The Concept of Culture by Carol and Melvin Ember

This is the final work where I will explain the different relations among the book “Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice” by Patrick Moran, the book “The Concept of Culture” by Carol and Melvin Ember and the Colonial Museum visit, this is a museum located in Bogotá city in the zone of La Candelaria, this is one of the most important parts of the city, because it’s full of history, tourist places and museums, one of them as I mentioned before is the Colonial Museum, this museum has a big importance because it shows several details about our history in the colonial period and how was the Spanish influence in our life style.

Patrick Moran in his book in the chapter 2 called “The Cultural Experience” explains the cultural knowing framework that offers a means for describing culture in terms of what students need to do in order to learn it-their encounters with another way of life. The cultural experience consists of four interconnected learning interactions: knowing about, knowing how, knowing why and knowing oneself, now I will explain these aspects in relation to the Colonial Museum.

Knowing about:  the Colonial Museum, this museum was inaugurated on August 6, 1942 by the President of the Republic Eduardo Santos Montejo and his education minister Germán Arciniegas. Its headquarters is the former Casa de las Aulas, a seventeenth-century building that was the seat in the colonial period of the Colegio Máximo de la “Compañía de Jesús”, now the Javeriana University and the Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé, the museum is divided into 5 rooms, each room has a specific thematic related with the Colonial period where there are different pieces of art among which you can find easel painting, textile products, sculpture, furniture, objects of silverware, numismatics, printed matter and manuscripts, and much of these objects have a religious influence.

Knowing how: As said before the museum is divided into 5 rooms the first one is “The Colonial Image: Among Fear, Salvation and the Nature of an Empty Territory” this room shows how the colonial image was the product of the European world expansion, which was moving from medieval orality to modern writing. The second room is "The Journey: Meeting and Transformation of Two Worlds" this rooms shows the colonial history of our country, as well as of the rest of Latin America, this has its genesis in a journey: the one undertaken by Christopher Columbus in August 1492 and whose result was the meeting of a New World. The third room is called "The cities: Foundation and settlements in the New Kingdom of Granada" this rooms shows how it was to raise the different cities in the territory of what was the New Kingdom of Granada and the different social actors participated in its construction.  The fourth room is called “Students and Artisans: Hands that write, Hands that Built” this room shows how was the education in the colonial period time when the access to schools was restricted; the only people who could study were white people and some mestizos, but even in this group the education was difference, the men and women education were the same and the last room is called "The Colony: a Past Still Present" this room shows how our present is full of elements that are the product of the material, social and cultural transformations that occurred in New Granada between the 16th and 18th centuries.

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