What does it mean to have culture? How does one have a culture? Is culture acquired or is it a right that we were born with? Where does culture come from? What is culture?
Well, according to "Merriam Webster Dictionary," culture is the set of "customary beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group;" also, "the characteristic features of everyday existence shared by a people in a place or time." So, if we were to break it down into layman's terms, we would say that culture is the beliefs and social norms held by a certain group of people.
One of my pet peeves is when someone comes up to me and says, "I don't have a culture." That is such a disservice for yourself to actually believe that you don't have a culture. Even if you lived in a town with only 300 people, you would still have a culture. To have culture doesn't mean you come from the most ethnically diverse parts of the world; it means that you were raised in an environment. Period. That's it. You were born and raised somewhere. Even if you were raised in a box, you still have culture!
In today's society, I think that many of us have lost a sense of what it means to have culture and the way that we act and express our feelings and our beliefs is partly because of our culture. I think that it is hard to recognize your own culture, but having the opportunity to travel to different countries, I was able to truly recognize what my culture looked like, but also the culture of others. I think that to really and truly appreciate culture, it takes a different state of mind. It takes a person to acknowledge that everybody is different, and they come from different walks of life. Something about that is so beautiful.
I think it is important to also recognize the beauty in one's own culture. I think that it takes time to really appreciate your culture. For as long as I could remember, I had a hard time really accepting my culture, but once I fully understood that my family's history would always be a part of who I am, I really was better able to understand who I was as an individual.
Culture is so important to truly being able to comprehend who we are and why we act the way that we do. I think it is absolutely essential to understand not only your own culture, but also the culture of others. Being able to understand where others come from better ables us to be more accepting and caring for one another. Cultural awareness can really open the gateway to openness and a better understanding for one another.
Over the next few months, potentially more, I will be releasing articles surround the topic of culture. I will be calling this, "The Culture Movement." These articles are here to educate and really explore different cultures and ideas.
Before going into these articles there are a few concepts that I want to share with you that are just good keywords to know when talking about culture. The first two definitions are, once again, drawn from "Merriam Webster Dictionary," and the last term is defined by "Global Sociology."
The first term is culture shock, which is defined as, "a sense of confusion and uncertainty sometimes with feelings of anxiety that may affect people exposed to an alien culture or environment without adequate preparation."
The second term is ethnocentric. This is the idea that, "your own group or culture is better or more important than the others."
The last term is cultural relativism, which is "trying to understand cultural practices in their own context, rather than judge them by the standards of other cultures."
I encourage everyone to really reflect over these terms and truly seek to understand what these terms and mean and how we can see them play out in our day to day lives. These articles are going to be an adventure, and I can guarantee they will open conversations that will not be intended, especially for myself. But these are conversations that should and need to be open to really become a society that is accepting to all cultures. These are conversations to create compassion, openness, understanding, and empathy.
