Exploring the Complexity of Culture

Hello and hi! And welcome back to the alleyway. I hope you've been having a wonderful few months, and welcome back to the series where I get way too distracted by definitions and fun facts, and accidentally make what I'm assuming is going to be a 40 minute video. And this one is all about culture. We all hear a lot about culture in our day-to-day lives, and it's something that everyone has a more or less accurate general idea of. Culture defines a group of people who all think, look. and act the same, right? And you are right, but it's more complicated than that. Whether you're a writer or just interested in the topic, culture is a fascinating and complicated thing. It's an all-encompassing living behemoth that envelops almost everything that defines us as humans. There isn't a single human being who does not belong to at least one culture, because there's no way for a human being to not be born into one. And there is no human group that doesn't have their own culture. A fact so obvious that it's how we've separated ourselves from animals since ancient history. So today we are going to be doing one simple thing. Define culture. Last time I used the definition of society to kick us off into the video, and we'll be doing the same thing this time around. Google, and by that I mean Oxford Reference Dictionary, defines culture as follows. The way of life of a people, including their attitudes, values, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, and habits of thought and action. activity. Cultural features of forms of life are learned but are often too pervasive to be readily noticed from within. Now this is just one definition of course, but it helps to look at this and break it down piece by piece. Here they've listed several parts of a person's way of life, and it's nice to look at them as a series of individual building blocks coming together to form the concept of culture. Attitudes, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, habits of thought, and activity are all their own subjects with their own meanings, and and all of them are small parts of a larger construction, the culture. Let's take another look at those building blocks and talk about what they mean for both the group and the individual, namely how a group of people think, what they know, what they believe in, and what they do. Imagine a very young river running down a mountainside. At first the stream will simply travel down the path of least resistance, changing whenever something gets in its way and prevents it from moving forwards. But as the river continues to run its same exact path for more and more years, the river wears down the mountainside below it, making a trench that gets deeper and deeper. Eventually the river has met a path that it could never deviate from even if it tried, because now that riverbed is its only path. This is exactly how the human brain works too. The brain is an extremely complex thing, capable of great plasticity and change, but also with the tendency to form biases and make preferential connections. This leads to the brain reacting to certain stimuli in a certain way, sometimes regardless of logic or reality. These preferential channels in our brains are formed over our lifetimes, instilled through education, life experience, and simply existing in an environment with people who think similarly. Maybe you've already pictured an example of these channels already, since with With most of the English-speaking world currently experiencing a culture war, and with constant miscellaneous infighting online, there's definitely no lack of examples. But let's try an old favourite. Ahem. Communism. Depending on your age, where you grew up, your education and social circles, you conjured up an image of what your brain deemed communism to be just then. Was it the hammer and sickle? The democrats? Socialism? Republicans? The far left? The far right? Dictatorships? the cold war, the memes, Karl Marx, maybe advances in space travel, and most importantly, was this image a positive one or a negative one? A lot of society's biases and stereotypes come from these preferential connections, often formed through cultural osmosis, leaps in logic and generalizations, or second or first-hand experiences. And it is incredibly difficult to deviate from a bias once you've grown used to a certain line of thinking. But it's important to remember that these trenches we make in our minds are not carved in stone. They can be overcome and changed with conscious, consistent effort. But this is talking about the individual. Let's talk about the group. First, let's take a single individual and inflict them with an opinion. Now that person has the capacity to influence the people around them with that opinion. And those people then influence those around them. And so it goes on and on. echoes of the same thought bouncing along a web of connections over and over again until it becomes an opinion held by an entire group. Humans, especially when they form groups, are very good at these sorts of generalizations and jumping to conclusions. Well why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it. A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. And again, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It can keep a lot of people alive if word gets around that a certain mushroom kills you instantly or that stepping a single foot in the bog will erase your entire existence. It's only when these jumps in logic cause us to create rules that aren't actually there where things can get dicey. And a lot of these entrenched preferential connections is the idea of us versus them. Humans are social animals with base instincts, whether we like it or not, and we are not above our design, at least not when we don't challenge it. And one of these base instincts is to form groups. There's an inbuilt divide in our minds between those within our