Wendy Griswold > Quotes

“Many live where they must, not where they choose, yet still endeavor to form lifestyle enclaves to whatever degree they are able. Simlarly, people now live within what we might call "cultural enclaves." Individuals with very different meaning systems - from cyberpunks to fundamentalist Muslims - can create and receive their own distinct cultural objects and confine their interactions to others who share their meaning systems. These interacting cultural groups may be labeled communities, and they may and do cross political and geographical boundaries, but they are built around sameness rather than around diversity. Their tendency is not to increase tolerance - the stated goal of multiculturalism - but to diminish it.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“Power gets legitimated through schemas; if there is an underlying schema that says that men are more decisive than women, this schema will structure new situations in which men get to make the decisions, often accumulating resources by doing so, and thus will reproduce male power.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“We have seen some of the mechanisms whereby culture serves the interests of power, including making something legitimate, moral, or common sense. One of the critical and most common ways this process takes place is in the construction of a group's past and its implications of future action. History, in particular a group's or nation's collective memory, makes some actions seem legitimate, moral, or common sense but not others. Yet, history is a cultural construct, subject to individual and institutional manipulation, revision, and selective emphasis and forgetting.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“Paul DiMaggio (1997) has looked at the interaction between cognition and social life. He notes that under everyday circumstances, people organize information via automatic cognition, using "culturally available schemata - knowledge structures that represent objects of events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information".”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“History is complex, with levels of detail; it must be taught and may not be known by all members of the group. Collective memory, on the other hand, is known by definition, for it is an account of the past shared by a group. Often such memories are perpetuated orally, informally, and sometimes secretly if the memory goes against the history as promoted by the dominant group. HIstory and collective memory may or may not coincide.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“Power holders as well as seekers of power work to legitimate their chosen frames through rituals and symbols. We saw earlier that this is in part a matter of efficiency: It is cheaper to organize a parade that whips up enthusiasm for the regime than it is to operate a police state.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“Charles Cooley (1956) wrote that primary groups, those groups such as the family and neighborhood where we have our earliest and most intimate interactions, form people's sense of who they are and with whom they are identified. Extending Cooley's reasoning, if electronic communications make intimate interactions possible for more and more people regardless of where they are physically located, it may lead to a greater communion among them, a greater sense of what they have in common as people.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“Information and Communication technologies have not so much changed cultural practices as reproduced and facilitated them. Groups and nations become networks, and in doing so, they reiterate their cultures and reforge their connections.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“We known the past - and shape our schemas about it - through memory, history, and relics but also through imagination. With such aids, memory organizes consciousness, transforming welter of actual experience into desirable or meaningful events, and these become institutionalized as history. 'Just as memory validates personal identity, history perpetuates collective self-awareness'.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“Two intellectual consequences of literacy were the separation of history from myth and the increased individualism based on highly specialized knowledge. In literate cultures, people are stratified on the basis of what they have read; academic disciplines and college majors are an obvious example of this kind of specialization.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“Recall Clifford Geertz definition of culture: "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about the attitudes toward life.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“...printing and the proliferation of written materials allowed ordinary people to be members of any number of relational communities.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“Identities are the key to political thought and action. IF cultural creators can frame their message so it resonates with a frame that the audience already possesses, they are more likely to persuade that audience to "buy" the message. Political propaganda operates this way quite overtly.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“He (Zerubavel) draws attention to the social influences on perception (what people notice), attention and concern (what people care about), classification (how people categorize things, meanings, memories - what to remember, what to forget, how to feel about it), and time (how people place things in the past or future). For example, many African Americans regard slavery as a relatively recent "cultural trauma" having pressing contemporary meaning, while many white Americans see it as a long past institution having little relevance (Eyerman 2002).”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

“A more general statement of Davies's point would be that when institutions and meaning systems are threatened or disrupted, it may not be the case that entirely new ones will be created; one response may simply be a greater emphasis on preexisting cultural traits and distinctions...Thus, Wuthnow's (1987) "breakdowns of the moral order" may not produce new ideologies; it may reinvigorate old ones, including old hatreds that were assumed to have vanished from the modern world. The increasing fragmentation and resurgent ethnicity of the former Eastern bloc gives evidence of this. The concept of "ethnic cleansing" represents community with a vengeance.”
― Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World