Tradition in Everyday Life

GENED 1196 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

How do groups express themselves creatively in everyday life, and how do these group expressions reflect our individual experiences of the world?

What does a jar of homemade pickles have in common with the boisterous chants of the Harvard-Yale game? Both are artful expressions of communal, traditional culture in everyday life! Beyond the walls of museum galleries, creative expression exists all around us in surprising
forms, shaped through individual and communal creation. In this course, you will learn to recognize and evaluate diverse expressions of traditional culture, from Harvard Lore to annual family traditions, to community festivals, to social media culture. Course readings introduce you
to a variety of traditional texts (forms of expressive traditional culture); contexts (the sites and occasions where traditional expressive culture is performed); and textures (aesthetics, or the culturally informed, group-based parameters that shape traditional culture). You will complete
small collection projects to look for and describe expressive traditions, and these exercises will culminate in your own capstone ethnographic project in which you document, analyze, and creatively present an expressive tradition of your choice. The course prepares you to see artful
expressivity in everyday life, rethinking the universality of concepts often attached to creative expression such as ‘beauty,’ ‘art,’ ‘individual genius,’ ‘progress,’ ‘ownership,’ ‘expertise,’ ‘agency,’ and even time itself.