briefly, notes on culture

I’ve been thinking a lot about culture, the general concept. 

I am an Enneagram Six with a strong Five wing and was really, really good at school growing up, so when I say thinking, I mean I’ve been reading a lot of sociology and theology and philosophy. God bless 100 free articles a month on JSTOR.

Culture is the systems and customs of a particular social group (be they region, nation, religion, Discord server). It’s the characteristic features of existence in a given place and time, shared values and conventions and norms of an activity, field, or subgroup.¹ It’s the pattern of our existence. We all exist within a set of overlapping cultures and subcultures, all a product of the influences of the cultures of our growing-up and the cultures we grew into.

Writers and thinkers much more qualified than I have written thoughtfully about the phenomenology of culture². There are a hundred philosophical dimensions: epistemological realism and constructivism, determinism, agency, and authority and autonomy. It obviously informs and is informed by our political and religious systems. Culture and society are not synonymous nor mutually exclusive. We can talk about ethics and conventions and progress vs regress, and how that functions within a given moral framework.³

Culture, the word, is after all derived from the same root as cultivate, rooted in husbandry and agriculture and labor. It demands work. It takes practice. It is shaped and formed and tended. In early uses, it was referenced more as an activity – a verb – than an entity as we know it now.⁴

Which is how “culture” has become a kind of shorthand for art. Cultural products are artifacts of the values that their time and place promote. We know what we know about ancient civilizations because of what they left behind. Lists of the dead, the spoils of war, sculptures of gods and beautiful pottery. This is what they valued. What they cared to write down and honor. ⁵

And we do the same, in Instagram stories and interstate highway systems or Supreme Court rulings. Audre Lorde books and Ben Shapiro videos; the United States Postal Service and You’ve Got Mail. All products of culture, representative of something at least a little bit important to someone, that feeds back and informs the culture around it and after it. 

All of those references are American, and mostly contemporary, which is such a tiny fraction of time and place. This is repeated a million times over across the world and throughout history. When I texted a handful of friends (all, like me, white American women in their mid-twenties) what they thought the most significant cultural moment of our youth was, I got answers ranging from the election and inauguration of the first black president of the United States to the release of the High School Musical franchise.

High School Musical itself was very important to me in 2006, and I spent a lot of time rehearsing the “Getcha Head in the Game” choreography with the 6-foot high plastic basketball hoop in the backyard. 

It wasn’t the first thing I remember loving that much (that title probably belongs to American Girl Doll Samantha Parkington or my beloved musical Annie), but it was one of my first deep obsessions. Part of it was, I’m sure, the insatiable curiosity of a pretty smart kid. Part of it was whatever it is in me that makes me love story and beauty and art, wanting to know everything that was worth paying attention to, participate in The Discourse as much as any third grader could. I’d like to think I was cognizant at some level of the way everything was shaping a culture I only tangentially participated in by virtue of being thousands of miles away.

 I have a very clear memory of going to summer camp for the first time (I would attend for seven years) and before the first camp-wide event began, all of the girls were scream-singing along to a song I didn’t know. It was Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” I remember resolving that I didn’t want to have that outsider feeling again. I didn’t want to not know things. I became a pop culture apologist. I credit Taylor for fifteen years of my cultural relevance. Taylor soon expanded to Justin Bieber and One Direction and The Hunger Games. I began to feel the need to minimize my affection for Star Wars and musical theatre and instead pick a Jonas Brother to have a crush on (Nick, because of that one song in Camp Rock 2, but by high school I was a Joe girl). The cycle continued; my interests, earnest or manufactured, expanding and contracting with moves, fluctuating friend groups, my pubescent desperation to be cool flaring or subsiding. 

And so, bit by bit I built my own little web of culture, borrowing from everything and everyone around me to find things I cared about and why I cared about them and then I found more things to care about. We all did. We all do. I listen to about a dozen podcasts exclusively about pop culture.⁶ 

A lot of this is rooted, I think, in being a third culture kid. That label implicitly labels me as other, separating me from both Culture One (my passport country) and Culture Two (where I lived – take your pick of the five). I also would be remiss not to make the disclaimer that though I lived in those places, the vast majority of my immediate community was also ex-pats, almost always TCKs in their own right. So the dominant culture during my adolescence was this sub-culture, itself an amalgamation of other cultures, defined in opposition to existing culture, positing itself as a kind of non-culture.

Whenever I’d come home as a kid, or whenever I awkwardly explain the situation to people at dinner parties now, I often hear some variation of “Wow! What an interesting/unique/thoughtful/global perspective you must have!” I’d grin politely and say yes, it does, and I’m grateful for it. Sometimes I’ll get a “you’re wise beyond your years,” or a “so what do you think about [insert hot topic du jour]?” This sometimes secretly thrills me, because I like to show off, playing right down the middle, then pivot the conversation toward some less divisive topic. But it is also exhausting, to feel like my brand of removed distance is the only way to find nuance or have an opinion that differs from whatever echo chamber we find ourselves in. Why is that so hard for us?

