Best-of-the-year lists are a staple feature of magazines and newspapers come December, but can make pretty grim reading—with backs predictably slapped all round, and the odd gem crowded out by big names. So this year, following on from the success of our 2006 “books of the year” feature, we invited over 50 Prospect writers to contribute their nominations for the most overrated and underrated cultural events of 2007 (interpreting “events” as loosely as they liked). A selection of responses are published in the print edition, but you can now read the complete results online here.
We’d love to know what you think about our poll. And, by way of a festive entertainment for all of our online readers over the Christmas period, we’d also love to receive your nominations for your own overrated and underrated cultural events of 2007. Simply unleash your sentiments in the comments below—and we hope to publish a selection of the best responses in our first issue of the new year.
Herman Goering once said, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my pistol’. When George Bush heard the word ‘culture’, he reached for his dictionary.
Oh! Cheap shot, shame on me …
Now a cultural event…let’s see. Oh I give up - does the auctioning Magna Carta in new York count?
Er…there is an ‘of’ missing between ‘auctioning’ and ‘Magna Carta’ in the above post … I misspoke in my typing
I understand Sean’s concern about culturebut have doubts about his motive. There are clearly a variety of cultures around the planet. It is about how a nation or national group live their lives and includes the spiritual values and behaviour which might include religious practice. What of the politics that are practiced and this may be in a ‘culture’ of violence consequent on how much groups or individuals respect the right to express views. There will also be social norms that are either from a line of tradition or the present climate of the society. I do think that culture is a valid term and that multiculturism is a valid practice in a plural society. My difficulty is when the multi means separate and antagonistic to one another. I try personall to practice transcultural behaviour. a sense of interest in how the other believes and practices what they do and attempting to share a dilogue and even where possible a debate of the issues that cultural practice puts into the conversation. It is when difference is respected and opportunity taken to enable the difference to contribute to a greater whole expressing both or many that there is a transferal product.
Malcolm, I did not mean to imply any doubts about ‘culture’ as such, I was just emphasising the fact that nobody seems very interested in culture in 2007. My cheap shot at Bush was linking this to a general dumbing-down and a possible rise of phillistinism. I suppose one should first define ‘culture’, there’s the general definition of ‘all learned human activity’, but I think the term as used in Prospect probably tends more towards ‘high’ culture.
I think your concerns about culture can be summed up as follows:
Those beliefs/norms in a society which, when offended, justify violence.
All societies have some version of it - offend these principles and we’ll kill you; all cultures believe that there cultural norms are universal and jutify death for those who violate them. Truly different cultures do not, and cannot, tolerate eachother because their values are antagonistic - for example the Saudi and European concepts of women, their bodies and their roles in society. Where these differences come into contact/conflict they provide cultural arguments for bombing the offending culture.
The idea of ‘multi-culturalism’ is premised on the idea that ‘cuture’ consists only of food, dress and dance; where it breaks down is when the totality of culture - the beliefs that justify violence - emerges. Multi-culturalism is possible only in the more limited sense of ‘culture’ (food and dance) where the beliefs that justify violence - and the fundamental issue of agreeing that we together consist a single, though not homogenous, ‘we’ are agreed. If you haven’t got this then you haven’t got a workable polity either a new, more rareafied culture must merge or you have the ingreients for a civil war.