culture

I noted this definition of culture in something I was reading recently.

Culture is a group's shared collective meaning system, including its values, attitudes, beliefs, customs, and thoughts.

Culture is one of those words that means everything to everyone to such a degree that it's often not useful in a practical sense.

The writer and academic Raymond Williams who has written books on the topic calls it "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language."

The definition above though struck me as useful to consider in a tactical, practical context. A practical question to consider based on this definition could be -

How is what I'm doing contributing to or helping build the culture? Or how is what I'm doing helping build a group's shared collective meaning system?

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I think one answer to this question was hidden in a comment I heard from some neighborhood friends recently. Katherine and I were having our usual Sunday Egg Hunt brunch. This was the day after my Detroit Dinner Club crew had done the food popup for Two Birds' third anniversary party in April. Some friends we bumped into had hosted some of their friends from a nearby suburb and had brought them out to the party the previous evening. Their visiting friends had commented in awe about how great it was that they were able to take them to a neighborhood bar owned by their friends, where dinner was provided by a popup also owned by other friends. The DJ playing the music was probably a friend too.

So in a practical sense perhaps we’re contributing to the culture or this shared meaning system in a way that says something like – We can build things for our friends and we can be patrons of things our friends build.

To rearticulate this with more meaning – We can create an environment where the places and things we and our friends build become a core part of how we live our lives. They become part of our lives.

There is something obvious sounding to this when I write it down but I think it's useful to reflect on because it's so easy to get lost in grand-scale cultural narratives where we may lack the same sense of agency. So I guess part of the distinction I'm getting to here is between small c culture and big C culture. When we use the word culture it's often in terms of a country or the world as a cultural stage. The impact of a president on the national consciousness. A meme that hundreds or millions of people have seen is part of the culture, etc.

But in the spirit of trying to focus on what I want to see more of, maybe the complementary litmus test is to ask whether I am contributing to the small c culture aka this shared collective meaning system in smaller scales.

A related sentiment from Emmett Shear.

Ppl only have so much connectivity they can support, and some neighborhoods prioritize local connection and some prioritize regional/global connection. The broader connections can feel exciting but there is something very much lost.

— Emmett Shear (@eshear) June 21, 2024

All of this is sort of funny because I'm mildly cringing as I write this. By putting it in writing, I'm claiming that I'm impacting the culture in some way, and that's exactly the kind of thing I would have seen as vain or pompous and dismissed.

But this is a note to self that small actions are ok. We can just do the thing and not overthink it and have an impact on our shared collective meaning system.

Thinking about how you can contribute to a shared meaning system feels like a useful exercise and if we think about "values, attitudes, beliefs, customs" on a smaller, local scale, we do have a lot of agency.

Coming back to Raymond Williams. In his book Keywords he talks about how culture in its early use was "a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals". I find the reference to tending quite relevant and endearing. In this connotation, and most of my meandering above, contributing to culture takes on the idea of service which I think is pretty neat.

Anyway, this all sounds quite serious, but I'm really just trying to have fun while figuring out what it all means. Strong opinions, playfully held.