metaculture

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

anthropologist

linguist

university professor

University of Pennsylvania

innovator in the field of

linguistic anthropology

is the evaluation and transmission of cultural products.

the evaluative processes which define and distribute cultural products, processes that Urban finds account for both the propensity for culture to conserve and transmit traditional folkways and culture's 'inherent dynamism, its built-in propensity for change.' A crucial function of metaculture, or the evaluation and transmission of cultural products, is 'its ability to generate self-interpretations or self-understandings that help to define what change or sameness is' (3). Working through the notion of metaculture, Urban distinguishes between cultures whose self-understandings promote cultural products that reproduce traditional folkways or 'inertial cultures,' and those whose self-understandings promote cultural products that are novel, or 'accelerative cultures' (15-18).. . . 'Internal Differences: Secularism, Religion, and Poetic Form in Nineteenth . . . '

Gregg UrbanThinkers

Gregg Urban