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CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2011

A perspective on a subject that is shaped by cultural assumptions, rather than having a natural or objective basis.

For example, marriage is a cultural construction: it is not biologically necessary for men and women to marry.

Another example is gender, we have concepts of masculine and feminine that suggest to us how men and women should behave, but very few of these gender differences are determined by biological sex.

On the study of foreign philosophy in Chinese cultural construction and its future - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 
Publisher Higher Education Press, co-published with Springer-Verlag GmbH 
Wang Xiaochao, Department of Philosophy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China 
Abstract Since the “Conference on Foreign Philosophy” held in Wuhu in October 1978, the study of foreign philosophy in China has undergone a prosperous stage. This article discusses the significance of the study of foreign philosophy in the context of renovation, transformation and remolding of Chinese contemporary culture, explores the role of the discipline in the context of Chinese cultural construction, and anticipates the future of this discipline. A cross-cultural perspective is needed for a proper understanding of the significance of the learning and study of foreign philosophy in Chinese cultural construction; otherwise we might fall into cultural conservationism. Secondly, to make philosophy and social sciences prosperous is also a task for foreign philosophy studies, and whether or not foreign philosophy can be well studied should be a mark of the prosperousness of the construction of Chinese culture. Finally, philosophy is a product of human beings and should eventually serve human beings. Chinese culture should open itself up to the world and so should foreign philosophy studies in China. - springerlink.com/content/0061104575693xl1/

Williams CA (1992). Homosexuality And The Roman Man: A Study In The Cultural Construction Of Sexuality. (Volumes I And II). Ph.D. Thesis, Yale University, DAI 53:11A, p. 3894, 511 pages. 
Abstract by author: This dissertation aims to reconstruct the linguistic and cultural apparatuses for the categorization and evaluation of sexual experience between males that were shared by Romans as part of their cultural heritage.

Making use of sources from the classical period (approximately 200 B.C. to A.D. 200) that range from such diverse literary texts as Plautus, Catullus, Cicero, Petronius, and Martial to the graffiti scratched on the walls of Pompeii, this study seeks to describe the dominant ideology of sexual behavior qua cultural product. 
A proposition that informs the entire discussion is that 'homosexuality' and 'heterosexuality' were not active categories within Roman cultural discourses on sexuality. Erotic behavior between members of the same sex was not conceived as a discrete area for the application of moral codes any more than was erotic behavior between males and females, defined as such. This dissertation thus seeks to demonstrate that its title is anachronistic. 
The first two chapters are concerned with the interaction between Greek and Roman culture, especially in the second and first centuries B.C., arguing that male homoeroticism was an unremarkable feature of Roman life from the earliest of times; what Romans identified as distinctly Greek in the area of sexual experience was the peculiarly Hellenic social practice of pederasty. 
The third chapter forms a pendant to this discussion, considering characteristically Roman aspects of surviving representations of erotic experience between males that can be connected with the lack of a pederastic tradition on the Greek (especially Athenian) model. 
The fourth chapter examines a code regulating men's sexual behavior that is encapsulated in the word Stuprum and that categorizes sexual acts on the basis not of gender-combinations but of the status of men's partners (free as opposed to slave). 
The fifth and sixth chapters examine a second code, centering on the physical and specifically phallocentric opposition between the active (insertive) and passive (receptive) roles in intercourse, that classifies sexual agents on the basis of the specific physical acts that they perform rather than on the gender of the persons with whom they perform those acts. 
The last chapter considers hints in the sources at the possibility of men's sharing erotic experience in ways that circumvented or disregarded this rigid penetrative code.  

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