Culture 1

Culture is a series of overlapping meanings and associations that are conditioned through the processes of habit, of institutional norms, social mores, existing in and permeating all aspects of social interaction with outside mediums of experience and in the process of introspection. It is a psychologically rooted process where all content is approached with certain norms of values, of taste, of modes of understanding and inquiry and association, which have been acquired by man's location in society.

When we speak of culture of a place, we refer to the accepted terms by which the interaction of different individuals, each with their notions and particularities, seek out markers for mutual identification through the set of habituated responses to familiar ideas, which point to a similar process of influence generated by shared conditions.

Conditions can be shared across time and places, however, the process of social interaction is the expansion of ideational associations that test the means by which ideas are related contextually to one another within the mind of interacting individuals, and therefore culture may be approximated as the maximum potential range of social influences which may bear on two interacting individuals to create the widest and deepest possible range of contextual meaning, and its effects, both externally and internally.

Therefore culture in its observable effects may be understood in terms of its location in social psychology, and the ability within the individual to play a variety of roles relating to the social environment, and by extension, within his own value system, his internal thought processes, and so on. The man who works in the office in the day and enters the bar at night adopts two different subcultures. These two subcultures reflect deeper underlying mediating effects of a culture, say, of value systems, ensuring that they reflect a level of continuity in a person's transition from one environment to another.

When I speak of a national culture, I do not refer to an aggregation of, or of a dominant culture. The distinction is invalid, and misrepresents the dynamics of its formation, and the identificatory relation of the concept to the phenomenon.

National culture refers to the essence, or fundamental constitutive set of ideas and understandings, internalized and preconscious, unwritten moral and hygienic rules of the game as it were, that underlie subcultures, or overt identifications of culture, and primarily apply, and in turn, shape the macrostructural understanding of the world, ie ideology. National culture is the intuitive application of socially conditioned and reinforced ideology.