Defining Culture

Frank's photo of a church youth group's dance team in Tanzania.

As a part of an internship I did in the Anglican church in Tanzania in 1998, I was in a very helpful orientation program at St. Phillip's Seminary in Dar Es Salaam. There a professor of Swahili culture warned us that so many times people judge another culture, based on their own, without taking in to account how each culture arose to handle the needs of a given geography and climate, available foods and livestock, etc. So that Europeans saw mud-walled, thatch-roofed homes as primitive and rebuilt the same designs out of concrete block with tin roofs. The homes were sturdier, but also much hotter in the African sun.

A little humility is in order in judging another culture. One failed attempt still proves instructive. It is the film "Man and His Culture" made by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1954 (Thanks Sierra for telling me about it). The film makes some good points, but also sees European culture as complex and African culture as primitive in a way that seems to make a judgment that might is not warranted on closer inspection. I intend to show the film to an upcoming class I will teach at Valdosta State University on Religion and Culture. While dated, it does make you think, both with the parts that are agreeable and the parts that are offensive.



Anthropologists consider that the requirements for culture (language use, tool making, and conscious regulation of sex) are essential features that distinguish humans from other animals. Culture is the total of the things that make us human, or reveal humans to be different from other animals based on our abilities as toolmaker and so on.

A dictionary definition of culture is something like, "the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another."

The word "culture" comes from the Latin word cultūra whose meaning is closest to our word "cultivate." This shows an intentional aspect of culture, as something cultivated, which may fit with our use of culture as the high forms of art and music of a given people. So much of culture seems to be accident of history, geography and tastes.

No matter how religion and culture are defined it seems as if the two go hand in hand more often than not. Thai culture and Tibetan culture are both linked strongly to Buddhism, each with its own take on Buddhist art and practice. Italian culture is separate from but very tied to Roman Catholicism, as is the culture of much of Ireland. I could go on. But religion and culture develop together in the same settings. And in each of these settings, religion seeks to define and hold in check some aspects of culture, while the culture tries to push religious change.

How might the connection of religion and culture be a helpful perspective to better understand? That's what I am wondering as I work on my upcoming class. And I am working on it less than it may seem to readers of this blog. These last few days of posts were all written on Monday as I began to get out on paper my thoughts for the upcoming class.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

The photos above are ones I took on trips. The one at right in the Kumari, a real girl worshipped as a living goddess in Kathmandu, Nepal. And below it at left is a photo in an Anglican Church on the decidedly Muslim island of Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa. The man in the photo was lamenting that his daughter married an islamic man and no longer attend the church they grew up in, where he remains the sexton (caretaker).