Knowledge, Culture and Society. Peter Burke. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Peter Burke
Издательство: Bookwire
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Жанр произведения: Социология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9789587831344
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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_9bd4fd07-7d4e-523b-9776-fc2e068d4042">22 predisposes toward certain interpretations of reality and determined cultural behaviours, and establishes shared significances. Common sense is constituted through learning processes in childhood, through observation, experiences of the world, situations lived collectively in society, normative social precepts and through institutions and instituted performative practices of behaviour, practices, discourses, representations…, that is, performances of reality. Common sense also participates, as a good number of studies have already shown, in the construction of western knowledge, of the so called scientific knowledge.23

      That’s why this type of knowledge can conceive a better reality, adapted to our needs (progress):

      […] the one who has penetrated the secret of plants can produce new plants, more fertile and nutritive; the one who has understood natural selection can institute artificial selection. […] Knowledge of what exists leads to technique, which enables the fabrication of an improved existent.

      Its results are universal, valid for all, since they determine the “objective laws of the real” that can be put in place by its supporters to guide the world at their will. That is, extending Todorov’s reflections a bit more, what all forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism have done all around the world to a certain extent since the Modern Age.

      We could say that reflections on culture have taken place within two great traditions that, although not unique, are the most outstanding and, more importantly, most sustained over time, and from which a large part of current studies are derived: the tradition of studies, history, philosophy and sociology of culture, and the German cultural critique (including the Volkskunde), which can be traced back to the18th century, and the so-called cultural and social anthropology, with all its derivatives.