in the text? Is work just about money or does it have other purposes (e.g. prestige, pride. identity, for the good of the nation)?

Class - What is social class? How is it represented or referenced in the text? Are characters shown to be wealthy, poor or middle class.

Family - There are many different types of families. How are families portrayed in the text? Does each family member have a stable role within the family (e.g. mother is housewife, father earns the money)? Are families made up of a mother, a father and children, or are there more member, or perhaps a different gender relation?

Economy- The economy is how people get the things they need to live; food, shelter, clothing, education, travel etc. Is the economy about taking things from nature, or growing things? Or is the economy about trade? Do people make things to sell and make money, like jewellery and weapons, or do they swop things, which is called battering?

Gender - Defining as a boy or a girl is about gender, but gender it is so much more. Instead of one or the other there are actually many genders. These genders can be represented in a story in many ways. For example, many people are non-binary; neither a boy/man or a girl/woman in how they feel, act, think and understand the world and how the world should understand them. Gender is one of the building blocks of culture and how it is expressed and represented will tell you a lot about the culture/s you are decoding in a text.

Nationality - Having a nationality is belonging to a nation, usually as a citizen but it can include other concepts such as heritage, language, appearance, location (as in being within borders) or traditions. Just to explain; heritage is about your own background, through family. Traditions are practices that are done because they have been done for a longer time than you have probably been alive. Often traditions are associated with nationality. Nationality is a booster for culture, and in some ways they are almost interchangeable. For example, Swedish Culture/Swedish Nationality can be thought of as the same thing. But then again, it is possible to be of Swedish nationality and not practice or observe Swedish Culture (this is a very widely discussed issue). The concept of Third Culture Kids is one way of understanding this. When you read a text for culture, pay attention to how nationality is portrayed or referenced.

Ethnicity - Moving on from nationality is ethnicity, or "a named social category of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups such as a common set of traditions, ancestry, language, history, society, culture, nation, religion, or social treatment within their residing area" (Wikipedia). The difference between nationality and ethnicity is that within nationality you do not have to have a shared ethnicity to belong. So if a position of ethnic-nationalism is represented in a text, then nationality and ethnicity are expected to be the same thing. This idea has led to many conflicts, and even enormous suffering within the recent history of Europe and elsewhere.

Nature - All the stuff that exists outside your home that is not made by humans could be called nature. But we also have special ways of describing nature. You know those documentaries that follow a group of penguins around, calling them a 'family' watching them struggle with the elements, reproduce and then continue on with their lives, while the TV program makes it sound like a drama? That is a way of representing Nature (notice the capital letter) according to culture. All cultures do it; they all have stories and ways of representing Nature that makes it seem closer to who we are, or more understandable. This is an interesting insight into culture according to how we think about Nature.

I want to work this year in the zone between culture and story. This work will be teaching reading, beyond just words and their meanings. It will teach how to read between the lines and understand a text at a deeper level. This understanding will then allow you to create more complex texts of your own, either as essays, stories or for argumentation. Let's take a quick look at The Hunger Games as a text that depicts cultures.

The Hunger Games

Students are reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. You can hear an audiobook of the story here.

This is a simple diagram I used in a classroom lecture on The Hunger Games and how it can be read for culture (you can expand the image by clicking on it). You are probably used to reading for the story. This is of course very normal and important. But it is possible to 'read for' other things. In this term we will work on the idea of reading for culture. To read for culture is to pay attention to how things like family, class, work, gender and nature are presented in a text. Let's take a moment to consider what is portrayed as culture in The Hunger Games.

So rather than reading for story, which you will also have to do, we are reading for culture. The hero (heroine?) of The Hunger Games is Katniss Everdeen, a teenage girl. She is strong, brave, compassionate, resourceful, intelligent, sensitive and determined. Perhaps the most obvious element in her personality is her ability to fight and hide. In short Katniss is a hero. This is not as unusual now as it once was, to have a young girl as a hero. But the first Hunger Games book was published in 2008 (the final Harry Potter book was published in 2007). It can be argued that this was a turning point for the portrayal of female characters in contemporary popular young adult fiction. So what makes a hero apart from being brave, smart and strong? You could say it is also claiming power and being able to make choices. Katniss's first choice in the story is to save her younger sister from taking part in the Hunger Games by volunteering to take her place when the younger girl is chosen by lottery. This decision by Katniss shows us something about the idea of the family in the novel, as well as love and loyalty being important within it.

The Hunger Games details the adventure of Katniss Everdeen, who is forced to engage in a fight-to-the-death tournament against other children. The novel takes place in Panem, a dystopic country built on what was once North America. In a world of limited resources, the despotic government run by the Capitol keeps its citizens in line by separating them into Districts and reinforcing severe class separations. But their strongest tool to promote disunion and to discourage rebellion is the Hunger Games: a yearly event where two tributes from each district are pitted against each other for the country to watch on television.

Katniss lives with her mother and younger sister Prim in District 12, the poorest of the districts. Ever since her father's death, she has been the family provider, hunting illegally in the woods outside the district with her friend Gale. The novel begins on the day of the "reaping," when each District must select two tributes, one male and one female, to represent them in the Hunger Games. When Prim is selected as the female tribute, Katniss offers herself as volunteer and is allowed to serve as tribute alongside Peeta, a middle class boy from the district.

The idea for the Hunger Games trilogy was based in part on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which each year seven boys and seven girls from Athens are sent to Crete as tributes to be devoured by the Minotaur, a cycle that continues until Theseus kills the Minotaur. Collins, who heard the story when she was eight years old, was unsettled by its ruthlessness and cruelty. Collins said, "In her own way, Katniss is a futuristic Theseus." Collins also characterised the novels with the fearful sensations she experienced when her father was fighting in the Vietnam War.

In the novels, Katniss is extensively knowledgeable in foraging, wildlife, hunting, and survival techniques. Collins knew some of this background from her father, who grew up in the Great Depression and was forced to hunt to augment a scanty food supply, although Collins saw her father bring home food from the wild during her childhood as well. In addition, Collins researched the subject using a large stack of wilderness survival guidebooks.

Katniss and the other tributes are, in their time before participating in their Hunger Games, compelled to compete for the hearts of sponsors who donate money that can be used to buy vital supplies for them when they are in the arena, such as medicine, matches, food, and water. The concept of how the audiences carry nearly as much force as actual characters is based on how, in reality television and in the Roman games, the audience can both "respond with great enthusiasm or play a role in your elimination," as Collins said.

From this short summary of the story The Hunger Games you can see evidence of culture according to the above listed categories.