Culture

The term, culture has a very broad definition as we discussed in class today. Culture may be about religions, art, politics and many other things. I picture culture as a pyramid with unimaginable size. ‘Culture’ would be on top, and it gets wider as it goes down towards the bottom. To get closer to the definition of culture, I tend to think of it as ‘characteristics of people living in a country', and when I think of it that way, the first thing that always comes up in my head is language which I would like to put right under ‘culture’ in the pyramid and focus on in my essay.

I have always thought that language best represents the culture, as it comprehends many things like history, what people value and mostly the inclination of people in a country. So I like the expression that “A country’s culture is dissolved in its language.” As the US and Korea were the only countries I have had chances to live in, I would like to take examples from the cultures expressed by languages of the two countries. Americans represent individualism, while Koreans represent collectivism. The most obvious example is the use of ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘my’, ‘our’. Unlike American people, Koreans say ‘our school’ when they mean ‘my school’. This applies in most cases. ‘My teacher’ in English would be said ‘our teacher’ in Korean, and even ‘my parents’ is said ‘our parents’ in Korean. Another example is about different postal forms or paper forms of the two countries. People put the names on top and nation’s name on the last line in the US, but in Korea, the nation’s name should be written on top and people’s name is written on the last line.

Besides the US and Korea, I think Japanese also represents people’s inclination or what they value in Japan. According to my grandmother who spent a part of her life in Japan, they put a great importance on being modest. I remember seeing dialogues in Japanese study materials, and many expressions were in ways of modestly lowering oneself and/or honorific. Practically, as I think about Japanese people I have met so far mostly during English workshops on campus, they very often used expressions like “It was nothing” or “It was not only me” in English as if they were saying in Japanese when I personally thanked them or tried to praise them.

Going back to the use of ‘I’ and ‘we’, interestingly, there are times that people from countries with no collectivism use ‘we’ in their conversations. Especially these days, I find uses of ‘we’ as people talk about Olympics a lot. It seems that the competitions create collectivism in participating countries. Generally, even American people or any others with individualism use the words, ‘we’ and ‘our’ when one introduces or talks about his/her culture to someone who has different cultural background. When I was taking English pronunciation workshop last winter, the people in the class had various cultural backgrounds. I remember that the instructor was using the word ‘we’, meaning Americans, almost in every class when she was saying such things like “Sometimes, even we get confused by the sounds of ‘can’ and ‘can’t’.” So, ‘we’ seems to be a convenient word for people when it is culture to culture.

Talking about culture, Raymond Williams said “I don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I’d never heard the damned word” in New Keywords. I agree with his thought that the word, culture is too complex, but I want to describe ‘culture’ as ‘fun’ or a 'connection' that makes me feel I belong to somewhere wherever I am in the world, instead of ‘the damned word’. Culture’s diversity, variety and even its complexity are enjoyable in my opinion. No one knows what are in the bottom row of the pyramid of culture, since almost everything can be expressed as a culture. So, I think it is better to enjoy the process of the endless learning about culture starting from language, rather than trying to make the perfect definition out of it.