What is Culture?

I didn’t think much about culture until my Bachelor’s degree in Social Work put the term under a microscope. One assignment asked us to research a culture that wasn’t our own and interview a particular group. I chose South Korea—partly because my dad spent years there with the Army in the 1990s, deployed for a year at a time. His stories and photos hovered around our family like postcards from another world, so South Korea felt like a place I could approach with curiosity and cultural awareness. That project cracked something open in me: I realized that defining culture isn’t just about festivals and flags. It’s the daily stuff that shapes human behavior and social behavior—the knowledge, beliefs, values, rituals, language, customs, attitudes, and practices of a group of people.

The Culture I Didn’t Know I Had

Growing up, people called me an “Army brat.” At the time, I didn’t read that as American culture. It felt more like constant motion: public education that changed when the orders changed, groceries from the commissary, afternoons at the AYA (I still don’t know what those letters stood for) shooting pool and playing basketball. Our neighborhood had woods and a jungle gym where we’d build clubhouses, scrape our knees, and invent the rules as we went—everyday life forming social patterns within our small social group.

On base there was a little of everything—trailers in a small court, a hospital around the corner, a church, a nursery, a pre-K. Life felt self-contained, like one society that could pick up and move if it had to. That rhythm—pack, unpack, settle, repeat—was an integrated pattern of material objects, routines, and relationships I didn’t recognize as “own culture” because I was inside it.

Music was another thread I didn’t think to name. When my parents bought a CD player, one of their first discs was Doug and Rusty Kershaw—Cajun bluegrass from Louisiana. I was a classic rock kid at heart, but those fiddles got into me anyway. At home we rotated through popular culture, classical music, and classic rock. My parents played The Monkees; I later claimed The Beatles; and somewhere in there I learned you can inherit sounds you didn’t choose and still make them your own. That’s social learning in action—how human beings absorb ideas and habits from groups across one generation to the next.

We took long drives to my mom’s hometown in Louisiana. My great-grandmother bought her house at 20, worked as a nurse, and lived to 100. By the early 90s, Alzheimer’s had rearranged her world, and my grandfather—who passed when I was in fifth grade—cared for her with patience that taught me more than any textbook. I helped him paint walls and pull weeds; I also learned the hard way what poison ivy looks like. That creaky two-story place—haunted in my kid mind—held birthdays, casseroles, hymns, and arguments. If culture is repeated social forms that give life shape, that house was a mold that stamped our family over and over.

For years I believed I didn’t belong to any culture because I didn’t have one fixed hometown. Later I realized I belonged to many: Army culture, Southern culture, and what I’d call an Eastern-American blend stitched from Pennsylvania, Maine, New York, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana. Traveling up and down the East Coast, I feel how different cultures show up in accents, food, and history. The farther north you go, the more the soup becomes stew—thick with different ingredients, still somehow one dish. The same is true across countries—from South America to Asia and beyond—very different environments producing different yet relatable ways of living.

Learning to See Culture—Mine and Yours

That South Korea assignment taught me to sit with people and listen for meaning underneath the obvious. Respect for elders, community before self, food as a medicine cabinet and a love language—those aren’t bullet points on a handout; they’re decisions made thousands of times a day. Interviewing a community reminded me that culture isn’t a costume you put on; it’s the way a neighborhood smells at dinner time, the cadence of greetings, the stories people choose to tell first. In cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology, we’d say cultural influences shape the human mind and relationships from early development onward.

Later, as a registered intern social worker doing intakes, I had to ask clients, “What is your culture?” Many people stared back and said, “I don’t know. What does that mean?” I understood. If you’re swimming in water, “water” can be a hard word to define. I started explaining culture the way it made sense to me—echoing what you’ll find in social psychology or in textbooks from publishers like Cambridge University Press or the University of Chicago Press: the term culture (rooted in Middle English and Latin) names that integrated pattern of beliefs, practices, organization, and relationships that gives life its form.

• It’s the food you grew up eating and the foods you crave when you miss home.
• It’s the music that raised you—what your parents played, what you chose later, and the tension between them.
• It’s the places you’ve lived and the ones that still own a piece of you.
• It’s the people who shaped your morals: a grandmother’s religious beliefs (mine was Catholic and Christian in equal measure), a parent’s rituals, a coach’s rules, a neighbor’s kindness.
• It’s the media and school that educated you—the shows, teachers, and textbooks that told you what the world is and who you might be.
• It’s the subcultures you step into on purpose: sneakerheads, metalheads, anime fans, skateboarders, gamers—each a cultural group with its own heroes and do’s and don’ts.

When I frame culture this way, most folks suddenly have too much to say rather than too little.

Borrowed, Blended, and Beloved

Culture isn’t only inherited; it’s also chosen. Maybe you found anime in high school and ramen followed, not because you were trying to “be” anything, but because you liked the stories and the salt. Maybe you went to Italy and asked why their pasta tastes the way ours tries to. Maybe you joined a heavy metal scene for the riffs and stayed for the family you found in the pit. None of that erases where you came from; it adds rooms to your house. Cultural relativism helps here: instead of ranking other cultures—from African cultures to Korean traditions—we try to understand practices within the meanings of one culture before comparing across cultural differences.

There’s a humility that comes with this. If my family’s Army routines taught me resilience and readiness, someone else’s traditions gave them steadiness, contemplation, or hospitality. No single pattern explains all of society, which is why we visit one another’s kitchens and playlists and holidays. Respect is curiosity with its hands open.

How I Help People Name (and Claim) Their Culture

In therapy and everyday conversations, I invite people to map their culture like a scrapbook. It’s a simple kind of cultural learning and studying culture that anyone can do:

• Make a food timeline. What did breakfast look like when you were eight? What’s your celebration meal now? What recipe would you call your grandmother to get right?
• Build a soundtrack. List five songs your family played, five you chose later, and five that define you today. What do the lyrics and instruments say about your values?
• Pin the places. Mark the homes, schools, churches, parks, and jobs that mattered. For each, write one memory and one lesson.
• Name your mentors. Who taught you how to argue? How to forgive? How to rest?
• Claim your subcultures. Which communities give you belonging now? What do they ask of you? What do they give back?

Almost everyone who tries this ends up saying some version of what I learned: “I thought I didn’t have a culture. I have more than I can hold.”

The Work of Respect

Respecting different cultures starts with naming your own without apology. Then you can approach others without fear of losing yourself. Ask, “What does this food mean here?” “What’s the rhythm of love and discipline in this place?” “How do people grieve?” “What do they celebrate and why?” Listen twice as much as you speak. Share your story like an invitation, not a defense. Whether we’re talking about an ethnic group, a faith community, a music scene, or a neighborhood, culture is always an organization of meanings people build together.

I used to think I was between worlds—too mobile to belong anywhere. Now I know I carry worlds with me: Army base afternoons, Louisiana kitchens, classic rock radios, Cajun fiddles, East Coast highways, a great-grandmother’s steadfastness, a grandfather’s care, a dozen schools and the same old lunchbox. South Korea didn’t just broaden my view of someone else’s culture; it helped me see my own.

Culture, as Scientific American once put it in plain terms, is what humans do together. I’d add: it’s also what shapes us—country and language, customs and relationships, science and story—turning time into meaning for human beings across countries and contexts. The more we honor ours and learn about others, the richer life gets—not because we all become the same, but because we learn how beautifully different we already are and how much we can offer each other when we lead with respect.