CULTURE

“Culture” can be defined as sets ideas or practices for which alternatives exist and which are adopted by the individual not through reason but through the influence of others. Culture dictates many aspects of life, from daily habits of food and dress to esoteric religious beliefs, but it should be distinguished from other aspects of living in that fulfills group-based expectations as opposed to purely pragmatic concerns. For example, if you buy a pair of blue jeans because they’re cheap and durable, that’s not culture, but if you wear them because all the other kids are wearing them, then that is an artifact of culture. We can see here how a cultural artifact can start out as a utilitarian innovation by a people whose place and time remain associated with it, eventually to re-emerge as something with cultural value long after the need for its original use has receded. Denim trousers were an obvious choice of garment for Western settlers, and quickly became an emblem of the rural working class. Later, middle class kids started wearing them as a rebellion against strict dress codes and soon pricey designer jeans were being sported by people who don’t spend a lot of time digging in the mines. Another basic example of basic culture is chopsticks–available in oriental restaurants simply to enhance the exotic experience, they were for a long time the primary eating utensils for East Asians. Plenty still use them exclusively–even in the U.S.–proving that in culture old habits die hard, while younger Asians (along with the occasional yuppie) are becoming bi-utensil.

Culture can consist of a lot of things and they can be modern as well as traditional. A somewhat narrower subset of culture is ethnicity. Ethnicity is defined by ancestry but it is not simply a recounting of one’s national heritage but rather the extent to which it affects one’s various habits and mannerisms. There is ethnic food and ethnic dress, of course, but the best example of ethnicity is accents. People with identical racial or national backgrounds can have accents with greatly varying “thickness”, and in an American context it’s typical to identify some folks as having accents and others not. This suggests that ethnicity stands in contrast to a “mainstream” set of mannerisms and so while anyone can talk about what they are on their mother’s side and father’s side, some people can be considered ethnic and others not. It’s not about being white, since to speak in a Southern accent (and to habitually eat grits), or a Boston accent or a New York accent or a Minnesota accent (as in the movie Fargo) is to be ethnic to a specific degree without being any kind of recent immigrant. The counter-argument would be that an American non-accent is in fact a Midwestern accent and that a different English-speaking society such as Britain would identify such erswhile
“mainstream” American mannerisms as one of several distinct American ethnicities.

Race is sometimes considered a form of ethnicity. I tend to dispute the notion that race is a form of culture, since it is immutable rather than developing from the influence of others. After all, an adopted child of a different race will adopt the culture and ethnicity (or lack thereof) of his or her parents. Then again, such a child may still develop an affinity with peers of the same race—race being such a visible marker—and such group-defining affinities are part of what ethnicity—and culture in general—are about. Perhaps ethnicity is not strictly a subset of culture but the two are overlapping categories. Ethnicity is the sharing of minority ancestral traits, some cultural, some genetic, while culture is the sharing of traits, some ancestral, some modern, some minority, some mainstream. (In the U.S., being white is only a form of ethnicity among white supremacists.)

Religion can certainly be considered a form of ethnicity where there’s emphasis on maintaining ancestral traditions, and a form of culture at all times. Many religious traditions have their origins in utilitarian practices designed to face the need for control, control over both the environment and the members of society. People have long believed that rituals, incantations, and/or symbolic displays can persuade God or the gods to intervene in their affairs, and that various types of misbehavior can provoke supernatural punishment. Some of this can be traced back to mystical experiences had by the founders of the tradition. Whatever conditions surrounded this poorly understood phenomena at the time are deemed facilitative and are preserved (a good example is baptism). More down-to-earth concerns take on a spiritual dimension when they become part of a religion’s laws for governing society, and obedience to such is usually part of a religion’s recipe for obtaining rewards in the afterlife. Religions by and large offer the same things to their respective communities, but like so many other aspects of traditional culture, they vary greatly among themselves, since they all developed in geographic isolation. But unlike most aspects of culture, religion is a particularly high-stakes game, covers a particularly broad range of topics, and is particularly resistant to change. The stage is set for a complex cultural clash. There is tension between traditionalism and modernism within mainstream culture, tension between mainstream culture and minority cultures, and (to a lesser extent) tension between minority cultures
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