What is Culture?

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How does your culture affect the way you experience the world? Take a moment to think about how you frame right and wrong or make and share expectations. Culture has everything to do with how you perceive and become successful.

Moving to a new country, you will experience some of the “edges” of your cultural framework, showing you different levels of yourself, as well as the cultural makeup of the new culture you are interacting with.

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Culture is systematic civilization. Civilization is human society. Society is human group. Group is entity bond. Bond is relational dependence.

PaulMielcarz

Disclaimer: I am not an anthropologist, or a sociologist. Although I have read independently about some theories of culture, my answer should be considered that of a layperson, and I will gladly defer to experts on the topic if they are in disagreement.

That being said, I’ve always found it interesting how people define “culture”. In how I’ve heard “culture” used in common conversation, it seems to imply something about the arts: theatre, music, painting, poetry, etc. But by my understanding, the arts takes shape within a culture, formed at least in part by the culture, and culture in turn finds its roots in language and history.

So to get to the point, culture is the lens through which we view our world, every waking moment of every day. As such, it can be difficult to see your own culture when you are living in it. It’s as if everyone is born with color-tinted contacts on their eyes which they cannot remove until much later. Most people don’t remove them until they are adults. Many people remove them, and then put them back on because they are more comfortable that way (admittedly, this probably applies to me personally). Some people never remove them at all. At any point, one could be forgiven for thinking that the world just is that way. If I had purple-tinted lenses on my eyes from the moment I was born, would I be all that crazy if I thought the whole world was purple? How could I even conceive of what it would look like without my purple lenses?

Culture is, in a way, the “other half” of language, like two sides of a coin. We start learning it before we are even aware of what it is, and it disseminates through mythology, bedtime stories, religious traditions, holidays and customs, music, art, drama, and poetry. It is imparted to us by our parents and families in similar fashion. Furthermore, if you have studied language you know that there are often words, or even entire concepts, within a language which cannot be directly translated into other languages. Knowing this helped me understand the interplay between culture and language. They are like the chicken and the egg - culture creates language, and language creates culture.

When you wake up in the morning, what are the first things you do? I shower, shave, and brush my teeth, then eat a bowl of dry cereal with milk with some fruit on the side - unless it’s a Sunday, in which case I make a big-ass omellete with fried potatoes, or biscuits and gravy (my hashbrowns are amazing, you have no idea. After decades of perfecting the art, they’re perfect and I’m not the only one who thinks so). I check my email and then walk to the bus. Most of this I do because it’s what I like - but I only like it because it’s basically the same as what my parents did when I was a child, and I was accustomed to it since before I could even speak. It’s what I’ve always done, or it’s what I’ve always seen others do.

Many Americans will share some variation of this. Maybe they read the paper or check the news online, or make some other changes. Maybe they do things in a different order - but regardless, it will be similar in many ways. Meanwhile, people who grew up in other places might have a different routine. Some may be very similar. Others might have absolutely nothing in common.

This extends to virtually everything else we do. Culture determines the proper time to start the work day, whether tardiness is acceptable, and whether we greet a business associate with a handshake or a bow, or neither. It determines what words and gestures are rude. It determines what words are allowed to be said on TV. It determines what food we eat, when we eat it, and how much. It determines where we go and what we do in our free time.

Do we go to Which one? Do you wear pants? Jeans or slacks? Would you still be able to wear jeans if you were of the opposite gender? Is it OK for a person to be a homosexual? What kind of music do you like? What kind of music do your parents like? What kind of music did your parents’ parents like? How old should a person be before having sex? How old should a person be before learning about sex?

Culture determines what constitutes acceptable/polite behavior in public - on the train, at a restaurant, while driving in traffic, or while waiting in line at the grocery store, or if you even go to the grocery store, or if you even have grocery stores where you live. It even shapes your opinions regarding philosophical concepts like morality and ethics: What makes a person good? Many people’s answer to this will reflect their culture, to varying extents.

All of these habits and routines are the lens through which we view our world, and that lens is shaped by friends and family and geography. Our parents had a lens too, and they helped shape ours. Interestingly, the degree to which we adopt our parents’ culture is also culturally relative. Culture also evolves over time, branching like a tree. It fragments and splinters sometimes, or one culture might assimilate another, or two cultures might merge mutually with each other. Occasionally, some branches on the cultural tree are annihilated; a facet of the human condition which is tragic even when it happens by accident, it is truly horrifying and gut-wrenching when it happens on purpose.

This might be very… uhh, American and I have no idea where you’re from, but are you familiar with the trope about school “cliques”? Jocks, nerds, preps, goths, punks, that kind of thing? These are also called “subcultures”, and they are a sort of microcosm of culture-at-large. They each wear a sort of “uniform” that codifies their culture into a mode of dress, listen to a certain kind of music, and they use certain words that only apply within their clique. People of the same clique tend to gravitate towards each other, but how much they “branch out” into other groups depends on the person and they all express the different aspects of their clique in unique ways. That is culture in a nutshell - it works in the same way, but with a lot more people, more complexity, and much greater consequences.

Your “culture” is your way of life - as it was taught to you by your parents, friends, teachers, and community. How your culture is important to you is a question of your own identity - and how your identity fits into your culture might not relate to how my identity fits into my culture. As such, I can’t really answer this question completely for you. What I can do is help you answer your own question by rephrasing it: How is your entire way of life important to you? Take some time and think about it. Then you will know how important culture is😊

firojahmed

What is culture, and what it really means. I ask because all my life I heard things about culture, but when the real test come to face what it really means, no one really their to whole on to it, but things like smoke that spreads until it disappear. Then we find the need to ride on the disappeared smoke to have just a moment in a day to reminisce about thing in what others did, who were more about principles, values, more then culture. So, what is culture, or should I say what are principles, and values because from my understanding of the struggles. Those who stood up where holding on to the principles, and values that were installed in them. That I can trace back to the medieval days, and hear the principle, and values game more then the culture that took priority over anything. If I'm looking at things right, did culture sell their people out, that happened in the past, and we still see the behavior in the future. To me culture is a bunch of sellout no good people, who have the first, and last say, along with in between to run the people days. Where the weak suck the bones, and steal their personality from the dead, to design a no thinking crowd to follow anything that be put in front of them. Most made culture clothes, hairstyles, and words without any of the real ingredients. So what is culture, is it anything we grab out the air, and those who look like the past to follow as being culture. Because I know culture help kill off a lot of freedom fighters, and those that did the traitor life, had justified it by saying it was for the betterment to save their people. Who saying what the freedom fighters were doing it was not culture, or are they saying, it just were principles, and values that had nothing to do with culture. If that's the case, give me principles, and values any day. Because culture throw all kind of things in to weaken the spirit of principles, and values that I see when one hold on to culture. So what is the real purpose of culture, if one take the skeleton bones out, which is principles, and values, what exactly culture supposed to be than. Can't you see.

heywardsanders

Wonderful video... Too helpful to know the real meaning of culture.

sukhgill

Culture is a constraint on the individual. It's an anchor.

YouTubeHandle

Culture shapes a collective societal identity and values. Culture is fluid. It is both homogenous and heterogeneous. Then there are sub cultures.😇😎😉

owlnyc