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Communicatheo.com is honored to provide our users with the essay, Prolegomenon, in three units, by professor and researcher of UNAM, Mexico, Doctor Gilberto Giménez. Prolegomenon: is by definition a discourse that precedes an essay and discerns the fundamental principles of a topic. In this case, culture. We recommend this reading to both undergraduate and postgraduate students from diverse areas of the social sciences, particularly to those who work and research within the framework of communicology. The reading also contains excellent bibliographic references that support the discourse. For our part, we did not make any revisions, corrections, or changes to the language of Professor Giménez; we only divided it into three parts to facilitate the reading and interest of our users. In the first unit, which we have called, Prolegomenon First Part, there are two chapters. One: Culture in the Literary-Philosophical Tradition and Common Social Discourse, and two: Culture in the Anthropological Tradition.

Excerpt:

PROLEGOMENON

I. CULTURE IN THE LITERARY-PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION AND COMMON SOCIAL DISCOURSE

Dr. Gilberto Giménez Montiel*

1. A persistent obstacle: the polyvalence of the term.

The scholar who sets out to explore the cultural territory of the social sciences immediately runs into a serious obstacle: the great variety of meanings that threatens to discourage any intentions of systematic comprehension and rigorous conceptualization right from the start.

There have been whole books written on this semantic polyvalence and definitional dispute, which have incessantly shaped the formation history of this concept, even after its incorporation into the lexicon of philosophy and the social sciences. (1)

An additional difficulty derives from the fact that, as much in the field of philosophy as in the social sciences, the concept of culture belongs to a family of totalizing concepts that are all closely interrelated through their common purpose, which is the comprehension of the symbolic processes of society, and for that reason they completely or partially cover: ideology, mentality, social representations, social imaginary, doxa, hegemony, etc. From here originates an obstacle to the delineation of boundaries and the standardization of meanings, which has also aroused interest.  (2)

An initial way to drastically reduce the amount of semantic uncertainty over the term that occupies us would be to retain only the concepts built by sociology and anthropology, systematically rejecting the wide range of meanings given by the literary-philosophical tradition and the common social discourse.

Even in the fields of sociology and anthropology, however, which supposedly work with concepts constructed in accordance with precise theoretical paradigms, culture has been and continues to be an object of assorted definitions, given the diversity of the theoretical and methodological interests in play. (3)

The current situation imposes a double task upon us: on the one hand, a new critical revision of the theoretical statute of culture in the primary currents or traditions of anthropology and sociology; and on the other hand, the proposal of a concept of culture that responds to the epistemological demands of semantic coherency and homogeneity, and at the same time is sufficiently linked to scientific practice in order to achieve a relative consensus among social scientists. This double task will be the specific subject of this introductory chapter.

(1)  See, among others, A.. L. Kroeber, Culture. A critical review of concepts and definitions, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1965; Philipe Beneton, Histoire de mots: culture et civilisation, Presses de la Fondation Nationale de Sciences Politiques, París, 1975; Various authors, Europäische Schlüsserwörter, t. III, Kultur und Zivilisation, Max Hueber, Munich, 1967; R. Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950, Columbia University Press, New York, 1958. You can find an up to date version of this conceptual revision in Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman (eds.), Culture and Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; and above all in William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of culture”, in Victoria E. Bonnel and Lynn Hunt (eds.), Beyond the Cultural Turn, University of California Press, Berkeley – Los Angeles –London, 1999, pp. 35 -61

(2)  See Robert Fossaert, La societé, volume 6, Les structures idéologiques, Seuil, París, 1983, pp. 495-500; Eunice R. Durham, “Cultura e ideología”, in Dados, Revista de Ciencias Sociais, vol. 27, number 1, 1984; Michel Vovelle, Idéologies et mentalités, Maspero, París, 1982.; Jean Starobinski, Le mot Civilization, in Various authors, Le temps de la réflexion, Gallimard, París, 1983, pp. 13-51.

(3) Pietro Rossi, Il concetto di cultura, Einaudi Editore, Turín, 1970; Hans Peter Thurn, Soziologie der Kultur, Verlag W. Kohlhamer, Stuttgart, 1976.

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*Gilberto Giménez Montiel is a Doctor of Sociology from the Sorbonne University, Paris III, 1976, holds a degree in Social Sciences at the Institute of Scienze Sociali (Gregorian University, Rome, 1956), holds a BA in Philosophy, University of Comillas (Spain) , 1950; C Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Research from the UNAM. Gilberto stands as a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI), also a member of the Mexican Association of Semiotics and the International Communication Association (ICA).

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Digital Paper Edition EDW -Prolegomenon, First Part (in Spanish).

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Volunteer translation by Ashley R. Gonzalez

Ashley R. Gonzalez currently attends the Ohio State University in the United States and will graduate with two majors in Spanish and World Literature next summer, 2010. She has academic experience in Mexico and the United States. Furthermore, because of her Mexican heritage, she has been exposed to the Spanish language from an early age. If you want to contact her for work, please write to joboard@communicatheo.com

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