The Nature of Culture

As a much as I love post-colonial theory and literature I often find myself hung up on a specific dilemma:

What is culture and how do we define it? Why should we define it? AND is culture responsible for the discord that is prevalent in our increasingly global world? Who gets to says what culture is superior?

These questions are similar to the ones Lyons asks:

What is Native culture? Is it a coherent body of specific beliefs and practices owned by a given group of pole? Who has the authority to determine what counts as culture, and how are such determinations put to use? (77).

In the face of this challenging predicament, I want to start off this post by saying I love learning about other cultures.  Cultural diversity is something I champion on a daily basis, and I can’t tell you how many I people I put in their place for being ignorant about people that are culturally different.  I don’t like when people put down other people because of cultural differences.  In fact I can get really angry over it. But I’d like to point out, I’m as guilty as a “culture cop” because according to Lyon’s culture isn’t something that is visible in terms of representation. Yes, I see myself as promoting good, but by seeing culturally different people as victims I am promoting the whole concept of “reactive self perception” that is a major problem when it comes to policing culture and behaviors.  I am just voicing injustices in a different way, but by seeing people as constant victims I am also promoting the oppositions that constantly define our existence. After all culture, isn’t just about nature it’s also about the politics of interaction between different types of people.

As much as I love culture, I find myself constantly trying to define it.  It’s just as challenging to define as the word nation. 

I really have no clear definition of what culture is. 

It’s a tricky space to tread being a post-colonial theorist because you must constantly be aware of the boundaries that refuse to go away.  Who and what are you doing when you analyze the implicit meanings of cultural differences?

After reading Lyon’s second chapter “Culture and Its Cops” I felt a little better about this cultural dilemma, and I realized that I must look at culture in a different light if I am ever to overcome this obstacle of reactive self perception that understands “difference” as the only way to understand other people.   In this case—taking a cue from Saussure—IN CULTURE THERE IS ONLY DIFFERENCES.

Lyon’s does a great job of unpacking the meaning of culture—and answering the questions he asks about Native culture and its revival—specifically within the context of Native life.  Reading his work helped me reconcile my own cultural conflicts and gave me a definition to work with.

On the subject of culture and its origin Lyons states:

Before there was culture there was nature. Both culture and nature are human ideas, and both started out as verbs becoming nouns. Nature originated in the Latin natura, signifying the process of birth; it has referred ever since to that which is “innate,” the word being one of natura’s etymological descendants (along with “natality” and “native”).   Nature was that quality or force that existed inside something and revealed its essential character; simultaneously it referred to the material world, with or without people, which was likewise filled with certain qualities or forces.  By contrast, “culture” comes from the Latin colere, signifying the activities of nurturing, caring for something, tending to it, and subsequently bettering it. Colere additionally meant “honor with worship” (which is why culture gave us “cults”) and “inhabit” (colere also gives us “colonies”). But the dominant meaning of colere was to nurture, what was nurtured was nature itself: in fact, the nurture of nature was culture.  (77)

WOW this passage completely changed my mind about culture and its meaning.  In fact, I have never read a better historical analysis of the origin of the word culture.  AND I had no idea that the word colony comes from the root word Colere.

When understood in the context of its original meaning, culture isn’t so bad.   Culture birthed life through its interaction with the nurturing of nature and vice versa.  BEAUTIFUL!!!

However, according to Lyons, modernity forced culture away from its meaning as a verb and into a noun (80-83).  Somewhere along the lines we lost touch of what culture actually was—an act of birth/life.  Now we’re “caught in a minor culture war over the meaning of culture itself” (83).

According to Lyons in Ojbwe there is no word for culture—it is an act all of itself—and “Objwe is a language of verbs rather than nouns, describing actions over objects, process over things” (88). I find Ojbwe speakers exhilarating because “Ojbwe speakers do not have a culture at all. Rather, it may be more accurate to say that they spend their time culturing…More life is the goal of Ojibwe culturing…For anishinaabeg, what we now call culture was always geared toward the production of more life, not political theology, and it was not defined by a discernible content that we can abstract…but experienced through a wide and constantly evolving array of practices performed in concert with the rhythms of the natural world” (88-89).

What type of world would we live in, if we set aside the modern definition of culture—which promotes the concept of difference—for the Ojbwe notion of culture?

 We’d favor life over destruction. We wouldn’t have people blowing each other up, poisoning each other with the chemicals of warfare, and or raping and pillaging innocents.  If we’d give up this notion of cultural superiority and cultural purity we could live in a world where difference wasn’t the only defining factor in the way we interact. 

I don’t mind difference, because no one person is the same. However, we are all human.

 Culture when it moves from a verb to a noun become destructive and harbors thoughts of fundamentalism and authenticity—it breeds fear and hate.

I know there will never be one universal Culture, with a capital C, but if we can set aside this notion of Culture as difference, we can overcome the violence that is associated when culture becomes a noun.

I think we can all learn something from Native culture in the process of Native revival.

I’d like to end this post with a quote from Cesaire that I have used before—“A culture that keeps to itself atrophies.”