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So, what is culture? In the most simple of terms, culture is everything that a group of people are and know.
In less simple terms, culture is a sort of an identity that a group of people—a community—has that manifests itself through things like language, religion, cuisine, social behaviors and habits as well as the arts.
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“Jesus, Mary and St. Joe”
“F**k him and the horse he rode in on”.
To make it even less simple, a huge chunk of what culture is deals with shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive structures and understanding learned through socialization. This further brings home the idea of culture being an identity all the while also explaining that it’s an organism of sorts—it grows, it develops, and it reproduces through being passed down to other generations.
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And there’s loads of these cultures. Each country has at least one, and if it’s a bigger or more ethnically diverse country, there can be more (in the thousands even). And that’s just one aspect. Cultures can form among regions, districts, or communities that can all focus on the various aspects of identity—communities based around political beliefs, religious ones, hobbies and interests, and the like.
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One of the key aspects that explain why there are so many cultures out there is the idea of ecology. In different parts of the world, people are surrounded by different physical and social conventions.
While we are all the same as a species, we all have mechanisms that allow us to adapt to our immediate surroundings in different ways.
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The phenomenon is called adaptive phenotypic plasticity and it’s basically the idea of the same genes leading to different human traits depending on the environment.
And the body is going to keep it that way because evolutionary theories suggest natural selection favors flexible behaviors that are sensitive to such environmental changes. And if you pair that up with the idea that we are stronger and more fit to survive in groups, it only solidifies the role of culture in evolution.
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European countries are like this):
- Surrogacy being illegal
- Good public transportation, which leads to
- Very young kids take buses, trams, underground, or ride bicycles to school and go home
- drinking alcohol at 18 or even younger
- wearing school uniforms
- No AC in the house
- not allowed to talk loudly in public
- parents allow their kids to stay overnight at their partners’ houses & vice versa
- Religion being a personal thing that doesn’t shove down other people’s throats; openly saying you are non-religious/agnostic/atheist
- Comprehensive sex ed > abstinence-only
As such, that which makes us all similar and psychologically tending towards the same things is expected of humans sharing similar ecological conditions.
To keep it clear, the idea of environmental conditions isn’t just weather patterns—it’s also things like the social, physical and a slew of other climates, conditions that force us to react in one way or another.
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