Bugs, Mangoes and Maids

Many Australian media reported this weekend that the Great Barrier Reef is among the list of potential Queensland items to be officially turned into "cultural icons". The National Trust Queensland is seeking nominations of things that make Queensland unique. 12 Queensland “icons” will form one third of an exhibition at the Queensland Museum. The other 24 were chosen in 2004 and 2005. Already on the list are such notables as the Pub with No Beer, the Gabba and Bundy Rum. The 2006 list of 12 will be chosen on 28 September.

Though the Reef is more known for its ecological properties, it is likely to achieve the cultural immortality as it gets its imprimatur from the tourist industry. Fraser Island is also nominated in this category. A third nomination is for the Quinkan Rock Art at Laura where the Ang-Gnarra run tours of rock drawings of an ancient Aboriginal society.

Moving back into the water, the Moreton Bay Bug has been pressed into serving its state in the identification stakes. The bug, thenus orientalis, is not totally indigenous to Queensland, its habitat is all of the coastline of the Northern half of Australia. Outside of Queensland it is known by a string of other mobster sounding names that are waiting for the band the B-52s to do something with: Bay Lobster, Bug, Shovelnose Lobster, Slipper Lobster, Squat Lobster and Mud Bug. Unfortunately for the humble bug, whatever you call it, the BBC has used it in another list of 50 things to eat before you die. Hopefully not everyone will take this campaign to heart. There is a human dimension to the bug’s culture entry as they are a staple catch of the Queensland Trawl Fishery industry.

The farming industy throws its akubra into the ring too with the nomination of the Bowen mango. The mango tree is a native of India. Two southern languages, Tamil and Malayam, claim ownership of the word and the Hindu Vedas described mangos as the "food of the gods". The fruit is easily cultivated and spread to any climate worldwide which no guarantee no frosts. Because these are high population areas, it is possibly the most eaten fruit in the world. It thrived in Northern Australia which has now has many varieties. The tastiest is the Kensington Pride, which is popularly called the Bowen Special mango. Bowen's unusually dry climate for a tropical location, plus its fertile alluvial soil, makes it the ideal place to grow a wide variety of small crops. But it is the mango that has the name attached to it and that’s the one that is a possible Queensland cultural “entity”.

But the “icon” nomination that has gathered most attention and the only reason the list in the news at all, is the inclusion of the Surfers Paradise meter maids. They are a 40 year old tradition where bikini-clad girls walk around the town putting change into parking meters. They claim this the only place in the world where parkers are subsidised in this fashion. The Maids were a 1965 brainwave of local entrepreneur Bernie Elsey help to beat the bad image created by the installation of parking meters in December 1964. Since then they have spearheaded many tourist campaigns for the tourist strip. Because the method chosen is on the faultline of sexism, the meter maids are not without critics and thus their appearance on the cultural index is given prominent attention in the headline for the whole event. It is now safely beyond argument in the list of things that are “iconic”.

In semiotics, an icon is a sign where the signifier (in this case, the Reef or the maid) resembles the thing it refers to (in this case Queensland). Clearly none of these things physically resembles Queensland. But they have a power of association that is redolent and real for all that. Primarily it is because they are all driven by human commerce. The identity they have for humans reading these signs is they are is part of an imagined Queensland community that everyone shares in a comfortable mutual illusion.

Woolly Days awaits the final list of 12 with curious interest.

the deconstruction of Sydney Harbour

This picture is a text. It tells a story of an Australian culture. One that is here and one that is gone. But to understand the story, we must first understand the cultures.

Raymond Williams tells us that culture is ordinary. He also sees it as complicated. But culture, like the picture, is a text. And Saussure provides us the textual means for an interpretation of that culture: the study of the sign. Semiotics provides us with a means of taking the temperature of the culture. The word culture itself is abstract, and packed of meaning, Culture,from French "colere", via German "Kultur", offers us a blueprint of what we do best as a group. And in the world of the sign, when the signifiers point to their significants we have a simple compass by which can circumnavigate all the denotations and connotations denote and connote at will with nothing more in the armoury than an icon, a symbol or an index. But the question is: how do we use it? What is this picture any good for?

What if, instead of examining the picture as signifier, we think of it as the signified? If instead of it being a vehicle to something else, we examine why it is a vehicle of meaning at all. And perhaps we can uncover a whole daisy chain of signifiers that point back to an antecedent signifier. Let’s ask then what backward connotations can we come up with? It shouldn’t be difficult to determine. People construct meanings using signifiers from an already existing structure over which individuals have no control. Why might this picture exist at all? Metaphor is the substitution of one signifier for another. A good starting point might be to substitute the picture with a code. it is a victorious parade of culture based on the white conquest of Australia. Here the denotation is easy enough. It’s a sunny day on Port Jackson. No humans can be seen directly, but it can safely assumed that they are present. They are the wealthy of Sydney, at play. They are busily bustling past the centrepiece de resistance, The Opera House. The "The Eighth Wonder" (the opera of that name tells the story of the building) is all three types of signs at once; a connection to the land of Sydney, an iconic sail, and a symbol of Australia.

The land of Sydney is Port Jackson. It was the home of the Cadigal, whom the Europeans called the "Eora people" (which meant “from this place”.) Cook looked in here but didn’t land. Philip instinctively preferred it to Botany. And so Great Britain offloaded in Sydney, the first, the biggest and most important city in Australia. With this importance came wealth and wealth needs to service its vanity in many ways. One way is to buy a boat and another is to inspire a unique cultural identity. Sydney could afford lots of each. The paradigm chosen to represent this city’s homage to culture was the sail. The Opera House is Jorn Utzon’s breathtaking vision which conjoins Sydney Harbour with the sea. It was a metaphor for culture, but it was also metonymy for a ship. The lonely building almost yearns to be in the harbour itself. And of course as a perfect simulacrum of something that doesn’t exist, it is supremely postmodern.

