The Oxford English Dictionary is the mothership of the English language. As I like to describe it, it's the only English-language dictionary with all the words in it.
(BTW, you can access the OED from the "Search Online Resources" area of the Dulaney-Browne Library website.)
Here's its entry for the noun subculture:
1. 1. Biol. and Med. [SUB- 9.] A culture (of bacteria or the like) started from another culture; the process of starting a culture in this way.
1886 E. KLEIN Micro-Organisms & Dis. (ed. 3) v. 43 From the individual and separate colonies, it is then easy by re-inoculation of gelatine tubes..to start pure subcultures of the different species. 1899 Allbutt's Syst. Med. VII. 550 Growth..in subcultures may be recognisable within four hours. 1911 Jrnl. Path. & Bacteriol. XV. 94 In sub~culture it grew on plain agar. 1962 Lancet 5 May 933/1 Amongst the 240 staphylococcal strains tested..64 showed discrete colonies of this kind and they were tested by subculture on to the same concentration of drug. 1971 Nature 16 July 174/1 Subcultures of the bacterial cultures were carried out at 7 day intervals to maintain vigorous stocks.
2. [SUB- 7.] A group or class of lesser importance or size sharing specific beliefs, interests, or values which may be at variance with those of the general culture of which it forms part.
1936 R. LINTON Study of Man xvi. 275 While ethnologists have been accustomed to speak of tribes and nationalities as though they were the primary culture~bearing units, the total culture of a society of this type is really an aggregate of sub-cultures. 1937 Brit. Jrnl. Psychol. Apr. 358 We may regard the adjusted group..as a small culture pocket or subculture within the larger culture. 1948 T. S. ELIOT Notes towards Definition of Culture iv. 75 We may find ourselves led to the conclusion, that every sub-culture is dependent upon that from which it is an offshoot. 1955 T. H. PEAR Eng. Soc. Differences iii. 111 The extravert's and the introvert's idea of good manners and goodwill, even in the same sub-culture-pattern, are very different. 1963 T. PYNCHON V. xii. 361 Anyone who continues to live in a subculture so demonstrably sick has no right to call himself well. 1970 G. JACKSON Let. 4 Apr. in Soledad Brother (1971) 214 We are a subsidiary subculture, a depressed area. 1976 DEAKIN & WILLIS Johnny go Home v. 82 The [social] workers dress like their clients... Only their accents betray them as not being part of the sub-culture they are ministering to.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Monday, January 7, 2008
[Some of] What We Are Reading to Prepare to Teach this Course
For the past year or so Dr. Cowgill and I have been picking one another's brains to ensure that the class truly benefits from our differing backgrounds as researchers: She is a sociologist trained mainly in social scientific methods; I am a rhetorician trained mainly in humanistic methods.
Huh?
For the purpose of our course, what this basically means is that we both study people and their stories, but we go about it differently. We'll likely discuss this during classtime.
Meanwhile, we'll use this posting to compose an informal annotated bibliography of the more interesting and important texts we've been examining. Because we're co-teaching this course, we assigned one another some readings to help us get a better understanding of how we each approach research--these readings included items we wrote ourselves as well as some articles or books that have influenced our own work. We also found a variety of books, articles, and websites that seemed like promising sources of information about urban sociology, cultural mapping, OKC history, and so forth--some of which we'll be assigning to the researchers in our course.
Our Ever-Evolving Annotated Bibliography for this Course . . .
Blair, Carole. "Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality." Rhetorical Bodies Eds, Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. [oops, I need to insert the publication city] U of Wisconsin, 1999. 16-57.
BH: This is the article I assigned to Julie as an excellent explanation and illustration of how rhetoricians use three-dimensional objects to analyze a community. If we end up analyzing Deep Deuce through its artifacts--perhaps inventing a methodology of our own called, e.g., "material ethnography"--then this article by Blair plus the book by Thomas might very well be our foundation.
O'Meally, Robert G. "Checking Our Balances: Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, and Betty Boop." Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies Eds., Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmine Griffin. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. 278-96.
BH: Although Ellison's "Deep Deuce" days are not the focal point of this article, we can learn a good deal about Ellison's perspective on race relations (in Deep Deuce and elsewhere) through his commentaries on Louis Armstrong's complex and ironical persona as an entertainer who seemed to reinforce racial stereotypes in, for example, this Betty Boop cartoon: I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal while also evolving into an outspoken civil rights activist. An OKC dance hall is where Ellison first watched Armstrong perform, and one of his indelible memories about that event concerned OKC segregation: how white women streamed into the dance hall, breaking the law to be a part of the music.
Thomas, Jim. Doing Critical Ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE, 1993.
