What follows here are some notes that I have made to stimulate a discussion which has been going on ever since people began to talk. We carry on this discussion from time to time, live, in Llandudno, and now I hope to continue it here. Everyone has a culture and an identity, so no special knowledge is required. For the purposes of discussion, I take it that we all speak from a culture and not for one; so there is no question of authority here. Having said that, while controversy and passion are welcome, gratuitous offensiveness is not. Please feel free to contribute your own thoughts, and/or recommended sites and book references which I will publish  in their entirety, or not at all, as I see fit.. bob Macintosh.

Culture and Identity.

A Prelude to dialogue.

Humanity has made enormous progress technologically in the last two hundred years, and in many ways our lives have improved. Yet when I hear President Bush talking about his Crusade, it seems that socially, we have not progressed in a thousand years. How we live together as individuals, as communities, nations, religious groups, races, is as problematic as ever.  Because of our technology, our survival as a species is at stake, but also as individuals, our survival and our happiness depend on how we get on with others. The aim of this course, as far as I am concerned, is to examine the question of who 'we' are and who are 'the others'.

Certain things, I assume we have in common; we live in this neighbourhood, we have the English language, we have some interest in whatever we understand the words of the title to mean. Already, I am identifying 'us' who are 'part of this discussion' and 'them' who are 'outside'; already, I have specified an aspect of culture. There seems to be no place to be which is outside culture, no identity which is impartial (not partial, i.e. fragmentary). Whenever I speak about myself, I am already using this language and not another, and whatever I say about myself is always historical and cultural - without culture I am nothing. This being so, there can be no experts in this area; someone might claim to know what it means to be Welsh, for example, but without the agreement of others it has no significance.

So the nature of this course has to be somewhat different to most. I have various ideas to put before you, which come from my own reflections on my identity and that of people around me, my own experience of culture. But I offer these ideas for us to experiment with and explore; please don't accept anything without questioning it; perhaps I have it all wrong. Let?s try and find out.

Topics.

o        Map and Territory.  

How thought thinks of itself and confuses itself.

o        Identity.  

Who am I to you, who am I to myself, and apart from that, who am I?

o        Communication.

How I learn about myself ? I can?t do this on my own!

o        Meaning, Value, Purpose.

Where is the love? Is life a pointless accident of selfish genes?

o        Creativity.

Whatever is new cannot come from identity or culture, from anything known.

o        Life and Death.

Fear and attachment, two sides of me, fragmented.

o        Culture.

?Who do you say I am??  living in the world, but not of it.