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February 16, 2025 18 mins

In this episode, we explore the concept of culture—its definition, creation, and ethical implications. We break down culture into shared beliefs, values, customs, and traditions, examining whether individuals can create their own cultures and how subcultures emerge. We also tackle the controversial question of cultural superiority, discussing why no culture is inherently better than another. Finally, we address the ethics of eliminating cultures, looking at historical cases where ideologies led to oppression and genocide. Tune in for a deep dive into the complexities of cultural identity and diversity!

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello everybody, welcome to another podcast. This is episode two. Today we are going to talk

(00:26):
about culture. In the last episode we talked about the importance of listening to podcasts.
So if you haven't listened to that podcast, you can go scroll, go to Spotify or whatever platform
you listen podcast in. So you just type maybe all this, this is going to be the very, it's going to
be the very first podcast. That way you can have an idea about podcasts and how important they are

(00:51):
and how you can integrate them into learning journey. Today it is going to be about culture,
a very broad subject, but hopefully we are going to try to answer some questions. Before we start,
we have a transcript. That way you can follow along. If you maybe have problem listening to the

(01:12):
podcast, you can just use the script and you have maybe enough time. Use the transcript and it's
going to give you at least a lot of words that maybe I say and you probably don't understand.
Maybe I'm speaking too quickly and you can get the correct word. The transcript should
essentially help you with that. But yeah, today we are going to try to answer some questions related

(01:34):
to culture. We'll start with our very first question. What is culture? Maybe something you
heard of it, maybe in your own language, but maybe you don't have an idea about culture. I have a
definition that is too broad. So there are a lot of scholars that study culture in D constructed

(01:56):
like a number of definitions, but I have one that is too broad. Hopefully this definition is going to
give you an idea about culture. So culture is defined in a way, is like a complex system of
shared beliefs, behaviors, arts, morals, customs, symbols, knowledge, habits, all of these basically

(02:18):
systems are learned and transmitted, right? So for example, if something that I learned
or beliefs that I had today, I could transmit that belief to my child, my grandchild, and so on and
so forth. So all of these kinds of behavior can be transmitted and passed on from one generation
to another. That way people can have in a way the same culture or that culture can live on.

(02:45):
But you might wonder what beliefs are. These are core ideas that members accept as true,
like the shape, the understanding of the word. And most of the time they are unshakable. Your
values are your fundamental principles that guide your behavior and define in a way what's important
and what's not to you. Customs are the traditional practices, like which roles usually passed on

(03:12):
from one person to another or from one generation to another. Behavior is something that's usually
observed in influenced the culture norms that you live in. Art, something creative expressions
that reflect the cultural aesthetics and emotions. And morals, these are shared notions of right and

(03:32):
wrong. But do I, what I accept or what I think is right, you may not think is right. These are again,
from one culture to another, they differ. That's why usually in today's society we have a lot of
problems because we have this class of culture. People get exposed to other cultures and they
start to dictate whether something is right or wrong because their culture and their culture,

(03:56):
what they think is right is totally different from the other culture. Symbols are basically
objects or gestures and knowledge, something that you accumulate, information, skills,
and also can be transmitted over time. And habits, these are just basically practices.
Maybe repeated behaviors, they are going to be habits. So basically, your mom used to do something

(04:22):
in a certain way, she is going to pass on that to her kid and vice versa, right? Basically,
culture is like a way of life, right? The way the previous generations lived their life,
everything they believed in, they accepted, they did, they are going to pass on and thought maybe
helped them survive, they are going to sort of like pass it on to the other generation, right?

(04:47):
That is in a way culture defined in a, like a broad, in a, like a silver term. And if you
talk to someone who knows a lot about culture, you might give you a lot of ideas about this,
not justice, but this is, again, an introduction, not necessarily something detailed, right?
The question is, can you create your own culture? Given what we talked about, these are, if these

(05:13):
are shared beliefs, values, it seems like plausible to create your own, right? And yes, you can create
your own culture, but it's not as simple as it is, right? It's very complicated because notice that
grandparents or the community that you lived in, or your parents lived in, they lived through years.
So everything that they learned and accumulated has passed on them from previous generations,

(05:39):
maybe they modified it, they added something to you, right? So it took them a number of years,
decades, if not centuries to create a certain culture or cultural symbols, right? To make your
own culture, meaning time. You can a lot of time. So look at this, something at the gaming community,
right? People who play video games, in a way, they created their own culture. These somehow,

