Culture is such a weird thing.\u00a0 It defines nearly everything we do.\u00a0 The time we wake up in the morning.\u00a0 The side of the road we drive on.\u00a0 The size of cups at McDonalds.\u00a0 Whether of not we have to capitalize mCdonalds.\u00a0 The types of cellphones we own.\u00a0 The size of our car tires.\u00a0 The width of our roads.\u00a0 The varieties of beer at the store.\u00a0 The taxes we pay.\u00a0 The way we cook meat.\u00a0 The designs of our kitchens.\u00a0 The prevalence of dryers.\u00a0 Where we take our shoes off.\u00a0 How we bathe.\u00a0 What we eat with.\u00a0 Partially, our language.<\/p>\n
We all live our lives, yet we never really think about it.<\/p>\n
Unless we leave it, and experience another.<\/p>\n
What the hell is culture determined by?<\/p>\n
Geography (latitude, longitude, continentality, elevation, precipitation, population, population density, access to the outside world, access to resources, electrification, wildlife), media access, art, politics, climate, history, (including dumb, random, sad, stupid, and unfortunate history), and of course (with the extent of which debatable) language.<\/p>\n
Yet, culture itself can determine half of those things.\u00a0 What boggles me about culture is that no one can really define it well.\u00a0 Karl van Wolferen, in The Enigma of Japanese Power<\/em>, quotes it as “the totality of man’s products.”<\/p>\n But what is that?\u00a0 It’s essentially a copout explanation of the confusing crap I’ve already written above.<\/p>\n Your thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Culture is such a weird thing.\u00a0 It defines nearly everything we do.\u00a0 The time we wake up in the morning.\u00a0 The side of the road we drive on.\u00a0 The size of cups at McDonalds.\u00a0 Whether of not we have to capitalize mCdonalds.\u00a0 The types of cellphones we own.\u00a0 The size of our car tires.\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,11,15,16,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alaska","category-america","category-english","category-japan","category-japanese","category-saroma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}