Somehow, over the course of the decade(!?) I’ve been writing here, I’ve pigeonholed myself into writing around a handful of themes. Which is fine, mostly. Home and transition and growing up and negotiating all of it do take up a lot of space in my brain.

But here’s the truth of it: those things are fully integrated into the matrix through which I see the world. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to disentangle the way I grew up from right now. I’ll be 85 years old playing bridge in my retirement home wondering if these people can smell the alienation on me. 

So in the last year or so, I’ve turned my attention to a more immediate question: what does that mean for me? What do I do with that?

An inside baseball note: I wrote, and then removed, several thousand words that began to answer that. It all just kind of came out. I wrote about the cultures that formed me and that I tend to move through now, how they affected who I am and are shaping who I’m becoming, and what I’m embracing and what I’m rejecting. I forecasted versions of myself and of the world I want to live in.

Some of it was really lovely work, some of it belongs more in a journal or on a therapist’s couch than on this website. This is perhaps the beginning of a series of essays – ones I’d like to write, maybe I will, who knows – on all of those things. Christianity writ large, the evangelical church of the 2000s, international schools, theatre, the internet, politics, my body, and half a dozen rabbit trails into tiny details I got excited about. I talked a lot about books and movies and music I read and watched and listened to in the last couple years.⁷

Because listen y’all, as excited as I get about, like, the eschatological implications of my concept of home, you should read the 2000 words I wrote about Mean Girls (2024) (the musical the movie).

That’s a joke (though not untrue). Among the litany of my missed callings – a phrase with which I have theological issues, but use anyway – is cultural writer⁸. I would have a lot of fun doing that, I think. But on a very real level, what I’m doing here (and in journals and rambling texts to friends) is culture work. I’m cultivating my worldview, tending and culling. I’m curating how I want to exist in the world, and I hope that it is good. I am tending to culture.

In Culture Making, his 2009 book, Andy Crouch spends a lot of time dissecting the idea of the culture war.⁹ It’s almost laughable to think about how radically the world and the culture has changed since then. His point remains salient: culture is about creation. The way to “fight” a culture is to make good things. Present a compelling vision of the future, curate a vibrant and engaging counterculture that can’t help but go mainstream. You can’t just scream about how these people or this thing are bad or wrong or evil. You have to create a beautiful thing and prove it.¹⁰

I’m not particularly interested in starting a movement. I have found myself hesitant to identify too closely with anything. It is too declarative. I’m too transient. I don’t want to be in charge of something like that.

But I am fascinated by why we are the way we are and why we care and what we owe to each other and why it matters and how we make sense of the world. And I want to do it well. And I want whatever little cross-cultural space I occupy to be good, and dignifying, and worthwhile.

That’s probably the project of a lifetime. Culture changes, my culture changes, I change. That’s kind of beautiful, a conversation across time and place about all the things that matter and some that don’t – from the cut of our clothes and the way we make our art to how we think about technology, or the marginalized, our societal relationship to power, and also to the color beige.

There’s a reference to be made here about boiling frogs or fish not knowing they’re wet. That’s not really what I’m talking about. Those aren’t really the realms I’m moving in, but let’s imagine I am: how do we talk to the other frogs in the pot? how to we treat the frogs we disagree with about the rising temperatures? Are we kind and generous and respectful of the other fish, whether fresh water or salt water or however else fish are categorized?

I so deeply hope we are. I hope I am. I hope I always am, even when the ponds and pots and places and cultures around me change.

1. This is the dictionary definition, paraphrased. ↩︎
2. This book by James K. A. Smith probably changed my life, and was the launching point for this psuedo existential crisis I’m having. ↩︎
3. This was informed largely by the work of Terry Eagleton, notably his book The Idea of Culture. Chapter 1 can be found in PDF here. ↩︎
4. ibid. Also, Andy Crouch, and the response I had to Kaitlyn Schiess’s latest book ↩︎
5. This textbook on Nietzsche’s implied cultural criticism is fascinating to think more on this. Like any good college student, I found random PDFs online. ↩︎
6. NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, The Popcast with Knox and Jamie, about half the output from The Ringer. ↩︎
7. Highlights include: Cocaine Bear, the entire Greta Gerwig filmography, the music of boygenius and The Porter’s Gate, Tell Me I’m an Artist by Chelsea Martin and Beth Moore’s All My Knotted Up Life. ↩︎
8. See: Anne Helen Peterson, Amanda Montell, and David French. ↩︎
9. Once again, Crouch. See link above. ↩︎
10. I would be remiss not to note the profound impact this Madeleine L’Engle book I’ve read once a year since college shapes my personal understanding of this. ↩︎