Quotes & Sayings About Cultural Artifacts

Four Ingredients Plus Three Generations The recipe for an institution, then, is four ingredients plus three generations: artifacts, arenas, rules and roles that are passed on to the founding generation's children's children. Fail to follow this recipe by neglecting the transmission over generations and you are likely to leave little of cultural significance behind - at best, a few mysterious artifacts and hazy, nostalgic memories. Likewise, fail to follow this recipe by neglecting one of the four essential ingredients, and enduring impact is equally unlikely, because only the fourfold combination of artifacts, arenas, rules and roles is strong enough to sustain a cultural innovation through time. — Andy Crouch

I'm not sure that I care for the idea of strangers examining my daily habits and folkways, studying my language, inspecting my costume, questioning me about my religion, classifying my artifacts, investigating my sexual rites and evaluating my chances for cultural survival. So I lived alone. — Edward Abbey

I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts. — George W. S. Trow

We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents. — Virginia Heffernan

So much of what we know, and what we think we know, about the land has first passed through someone's lens. The interesting thing is to make use of this history, not merely to be absorbed into it. For me, landscape photographs begin as the artifacts of personal moments. They get interesting when they become cultural commentary. — Mark Klett

Meme A term introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, which are spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Examples of memes in his pioneering essay include cultural artifacts such as melodies, catchphrases, and clothing fashions, as well as abstract beliefs. Like genes, memes are defined as replicators that undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention. At any given moment, many memes are competing for the attention of hosts; however, only memes suited to their sociocultural environment spread successfully, while others become extinct. — Limor Shifman

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect. — Bruno Latour

I know this is a major cultural artifact but it's bad for the community. — Dante Alighieri

No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now it's our thoughts, our values, are embodied in this [digital] stuff. — Terence McKenna

Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan - regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country. — Marilyn Johnson

In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation. — Terence McKenna

The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural
and last but not least
political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed. — Johannes Grenzfurthner

It was just a temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened. — Rob Sheffield