what is culture in your own words?and give examples from your own life?

Answer 1

A friend of mine just asked me about this, so I have lots of thoughts about it. This may be deeper than you need, but here goes: My initial feelings about culture lead me to think of simply a “way of life” but if I think about it just a bit more, I notice that the word “way” connects to the idea of a path or perhaps even a journey – as in “let’s go this way” or “you go your way, and I’ll go mine.” Of course there is a collective nature to culture, so culture is like a collective journey or shared path. But I also get a feeling of boats on a river. Each boat has a certain level of individual freedom, but collectively they are all floating down the same river, so there is a sort of shared movement and common history despite whatever individual movements or relationships there might be among or between the individual boats. And of course rivers have branches, so some boats follow one branch while other boats follow other branches, so shared histories diverge and thus different cultures have very different characteristics.

Getting a bit more philosophical/esoteric, I also get an image of the individuals in a culture existing like cells in body. Different cells belong to different bodies, but each body defines the context – the role, function , or “meaning” – of the individual cells. The “essence” of a brain cell is different than the essence of a liver cell, and these differences in essence are correlated with their different roles – but these roles, in turn, spring from their function in the overall body – and this is what culture does; it is the larger “body” or context that defines a great deal of our essence as conscious individuals. Just as there is a degree of literal truth in the old saying “You are what you eat,” I sense a degree of literal truth in the idea that we are, to a significant degree, constituted by the culture in which we live. Our bodies are constituted by the materials we ingest, and our minds are constituted by the “psychical material” that we ingest, and the contextual meaning of this “mental food” comes from or culture. I want to emphasize the word ‘constituted’ because it is a lot stronger than just saying “influenced by” – it gets at the idea that our culture becomes part of our actual, deep, essence.

As for examples from my own life…well…since I am a philosopher, a great deal of my life IS thinking about stuff like this, so in a way, I have been speaking from my own life this whole time. For various reasons stemming from my interest in philosophy of mind, I do not believe that there are any such things as isolated (or isolatable) conscious individuals. A major part of the essence of a conscious individual is the context which provides the systems of meaning-relations that constitute the very nature of consciousness. Consciousness, I believe, is culturally constituted. Without culture there is no consciousness, and without consciousness, there are no selves, no egos. Without my consciousness there is no “me” as the individual that I am. But I know you are asking for something more personal, so let’s see…here is one concrete example: I was raised in a culture that values monogamy and devalues alternative lifestyles. For various reasons I have protested against this cultural mainstream. To borrow from my boats/river metaphor, you might say that my wife and I have spent a lot of time “swimming up stream” on this issue. Part of our role in life – one of the labels defining who we are as individuals is our membership in “alternative lifestyles”. But notice that this definition of who we are – this aspect of our identity – only has meaning in the context of a culture that values monogamy. Even tho we don’t flow with the majority, our lives are still to some extent defined by the flow of the majority – the overall flow of the culture that gives our status as “protesters” the very meaning that it has. We are who we are because of the culture, even when we don’t flow with the culture. It is part of our very essence as individuals, and we cannot abandon this essence no matter how hard we try (or at least we can’t abandon it without losing our selves in the process).

Answer 2

Culture is history and tradition. It's a "way" that people have, thus the saying "when in Rome, do as the Romans do."

You won't know real and true culture until you go to a different country. I'm not talking about the US or Canada either.

Until you experience what it's like in a different country you can't say you REALLY know culture. You may know your own and that of others similar to yours but to truly know someone's culture you have to step right out and into their world.

Answer 3

Culture is anything I do to survive. More generally, culture is everything anyone on earth may do to survive. That said, the Moscow citizen who before 1990 on a Friday night ate some Borschtsch, then went to the Symphony to listen to Shostakovitsch, the Paris inhabitant who at the same time went to a five hour sit down dinner at a 17 Toques restaurant and the citizen of 'you pick a town' who takes his child and guests to a McDonald's organized birthday party, all practice cultural survival skills. Who are we to judge...

Answer 4

What Felix said are the obvious things. There are a lot of subtleties in culture. For instance, even after 20 years of immersion in my husbands culture, I still make mistakes.

There are a million hand gestures, actions, colloquial language, religious mannerisms that you can never fully learn. You can understand the basics, but your own cultural upbringing takes over where the new culture leaves off.

I truly believe that world leaders should be forced to immerse themselves in another culture, live in their neighbourhoods, try to speak their language.They would always feel slightly off kilter, because it's really hard to understand colloquial language and jokes etc. And its hard to flex your upbringing to fit into another culture.

This would make a much better world community, because then our World leaders would appreciate being displaced, they would be empathetic toward immigrants, from personal experience. They would not propagate racial profiling, and hate mongering, because they would understand what it is really like to be the odd man out, by skin colour, language, religion, custom, and morals.
Yikes that was long. :)

Answer 5

It is the manifestations of human intellectual achievement. Nowadays it is very materialistic (actually only 14% of the world) still it is strongly felt. It keeps people in illusion that there is no need of spiritual wisdom. So the philosophy is just work hard like an *** and try to enjoy. This is very low intellectual achievement. Even scientific discoveries are only directing people to this two goals. Therefore no one becomes enlightened, self-realized.

Chant Hare Krishna and be happy
Visit http://krishnascience.com read about devolution theory, genetic degeneration, what is beyond matter etc.

Answer 6

your question is miscategorized. Now, you may be a homeschool student, but you should categorize your questions based on what you are asking, not who you are or what you do. Too confusing that way, plus it was very nice of YA to give homework it's very own category, so you should use it.

Answer 7

Culture is the way you live and what you do, the language that you speak, the food that you eat, your manners, religion, and history

Answer 8

"masala" (spicies)