Culture is more than Beethoven, Buonarroti, and ballet.
“I always thought ‘culture’ meant music and the arts,” a friend once told me. “In fact, we would say things like, ‘oh, he’s not very cultured.’” For her, culture was associated with classical music, classic literature, art, music, and ballet. “It wasn’t until I started studying sociology that I realized culture is much broader than that.”
Culture means ways of thinking, acting, and believing that are shared among a group of people. And these shared ways of being separate them from other groups that have their own norms. Yes, this includes nationality, but is much larger than that. Think of people from the north, south, east, and western regions of your own country—do they have their own distinctive traits? Our ethnic backgrounds shapes what we see as “normal.” So do race, socioeconomic status, religion, educational background—the list of cultural contexts goes on and on!
Culture is woven into the fabric of who we are.
So to say someone is or isn’t “cultured” is a misnomer.
We’re all cultured.
We’re just cultured into different contexts.
(And I’ll reserve a discussion on how “cultured” when used in the sense above is equated with exclusively western classical arts for a post of its own!)
#culture #context #culturesavvy
