humane stories bone value

WHAT IS OF "VALUE" AND WHO POSSESSES IT

'Culture' is a loaded concept and once you start mixing it up with 'money notions' and 'economic imaginings' it is ever likely to get to be a much more tricky and perplexing idea. If you apply the test that nothing is real unless you can see it from space, well then you can expect some arguments that might well challenge your debating skills and prepare you to confront the climate change deniers.  

The visibility from space test is an interesting one because while you arguably can see neither – that is culture or value – each being abstract ideas, you can in fact see 'cultural landscapes' from space and they are so very real – albeit a constructed reality. 

Despite everything else, all of humanity is fundamentally driven by three primordial urges– purposes for being:
• to survive;
• to procreate; and
• to assert identity and relationships/rank(?) – all are interdependent, they are inseparable and one doesn't exceed another. 'Culture' almost always relies upon the primacy of these urges together.

These 'landscapes' are constructed, typically by human communities exercising assumed human hierarchies. Human, self-positioning at the top of the food chain supported by humanity's assumed superior knowledge systems that encompassed language; belief systems; food preferences; social habits; histories, memories and other narratives; personal inter-relationships; music and 'art' making; technologies and all kinds of 'placescaping' practices come together simultaneously to define 'place'. In turn these things are defined by 'the place' – and in ways that ultimately informs 'cultural production'. Let's just leave 'art' making out for now and leave it for another time given its ambiguity. 

Tracy Puklowski, the QVMAG's Director, when welcoming  attendants to the 'Cultural Value in the Regions Symposium' Launceston 30-31.Oct 2018, she mused upon Bhutan’s notion of ‘Gross National Happiness’(GNH). GNH is an idea that all at once challenges and confirms Anglo Western perceptions of cultural expectations of uninhibited and ongoing 'exponential growth'. Interestingly, GNH in various ways kind of summons up indigenous peoples' belief systems and precolonial peoples' cultural connectivity to place, cultural landscaping and community understandings of 'sufficiency' – its a set of ideas that survives and are designed to keep on reasserting themselves.  

On the other hand, while an economy might be understood as a system of trade and industry by which wealth is generated and where wellbeing underpins the 'value/s' of 'a people'.  In 'a place/region', where things are made, measured and ideally 'valued' relative to something else, 'the economy' belongs to 'place' yet it is a cultural outcome – a component of the belief systems etc to be found in a place. It is believed/assumed to be there even if it cannot be seen from space.

In so far as 'culture' has any tangibility at all, 'the economy' is a product of a culture. It's something of long bow to draw to use economic imperatives in the 'measurement' of the thing that it is a component of. 

Logic would seem to suggest that in an attempt to 'value' the whole – and definitively so in regard to the valuing culture per se – all the constituent parts rely upon each other are thus somewhat inseparable. 'Value' is a set of slippery and subjective ideas that are always just out of reach.

Thinking about plants in 'the economy', there are plants that are treasured and cherished while there are others that are abhorred and hated as 'weeds' – often times the very same plant.  Whichever it is, humanity and 'culture' and its relativity to place, does the determining  – or is it deeming. Dispassionate, abstract 'science' has almost nothing to do with anything here – albeit that science is ever likely to be invoked.

Then there is the issue of civilisation. So called highly developed communities/cultures, hierarchical collections of people – their social organisations, their  governance, their  laws, their belief and value systems, their distinctive cultural practices, or their social groupings – are liable to rank themselves highly and in accord with humanity's assumed positioning reflected in the food chain's hierarchies. When 'Western civilisation' colonised indigenous cultural realities under the guise of 'civilising' them, without exception, the imperative was to overturn and overpower them rather than share technologies – or the wealth collaborative sharing brings with it.

Civilistation always ranks everything in every situation – and all the time. Civilisation deems 'value' ideologically and subjectively but worryingly imagines it to be 'objective'. Value is only pertinent to, relevant to, compliant 'civil-societies' where over time 'value' assumes an inviolability until the systems that sustain them in their 'cultural landscapes' fail, or breakdown or are decimated, due to the omnipresent in-built vulnerabilities within 'the system'.

Arguably, 'culture' escapes civilisation's most feeble aspirations – and yet there is no escaping it's multiple layers and complex dimensions while ever humanity lives in the world.

 

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BETHLEHEM A CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

Given the 'Jesus Factor' and for the 'Jesus Birthday Business' in Bethlehem/Palestine, 2017, Banksy collaborated with Danny Boyle to interrogate values at The Walled Off Hotel ... Click and watch and consider 'value', culture, theft, ownership and other things