A Complex Culture

What is the genuine definition of culture? Does it require the convergence of all forms of art and expression within a community? Can it be distilled down to one facet of the artistic force that drives a group?

The deeper we delve into a world that swirls, sometimes frenetically, around a single art form, we find it becomes a native definition of our sense of self and others. We initially gather a feeling of fragile pride about our emerging culture, which later begins to morph into a durable attachment to and defense of the art.

Just as with any gathering of human minds and hearts, there are the occasional conflicts and musunderstandings. Other times we all surround the fire and dance in unison...for there can be no such revelry without the music that moves us.

We-as all who define ourselves within the community-are joined together under the force of one message and one messenger, along with his own eco system of equally integral music makers.  It becomes a part of our individual narrative, thus becoming part of our personal culture. Certainly all of us carry several cultural identities, some are evident and others more insular, but all are of equal importance to the story of our selves.

What are your cultural identities? In what ways do you define them? 
Does your love of the music hold a place in that deeply personal space? What about it makes it part of who you are?

Those can be difficult yet incredibly empowering questions to explore withon one's self. Sometimes we find a deep, abiding need to bulwark those things we have reconciled into our personal story. Not every soul in our circles will understand or support what we hold dear. Some may even try to destroy it.

That is all part of the hunger, the drive to seek spaces where others exist who have created the culture around one shared love or one mission. Sometimes we cleanly integrate into the community, other times we must labor our way in. Either way, once we find that space, we find great personal and collective power. There are struggles as well....nothing in the affairs of human kind is free of troubles.

Perhaps it seems lofty to intimate that the work of one artisan can become an genuine culture. Human history would seem to suggest it is entirely possible, and has occured throughout our combined narrative. In modern context, culture moves swiftly through wires and sattelites and signals. Some cultural contexts start to bleed over into other spaces, some remain confined to a comparatively small community.

Whether ot not it seems reasonable to say that the dedication to one specific creation qualifies as a culture, I suspect those who ascribe to it would defend that evaluation. Within this micro, mostly digitalized community, we share stories, works of art, thoughts, feelings, and even the occasional constructive discord. All of these are the facets of a culture, whatever the population density may be. We each have an individual story and name, we may carry other monikers to define wherein we entered the society, but ultimately we are all members of the ecology, the cultural community. What a brillaint and complex reality that can be!

~~c. P 2012