Exploring the nature of culture

We acknowledge that culture is something that is transmitted between individuals, especially in their interaction with each other. This idea along with the knowledge of the existence of cultural boundaries often gives us a sense that culture is something that is preserved inside a silo – the silo can be as small as a team, to as large as a civilization, an ethnicity or a nation – and is transmitted outside during its interactions with other silos.

So what is culture? Is it a monument such as the Eiffel Tower? Is it the language of a civilization? Is culture the art and literature of a time period, or the taboos and code of manners? It is all of it, and yet none of it. All of these aspects are a result of culture – an expression and a measure of culture. They aren’t culture. This is because culture can be expressed at the smallest scale not in terms of society but in terms of the fundamental element of society – the individual. Culture is deeply personal to and is cultivated and embodied within a single individual. It is when this culture is similar across people, that they come together to create its symbolic expression such as the Statue of Liberty.

We do not normally notice culture. Yet it is all-permeating, much like water around a fish. It is precisely because of this reason that we do not notice it. The realization of cultural difference is acutely sensed when we travel to a different culture, crossing cultural boundaries, and realize that despite the excitement and adventure it promises, it does not feel home. It is this feeling of amusement combined with, as Arthur Goldhammer puts it in his article Poisoned Fruit: Crossing Cultural Boundaries, ‘an exhilarating disorientation of the senses.’

Exploring the nature of home

It is easy to understand that we don’t feel at home in a new culture because it is not our own. But is our own culture, where we relatively feel-at-home, really our own? Isn’t it formed as a result of crossing the micro boundaries of thousands of cultures between individuals? According to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, being not at home is a fundamental aspect of our existence. He writes: “The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but she does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there” For him, being at home means something like having practical knowledge of the situation and knowing how to act. Being at home, in this sense, is therefore different from being somewhere.

Maybe we are homeless in both the sense of a place of dwelling, but more importantly in the context of culture too. This is because culture is something that is cultivated. It is cultivated within every individual – our home is in a process of never-ending creation by ourselves. We are homeless, yet we have a home of our own that is perpetually under construction. This realization is one of returning to a new sense of home – one of homelessness. It is paradoxical, yet true, much like when the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Life is Flux”, what we now commonly interpret as ‘change is the only constant.’

The very act of seeking a home for oneself in a perpetual state of homelessness is also an assertion of the human will, the capacity for us to integrate our learnings and live meaningfully in the face of the absurd.