e comes to stand in all its forms (that is, us), the event for which I provided the structure for my students was an attempt to put into practice the widely held notion that we are, as individuals and as communities, socially constructed. As Geertz also tells us-- The control mechanism view of culture begins with the assumption that human thought is basically both social and public- that its natural habitat is the house yard, the marketplace, and the town square. Thinking consists not of happenings in the head (though happenings there and elsewhere are necessary for it to occur) but in a traffic in what have been called, by G. H. Mead and others, significant symbols--words for the most part but also gestures, drawings, musical sounds, mechanical devices like clocks, or natural objects like jewels.......While he lives he [sic] uses them, or some of them, sometimes deliberately and with care, most often spontaneously and with ease, but always with the same end in view; to put a construction upon the events through which he lives, to orient himself within the ongoing course of experienced things, to adopt a vivid phrase of John Dewey's ........... We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture- and not through culture in general, but through highly particular forms of it........ We live, as one writer has neatly put it, in an information gap. Between what our body tells us and what we have to know in order to function, there is a vacuum we must fill ourselves, and we fill it with information (or misinformation) provided by our culture. 2 This is a fairly clear statement of the constitutive aspect of culture, but one must be careful to note that Geertz is telling us that culture is not only acquired by us, but is also made by us. That is, culture is by definition a product of human endeavor and therefore can be very much a set of deliberate choices which one makes. Ye...
