ABSTRACT
It is harder to think about culture than it is to talk about it. At best a conceptual moving target, even anthropologists contest its definition (Finnan & Swanson, 2001). Most people would agree that culture is far more than “local color. “It is not merely food, costumes, and festivals. But easily saying what it is not, we struggle to learn what it might be. We can be helped to understand “culture” by looking at ways people have struggled with other “big ideas.” In this chapter I want to make three points about culture: first, like other “big ideas” it resists easy definition; second, despite this resistance, our definitional work reveals culture’s power as an idea in education; and third, our definitional work involves conversation and story-both acts of imagination. I would like to illustrate these ideas first by turning to a story about another such “big idea,” Carver’s (1982) short story, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.”1 In this story, friends engage in a rambling conversation trying to define love. During this ramble they visit many of love’s dimensions, contradictions, complexities, and expressions. Resisting consensus or concise definition, “love,” is a concept inviting dialogue, disagreement, metaphor, and narrative.