group and everyone else, who are then classified as other. And often these others are split into groups in our minds as well. Group A across the river, group B in the mountains, group C from the desert, etc. This identification is how we define ourselves and the people in our world, all on the foundation of this deeply ingrained mindset. But what does that mean? To have this us versus them manifest in our everyday lives? Well, unfortunately, mostly not good things. Because this belonging, this identification with a group, any group, is one of the very few things that can completely suppress the individual. Our need for and sense of belonging is stronger than our sense of self, to the point that we would surpass our core instinct of self-preservation in order to protect our group, or in some cases just our place within our group. It's an incredibly dangerous thing to believe in your group too strongly. And it's also shockingly easy to manipulate people through withholding or putting them at risk of losing the group they want to be a part of. I'm sure you're imagining examples again because I certainly was while writing this, but I find the first that comes to mind for me is that many alpha male and manosphere groups tend to do this by convincing young men that they never had, have lost, or are at risk. risk of losing their masculinity, they can create a sense of panic and despair in their audience that they can then sell a solution to. It's so prevalent in fact that I'm sure if you're an AMAB viewer, you've probably experienced some form of this in your life. And you know, it sucks. It's a terrible thing to experience no matter who you are. And there are examples of this almost everywhere you look, from primary school girls othering a fellow student as a form of bullying. to many militaries requiring complete assimilation of the self. Whoops, got a bit political there. But moving on. Since we love restricting ourselves into groups, we also tend to obsess over defining what exactly is our group. Because if I, a self-identified pizza enjoyer, consider pineapple on pizza to be a pizza, but another pizza enjoyer doesn't, how do you think that will impact our shared community? If we define ourselves through our gender, our jobs, our generation arc, country, our religion, and our language, eventually we're going to disagree on what our definitions of a culture or a gender or a language are. And these disagreements come from both within our groups and the outside world. In fact, this is one of the fundamental characteristics of a culture, that it will always try consciously or subconsciously to define itself. Fascinatingly enough, this also leads to a lot of internal paradoxes or dissonance within groups. For example, a lot of USA Americans, sorry for picking on you so much but you're the ones I consume the most media about, largely define themselves through their individuality and independence. But they all form groups of people that bond to over, agree with, and follow those same creeds, forming a single group mentality and therefore, ironically, making them a collective. But just as the US is relevant in our everyday lives, the them is just as important. And for our entire species throughout history, the threat of the they has been the source of endless conflicts, condemnations, and excuses to erase the humanity of those other groups. Because as much as we can humanize, empathize with, and even be willing to die for the us, we are also almost always trying to strip away all the humanity we can from those we deem other. In fact, the comfort we find in the inhumanity of the other is so strong that it's one of the reasons pop culture tends to get such a kick out of creatures in fiction. Like the TV version of Frankenstein's monster, ghosts, zombies, the fae, vampires. It's so much easier to characterize the bourgeoisie in fiction as inherently evil, blood-sucking monsters, or a billionaire as a biologically evil, manipulative lizard person from the center of the earth, rather than to recognize and come to terms with the fact that they're not evil. with the idea that they're just an admittedly power drunk extremely rich but still just a flawed human unwilling to care for the needs of the poor or downtrodden or even their own workers because from their perspective you too are other a them and undeserving of the wealth reserved for the us with all that having been said otherness does not inherently equal hostility we aren't all hardwired to hate those we see as other. There are many ways we can perceive the groups that don't belong to us. If a hunter-gatherer tribe comes into contact with a strange new kingdom, they don't immediately see those other people and their language and customs as hostile, just other. In fact, they're probably more worried about the known hunter-gatherer tribe across the river, who look like them and act like them and speak the same language as them, but who are a real and known threat with probably a long history of conflict attached to them too. After all, they're close enough to you to attack you, your shared language allows them to sow treachery within your ranks, and they know the land well enough to sneak up on you when you least expect it. Just like your grandfather used to tell you they would. This actually is how a lot of colonization stories go. Smaller native groups in an area that have generations of history, feuds, and wars and alliances to worry about, wind up completely blindsided by the sweeping wave of colonization simply because their first instinct wasn't to view those invaders as a threat while they had their own local politics to worry about. But on top of the us versus their mentality, there are also other mental passages that are thought to be inherent to our nature and as a result heavily influence our cultures. For example, and this is slightly controversial so I'll put a disclaimer in a little bit, monogamy. Generally, we