Page 10 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 3

Reflection upon cultural practices is of course possible. This can be
done cognitively. (Non-cognitive reflectiveness will be returned to at the
end of Part IV.) For example, one may ask whether lawn mowing is
performed by an individual acting alone, by a group, or somehow and
sometimes both; one may ask whether it is a cognitive effort, ultimately
a practical effort, or something else; one may ask about the mowing
effort as an activity directed at objects and, correlatively, about the lawn
as it presents itself to the mower as to be, being, or having been mowed;
one may ask how equipment is used in lawn mowing; one may ask how
a practice such as lawn mowing combines with others, such as tree
pruning, into combinations, e.g., gardening; and so on. Such questions are
external to lawn mowing itself because lawn mowing can be performed
without worrying about them, while they imply that the unreflective
practices such questions are about can at least be feigned and are
independently possible, and because they are raised out of concerns
different from those essential to the straightforward or unreflective
practice reflected upon.
Enough may now have been said for cultural practices to be recog-
nized. This recognition is important if only because the cultural dis-
ciplineSy the theme of this essay, can be characterized in terms of the
types of cultural practices that pertain to them, lawn mowing again being,
for example, a type of landscape maintenance pertinent to the discipline
of landscape architecture. If cultural practices can be combined in distinct
ways, then the questions can be raised of whether all combinations of
cultural practices are disciplines and then whether all disciplined
combinations of cultural practices are cultural disciplines.
A weekday morning's "amateur" practices may consist of getting up,
using practice-specific equipments in the bathroom, dressing, using other
practical-specific equipments to prepare food, eating it, and traveling to
work. Amateur lawn mowing is probably done on the weekend. Besides
being a part of the gardening or yard maintenance that a house holder
might engage in as an amateur, lawn mowing can also be done by a
professional As in erotics, athletics, and academics, the professionals are
the ones who are, as a rule, rewarded in money. There are many types
of professionals thus defined, but two broad kinds, each of which contains
many sorts, can be distinguished according to degree of competency.
Some professionals might be termed craftspeople. They have preparation,
experience, equipment perhaps, motivation, and skill that is beyond what
is involved in an amateur cultural practice. In this signification, technicians