(06:04):
they play games, they have their certain beliefs that are shared, and they like certain things,
right? Maybe like most of them like to watch anime as well, right? So they created a culture,
they have a lot of similarities, a lot of habits. They play video games, they go to
conventions, game conventions, or in these like platforms, these stream most of them streams,

(06:25):
so most of these cultural symbols exist in the gaming community, but it does not exist
in another one, right? So you can, in a sense, create again your own. You have to find like a
community, a group to be like online, or otherwise, you need time, you need to do certain things,
you need to have similar behavior, you need to create an art of your own, you need to have your

(06:48):
own morals, symbols. You see these gamers now they even have certain words that are defined
gaming, like ending, like certain words that exist, even language is part of culture, right?
These gamers, again, they added certain words to the gaming community that can only be used
in the gaming culture and they cannot be used otherwise. If you talk to an academic and ask them

(07:12):
what do you mean by ending, they might not know it, right? Because again, the language is limited to,
again, these academics, we can say they also created their own cultures. If these academics
and gamers clash, they might not have the same vocabulary, same jargons to express something,
right? Gamers may, I'm not too judgy, but the language may be like, maybe not too limiting,

(07:38):
it's not very expressive, but the others, the academics may think that their language is too
expressive because they have broad vocabulary and broad understanding of each subject. But yeah,
again, this is our subject to debate. And we're not going to dwell on this too much,
because the podcast is supposed to be short. But yeah, in a sense, you can actually create

(07:58):
your own culture. You can, but again, as we establish, it needs a little bit of time,
it needs a lot of time to create a culture, right? And it's important for a lot of people,
hypothetically, let's say, just to give you an idea, hypothetically, let's say,
I like to collect bottles, maybe I am the only person that I know that collects bottles, and then

(08:21):
I want to create a culture. I can just go online and create a blog or post about this or tweet
about this, I like to collect bottles and I want to keep a small community to be, to have the same
interest. Now you get people, so you got people interested, right? So all of these people, you
got maybe, I'll say the 1000 people interested in collecting bottles, right? And these people can have,

(08:43):
you can create your own beliefs, you can create like a location, a place that is online right now,
certain behaviors, what you should do and shouldn't do, maybe certain, what should you
celebrate, maybe certain rituals as a group. And now that you succeeded, maybe with time,
you can, maybe a couple of years, you essentially create your own ritual or your own culture,

(09:05):
right? Because of these shared interests, beliefs that you do together as a group,
and you created your own culture. Okay, this move on to the next question.
This is a very debatable subject and it's kind of hot.
What's the time, we talk about the notion of superiority, right? Whether a culture is superior
to another, right? Most of them, we talk to academics, they say, no, it is not, there is no

(09:30):
such thing as something superior, right? A lot of scholars, like anthropologists, they say,
they argue that each culture must be understood in its own terms. So as we start at the start of
the podcast, we can't judge a behavior if you live in a certain culture. You move to another

(09:52):
culture and you judge a certain behavior as bad because you're comparing your culture versus the
other culture. And in a sense, you shouldn't do that because you, as a group of people, lived or
you did certain things. And when you move to another culture, these users found out they do
certain things differently, right? And then that's a way of life. That's how they live their life.

(10:17):
That's how they found maybe their systems, belief system. So you cannot be too judgy about that,
right? Just learn more like to accept or to understand that, yes, there are a lot of people
with different cultures and they are going to have different things. So in a way,
there is no such thing as superior culture. Although most people arguably, the are going to just

(10:41):
go to American culture as the superior culture because of their democracy that they have,
the individual liberty and the rule of law. So all of these principles somehow made them stand out as
to a point being superior, but they're not, in fact. I mean, yes, I mean, a lot of people usually

(11:04):
get influenced by the American culture. Maybe on most of my students, they would just like mimic
an American culture, maybe like a rapper, like M&M, they like to take a certain character and then
they embrace it, they behave the way this character behaves, they take the language.
This is the American accent. This is part of a culture. In a way, if you want, if you learn English

(11:28):
and you speak with an American accent, yes, you are actually taking or embracing part
of the other cultures, right? That's not necessarily bad. Today, in today's word,
embracing certain elements of certain culture is good. Yes, that's universal. You can embrace
whatever you want and then that's it. That's okay. But again, American culture is not necessarily