bond with one partner at a time, but due to a lot of factors, infidelity is pretty common across our species, so every society generally has a method of dealing with this behavior. There's also an interesting trend showing that the higher up a person is on the social ladder, the more likely they are to search for other partners. This is... Something that our chimpanzee cousins do as well, since they build their hierarchy on the number of partners they mate with. So there's a theory that in our minds, we as a species associate promiscuity with a higher hierarchical position. Harems operate on the same principle. It's that same promiscuity combined with the desire for monogamy. But even if, for some people out there, a harem sounds like heaven, we aren't really made for that. There is a... difference between intercourse and love. Even for a culture where polygamy is expected, the man, because let's face it, when we're talking harems, it's always a man with a lot of wives and or concubines, tends to either find a favorite with whom he really bonds with, or he just doesn't love any of them, using and collecting them as objects. That's why even in pro-polygamy cultures, their love stories are always between two people, as shown throughout all the various love stories compiled in A Thousand and One Nights, which contains plenty of stories featuring cultures that are pro-haram. And disclaimer here, love between two or more people is really complicated and deeply personal, and I have no strong opinions on the sanctity of monogamy. My rule is that if it's not hurting anyone and it's all consensual, you should be allowed to live your life however you want, okay? Okay, moving on. Our last universal rule is that humans hate randomness. Not in the funny 2014 way, though that's certainly been showing its age for a while now, but... in the universe as a cold and knowing chaos god kind of way. Not knowing what causes a certain event is extremely stressful for human beings who will always, always try as best as they can to find an explanation for and predict the world around them. This is great for things like science, but it's also the root cause for pretty much every superstition and belief. The more beyond our understanding something is, the more we will work for a way to understand it and guarantee a positive outcome. first with science, then with internal knowledge, then with hearsay, and then finally with superstition. As an example, Polynesian tribes have rituals for fishing, but when working in a safer local area like a lagoon, there isn't a need for them, as they can rely on their own knowledge and expertise with the task. but when fishing in the open ocean, the rituals are seen as necessary, since there are so many more factors that can't be controlled with experience. Now, this isn't the be-all and end-all of the human mind. There's a lot we haven't covered, and a lot that we've kind of glossed over for the sake of brevity. But since we've still got a lot to cover, consider this the basics, and let's move on to our next section. But first, this video is sponsored by Skillshare. How neat is that? The channel's first sponsor. I absolutely love drawing, as you could probably tell already. but it's still something I'm trying to improve on every day, which is why I was delighted to be given a chance to work with Skillshare and get a leg up on my own independent learning. Skillshare, if you don't know yet, even though they've been around longer than this channel, is the largest online learning community for creatives like you and me, with hundreds of classes led by industry experts that cover art, editing, animation, design, DIY crafts, and way more. Using Skillshare, I was able to really work on some of my weaker points when it comes to art, like focusing on realism and the human figure, as well. As well as refresh myself with a lot of the basics, which my art teachers always told me to do, but I would immediately forget to and so never did. For beginners there are plenty of options to choose from to learn the basics, like Mimi Chow's very aesthetic Learn to Draw introductory class. But for the more intermediate gang like myself, I highly recommend Brent Everston's Introduction to the Art of Figure Drawing, which not only covers a lot of the stuff I learned in a formal academic setting, but the simple fact that I can rewind and rewatch a lesson if I need to has done wonders for my retention. So if you want to learn a real tactile craft, improve on a hobby, or simply learn something for fun one lesson at a time, Skillshare is definitely the right choice. Best of all, the first 500 people to use my link in the description will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare. Get started today and thank you so much Skillshare for the sponsorship. And back to the video. What a People Knows covers the wide range of what we call material and immaterial culture. These are a group's stories, myths, maps, environmental memory, crafts, domesticated animals, etc. and covers everything from their understanding of agriculture to how they explain the sun and the stars and the birds and the bees. As societies and cultures become more complex though, it becomes literally impossible for every person to know everything within it. But as long as a subsect of people within the culture do know it, then that knowledge can be passed along throughout the culture. For example, I don't know how to build a smartphone. But as long as there's a group of people out there in the world that do, then our entire society has access to smartphones. Or at least until my six-year-old Huawei dies, then none of you will ever see me again. But Back on topic, for all of human history, the material knowledge a group accrued became an identifiable part of their culture. For example, Roman concrete and Roman architecture, or Damascus steel, or Chinese paper. These are all examples of material