Cave art is one of the first storage places where culture and cultural knowledge was stored and transmitted to the next generation. And in a way, going back to the basics, the very perhaps banal fact that culture is not transmitted automatically,. When it comes to culture, cultural knowledge, we have to devise external storage media because otherwise it's lost. So for me, storage and transmission became crucial.
In an age where the line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation seems ever more blurred, can anyone actually own a culture? In this conversation acclaimed author and public intellectual Martin Puchner explains that the history of mankind has always been a story of borrowing from one another and that this is something to be celebrated, not lamented. The idea of ownership implicit in debates about cultural appropriation, he argues, presents an insular tale about how culture evolves — flattening out the complicated textures of human history and, in the end, what truly makes us us. Our host for this discussion is Edward Wilson Lee, fellow and lecturer at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge.
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