Culture plays a funny role on this campus.
On one hand, culture is the core of every problem at Duke. Gender, race, sexuality, sex, politics, experience, drinking, behavior—it all goes back to culture.
And then there’s Culture. Duke is brimming with Culture. If you’ve ever opened the pages of Recess, you’ve no doubt seen some of the visionary programming of Aaron Greenwald and company (and it’s a good company) at Duke Performances, serving as vanguards of Culture for students and community alike. And there are the good folks at the Coffeehouse, around the Triangle, in arts faculty positions and at innumerable other places. And let us not forget the students.
To be sure, culture and Culture are conflated, difficult to divorce. But culture and Culture are not the same; culture is an institution. Culture is a practice which can inform this institution.
It would be easy to go through Duke only performing one type of prescribed and problematic culture—that is, pouring through tomes Sunday to Thursday and guzzling cheap beer on the weekends. I might have been better off squirreling away my hours on the third floor of Lilly’s stacks, soaking in Jameson and Husserl, learning my ontologies and epistemologies. But I don’t regret the visits to Nelson Music Room or forays to Local 506 and the Carolina Theatre.
At a liberal arts college or university, Culture seems like a necessary part of the practice and daily life. It is crucial to our education if only because it has been constructed as such. But, without getting too theoretical or spiritual, you have to believe it enriches the lived experience at some level.
Maybe I’m just some irrelevant art-loving Marxist holding tight to the humanities as a rejection of the ills that befall West Campus. Hopefully, though, there is something more universal informing my appreciation.
And all this said, I like to see Recess as not the arts or A&E or lifestyles section, but the Arts and Culture section. At Recess, we’ve tried to cultivate this and cover as much Culture as we can. But there are page and word limits, constraints of staff and time and a whole slew of other roadblocks. We’ve privileged certain people and groups over others and missed stories. Paradigmatically, Recess is not a promoter of Culture but an interface to it, critically engaging and asking questions. Again, we haven’t always done this, but we have strived to.
To view this as a failure would not only be too binaried a view, I think it would be incorrect. At its best, I hope that Recess is an agent of ushering and facilitating access to Culture. Maybe we spend too much time with culture, maybe we poorly represent Culture or maybe I’m wrong and we’ve totally failed. But ideally, we’re an agent of Culture.
Moreover, these shortcomings speak to the richness of offerings before us as members of this community. As much flack as undergrads give Duke and Durham, there is a lot laid before us. Troika, Full Frame, the many on-campus offerings—the list goes on.
We can all immerse ourselves in the world a little bit more, push ourselves a little farther and try a little harder. There’s no reason to be amateur. We should be doing the best we can to facilitate Cultured culture, spending more time looking at art or thinking about Culture. It doesn’t matter how.
We can all do Culture a little better, and maybe then we can have a bit of a warmer, more open culture, rooted more securely in Culture.
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