时事英语02-7全真试题及标答(6)

高级时事英语期末试题

Whilst agreeing with the three points made by anthropologists:

that culture includes norms, values and symbols; that culture, by

providing shared meanings, holds society together; and that none of us

could exist were it not for culture and society, many other theorists see

problems with this perspective. They point out that culture can divide

as well as hold a society together. Whilst a dominant group in society,

for example the factory owners, might hold one set of values, these

values will be damaging for factory employees. The reason the society

does not split apart is that the dominant group use force to make the

majority conform to their rules. They actively manipulate the key sites of

cultural production, religion, education and/or the media so that their

values remain the ruling ideas.

A variation of this view of culture as ideology is that we are not all

'cultural dopes' unknowingly being manipulated by the power.

Although cultural domination is a fact of social life most people

understand that and can even oppose this cultural domination. Female

workers for example are often doubly exploited in the labour market.

However, women workers have protested, using the message 'we want

bread and roses'. They are using these cultural symbols to say that as

women they not only want to have income equality with men workers

but also to be treated with dignity as women.

This view includes many of the ideas of anthropology and of A. and B.

above. However whilst A. and B. view cultural knowledge as the tool of

the powerful, discourse theory argues that knowledge is power.

Foucault, the major writer in this field, writes that in modern societies,

new forms of powerful discourses, or ways of speaking, were

developed not by a few powerful people, but by medical, psychological

and criminological experts in three key sites: research hospitals,

research asylums and prisons. There, knowledge, or discourses,

developed about human personality, human bodies and human failings.

These discourses soon spread. We all took on the medical concepts of

'normal' and 'pathological', applied them to ourselves, and to others, in

every aspect of modern life, work, family, schools even our leisure