What Is Culture?

What Is Culture?

(Note: The following piece was written responding to story that was published on https://www.NPR.com about dropping population numbers in Japan, with fewer and fewer younger couples choosing to having children at home, while others traveled abroad, such as to the US, to have careers and start families. The question raised in the comments that followed was ‘What happens to a culture when its people are gone?’)

Japan is a top-tier ‘first world’ society. It now enjoys a strong presence in the capitalistic sphere equal to the United States in many respects. As such, Japan has a considerable influence on the world’s economy at large through dozens of its technology sectors and companies.

However, the current population fluctuations and downturns make it potentially quite fragile. Therefore, what would happen if the worst were to occur, and its numbers dwindled to a point of virtual ‘no return’ (or, at the least ‘non-viability’), one which would make it impossible for any such country to continue to function as nation, and a people? (Sorry, Japan! This short essay is merely speculation and conjecture on my part, and an intellectual exercise, using current population trends as a platform for conjecture.)

Well, as much as we like to think sashimi, Manga, (or tacos) define a culture, they do not. Those types of ‘relics’ are just the physical manifestations of culture, symbolic representations of it. Without a living, thriving society behind them, they are nothing. (Consider Taco Bell is not in the business of selling ‘culture’ after all, only Americanized ‘cuisine copies’ of the artifacts of a culture, and not very accurate ones at that.)

It is easy to confuse the artifacts or physical manifestations of a culture with the culture itself. Manga and sashimi are just physical manifestations or outward expressions of the unique culture of a people, with Manga being an intellectual expression (articulated as an art form), and sashimi being a dietary one, expressing the importance of a food staple endemic and indigenous to a particular region. (The last classification is the most important.)

Therefore, these outwardly manifested expressions are nothing by themselves, which explains why it is so easy to export them to fast-food restaurants and other mass markets, which offer the cuisine (or the art reproductions, or other by-products of a culture), but cannot offer the intangible essence or the finite qualitative experience of that culture.

‘Culture’ is the impetus behind these artifacts, but it is not a physical thing itself, and they are not the sole expression of what constitutes that culture. Those artifacts merely present an outward facet of that culture, in essence, a physical representation of a nonphysical, even spiritual phenomenon.

Culture, instead, may be described thus: “Culture is the living expression of a people’s ongoing history of survival and adaptation through all the rigors of their native environment, including its resources, or the lack thereof. The outwardly manifested ‘cultural artifacts’ (national art, style and mode of clothing, literature, cuisine, religious practices) are, therefore, defined by how their ancestors (from most ancient to most recent) met, engaged, and overcame (or, conversely, were overcome by) that environment. ” (Quote and quotation marks are mine.)

The shaping forces of a culture can also be external and invasive, such as a people who may have spent many years under the oppressive rule and foreign culture of another nation. This occurred in China during the last great dynasty, the Ming, which ruled as foreign invaders for almost three hundred years. Human cultures of disparate peoples often co-mingle and cross-contaminate, creating hybrid cultures and alternative methods of survival (which also become a part of that culture).

Nearly all aspects of culture, from religion, to native cuisine, to even (counter reactionary?) responses to extant political systems, are the stepchildren of a onetime and long-ago struggle for survival in an environment that was once, more likely than not, very harsh or demanding, whether those difficulties were manufactured or natural, internal or external.

In this sense, cultures are like families in macrocosm. Individual (human) families have certain tastes, rituals, preferred foods, and practices that stem directly from how they, as a group of people, tried to grow and tried to learn how to live with each other, and within the limits of the resources available to them. Hence, a rich family would have a decidedly different culture from a poor family’s, with their various group tastes dictated largely by that predefined state of existence, and the resources available to them. The artifacts of their culture (like favorite recipes or treasured family items of special significance to the group) could certainly be passed to another family, but in many cases not the emotional history or the story behind them.

Cultural artifacts only exemplify a culture; they represent the outward expression of it, and, at best, only simulate the meaning of its existence OUTSIDE of its native environment. However, once a people are gone, their culture dies with them, though the artifacts may linger, for a time.