Adverse Situations and the Formation of Culture :: Cultural Identity Essays

An unspoken contempt of culture has grown throughout white America. What benefit could possibly come from silly rituals, special foods, colorful garments, jewelry and ceremonies? Even most of the relativists have forgotten the purpose of culture and blindly dispense hollow respect for it. Sociology and anthropology texts imply it's just arbitrary stuff people come up with for the hell of it when they live near one another. With such an implication, it certainly seems a little silly in today's world. Culture emerges in only one circumstance and serves only one purpose. When a group of people face the same adversity at the same time, they do better if they deal with it together. A people's collective solutions to adversity is their culture. If there's a limited supply of food, we'll get used to the same fruits and meats and use the same cooking techniques. If we live in the same climate and around the same building materials, we'll learn to build dwellings together. If we experience the same weather and live near cotton plants, we'll weave similar clothing. If we're confused by the same astronomical phenomenon or killed by the same unknown disease, we'll come up with myths together. Without unified adversity, problems are fleeting. If I face hunger one month, infant mortality the next, and predators the third, and you face these things in the opposite order, we build no culture together. We're not going to hunt together or create a common death ritual or learn to build secure dwellings together. This is the only reason culture is geographically localized. Now, many classes of people do not face any perceptible adversity that unification is a weapon against. A non-trivial percentage of the world who are of certain races, live in certain countries, and are born to affluent families no longer see problems in their lives that could be overcome if they just had the help of their fellow man. There is no hunger for them, no discrimination, no infant mortality, no predators, no droughts. As far as they know, their only enemy are the people around them competing for the same jobs, resources, and mates. Genuine culture cannot emerge in these situations. Instead, we end up with something that looks a lot like culture—a common language, beliefs, some customs, ways of greeting and acceptable conversation. However, for these people, this commonality does not serve the purpose of culture. Instead, it's used only to smoothly interact with those in proximity.