Culture Belongs to Everyone
When most people think of culture, they think of the culture of a particular country or ethnicity. They may think of some particular subcultures. Culture isn’t limited to that of an easily defineable set of people. Culture is merely the shared behavior, thoughts, and modes of interaction between a particular set of people. As soon as you have two people together, they can start to create their own culture.
Groups of friends have their own cultures, so do workplaces, families and villages. Sometimes the culture in one subway station is different from the culture in the rest of the city. Sometimes an Apartment building has a different culture from the one next door.
When you have your own culture (and most of us do), you sometoems forget that others don’t share it. I remember when I spent a few days hanging out with a friend of a friend. “You don’t play video games? What do you do!?” He couldn’t fathom what I could possibly do with friends besides watching tv and playing video games. We are all guilty of forgetting that’s others (even those who look like us and come from the same places and have similar habits) may not have the same culture.
When I’m with my tribe for extended periods of time, I forget as well. We typically do not feel the need to be overly polite and showing off is frowned upon. A genuine desire to help others is encouraged, vegetarian is the norm but no one pressures anyone to stop eating meat as long as they not rub their love of meat in others faces. Sex and gossip are not really things that everyone feels comfortable talking about, no one buys much, we all have a desire to help the underdog. We don’t like hierarchy.
None of us use the framing of the business and marketing worlds. Many of us are non-judgemental towards those who do, but anyone who tries to engage with us using this language will receive blank stares. It kind of feels like if someone walked up to a bunch of Amish people and used hip hop slang with them....
I’m not defined by my tribe and I have shared culture with other people besides one tribe but this culture plays an important part in how I interact with others. I did choose them and so in many ways, they fit me well, though not perfectly. I typically avoid situations where there is a shared culture that is vastly different from my own, although I’m happy to interact with individuals from those cultures on a one-on-one basis, or in a mixed group.
There is a dominant culture though, a pop-culture, and people who fit into it often feel that others need to adjust themselves to fit the norm. Pop culture includes most of whatsoever on television and media, corporate culture and the typical political paradigms, academia and the like.
I would like to allow those who come from the dominant culture, or any popular subcultures to do what they do. It can be hard though, when they often expect me people like me to fit into their world, rather than accepting us for who we are.
What kind of culture are you a part of?
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by @skyleap
This is a great article @whatamidoing. In anthropology, the debates around culture/society are always the most heated. From outside, it's also farcical, in that they try to separate from said to culture, to understand it.
I think the greatest way to understand culture is by placing yourself accordingly, for a culture shock.
For example, I haven't watched TV since 2001. No one I hang with watches TV. So occasionally, if I need to pop in somewhere, with someone else, and they're all sitting around watching TV, I still catch myself falling into judgement, with my assessment of the situation.
I am active within a few *sub-culture groups, one of which is the Melbourne hip-hop scene.
A common question I am asked is what is the difference between rap and hip-hop. Well;
Rap is music.
Hip-hop is the culture that is shared by it's adherents.
and it's not all the faggot, bitches, hoes, gangster crap that the mainstream media likes to portray.
This culture, differs not only from town to town, but from venue to venue.
the hip hoppers I hang with are very, globally aware, and many tracks are about the banking/political/medical/educational/ scams.
Again, a great article :)
Peace.
There is no way to really understand a culture from outside unless you’ve been inside it. That double perspective is where the real insight comes, from being able to put yourself in it our take yourself out of it at will.
I’m still quite judgemental about certain culture but it does not as tied up in bias as before, not labeling it as “bad” but rather seeing it as contradictory and willing to illustrate why on the rare occasion that someone is interested in hearing my perspective.
I really love to place myself in a foreign culture from time to time, and I don’t mean other countries cultures, I mean like a room full of people watching tv. It’s fascinating!
My ideal lifestyle would be;
5 long blacks a day,
each at a different street cafe.
Watching the world fly by, then die.
while drinking coffee, with a slice of pie.
Peace.