culture. But it's not all of them. always real factual knowledge like those examples. It's also knowledge of a language or symbols or abstract localized concepts like monsters and legends. You don't even have to believe in something to know it and make it a part of your material culture. Just like how renaissance artists drew and took inspiration from Greek myths despite not believing in the figures or gods themselves. And today we still remember the renaissance as a time where people became interested with Greek plays, architecture, myths, and legends. But there's a difference between knowing what something is within the context of its culture and just recognizing certain images within that culture. For example, and this is a bit of a self-report, I can recognize the crescent moon as one of the symbols of Islam, but I don't understand the context that makes it one of the symbols. This brings us to another fundamental part of culture. the language. It's important to note that language doesn't define a culture in its entirety. There can be multiple cultures with the same language and a single culture that has multiple languages. But there is no culture without a language because all humans communicate through sound. The transmission of knowledge and meaning within a culture is essential and languages are built around the knowledge that they express as their people understand it. And in many ways, language becomes a mirror to its culture, showing insight into how how the people who speak think, while simultaneously being able to influence the way that a culture can interact with other new or recurring concepts, because of the associations and understandings that languages can give them. It's a bit complicated of a concept, but it's actually utilized a lot in marketing, and a cool modern example comes from the video game console market. After the market crashed in the 80s, thanks to ET and nothing else, the average buyer was extremely skeptical about the market. buying any game consoles at all. And it was only once Nintendo swept in with their new gaming console that they cleverly marketed as an entertainment system were they able to dodge around the bad PR of the game console market and find a foothold in American homes again, despite their product being just the same thing but newer. As an older example, Homeric texts don't have the word blue in them. describing the famously azure ocean as a wine dark sea leading to the idea that there just wasn't a word for ultramarine in the ancient greek language so imagine how a lack of even a word for blue could have affected how art and design was approached in ancient greece and people also define themselves and their cultures by the languages they speak the word barbarian even originated as an onomatopoeia for someone who does not speak greek given of course by the ancient greeks who did speak greek Um, so yeah, language can do a lot of heavy lifting for a culture. A culture's belief is hard to define. A group may believe in a certain religion, but they also believe in certain rules, that some things are right and some things are wrong, or that others have more or less value depending on factors both outside of and within their control. And in most cases throughout history, it can become pretty difficult to find the separations between what a person knows and what they believe. In the late middle ages, blacksmiths knew about tempering and understood that doing it in fresh water yielded pretty poor results. But they believed that um... the urine of red-haired boys was the best liquid to use to produce quality metals. To us modern geniuses nowadays, who of course know that fresh water evaporates more quickly and produces more varied bubbles that make the tempering less uniform, the use of urine is completely unnecessary and the result of a belief. I mean, the blacksmith could have just used oil or salt water, but to that blacksmith in the 1500s using Urine would have been technical knowledge and a vital a part of the metalworking process as the fire or the anvil. And obviously this confusion between fact and old wives tale is very much still around today. Even knowledge obtained through the scientific method could be wrong, for reasons we couldn't have ever considered. Who knows how many things that we assume are fact today could be myth tomorrow. That having been said... Please believe science and doctors. But moving on, I think it goes without saying that beliefs were fundamental in keeping groups together, especially in the ancient world. Religion and religious beliefs were important to support and hold together a community, especially when those communities grew into kingdoms and countries and empires, since they no longer had local familial bonds or direct relationships with their leaders to keep each other united. Even now, though the importance of religion in our daily lives has diminished in the last 300 years, there are plenty of other myths that modern states and empires uphold that hold them together, whether they be political values, a historical legacy, an origin story of the country, or the belief that your country contains people that are superior to everyone else. You know, harmless little myths that make up our day to day lives depending on the geographic location we're randomly born into. Definitely not the kinds of things that start civil wars or hate groups or ingrained societal despair or anything. So most of what we've covered in this video so far have been talking about the internal machinations of a culture, but Internal thoughts and beliefs give way to external manifestations of that society. We've already mentioned how it comes in the form of artistic expression, architectural styles, local celebrations and rituals in the form of material culture, but it also manifests in just the generic way people act in their day-to-day lives. All these elements that make up their society and worldview