Postmodernity is laced with irony as it is a concept that it posits a reality existing in a timeframe later than now as well as reminding us of a more stylised version of the past. The beautifully sad Opera House aches to be among the pleasure crafts, also but silently bears witness to the death of the Cadigal. The code (parole) of this picture might be applied differently but the message (langue) exists independently of the people in it. The paradox is that if culture is ordinary, it exists without people. Britannia no longer rules the waves. The sea will reclaim her own.

An Introduction to Cultural Studies

Culture. Now there’s a word with many meanings. My dictionary has eleven different definitions for it. The first one is “the total of the inherited ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge, which constitute the shared bases of social action”. The 20th century Welsh academic and cultural historian Raymond Williams says that “culture is ordinary”. But he also says that culture is one of the ‘two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ How can both these statements be true?

In calling culture ordinary, he means that society is made and re-made in every human mind. Humans then test this learning by experience. Williams is not impressed by the term ‘cultivated’ and its inherent snobbishness and associated cliques. Nor did he have much time for the term ‘culture vulture’ with its implied sanctimony about the high arts. But there are still many other meanings which Williams does allow the word. The word comes originally from the Latin ‘colere’ which had a range of meanings such as inhabit, cultivate (in the sense of till,) protect and honour with worship. The inhabit sense gave rise to ‘colony’ whereas the worship sense gave rise to ‘cult’ . The French used the word culture in the 15th century to mean cultivation of the land (the till sense) and it quickly passed into English.

Culture initially meant to process something or cause to grow, usually crops or animals. By metaphor it extended its meaning to human development. Culture did not fully gain its abstract sense until the 19th century. By then, it had connotations of class as in ‘persons of birth or culture.’ The Germans also borrowed the word from the French and their word ‘Kultur’ meant civilisation. This German usage was soaked back into English to complicate the usage. Williams talks now of three main usages of culture. i. the process of intellectual development ii. a way of life of peoples and/or periods and iii artistic activity. The third sense is now most widespread. In Cultural studies the reference is primarily to signifying systems. And the way we signify is through signs.

Semiotics is study of signs. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) envisioned a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life Saussure made an important distinction between langue (language) and parole (speech). Langue refers to the system of rules and conventions which is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users; parole refers to its use in particular instances. Applying the notion to semiotic systems, the distinction is one between the code and the message. Semiotics teaches us that reality is a system of signs.

The sign has two components, the signifier and the signified. For instance in a traffic light sign, the signifier is a red light, the signified is ‘the driver must stop’. The American Charles Sanders Pierce (pronounced “purse”) classified signs into three forms.
1. Symbolic (an arbitrary sign or code that must be learnt eg numbers, Morse code, flags, traffic lights)
2. Iconic (a sign where the signifier resembles the signified eg portraits, cartoons, scale models, metaphors)
3. Indexical (where the signified is connected to the signified eg clocks, scars, doorknocks, film)
Some signs have components of two or all three forms or have evolved between them. Thus iconic pictograms gave way to symbolic alphabets (at least in the West).

Fashion and clothing are amenable to semiotic treatment. The clothes we wear make a statement. And the statement can be read and decoded. Dress constructs a social order. The source of meaning for garments can be placed with the clothes designers, the wearers, the spectators and even the society it is worn in (witness the unsuccessful Sumptuary Laws of Elizabethan England which attempted to legislate dress sense). Signs have denotations (literal meanings) and connotations (associated meanings) which work on different levels. The connotative meanings are more subjective and are called ‘hermeneutic’ (interpretative). Both meanings are understood at the same time. This is a historical process. People construct meanings using signifiers from an already existing structure over which individuals have no control. This is typically called a code.

In describing the relationship between signs, semiotics offers two dimensions. A paradigm is a set of related signs and a syntagm is a set of paradigmatic choices. So for example all the shirts in a wardrobe are a set from which the wearer makes a paradigmatic choice. The syntagm is the total ensemble chosen, the wearer’s shirt, shoes, hat, shorts etc. The code of the syntagm will differ depending on the paradigmatic choices. For example a cardigan with an open collar may connote a ‘sporty’ look whereas the same cardigan with a closed collar may connote a ‘dressy’ look. This is purely a cultural signification. Similarly in a Western-style restaurant we eat a starter followed by a main course followed by a dessert. The meal syntagm is also a cultural construct.

Advertising takes this coding a stage further. They constantly translate between systems of meaning and constitute a meta-system where values from different compartments of life become interchangeable. Often the text or images of an ad are not linked by a narrative but by juxtaposition. The aim of an ad is to associate the values of a known meaning with their message. Look at all the ads that use the notion or image of Australia to sell a product. We know too that sex sells.

Ads also use two concepts of figurative language to produce meaning: metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor is the substitution of one signifier for another. It can make complex ideas simpler or more colourful such as the use of the phrase ‘couch potato’ to describe a lazy TV watcher. Metonymy uses part of the signified to stand as a signifier. Therefore some part of an object is used describe the whole object (describing the king as “the Crown”) or vice versa, the whole object is used to describe some part it (using "Australia" where "Australian government" is implied). Cultural theorists have criticised the advertising and fashion industries for their manipulation and persuasive techniques. Douglas Keller believes that consumers need to learn how to read ads as texts so they can be analyse and properly critiqued. He has called the advertising industry parasitic and a huge social drain. More money is spent on advertising in the world than schooling. He concludes that we are “going to have to question seriously the priorities, values and institutions of consumer capitalism if we wish to preserve the democracy, freedom, health rights and individuality to which we pay lip service”.

That’s culture for you. The signs are there.