What a Cultural Explorer Explores

Yesterday, I wrote about how I define the cultural, and how it relates to when we travel. Obviously culture is a big topic, but we can use some of the more high-level aspects of culture to quantify what to consider when we visit a new place.  The idea here is to avoid going to new places uninformed, and waiting for the city or region come to us, when instead we travelers should be the ones doing the leg work in trying to understand the places that we go.

The starting point for me is the list of L. Robert Kohls' aspects of culture. His list here isn't in particularly in depth, but for our purposes, we don't need it to be. It just needs to be a starting point.  To revisit, Kohls says that culture consists of the following:

“- Manners
- Customs
- Beliefs
- Ceremonies
- Rituals
- Laws (written and unwritten)
- Ideas and thought patterns
- Language
- Arts and Artifacts
- Tools
- Social Institutions
- Religious Beliefs
- Myths and Legends
- Knowledge
- Values
- Concept of Self
- Morals
- Ideals
- Accepted Ways of Behaving”

In reviewing the above, I've arrived at a list of aspects of cities that either inform, or result from some, if not all, of the above. There's some overlap here. This is also my baseline position, one that will likely evolve as I explore this path in more depth and detail as we go forward.

Firstly, we have the environment, which is the foundation of culture.  They include aspects such as:

• Geology
  • Climate
  • Indigenous Wildlife
• Geography
• Time Zone

Then we have the people who inhabit this environment, and the various sub-tribes found within each area.

• Founding of the region/city by people
• Who arrived later
• How they categorized themselves
  • Communities
    • Majorities
    • Minorities

People tend to create or provide either goods or service to the community that has been created. This includes the following:

• Shelter/Architecture
• Food
• Craft/Goods
  • Guilds/Small businesses
• Entertainment/Art
  • Literature
  • Music
  • Dance
  • Theater
  • Visual Art
    • Paintings
    • Sculpture
  • Film/Television
  • Sport

People then use some type of institution to hold sway over them. They include:

• Governments (to provide guidance and leadership over known issues found within the geographic area that they claim)
  • Politics
  • Military
  • Police
    • Crime
• Religion (to provide guidance and leadership over the metaphysical)
  • Rituals
• Economics (to provide guidance surrounding the exchange of goods and services)
  • Businesses (large)
• Industries
  • Banks

Finally, after some course of time, all of these items above result in a history, in some form or another. Depending upon one's taste and knowledge,  this history can have varying degrees of importance. But the key thing to understand about history, is that it is theghostly remains of culture.

All of these items intermingle with one another to create a melange that results in a "place".  And of course, life isn't as simple as the list above might suggest. Each item listed very likely informs another. For example, a State Fair may have resulted from a group of guilds that agreed to meet once a year to celebrate the harvest as well as sell various wares. They invited many members of the community to attend, and the government may have provided a subsidy to support any cost overruns, or a centralized place where the fair could occur. As with anything surrounding humanity, there's always a complex intermingling of cultural ideas at play with one another, far to complex to quantify simply.

Let's take a quick rundown of a few touristy places and/or events, and see if we can place them into a category listed above.

Grand Canyon - Geologic

Crossing a border - Geographic/Governement

Eating a meal - small business/food/Indigenous Wildlife

Oktoberfest - Crafts/Goods/Government/Industry

Broadway show - Art/Theater/Music

Gettysburg - History/Military/Government

Soccer Match - Sports/Entertainment/Community

The point of this exercise here is to point out that using culture as the basis of travel, one can create an itinerary of sorts, based off of their interests as they relate to the lists above. 

In fact, that's what I entirely intend to do. Not just for myself, but for all of us.

Culture - The Language of Life

So here's a loaded question - What is culture? A person can spend their entire life trying to find an answer to that query. I'm not planning on going into that level of detail, but for those of us intent on exploration of new and possibly strange lands, it's an important part of the traveling experience.  As I have noted before, the moment one steps off of the airplane, one is immediately immersed in the culture of that land.

When some of us think of culture, we end up thinking of the arts - ballet, classical music, opera. Ifone has an appreciation of these, we tend to think of these people as 'cultured'. However, not only is this a misappropriation of the term, it leaves out aspects of our society that have far more impact upon the day-to-day lives of every day folks like you and I. We are all cultured.

Culture is the language of life. It is how we communicate our interpretation of the world to others.  Yes, art is the most obvious example of this, but so is our collective morality, which ends up informing where we put our faith. Sometime we put our faith in religion, other times with government, other times with our community or immediate environment, sometimes we even put our faith in individuals.  Our expression of these faiths results in the cultural.

"All right," you may be saying. "How does this affect the poor, lonely traveler?"

"How does it not?" I would respond. Your first decision on how to get to your destination is steeped in culture. Stepping into a car in order to get to the airport is an exercise in the cultural. The car is an invention created to a quick method of transportation between extended distances because the natural environment, as well as our natural bodies, are ill-equipped to get from point A to point B in a timely manner. The car you drive reflects either your values and class status. The roads your drive upon inform your interaction with that environment, and may even dictate where you can live.

"Okay," you say, a little exasperated.  "But this doesn't tell me about the place I was going to visit."

Fine, fine. If you head to Tucson, and try out Sonoran Hot Dogs? You'll be eating a food that found its way from Sonora University, where it fed the local students cheaply, to the streets of Tucson by those who had come from that region.  It is a dish created from the local resources that reflect the region.

Every time you cross a border, or go through customs, you are embarking on a bureaucratic process implemented by a local government designed to control the influx of visitors. Governments are but an legislative extensionof the culture of the local citizenry.

If you go to London, and visit St. Paul's Cathedral? You're visiting the manifestation of the local citizen's interpretation of the unknown communicated through architecture.

If you go to Tokyo, and take your beer along with you as you walk the streets, you're indulging in the city's (and by extension, its citizens) lack of concern over public consumption of alcohol. My examples here are admittedly high-level. I can go on, but hopefully these communicate how culture informs the traveling experience.

Don't take my word for it. L. Robert Kohls, in his primer Survival Kit For Overseas Living, defines culture in the following way:

“ ...we can see that a particular culture would consist of at least the following:

- Manners
- Customs
- Beliefs
- Ceremonies
- Rituals
- Laws (written and unwritten)
- Ideas and thought patterns
- Language
- Arts and Artifacts
- Tools
- Social Institutions
- Religious Beliefs
- Myths and Legends
- Knowledge
- Values
- Concept of Self
- Morals
- Ideals
- Accepted Ways of Behaving

In short, culture is the total way of life of any group of people.”

The food you eat while visiting New York City? That's an artifact of the culture. The bus you use to get from the airport to the hotel? That's a tool used for transportation. Have you visited Oktoberfest in Munich? That's both a ritual and a ceremony.

My point here is that everything we do when we travel is related to the cultural. And if you're someone who seeks out these things, the experience you have is exponentially greater if you understand the hows and whys of these things and how the end up impacting the place your visiting.