Essay 2: Cultural Artifact

This is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained.

~ Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

Love is the invention of a few high cultures, independent, in a sense, of marriage—although society can make it a prerequisite for marriage, as we periodically attempt to do. But in terms of a personal, highly intense choice, it is a cultural artifact.

~ Margaret Mead, The New York Times

The Moon Pie is a bedrock of the country store and rural tradition. It is more than a snack. It is a cultural artifact.

~ William E. Schmidt, The New York Times

Overview:

Write a 3-4 page* expository essay that considers the reciprocal relationship between culture and an artifact of your choosing. In your essay, you must discuss not only what the artifact communicates, but also, how the artifact communicates AND you must address how the artifact shapes and is shaped by culture. Ultimately, you will make a claim about how the artifact operates—as an expression of cultural experience, as an agent which might affect culture, and as an act of rhetoric.

Update 11/21 | While this was already a part of the essay requirements, what’s below might help to clarify:

In your cultural artifact essay, you should:

Discuss how the artifact is a product of culture and how the artifact produces culture

In other words:

1) How does culture shape the artifact? and,

2) How does the artifact shape the culture?

Discuss not only what the artifact communicates, but also how it communicates

In other words:

1) What does the artifact communicate about the culture in which it is embedded? and

2) How does the artifact communicate within the culture?

While your essay need not be argumentative per se, it can simply suggest (or, argue implicitly,) that your artifact is important, interesting, or otherwise worth paying attention to.

Artifact Criteria:

Anything can be an artifact, which is wonderful and awful. It’s wonderful because artifacts are found all around us; it’s awful because that also means you need to see the world around us as an object for analysis.

To varying degrees, your cultural artifact must produce and be produced by the culture in which it is embedded (in other words, it must shape and be shaped by culture).
It must be specific, knowable, and identifiable. In other words, you can’t choose “notetaking apps,” or “tattoos,” but you could choose “Evernote,” or “Sally Smith’s memorial tattoo for her pet lizard, Fluffy” (or perhaps “memorial tattoos” generally, as they share many features and charactertistics).
You must be able to make some claim about what the artifact communicates, how the artifact communicates (appeals, etc.), and what it says about the culture in which it operates.
It must be interesting, significant, or meaningful enough to write about.

Defining Culture:

For our purposes, culture can be a specific group of people, a small community or a large one. While you may think of “culture” in the larger (largest!) sense of the word, you may also identify a smaller, local, or more specific culture/community. The culture or community needs bound only by a shared interest, value, or location (in time, geographic space, or virtual space).