Culture

The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop

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Pub Date 07 Feb 2023 | Archive Date 31 Jan 2023

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Description

A gripping story of losses and rediscoveries; power plays and heroic journeys; innovations, imitations, and appropriations.

Why care about the past? What good are the arts? At every stage, humanity has sought to understand and transmit to future generations not just the “know-how” of life, but the “know-why”—the meaning and purpose of our existence, as expressed in art, religion, and philosophy. Crucially, societies have always been most successful in both know-how and know-why by adopting and remixing the insights of the past and of other cultures. In this expansive one-volume tour of world culture through the ages, Martin Puchner argues that the arts and humanities are (and have been) essential to the transmission of knowledge that drives and undergirds the efforts of human civilization.

With magnificent global range and narrative flair, Puchner focuses on a series of dramatic turning points to highlight cultural achievements from Nefertiti’s lost city to the plays of Wole Soyinka; from the theaters of ancient Greece to Chinese travel journals to Arab and Aztec libraries; from an Indian statuette found at Pompeii to a time capsule left behind on the Moon. His book astonishes, informs and delights at every turn.

About the Author: Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, is a prize-winning author, educator, public speaker, and institution-builder in the arts and humanities.

A gripping story of losses and rediscoveries; power plays and heroic journeys; innovations, imitations, and appropriations.

Why care about the past? What good are the arts? At every stage, humanity...


Advance Praise

"Martin Puchner has exceptional and invaluable gifts: intellectual fearlessness, dazzling erudition, trenchancy tempered by breadth of mind, and a humanist's eye for minute evidence that illumines huge problems. He leaps daringly among well-chosen vignettes to show us what cultural change is like: contingent, fragile, unpredictable, and always dependent on our willingness to exchange objects, people, and ideas." - Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of The Oxford Illustrated History of the World

"Fearless and exhilaratingly erudite, Martin Puchner’s panoramic tour of human culture across the millennia is a riveting page-turner. Revealing the beauty and necessity of cultural cross-pollination and borrowing, Puchner’s tour de force is the perfect antidote to our increasingly dreary and close-minded times." - Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

"Cultures develop by sharing, borrowing, and collaborating—but also by conquest, appropriation, and theft. Martin Puchner’s timely book takes us on a breathtaking tour of world history, reminding us that as we judge the past, one day we, too, will be judged, and that when we ignore or try to erase our cultural heritage, we are only impoverishing ourselves." - Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club

"Culture is a breakneck, utterly captivating survey of threads of cultural transmission—how ideas, stories, and songs—survive, change, vanish, get borrowed, refined, coopted, and grafted through time. Reading this book was like taking a course in the history of humanities from a world-class professor with a rapacious, global, up-to-the-minute curiosity. I underlined sentences on every page." - Anthony Doerr, author of Cloud Cuckoo Land

"If anyone wants to know what it is for comparative literature to encompass the globe, they need only read this remarkable book." - Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity

"Martin Puchner has exceptional and invaluable gifts: intellectual fearlessness, dazzling erudition, trenchancy tempered by breadth of mind, and a humanist's eye for minute evidence that illumines...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9780393867992
PRICE $35.00 (USD)

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Featured Reviews

Culture, Puchner says, is a broken chain that humans repair every generation. While destruction and cultural development go hand in hand, this does not preclude the fact that humans are culture-producing animals who have, for millennia, relied on the availability of new forms of expression and meaning-making to develop worldviews. We confront what came before us so that we can understand it and adapt it for our own purposes.

He explores the popular notion that culture belongs to the people born into it. In this view, national traditions, customs, and arts are seen as a form of property that is off-limits to outsiders. Cultural appropriation is viewed as violative. He will argue that this view impoverishes and does not recognize how culture actually works. His view is supported by an extensive world tour itinerary beginning in prehistory. Culture does not sprout from the ground fresh and unique, unadulterated by those who came before or encounters with other cultures where forms and ideas are borrowed and articulated in a new way. Puchner’s argument, backed by a sweeping review of historical cultural sharing, is both enlightening and reassuring. Reflecting on culture as a beautiful layering of others gives one a sense thrilling connectedness in a world that is fractured, one where mine might be bettered thought of as ours.

