Culture and Amateur Culture
Amateur Culture and Learning Mind
While we talk about amateur culture, the concept needs a comprehensive explanation. Because it is new to the game. Amateur Culture easily relates with inspiration, love, lifelong learning, social life and cultural participation. However, we starts with dictionary definitions then will discuss about its relation with above concepts and more. Questions arise on amateur culture, love, learning and mind.
What is Culture? Mind
Culture’s turn to come. Etymologically its roots goes to “pertaining to the raising of plants or animals,” from Latin cultura “tillage, a cultivating, agriculture. The figurative sense of “cultivation through education, systematic improvement and refinement of the mind” is attested by c. 1500. According to Century Dictionary “Not common before the 19th century, except with the metaphor used in Latin by Cicero.” Meaning of “learning and taste, the intellectual side of civilization” is by 1805.[1]
For Oxford Dictionary, culture means ‘refinement of mind, taste, and manners; artistic and intellectual development.’ ‘The distinctive ideas, customs, social behaviour or products of a particular community.’ Also it is the social environment or a way of life characterized by the specified quality or thing. Hence, it covers the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement.
Amateur is not a profession that requires specific working hours and has no certain borders. It is an understanding that we embrace for all dimensions of life, even crooning at the shower or voting. Amateur starts with mind-set. Thus, while encouraging the amateur, culture present a proper ground.
What about Amateur Culture? Learning and Love?
Amateur culture asserts to learn and improve our mind by becoming perpetual beginners.
Not only minds but also our spirits and bodies as a whole need to be cultivated about various fields.
By not avoiding become beginners, we should go beyond our professions as secure nests. In contrast to ostrich that bury its head into sand, intellectual human should not be conservative of one profession by being indifferent to outside.
As a way of Socratic life, we are able to handle with new pursuits. By the motto of ‘I know that I know nothing’, modesty on the past, already known, but enthusiasm for future learning with an amateur attitude.
In the terminology of C. P. Snow, ‘two cultures’ refer to science and the arts, considered as being in opposition to each other. However, Amateur culture get on with the two cultures.
Some Amateur Learning Minds
In many fields, ‘amateur culture’ has found a place for itself. In literature, Franz Kafka was at the amateur level, writing in his spare time, never earning any money from literature, and a few of his works were published while he was alive.
On the other hand, Karl Marx was not a professional in economics.
He had no ties to any institution, nor did he have a prestigious professional title.
One profession could be enough to keep the food on table. If any additional pursuit is there, it refers to the love as Latin root of ‘amateur’. Love maybe the only force that makes people do somethings, more than make money.
It is the seeds of versatility, needs to be irrigated by the labour.
With reference to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, basic needs at the bottom satisfied by professional activities and self-fulfilment needs at the top met with the love of amateur spirit. According to the study, amateur culture is able to relate with multidisciplinary, lifelong learning, interdisciplinary, multifunctionality and versatility.
Amateur Culture because of Love
Then anyone can ask why we need ‘amateur culture’ instead of all these concepts and prefer this to them. Because Amateur comes from the root of Love as founding principle of cosmos, it is more comprehensive and precede than others.
We hope you find some questions and answers on amateur culture, love, learning and mind.
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Take a look at Amateur Manifesto !
[1] Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/