My opinion on culture

Does culture define who we are?

The word culture has many meanings and definitions, depending on what the person’s own view of culture is. I think that culture designates the artificial productions in which humans distance themselves from nature, or many their own nature. In different areas of the world you will find different culture and although it shapes our identity it does not define who we are as individuals.

Culture defines people as it does shapes them. It is the base of their master identity, as that is their ethnicity and a few of their morals and beliefs that may come from their culture. Human are who they are today by the result of the process of evolution in their region and that is culture. Humans have the capacity to transfer, accumulate knowledge, techniques and values. 

Culture is first a social need, as human beings are social animals with the need to belong ( I am pretty sure I have said this in a previous blog post but psychology is so relevant to the subject of culture). If mankind transforms the nature around him, by technique notably, it is first because mankind is incapable and unable to survive in nature without it’s tools. Mankind is not originally able to assure it’s own survival individually without using tools from the culture. The whole essence of humanity is to set aside from nature and extract from nature what it needs to make it’s own nature. 

What we can notice in the different texts we have studied is how culture indeed has an important role in our lives, but that does not define fully who we are. In the essay Mother Tongue by Amy Tan, she talks about how her mother has these issues with communicating in English because it is her second language and she is not fully fluent in it, yet Amy Tan speaks it a lot better because she was raised in an English speaking country. Now surely she was raised on the culture that her mother was raised on, but that definitely does not fully define who she is because she found a balance between what she was raised on and what she is surrounded by on a daily basis by an environment that does not belong to the same culture as she does. 

Now you cannot disagree that language indeed is a big part of culture. It is the way we communicate our ideas, thoughts and feelings to people that speak the same language as we do and that are most probably in the same culture or a similar one (this does mean you cannot speak to people from different culture, but the idea that people speak the same language instantly gives them a thing in common) . Once we acquire a language, we also start to learn about the country/countries that speak that language, their customs, mindset beliefs etc… This does not mean that once I start learning Russian, I will become a full Russian once acquiring the language, but when you are constantly being exposed to it and you consider yourself bilingual or trilingual you realise that your interactional identity is different from the one in your culture or at least the one you identify to the most. It is possible to have many cultures and if something defines you it cannot be in a plurality which is another reason that I think that culture does not define who you are.