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Purposive Cultural Text

Cultural texts refer to objects, behaviors, and symbols that reveal cultural meanings and contribute to shaping a society's culture. They can include photos, food, clothing, rituals, and interactions between people. Cultural texts are multidimensional and can be understood differently by various groups depending on factors like age, race, nationality, or sexual orientation. When analyzing cultural texts, questions arise about what defines them, how they represent and are produced by cultures, and how signs within them gain symbolic meanings.

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Micaela Marie
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70 views17 pages

Purposive Cultural Text

Cultural texts refer to objects, behaviors, and symbols that reveal cultural meanings and contribute to shaping a society's culture. They can include photos, food, clothing, rituals, and interactions between people. Cultural texts are multidimensional and can be understood differently by various groups depending on factors like age, race, nationality, or sexual orientation. When analyzing cultural texts, questions arise about what defines them, how they represent and are produced by cultures, and how signs within them gain symbolic meanings.

Uploaded by

Micaela Marie
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Cultural text

Cultural Text
 Cultural texts are those objects, actions, and behaviors
that reveal cultural meanings.  A photo is an image, but is
also a cultural text, a picture with cultural information
beyond just the picture itself. Food and clothing also
suggest cultural information, and it doesnt stop there. The
entire place and space, all of the people and interaction, all
of the rituals and rules and the various forms in which
they manifest themselves, are texts, suitable for
observation and analysis by the ethnographer and writer “
namely by you
 A text is not a literal text, but in Semiotics refers to a combination
of signs, signifies and mechanisms like metonymy. A text could be a
sentence, a paragraph, an image, a story, or a collection of stories.
 A collection of signs in a single photograph or painting, a video
clip, a television show, a feature film. Whenever signs come
together in the land of semiotics, they become texts. These texts can
be understood, rearranged and put together in different
combinations, with different meanings to different groups of
people.
 Cultural texts refer to sign systems, storytelling tools and
symbols that contribute and shape a society’s culture.
They have underlying cultural meanings. They either
require certain cultural knowledge to be understood, they
are produced through a certain cultural context or, as
most texts do, become representative of a culture and its
values.
 But cultural texts are not one-dimensional. A text is not
simply representative of one culture, it does not belong to
one culture, even if it purposefully excludes others
semiotically. Cultural texts are multi-dimensional, they
are dynamic.
 A cultural text is perhaps better understood as having
cultural layers of understanding. Where groups different
in age, race, nationality, sexual orientation may read and
understand a collection of signs in different ways.
Depending on the producer or the audience, the text itself
has a kind of flexibility in meaning to different people
when it starts to operate culturally.
 Semiotics more generally poses a number of questions in
regards to cultural texts and the stories they tell. 
Questions like what makes a cultural text in the first
place? What is defined by a cultural text, what is included
and what is excluded? How are cultural texts used to
represent society at large? How do cultural texts even
become representative? What do signs signify culturally,
and how and why do they become symbolic in the first
place.
What Filipino cultures are represented in each of the
images?
Detecting bias in the media
 Media bias is ubiquitous (everywhere) and not easy to
detect. It is always useful to compare several sources of
information and, in doing so, it becomes clear that
media coverage is never completely objective.

 Here are some forms of media bias to watch for:


 Bias by emphasis: What stories are on the front page or
“at the top of the hour?” Which stories get the largest
headlines, or the first and longest coverage on TV or
radio? Consider how this placement influences people’s
sense of what is important.
 Bias by use of language: The use of labels such as
“terrorist,” “revolutionary,” or “freedom fighter” can
create completely different impressions of the same
person or event.
 • Bias in photos: Unflattering pictures can create bad
impressions, and partial pictures of scenes can completely
change the context of an event.
 • Bias in the source: An article about a cure for cancer
written by a drug company is not the same as an article
by an independent researcher. Often, private companies,
governments, public relations firms, and political groups
produce press releases to gain media exposure and to
influence the public.
 Bias by headlines: Some headlines can be deceptive, as
their main purpose is to grab attention. Many people read
only the headlines, which can create a distorted sense of
what is really going on, or turn a non-event into a
sensational event.
 Bias by repetition: The repetition of a particular event or
idea can lead people to believe that it is true, very
widespread, and much more important than it really is.
 Bias in numbers and statistics: Statistics need to be
interpreted; they are often used to create false
impressions. Of the following statements, which statistic
would you use to try to convince someone that the death
penalty is a good idea?

Always be critical and aware as you read, watch, or listen to


mass media. Keep alert for these many forms of bias.

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