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My thanks to both Netgalley and the publisher W. W. Norton & Company for an advanced copy of this book on culture, history, and understanding what is left behind.

The art and interests of a people sometimes tell more about them then the ruins they might leave behind, thought even then these ruins are probably influenced in someway by cultural influences. The real problem is seems is understanding what a picture, or a couple of slashes in rock might mean, as the art remains but the interpretation could be endless. What were the influences and what was later influenced. This can tell us alot about the past, and about ourselves. Critic, commentator and Harvard Professor Martin Puchner in his book Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop looks at humankinds earliest works at understanding and leaving a legacy to the top of the charts of today to see where we have come, where we are going and what be lost.

The book begins with a look at the Chauvet cave paintings, a prehistoric site where ancient people created art featuring the animals around them, and left tracings of hands and themselves for future generations to both learn from and remember. Puchner explains both the significance and importance of what was shown and how it influenced others who came behind, plus what a loss it was when the cave was covered in a landslide, preserving the site for us, but cheating others of knowledge. Readers than follow along as Puchner travels the mostly western world, showing the influence of art, and how this art and learning was shared, or in some case used to subjugate others, or even worse was wiped out by others with their own culture.

The book is both an interesting look at history, and look at the importance of art and the study of the humanities. Puchner has a talent in his writing to educate without lecturing and more importantly interesting. There is a little bit of reading curve, it does take a while to get into the groove and to figure out where Puchner is taking the reader, but soon the narrative becomes clear, and again is so intriguing that readers soon are flipping along. The book is well sourced and researched, with a lot of different facts and ideas on each page. The examples and Puchner's ability to explain and again to keep everything entertaining, as well as educational makes for a very informative read.

Recommended for both historians and readers who enjoy books about pop culture and the understanding of culture and entertainment on history. A different view of the growth and failure of many civilizations, and the many works that have been lost.

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"It’s not always a pretty story, and shouldn’t be presented as such, but it’s the only one we’ve got: the history of humans as a culture-producing species. It’s the story of us."

A gripping story of losses and rediscoveries; power plays and heroic journeys; innovations, imitations, and appropriations, Culture is presented by literary critic and Harvard professor of Drama, English, and Comparative Literature Martin Puchner. We as readers are taken on a tour through space, time and the human experience through both science, the natural world, and the human way of finding meaning in this life we are given.

Throughout this study of culture, Puchner shows us time and time again, just how important studies in the Humanities (like art and literature) are to molding the human experience and life as the more hard or physical sciences like Biology and Chemistry are. Without the Humanities, we would be nothing but robots. Art is what gives us the chance to express ourselves, and allows us to find and show who we are.

I found this collection highly intriguing and a probing dive into the human experience across time and various geological places and cultures.

Culture is set to be published on February 7, 2023. Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company, NetGalley and the author for the advanced reader's copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

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In Culture: The Story of Us, literary critic and Harvard professor of Drama, English, and Comparative Literature Martin Puchner takes us on a tour through time and space to discover the strategies that humans have developed to understand our world: both through STEM-type discovery and mastery of the natural world (our know-how; only briefly referenced here) and our efforts at meaning-making (our know-why; the focus of this book). Throughout this overview of thousands of years of humanity’s quest for knowledge and meaning, Puchner seems to be stressing two main points: that the Humanities as an area of study are equally as important to improving the human experience as are the “hard” sciences; and that humans have always borrowed from and built on the culture of other communities — our current focus on gatekeeping against “cultural appropriation” is in direct opposition to the ways in which culture has always been diffused and preserved. That last point might be controversial — and as Puchner returns to it many times, it would seem that he understands he has a hard case to make — but through many, many examples (from the Chauvet cave paintings, to Pompeiian mosaics, to Aztec pictograms) he proves that knowledge can be literally carved in stone for future generations, but if a particular culture doesn’t survive into that future (and most will not), there will be no one around who can decipher what remains; culture needs to be adopted and adapted and carried forward in order to meaningfully survive. From the fascinating details to the overall message, I appreciated everything that I learned from this read.

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