Culture

                                    Culture

 

 

          

 

            “I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humor and English wine.” 

                                                                                      Peter Ustinov

I'm writing this to raise awareness of how truly difficult it is to understand and thereby live peacefully with others that are different from us. Yet I truly believe we must try our best and that our future as a species depends on it.

Culture is an interior experience writ large, it is the subjectivity of any more than one person. Culture is the experience of “We,” or “Our,” or “Us.” There is nothing innate about culture other than all humans have some kind of cultural experience as a developmental matrix, and then whatever they co-create with others throughout their life.

Culture can be everything from the kind of beer we share, geography, language, religion, politics or our shared Alma Matter. The operative word is “shared.”

Cultural anthropology is an attempt to try to understand from the inside what a particular cultural is. So cultural anthropologists live with, eat, sleep, work, play, worship with whatever culture they are studying, so they can have some kind of “We/Us” shared experience, then they try to write about it as if they somehow know the culture from the inside out.

I do agree it's a good idea to try and get an insider's point of view with culture, but I also think ultimately the view is very limited. Unless one grows up and gets calibrated to a particular culture I think it is very different to really have a sense of what  it's like to be a part of a group from the inside.

When I worked as an intensive in home worker, I experienced vastly different cultures every day. Going into someone's home is a cultural anthropological experience, and it should be approached as such. Now, I'm working in a county that has a culture of meth use, incest, poverty, domestic violence, and xenophobia, they are literally dying off and/or killing each other.

Last night I come back to a culture that is much more diverse and tolerant. I go into the Dollar store on Haywood road, West Asheville. It's about 6:15 and things are hoppin'! 98% of the people coming, going, and working there are Black. The guy at the cash register is flirting, greeting, and messin' with everyone who comes in.

“How u doin' young lady, u look gooood tonight!” he says to an elderly Black woman walking with a cane.

Then a young fox walks in and he blurts out; “Oh no, we closed now, y’all gon need to go!”

He's banging on the cash register, cussing it, and somehow getting it to work, there is a long line, but nobody seems to mind.

I am sandwiched between 2 elderly Black women, with my Listerine and triple A batteries, and they begin to banter, coo, and howl with laughter after one will say; “I know that's right!” One talks about hitting the lottery saying how she's gonna help everyone. The other says; “Well I'm gon hitit too!” They start playing off each other, competing, but also saving the world.

“I'm gon help the churches, and come back here an giv some to every one here, even this man here!” she touches me kindly on the shoulder. Meanwhile, the cashier is calling out; “Y’all sure gon giv som ta me!” and the women call back; “Oh, you know yo gon git some, we gon send yo to collage!”

My heart and soul are filled with joy and a sense of humanity when I leave. Because I was available and open, I had a glimpse of another culture. They let me in during that brief but deep encounter, this is the stuff of unity. Meanwhile people of one culture were slaughtering others in Paris, the international city of love.