But what is "culture"?

Well, SPAM gave us quite the roller-coaster ride. So, we’ve stocked up on some (or a lot) of cans of the porky, salty goodness, and we’ve talked a bit about the unique ways that cultures mix with foods and practices, but let’s back it up and discuss: what is “culture”?

Maybe it’s not something that you’ve necessarily thought about – it just is. Maybe it’s something that keeps you up at night, especially when it comes to what to eat, what recipes to use with what ingredients and which restaurants are “authentic enough” to enjoy (we’ll have a whole spiel about authenticity during a later post, not to worry).

But what is it?! As we already know about humans and boundaries, we need some working definition to be able to talk about a concept. Anthropology usually states that “culture” is the learned, customary ways of thinking and behaving of a population or society (Lavenda and Schultz, 2008, p. 6). Each word is pragmatically chosen here. “Learned” implies that culture is not genetic. It is not inherently existing within any individual from birth, it is not in our blood, and it can be changed. Parents, peers, teachers, language, and media all influence how, when, what and why we learn our culture. There is a perpetuation of changing values, beliefs, norms and customs here. “Customary” suggests that culture is derived as an amalgamation of what grows to be normalized and widely accepted in a society - that is not just the normalcies of one or a few individuals. Culture is also integrated – this simply means that change(s) in one area of a society will often change other parts of the culture. This leads to our next cultural feature, culture is constantly changing. It is not a fixed set of ideas a society wants to uphold (though it may be for a certain time); culture gets pushed through sieves of time, mistakes, learning, and evaluation of meanings. And one of the strangest but most beautiful parts of culture is that it is tacit. It is not formally taught in classroom, it does not need a license to be official or true. It lies below the surface of ourselves and our societies, but is still very much known. It is shared and passed on from individual to individual, group to group, through generations, migrations and interests. In addition to what anthropology says, sociology also says that culture is a system of intense and sustained interactions over time. Here the notion of “over time” is very important, since it means that one must include the past in their analysis of culture, along with the present, and predictions for the future.

Unlike a car or video game, we cannot just take bits and pieces of what a culture is or isn’t and give a step-by-step manual to a new user. While there are things that we can be aware of which may be more prominent, there is so much that even those on the “inside” are not aware of consciously. This often means that cultures are pitted against one another – there are sections of our own cultures that we will find more understandable than others. Usually this isn’t contrived, but simply the way humans have evolved over time (as if this was simple, haha!). We learn what worked for those who came before us and we aim to recreate it – unless it no longer is a best practice, then we change along with our practices. We evolve and our cultures evolve too. We may seek to uphold certain ideas and pass them onto others, but does this mean they are objectively the best practices or the only way of doing things? Bluntly, no.

Now relate this back to our ideas of food and globalization. For example, there is no one way to cook a piece of chicken, to enjoy a dairy production or add spices to your dish (and oh boy, the spices change everything). Furthermore, there is no inherent concept of what ingredients to use or not, or in what order or amount. These are learned practices, through our culture. So why then do we believe this authority now lies with someone or some group who can say that only certain people can eat certain foods, only cooked in certain ways with specific ingredients, spices etc.? Because we want to uphold cultural boundaries which make sense to us. Not out of maliciousness but because it provides a sense of belonging, meaning and tacit survival methods. We want to secure our own culture by building walls around it. Being a part of an in-group has long provided human groups with the opportunities for survival not typically available to singular entities or conflicting ideologies. Rather than displaying authenticity, maybe this is a contemporary showcase of how fragile our identities have become.

It’s funny to think that the mingling of cultures is greater now than ever in history, yet rather than understanding spaces of intersection, we have bolstered our boundaries. Not all aspects or all cultures are accepted by all others. Based on the unique qualities of so many cultures this would be, and is, rife with contradictions. We do not have to seek out many news stories to understand that so many constructed cultural boundaries still hold our brains and actions hostage. This mingling is not just a recent phenomenon or movement. People have been traversing this globe since we were able to, in search of resources and safety; conditions might not have always been favourable but this factor produced a huge variety of “making live” or building up aspects that would benefit the population.. The “us versus them” scenario was eventually instilled as a byproduct of geographical location, differing customs and material availability. Our physical boundaries had helped create cultural ones.

The New World (the Americas) didn’t have coffee beans, onions or the sugar cane before Europeans “discovered” the land in the 15th century. But this didn’t make those in the New World any lesser-than the Old-World travelers, who hadn’t had tomatoes, vanilla and tobacco before the Columbian Exchange (Kiple, 2007, p. 214-215)! Yet, we have been constantly bombarded with seemingly “objective facts” about who was more progressive, whose culture was “best”, and which people benevolently “needed” to be changed. Each group had its own changing qualities and products that benefitted it, as well as those that it may have wanted to emulate from others. Humans have consistently created the “them” that should be more like “us”. But, this “should” is entirely arbitrary based on the conditions of what “us” considers appropriate. This is the less glamourous side of how we formulate culture: we build ourselves higher by putting others beneath us. But this too is, of course, a social construction. Instead of creating hierarchies of knowledge, practice, and beliefs, a more holistically-beneficial way of viewing the world would be space(s) full of multiplicities. A space where there is no this or that, but this, that, the other, both, all, and some combination of any.

Yet, food is an implicit way we have been bridging these gaps for thousands of years. It is not so assertive as politics or ideology, but it is still susceptible to being beat down by racism and xenophobia. However, food has had much better luck much of the time in alleviating harsh separations. If it tastes good, it’s good. Our taste buds tell a truth that our cultural brains may not want to initially admit. A lot of prehistory remains mysterious to us, but we can discover, through archaeological remains such as pot sherds and bones, that humans have been travelling, trading and expanding their food horizons for millennia. It is often the strict boundaries that furthers the “us versus them” narrative. Recorded history tells us so much of where food comes from but often the story isn’t simple. Can we ever find out who discovered salt first? Or who brewed the first beer? Can we really know the why? Does it matter? Maybe we can stop asking the questions of origins, boundaries and inflexible heritage, and instead ask where can I get the umami-est (yes, it’s now a word) ramen, the creamiest korma and the spiciest chili oil?Click here for a Crash Course on Cultures, Subcultures and Countercultures. 

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References

Crash Course. (2017). Cultures, Subcultures and Countercultures: Crash Course Sociology #11 [video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/RV50AV7-Iwc.

Kiple, K. F. (2007). A moveable feast: Ten millennia of food globalization. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Lavenda, R. H., & Schultz, E. A. (2012). Anthropology: What does it mean to be human? (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.