Culture

Culture is a complex topic that, I’m sure, has many different opinions and view points. My opinion is that culture is in everything. It comes from every piece and person of society, not just from the trained artists and musicians or what appears on television. Which agrees with what Aime Cesaire says, when she is speaking to the world congress of black writers and artists in Paris (1959). She states that “Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties-it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.”

Anyone can contribute to his or her culture.  Especially in the country and society we live in today, where it is a combination of many different cultures, creating one very interesting one. I think our society allows us each to have our own unique culture through our parents’ pasts and their parents’ pasts. For example, my mother and grandmother’s stories of their life when they lived in Mexico help contribute to my understanding of my culture and the culture that I’ve come from and the same can be said about my dad and his parents’ stories of their country, Czechoslovakia. By combining all these different cultures through marriage we have, in a way, made our own with the understanding that everyone’s culture is distinct.

I also believe that most anyone can appreciate culture in their own way, they don’t have to have an enlightened and excellence of taste, like the Merriam-Webster definition of culture states, or be “cultured”, to appreciate the arts. I’m not saying it doesn’t help, but I believe that an untrained ear can appreciate a song just as much, if not more, than the trained ear.  For instance, the trained ear of a professional musician would hear everything that’s wrong with a song before appreciating the good in it as opposed to someone who can just listen to the song for the joy that music can provide to anyone who is looking for it. That’s what I think being “cultured” means, to just be able to appreciate and know that what you are hearing, seeing, or experiencing is a part of culture.