by Padini Nirmal
about Padini Nirmal
Padini Nirmal is a doctoral student at Clark University. Her doctoral research focuses on the dispossession of indigenous peoples by the development-capitalism-modernity complex and the resistance movements that emerge at its juncture in Kerala, India. Broadly, her research interests lie within political ecology, feminism, and critical development studies.
Culture
The popular understanding of culture in mid-twentieth-century America and Europe was arguably the symphony orchestra, the ballet, the art museum, and a “national” white, elite etiquette dictating, and explaining, how people should behave. Since the mid-1960s, we have witnessed the production and recognition of a proliferation of “cultures” and “multiculturalisms” within popular culture and informal political and economic institutions. Current usage is replete with compound cultures: counterculture; pop culture; office culture; indigenous culture; urban culture; peasant culture; global culture; “mainstream” culture; and “other-cultures.” The biological and agricultural roots of the word have also expanded, as illustrated by frequent references to “lab culture” (a living bacterial or fungal assemblage produced by humans in a laboratory); and living “micro-cultures” purposely fostered in yogurt, sourdough, tofu, and other living foods. The latter sense of the word is by no means irrelevant to the prior “social” sense; they are all about the terms of relationship among various elements in complex assemblages of humans, other beings, the Earth, and things. In contemporary vernacular understanding, culture is the ongoing collective sense making of how we be in relation with each other, other living beings, and the living world, and may include everything from microbes to artificial...