Reviews for Transmitting Culture

The average rating for Transmitting Culture based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-11 00:00:00 Tim Libra This was my area of study or at least adjacent to it. It is the first time in a long time that I read something that was a bit more challenging and tight in terms of academia. It is easy to read something that thesis, all sorts of argumentation reiterating the thesis and then summary of thesis versus something like this. It is a wide ranging piece that is arguing for a new discipline. it was written in 1997 and was arguing for mediology. The study wouldn't be on the artifacts of communication or the transfer of ideas but something more. How are ideas transmitted? A move beyond the medium is the message to something more. Now, this is where I put down my hat and say that I have been out of academia for so long that only parts of the book hit me. I am going to read this again. I get the jist but this is really pushing it. I was hoping to go through my old texts and stuff that I bought afterwards because of continued interest in the area. Many have not stood well to time. They are already gone and I can see how many more will fall but this thin volume will need to be read again. Not because it is particularly hard to understand but because it is pushing against the standard ways of academia. There is a bent towards interdisciplinary and looking at the margins that are rarely the object of study. The printing press is often looked at more than the ideas that made it possible. Rather than look at the printing press as a way that democratized reading and made the Bible popular maybe looking at the way the faith needed to be transmitted and used what was available. This is but one lobbed thought. And there is something to noticing the connection of things. In fact, there was a bit of the tv show "Connections" in this book as a way of beginning to understand culture as an object. But as I said, I have lost the discipline of academic close reading. I will return after going through more texts of the past. I really enjoyed the challenge and look forward to coming back to this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-11-05 00:00:00 Anthony Lane This is an engaging meditation on what is the driving force in most of the planet but particularly for those of us United in the States of Avarice The writer introduces a wide variety of takes on the subject by theologians, philosophers, writers and artists. I would have added another star were it not for two shortcomings. The first is having a set of notes that equal the number of pages in the work itself. They are certainly not to be skipped, but one wonders whether they would have been better off had they been integrated into the main narrative. The second is with the temporal organizing scheme into three imaginations. While the first two, which the author names physical and intellectual imaginations, are convincing, the third is something she never convincingly fleshes out. I suspect it is because there's nothing really there, and all the rhetorical pyrotechnics can't quite bring it to life.