On Sat, 30 Apr 2005, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Fascinating. (Aside: Is there an lbo-talk 'culture'? How specialized, in
> its membership, can a "culture" be without emptying the word of
> significance? E.g., there are 7 houses on a given block, call it Block
> Q, one household unit each. Can one speak intelligibly -- or, rather,
> usefully -- of The Culture of Block Q?)
Social scientists grapple with this. To the extent that people share values, norms, and beliefs created by ongoing social interactions, they create and sustain a culture. Large scale, nations/regions, cultural distinctions are apparent (e.g., different languages, religious rituals, holidays). Smaller scale, it gets fuzzy: do people in Block Q and R create and belong to distinct cultures?
One way that social scientists finesse this is by identifying subcultures within a larger culture: in the U. S., we have subcultures based on profession, religion, political affiliation, ethnicity. In a subculture (say, as a lawyer), I share most of the values and norms of the broader culture, but I participate in a lawyer culture as well (shared knowledge, lingo, injokes, values) that clearly differentiate lawyers from nonlawyers.
I don't really see LBO as a distinct subculture, using this standard. The posters are all over the place, on everything from whether or not it's useful to read Marx to the Schiavo case. I like that lack of cultural consistency myself (the list would be pretty boring if everybody just toed the party line), but we're definitely not a cohesive culture.
Miles