Lesson 2

What is culture? Edward Hall writes in his book “Silent Language” that culture is an interrelated mixture of complicated and unknown behaviors of the past and presently all linked together by communication. Technology and language allow substantial findings by anthropologist storable thus giving future generations a better understanding of the past (p 57).

Disnnanayake and Hall share similar views on art and culture; although Halls’ takes an anthropologist angle, noting cultural learned behaviors are often unconscious. Hall writes of the “out of awareness” communication wherein we pick up certain behaviors through life and unconsciously relate to certain situations. As a little girl I wanted to comb my own hair from an early age. No one sat down and taught me how but the action came naturally to me. I realize that I probably watched my mother and my older sisters comb their hair and learned without noticing.

Disnnanayakes’ angle is from a bio-behavioral point of view based in “attempts to account biologically for the emotional physiological need of people just as much as the physical physiological” (What is Art? p 31). I think this is very interesting because we (depending on where we live in the world) would listen to various music and disliking it or liking it greatly due to culture. Disnnanayakes’ used the example of eating a sugar based treat and recognizing something as sweet or too sweet. A friend of mine dragged me to a theatre for an opera by Luciano Pavarotti overseas, I was hesitant to go because I was a hardcore hip-hop, rocker chick at the time, but during the singing of "Nessun Dorma," I felt the hair raise on the back on my neck and I was overwhelmed with this strange emotion that I cannot explain to this day. I was happy to see Disnnanayakes’ state that highly emotional experiences (including one by S.J Gould when he sung in a chorus) cannot be explained by science or thought.

I like knowing that there are some things still left unknown and we can float into these experiences with freedom and blissful incompetence.