If we are talking about culture, in terms of tribe, men my tribe is wild, trash talking, extroverts. They love women and alcohol, talk about money a lot but make so little of it. They are ambitious to desperation and they are laid back in their various faiths and doctrines. They don't read books, some don't play games, some do illegal stuff to survive. Basically I hang out with the good, the bad and the pretty ugly but I am not them. The only similar things we share is our love for beautiful women and alcohol.
As far as they are concerned, I am a weirdo but they are cool with it. They say it's my thing and they listen to me and take me serious. 😂
My culture is quite complex.
It sounds like you don’t fully relate to the people around you. Sometiems that’s just how it is, but if you desire people who understand you on a deeper level, insist on being yourself and you will eventually find them. It took me giving up everything in order to find a family, and it took me going off on my own once I found them to help them grow into the people they wanted to be. If you enjoy people just enjoy them though, no need to reject them because they are different from you, as long as you feel fulfilled. I think “they listen to me and take me seriously” is an essential point!
Your tribe sounds amazing and like the kind of tribe I would love to be a part of!!
You will have to visit some day!
😀
I've just made a post about it.
I'll also like to know what kind of culture are you a part of, cheers!
I think I could have made a point that each individual person has their own unique culture, I am a culmination of many different cultures and my position within them, usually a bit of an outsider, even when I’m on the inside. I’ve been influenced greatly by my early struggle to be understood and so I can appreciate most subcultures and also don’t feel unfamiliar outside of my own culture because I never fit in much there anyway so as long as long as I can find some outliers who are decent people, I’m good.
Agree, each individual person has their own unique culture, there are a lot of problems about understanding and where you fit or belong, I think you got a pretty good position.
Maybe tribe is the best word for it. The people you spend your time around. I forget sometimes that people outside my tribe do not understand my 'inside joke' humor always.
But if you look at culture in the way that most people define it, I find it mostly geographically based what kind of culture we live in. And that gets challenging when you are moving around a lot like me ;)
The dominant culture is quiet similar everywhere, rather herd like, but exhibiting different features base do on those who lead the herd. They misinterpret the words of thinkers and artists who were not part of the herd and ar influence s by those misinterpretations. I find artists and those truly connected to nature to be quite similar everywhere as well and I can relate to them much easier than the herd.
I always viewed culture as far more fluid than a lot of people want to accept and I think you hint at that a little bit here. It is easy to tie our identity up in a culture but it is an intangible concept and no two people, even within the same culture, interpret it exactly the same. This is one of the reasons that I always thought it was a bit silly when people get bent out of shape over "appropriation."
As for myself, it is hard to pin down. I find that I can "slip" between several cultures. Border culture, Southern culture, academic culture, ghetto culture, psychedelic culture, weed culture all have something that I view as part of my culture but I can't say that I really fit into any of them very well.
The only thing I think is worth calling appropriation is when people actively try to cash in on a certain culture. If our culture didn’t encourage the commodification of everything down to our very personalities, appropriation wouldn’t be a problem, we’d all look at someone who had dreadlocks or a nose ring or whatever else in order to create a kind of image as a bit of a tool. Authenticity makes the whole issue redundant.
nice post.
culture is the ability of a civilization to dwell on living. Deeper the ability, richer the culture.
earlier a culture (practices, philosophy and spirituality) could not be separated from its community. but now with so much knowledge floating around, culture has become a set of diverse practices without cohesion.
Indian culture has deep roots within my thought process. Most of my practices are things that i learned subliminally by watching people around me. i did learn a lot when i stepped out of my country.
You could say that my culture is about letting life flow through me rather than try and control it. spiritual and cultural practices teach us to watch life rather than be rattled by it. my tribe is about people who are spiritual (need not be one particular way), treat life with the knowledge that we are minor cogs in every happenstance and are prepared to be less covetous about the self. Peace of mind is a very prominent asset!
I am quite optimistic about the new cultures forming now. The dominant culture has always been top down and full of holes but now there is a kind of “decentralization” of culture that more people can take part in than ever before. We, here, on steemit or other online communities can build our own cultures taking the best from many different worlds.
grasshoper am i right?
Stick bug?
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