Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Michael Parenti: "The Culture Struggle"
I just finished reading The Culture Struggle by Michael Parenti (who I believe is at the tippy top of his game right now).
I plan to excerpt from this highly recommended book here soon...for now, I’ll quote from a related interview Parenti did with ZNet:
“Culture refers to the entire panorama of conventional beliefs and practices within any society. But it has long occurred to me that what we call ‘culture’ is not just a set of practices, mores, and beliefs, the ‘innocent accretion of past solutions,’ as an anthropologist once said. Much of culture is certainly that, but culture is also a politically charged component of the social order, mediated through institutions and groups that have quite privileged vested interests.
“Culture should be thought of as a changing process, the product of a dynamic interplay—even serious struggle—between a wide range of social and political interests. To understand a society we need to understand the problem of culture as well as that of power. And, conversely, to understand culture we also need to take note of how power is used in society, toward what end and for whose benefit and at whose cost.”
Also, I thought it’d be timely to revisit an article Parenti wrote in 2003, re: Slobodan Milosevic.
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