(11:53):
a superior culture. Again, as we said, it's just because of me that they somehow control
a lot of media and they have this soft power. They're able to fund a lot of programs in a lot of
countries to advocate for American culture, whether they're by funding scholarships or

(12:14):
by somehow motivating people to be interested in the American culture or like certain events.
Remember, it used to be an event coordinator and we used to get grant from the American embassy
because we used to find certain programs like we celebrate certain activities that maybe people
in that culture don't. So embracing the American culture or just getting other people to be interested

(12:41):
in the American culture is seen as a win for them, for America. Then that's why they fund
a lot of programs and it's for them just that soft power. If a lot of people speak the language,
they're somehow instinctively are going to like it. This move on to our fourth and the last question,

(13:06):
should certain cultures be eliminated? We saw you might and you'd think if you think back
into the past, there are certain cultures that existed that maybe should not or should probably
be eradicated or should not exist until today. Let's say hypothetically, there is a group of people

(13:29):
that kill people. Part of the ritual is to sacrifice a child, say every month, to a volcano
in efforts for the volcano, not maybe to sprout out, to silence maybe to make the volcano happy.

(13:49):
They think maybe there is a god in the volcano that protects them and if they sacrifice every
a child to the volcano every month, they are in a way saving themselves. Now, if you look at this
culture and this especially practice in the culture, you don't want this to be passed on,
you don't want this to be. Yes, this should be eliminated, right? Maybe even though if you embrace

(14:14):
the notion of we should embrace every culture, we should accept every culture because every culture
is unique in its own way, but again, this is a culture that you don't want to happen or to exist.
Something else is in maybe you don't want, let's say there is a culture that maybe we
do way to punish people by torturing them and to that for a very simple thing like stealing,

(14:39):
if you steal something and in this culture, if you caught stealing, they would torture you for
maybe a couple of years until you die and that you and I probably agree that it's
humane in something that should not be accepted or embraced, right? So in a sense, yes, there are

(14:59):
certain cultures that needs or should be eliminated. I think on the top of your head, you can think of
the Nazi Germany, right? They had a certain culture, like an ideology that they had, it was
a little bit of extreme, extreme nationalism, right? They had like racism or anti-Semitism

(15:19):
and they had the cultural framework that somehow dehumanized the large segments of the population,
right? Which eventually led to the Holocaust and in devastating World War II, right? You don't want
this idea, it is considered a culture because they had certain beliefs, certain ideas, they all
accepted them as true and again, you don't want this culture to continue, you don't want this

(15:43):
is a culture. Of course, this is part of the German culture, it's not necessarily
all of it the German culture, but again, there was part an ideology existed in Germany, right?
Maybe accepted as true or good or not, but today in today's society, you don't want that culture to
live on, again, because it's just somehow it was going to stand in society and it was not for the

(16:11):
better of society. Anyway, there are certain, I would say there are certain practices within
a certain culture that should be eliminated, right? Or not necessarily the entire culture,
because again, as we said before, the culture is not as simple as we think it is, right? We said it
itself, a complex system of beliefs, values, habits, customs, right? Artifacts, arts that

(16:39):
a community, a group that can have together, right? And we have within a culture, we have
subcultures, right? And we have also microcultures, right? It's very, very smaller parts of a culture.
So there are again, if we were to ban certain, most of these again ideas we talked about,
the non-sensitivity culture, they're like a subculture of the culture. So we cannot in,

(17:04):
for example, trim, you cannot eliminate the entire German culture, what we can eliminate the part,
the extremist part of the culture. Same thing, maybe, and a lot of religions, we have a lot of
religions that they have some part of it, like religion is in a way embedded in culture. But
in most countries, religion is considered like a, as the whole, like the big part of the culture,

(17:29):
and not the culture as big. It depends on where you live. And some countries, culture is considered
as part of religion, and it's like too small to be noticed. And in some countries, religion is
like too big, and culture is sort of like part of it. But both of those coexist together. And again,

(17:50):
on, yes, certain subcultures should be eliminated, but we want the best for society. You don't want
against certain habits that are bad, certain practices that are bad should be cherished and
accepted and celebrated at some point, right? Hopefully the podcast was short and was clear.

(18:10):
Again, there is going to be a transcript of the podcast that way you can follow along.
But yeah, thank you so much, everybody, for listening. See you next time.
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