Extract from a work in progress by Gillian Polack

Culture is not a simple phenomenon. It operates at a range of levels, in a range of ways. Different people can read the same cultural artefact in entirely different ways and both can be "correct".

It does not have a moral code, although morals and ethics can be a part of it. A culture which celebrates killing human beings is not admirable, but it is a culture.

Cultural artefacts are not just operas and ballets. These represent the tip of the iceberg. Words and gestures are cultural artefacts. How we interpret them - what rules we have to make sense of them - are also cultural artefacts. In a seminar on Arthurian matters, the audience argued with me that early European settlers had been completely denuded of their culture - terra nullius theory applied to the Australian heritage. I would argue that assumptions like this keep us from understanding why we think the things we think, even while they (the assumptions) form part of our interpretative arsenal.

We all carry around our own cultural baggage. We don't look at the world through blank eyes, or even through something as simple as rose- coloured spectacles. What we read and how we read, what we listen to and how we listen,. What we see and touch and how we see and touch. All of these are our interaction with the outside world. The "how" of all this is a mixture between our bodies' giving us input and our cultural interpretation of that input.

It is an amazingly complex system.. It is a bit like DNAs, if you want another analogy. We each have our own arsenal of interpretative matter (the "how" )but we inherit quite a bit of it from various sources, especially from those we have lived with in childhood. Some of it is determined by our bodies themselves, with disabilities being at the extreme end of influencing things. This gives people with disabilities a role on the edge of our society/group cultural consciousness which is not very comfortable, but it also gives individuals with disabilities special insights on how that society operates. Minority groups have the same distancing, and the same potential for alienation and for insight.

This book does not show you the full gamut of how culture operates, nor does it stick to one society. It illustrates facets of cultural movement and change and of the interpretation of cultural artefacts. Every history you read, is, in essence an effort at cultural interpretation - making the underlying culture apparent to the reader - this book takes the idea one step further and explains how we see history and the past through our cultural baggage.

The approach is very interdisciplinary, and most of the examples used are literary. Literature is most certainly not the only cultural artefact worth writing about: it is just the easiest. Everything from how paper and cloth fans are decorated to how recipes are transmitted, to how sport codes are interpreted in play and how they evolve, would have been useful. But my training was primarily in the written word, and so I am using the material I know best, as illustration. It is also, in some ways, easiest to trace as a cultural artefact. The reception of books is increasingly studied, for instance.

This book was originally going to be about changing cultures - about key moments of transmission and change. But increasingly, it became obvious to me that to mark cultural change you had first describe cultural mechanisms. It was never an issue of this idea evolving into that idea. It is easier to think in this way, and so many of us have evolved a kind of intellectual short-hand for the description of change. The Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, for instance. Frameworks such as "evolution", "civilised", "religious" pepper our world views. I am not arguing we should stop using them. I am arguing we need to understand why we have them and how they operate. Some fo my argument is self- interested. As a Jewish feminist I belong to two of those disadvantaged groups I mentioned earlier. While it gives me particular insights, it also leads to acute discomfort in many situations, such as when a bomb blacked the wall of my local community centre. One way of reducing this discomfort (for all of us, not just for those who flutter at the edge of "common culture") is for us to understand where we come from and how. This is the ultimate in political correctness - find out where prejudices come from and make an active choice about how much you want to retain and why, about how your views and the expression of your views can affect other people, and why.