ethics week2

• Moral values, judgment, behavior as well as moral dilemmas and how we perceive them are largely shaped and influenced by history, power dynamics, and the religion of a society.
• The way we appreciate and assess things are not created out of nothing or simply out of our imagination, but are conditioned by external and material elements around us that provide the basis for principles that orient our judgment and valuation of things.
• Culture is what shapes and influences social and personal values, decisions, behavior, and practice.
• According to Hopkins, the necessary feature of culture is brought to the fore, identifying the essential categories that explain postcolonial Filipino culture as fundamentally constituted as and by both religion and colonialism.
• The link between religion, culture, and colonialism is highlighted in this brief discussion.
• This is a virus that needs to be taken out from the Filipino body.
• Colonialism has penetrated in the inner sanctum of the being of the Filipino people, indicating how invasive colonialism is to Filipino culture.
• Understanding how culture works and its features is to also grasp the reason why things are done in a particular way and why we do these things the way we do them.
• Many of Pierre Bourdieu's key concepts like habitus, doxa, practical logic, and cultural capital have become integral and influential in social sciences and humanities.
• By practice, Pierre Bourdieu refers to the things that people do as opposed to what they say; and the way he theoretically develops this idea of practice is through the notion of habitus.
• For our purposes of thinking about the processes or practices of social patterns, particularly in relation to behavior, the concept of practice and habitus is especially relevant.
• Habitus is defined as durable, transposable, dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively "regulated" and "regular" without in any way being the product of obedience to rules.
• Pierre Bourdieu is known for his works in sociology of culture, education, language, and literature.
• In his best-known text, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), Pierre Bourdieu defines habitus in this manner:
• Power is not ahistorical and its "form" differs and varies across history.
• Social practice or behavior is produced through knowledge, or more precisely, through the ruling episteme/knowledge of a particular time.
• Habitus, as a structuring structure for social behavior, manifests differently in terms of its social or cultural markers and its historicity.
• Power, as per Foucault, is an effect that varies depending on different situations in a particular society.
• Through the Foucauldian lens, we can understand why we do the things we do through power, particularly as this is inscribed and articulated discursively.
• Christian episteme/knowledge saturates the moral universe of the Filipino people.
• Christian episteme/knowledge provides us with the capacity to read the text before us.
• The kinds of subjects produced by such power also differ and vary in every historical milieu.
• Any social practice or behavior is produced by power, through power relations.
• In the field of anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, scholars have demonstrated that culture is the best site for consideration as the material condition that shapes the way we judge and value things, and how through culture these things come into concrete expression.
• To understand Filipino values is to understand Filipino culture.
• After hundreds of years of colonization by Western Christian empires, the Filipinos' moral and ethical imagination cannot be understood outside Christian values and morality.
• A Filipino culture today is, by and large, shaped by a religious ethos of the Christian faith.
• In the Learning Exercises section are activities that could enhance reflection on the issue of culture in general and Filipino culture in particular.
• In the Analysis Section, I will further elaborate more on the stake of the question of culture by way of looking at it through the concept of apparatus of Giorgio Agamben.
• To talk about Filipino culture is to talk about Filipino religiosity/spirituality.
• In the second section, the aim is to deepen our reflection on culture, particularly on the way in which culture becomes a conflicted and contested site of various interests and power dynamics.
• The two most important thinkers in the study of culture are Pierre Bourdieu and John Berger.
• The Conclusion Section outlines the important insights from the discussion.
• Pierre Bourdieu and John Berger transformed the terrain of the study of culture and demonstrated the importance of power and social structures in understanding how culture works.
• Pierre Bourdieu and John Berger can help us understand the elements and nuances of a culture.
• The aim of the third section is to emphasize the fact that culture is not a homogenous space nor has a singular operative logic.
• Christianity is pervasive in Filipino culture so that the way we judge and value things and how things ought to be follows the doctrinal grid of Christian theology.
• An example of this pervasiveness and influence of Christianity to Filipino culture is how Filipinos value more neighborliness than filial piety.
• Filipino moral universe is framed through the ethos of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
• Christian episteme/knowledge saturates the moral universe of the Filipino people.