The Cultural Diamond

Fig. 2. Griswold's Cultural Diamond is an accounting device that helps to identify relationships associated with a cultural object. The Matrix is Everywhere. Wendy Griswold's Cultural Diamond. Pinterest, 2014. JPEG.

Star Trek’s depiction of life in the twenty-fifth century focused less on the accumulation of wealth and more on intellectual pursuits. Here back in the twenty-first century, it may come across as ironic to say that this academic exploration of the fictitious future depends heavily upon the use of an invaluable “diamond” in order to reach a meaningful conclusion. To clarify, it’s not a precious gem that is being referenced but an accounting device called the cultural diamond, developed by Wendy Griswold as a way of understanding cultural objects (see fig. 2).

Griswold defines a cultural object as, “[a] socially meaningful expression that is audible, visible, or tangible or that can be articulated [and] . . . moreover, tells a story, and that story may be sung, told, set in stone, enacted, or painted on the body” (12). Not all expressive works can be thought of as cultural objects until they possess a shared significance among a group of people. “Only when such objects become public, when they enter the circuit of human discourse,” Griswold elaborates, “do they enter the culture and become cultural objects” (15).

Therefore, in order to understand why an object has cultural relevance, it helps to consult Griswold’s cultural diamond. The tool consists of four elements - the producers, the cultural object itself, its recipients, and the social world – which are all connected via four points and six links (Griswold 15). While not providing a cause and effect relationship between the points, or even a true definition of what any of the relationships are, it can at least show a relationship exists in the first place and that helps our understanding (Griswold 16). As a popular television show broadcast to audiences all over the world, it’s easy to see how Star Trek functions as a cultural object and, that considered, it can be examined using the diamond’s various points.