Your Culture, My Culture

Or, as I would argue, "your cultures, my cultures." E.D. Hirsch and his ilk want a single, universal, or at least highly preferred, definition of culture, analagous to the "high culture" concept. I maintain, however, that there are multiple cultures existing and interacting even in a limited physical domain and that, especially today, we participate in multiple cultures.

My culture, for example, draws elements from Euro-American, middle-class, liberal, urban Minnesota--an appreciation for the arts and education and the environment, a certain style of civil social and political discourse, a determined optimism about the place we live. But I also have deep roots in the lower-class, rural culture in which I grew up and influence from African American and Latino communities in which I have lived and which inform a skepticism about values, beliefs and norms of the dominant "Minnesota nice-ness."

Then there is the difference between male and female experience of the same culture. Where I hear footsteps behind me as possible danger calling for me to be alert, many males raised in this "same" culture do not even hear them.

I haven't even touched on religions, which make their own contributions to world view, values and beliefs, conditioned responses to the world and to others ... but my point is that I do not want to overlook the complexity of culture or to ascribe to myself or anyone else just one cultural label.