BH: Julie assigned me this article as an introduction to ethnographic research done by people in her field. In a nutshell, ethnography is a research method that involves immersing yourself in a community in order to study it firsthand. When we first envisioned this course we were going to spend 16 weeks as ethnographers. Now that the course is happening in a weekend format, we're trying to design a research methodology that will enable us to still make critical observations despite our limited time frame--in Deep Deuce we'll basically be passersby more than community-members, though we'll still be thinking about "subcultures" to which we might each belong in everyday life. (I need to return to this article to write more about how it intersects with the material rhetoric article. I'll write more then.)
Huh?
For the purpose of our course, what this basically means is that we both study people and their stories, but we go about it differently. We'll likely discuss this during classtime.
Meanwhile, we'll use this posting to compose an informal annotated bibliography of the more interesting and important texts we've been examining. Because we're co-teaching this course, we assigned one another some readings to help us get a better understanding of how we each approach research--these readings included items we wrote ourselves as well as some articles or books that have influenced our own work. We also found a variety of books, articles, and websites that seemed like promising sources of information about urban sociology, cultural mapping, OKC history, and so forth--some of which we'll be assigning to the researchers in our course.
Our Ever-Evolving Annotated Bibliography for this Course . . .
Blair, Carole. "Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality." Rhetorical Bodies Eds, Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. [oops, I need to insert the publication city] U of Wisconsin, 1999. 16-57.
BH: This is the article I assigned to Julie as an excellent explanation and illustration of how rhetoricians use three-dimensional objects to analyze a community. If we end up analyzing Deep Deuce through its artifacts--perhaps inventing a methodology of our own called, e.g., "material ethnography"--then this article by Blair plus the book by Thomas might very well be our foundation.
O'Meally, Robert G. "Checking Our Balances: Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, and Betty Boop." Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies Eds., Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmine Griffin. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. 278-96.
BH: Although Ellison's "Deep Deuce" days are not the focal point of this article, we can learn a good deal about Ellison's perspective on race relations (in Deep Deuce and elsewhere) through his commentaries on Louis Armstrong's complex and ironical persona as an entertainer who seemed to reinforce racial stereotypes in, for example, this Betty Boop cartoon: I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal while also evolving into an outspoken civil rights activist. An OKC dance hall is where Ellison first watched Armstrong perform, and one of his indelible memories about that event concerned OKC segregation: how white women streamed into the dance hall, breaking the law to be a part of the music.
Thomas, Jim. Doing Critical Ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE, 1993.
BH: Julie assigned me this article as an introduction to ethnographic research done by people in her field. In a nutshell, ethnography is a research method that involves immersing yourself in a community in order to study it firsthand. When we first envisioned this course we were going to spend 16 weeks as ethnographers. Now that the course is happening in a weekend format, we're trying to design a research methodology that will enable us to still make critical observations despite our limited time frame--in Deep Deuce we'll basically be passersby more than community-members, though we'll still be thinking about "subcultures" to which we might each belong in everyday life. (I need to return to this article to write more about how it intersects with the material rhetoric article. I'll write more then.)
This is Where Our Journey Begins
Greetings!
Dr. Cowgill and I are starting this blog in January--about a month before our "Mapping [Sub]Cultures" course with you commences--as a way to offer you a glimpse of our creative process as co-teachers and researchers, and also as a way to share with you the nagging questions that inspired us to invent this course in the first place!
The image above is as good a place as any to begin explaining what this course is all about--and why we believe it is important.
The mosaic is on a wall in Bricktown, and it represents the glory days of "Deep Deuce."
As a transplant to Oklahoma City, I was delighted to learn about this part of the city's heritage and I love the idea of educating the public--locals as well as tourists--about this community. But as a rhetorician--someone who studies symbolic communication--I'm intrigued by, among other things, the tidiness of it all, the way this complex community and its history is being packaged and re-presented for our consumption. Most of the area was cleared for a highway project; a few spots are being rebuilt or preserved. When Dr. Cowgill and I wandered the hub of Deep Deuce together we had the same thought: Disneyland --specifically, its "Main Street USA."
We believe that you can learn a lot about a community (such as our own Oklahoma City) by examining how it portrays and locates its subcultures. In this case, we're calling Deep Deuce a "subculture" because it is an historically African-American community that developed during our city's segregationist era, when whites lived in the regions "above" 2nd Street.
Our hope is that you will join us as fellow researchers identifying what "subcultures" look like in Oklahoma City today (is every community its own sort of subculture? or does the "sub" in subculture mean something else?) and that together we can generate some interesting insights into culture, society, and ourselves.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)