Aside from anthropologists, virtually no one knows what ‘culture’ is. I didn’t know, after a decade of global travel, until I was in my 30s, what ‘culture’ is.
‘Culture’ is the entire world that surrounds each person, including language, posture, worldview and all the implements of daily life. Like a fish to the body of water it inhabits, we are each so immersed in our culture we don’t know it exists. Each culture is bounded by language, sometimes geography and usually by kinship. Some people, like myself, followers of Sapir-Whorf believe that different cultures are so different from each other that genuine mutual understanding is not possible (The Sapir-Whorf thesis has been written out of textbook anthropology.) When we deal with a different culture we can only see the parts of the other culture that are part of our own.
I’ve spent fifty years visiting and traveling in Japan, and every year I find some new Japanese behavior that I had never seen before. It is unique to their culture and invisible to me. For example when the Japanese see a rainbow they see two different core blues and have different names for each. We don’t see them. Look at a ‘rainbow’ flag. One stripe is blue, not two.
The concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is somewhere between ignorant and absurd. A girl in Boston putting Japanese fabric over herself has nothing to do with a Japanese kimono which takes a Japanese a half hour each day to put on and another half hour to care for including stitching together and taking apart, sometimes daily.
Dealing with non-Americans (or the many subsets of American in the U.S.) is always a troublesome area because nearly no one knows what culture is and how intractable cultural differences are. My best example of this is native Americans. Five tribes in Washington own casinos and have significant wealth as a result. Not one of these tribes uses their money the way standard American culture proscribes. None of the tribes have paved streets, street lights for night time, they still have washing machines and motorcycles on the front porch or front yard. Definitely nothing resembling suburbs. A few tribes spend their money getting medical training for tribal members, others spend their money on their own retirement facilities.
One of the most stunning cultural blindnesses is the presence of street people (‘homeless’) in the U.S. and their absence in Japan. In Japan there are homeless people, people who don’t want to be part of the society; many who couldn’t be if they wanted to. They live in secluded parts of the big parks with water and bathrooms but out of sight of everyone. In the U.S. and other Puritan countries we allow the homeless to mingle with us, daily, because we view them as temporarily out-of-sorts; all are considered potentially productive members of society who are victims of some abuse, childhood abuse, medical troubles or addiction. Just given the right help, support and inducements, they will be productive members of society. That is the Puritanical view; the Christian Protestant deep cultural view we live in. That deeply felt belief is part of our culture. Irrational and wrong, but not subject to examination or debate.
There are many similar deeply felt worldviews that are part of our culture in addition to words, images, conceptions that are not subject to examination or even comprehension.
In all my thousands of blogs, when I use the term ‘culture’ that is what I mean.