Two-and-a-half hours to deadline, and 655 words to go. My muse urges me to “write about something you don’t know; it’s all you have.”
I don’t know this culture. Interpret “this” anyway you like. Your culture, my culture, white people’s culture, corporate culture, any culture that springs to mind. I don’t know this culture, that culture, the one behind that one, the one underneath.
I don’t know what a culture is, really. I took a sociology course in college. The definition I was required to memorize and regurgitate was something to the effect of “that which is transmitted from generation to generation.” I annoyed the professor by complaining it was almost useless. Webster’s says “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group” and also allows that it could be “the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time.” So I share in a culture that features “Star Wars” movie-going. That wasn’t passed down by my parents.
Webster’s definitions fail what I call the “cleavage test.” The cleavage test is: If I don’t see cleavage — as in separation —it’s not defined. To define a thing is to find the lines between what it is and what it isn’t. I don’t see anything that is definitely not-culture by the Webster’s definitions, so they can’t have defined anything. My professor’s definition defined too much, a fact that he tacitly admitted later in the course by never holding himself or the class to it, except to require us to repeat it for the final.
Culture is clearly relative.
I can’t define “human” precisely either, but I can see clearly that humans are more extensive than nationalities, and that human customs as a whole are more extensive than national customs, and going the other way, national customs are less extensive than regional customs or ethnic and racial customs within a nationality. And those are less extensive than generational customs within those ethnic and racial groups.
When I was in high school, among kids of the same ethnic groups who identified as white, there were hippies and greasers.
The characteristic features of their everyday lives diverged.
Corresponding to the nests of bodies of customs are varying identifiable people in the second sense of Webster’s, providing different, extensive domains of cultures linked to them.
If the previous sentence seems convoluted it is because I am reaching, within it, the limits of my ability to cope with the use of the word culture as meaning distinct entities that belong in separate and distinctly identifiable boxes, with clear spaces between them. The convolution you hear is the sound of me thinking “as if.”
Not knowing what culture really is, I am nevertheless expected to know mine.
But I can’t have a culture. Cultures are shared entities, and in order to know the one I’m in, I have to identify who I’m sharing it with, in order that I may figure out what we are sharing. Does that sound circular to you? I hope it does, because it is.
The issue to me is not culture at all, but the meaning assigned to culture by those who want to identify it. And there are two well-cleaved pieces of that meaning.
One meaning: Let’s identify what we share. If this is the only meaning it has to you than the issue is, let’s all share as much as possible and have the biggest culture we can.
The other meaning: Let’s use culture and its markers to know who we are and where we have been. It concerns small groups and families, then spreads out from there. If this is your concern, too much sharing threatens to overwhelm your own sense of identity.
What you see as your culture is intertwined with your sense of identity and other cultures can engulf that and dilute it.
Hey, look: My deadline is met. Happy holidays!