influence how they speak to their family and to strangers, if they avoid certain foods or prefer particular games, how they spend their evenings or their favorite time of year. But don't assume that you and everyone else you know is just a product of their environment, because this influence goes both ways. The people living within a culture have the capacity to change it every day through their own actions. Whenever a person paints a painting or writes a book, it expresses their own way of thinking out into the world. Others can protest or provide goodwill or education. And when their actions and creations are perceived by others, it can influence and sway them. and lead to them interpreting the work in their own way. And eventually the art or action becomes a part of the culture, shifting it and changing its shape ever so subtly as it does so. It's all an interconnected web of outside and inside influences that come together to shape both the society and the individual. And they both change one another in a constant to and fro and have done so since the dawn of humanity. It's all a beautiful thing, really. In fact, that's what I've been doing this entire video and for every video I've made even if I don't think it's going to change society I think it's going to change you who watch it so thanks for that So we've talked about how a culture makes you think, affects what you believe and what you know, what you create and how you live your life. But don't worry dear viewers, it gets even more complicated than that. Human beings are of course all different from one another. We all have our own lives, histories, and families. Sometimes those families are deeply rooted in a culture and location to the point where it cannot be removed from the fabric of the people within it. But for others, the water gets a bit murkier. And here we come back to the main problem with culture. It's really, really hard to define. The concept of a culture is intrinsically collective. It omits the idea of the individual to instead pretend that a simplified common denominator of the people within it is the entire culture. But at the same time, when we start defining culture, we must stretch the concept out to encompass these incredibly specific situations and individuals on the fringes of that culture. And there is a lot of grey area between what is and isn't a part of a specific culture. If for example, a daughter of an all-American Christian family converts to Buddhism, does that mean she's no longer a member of the United States of America culture? No. what does it mean to be a part of the USA? Is it a core part of American culture to be a Christian? Well, I think a lot of people, including me, would say no. Sure, Lisa changed her religion, but she still spoke the language, dressed in the local styles, and had a family within the culture, and was raised within that culture. But the question here is, how many parts of yourself do you have to change before you forfeit your culture? Okay. Maybe the last example was a bit too political. Let's talk about me instead. I walk like a South African, I talk like a South African, and my entire family were born and raised in South Africa. So I'm South African, right? Well, almost. See, I was actually born in Seattle, Washington. And as a result, I have a lot of paperwork saying that I'm not actually a South African. And I only got dual citizenship after I turned 18. So am I still a South African? But. Also, I'm, well, a white South African. The British first landed in South Africa in 1820. That's barely over 200 years of history. Does that mean I'm just British? And how South African can I call myself if I don't speak the native language of the area or know how to cook any of the local food? Or even know much about my local politics, sorry. So really, am I still a South African when every factor is considered? Well, here's the thing. By now you should know that we humans love sorting concepts and people into boxes. And we again try to do that with culture too, clearly. But truth be told, there is no one out there who belongs to only one single culture. And that's because of what we think a group's culture is. One single solid definition containing everything that makes up a specific culture. standing as a single monolith one-size-fits-all block. But you should also know by now that that's not the case at all. Culture is more like a stone wall. There are various blocks overlapping and building on one another until they form a big wall of culture. Less in the shape of an actual wall, but more like a spiraling galaxy of stones clustering together under a generalized definition. My family and friends call us South African and... We are, but we are a subculture within the overall South African culture, and we are part of multiple overlapping subcultures that influence our holidays, our cuisine, our home decor, our relationships with one another. I come from an Anglo-Saxon United Kingdom family. Which means that while I didn't personally follow it, I treated Christianity as the default belief system for most of my life. Celebrate both Christmas and Easter every year, and I have performed more than one nativity play in my lifetime. I relate a lot to those living in the UK, the USA, Australia, Canada. Because my upbringing was very similar to those of every other white person in a predominantly Christian English-speaking country. I am South African, but I'm a very specific flavor of South African. I'm... not the only one like me, and there are plenty of us within the country, but we are only a small brick that exists alongside many in the South African brick wall. So what does that mean for you poor souls out there still trying to figure out what a culture is 5,000 words into the script? Well, we've now established that culture does not necessarily correspond to a specific state or group. In fact, it almost never does. The idea of an ethnocentric kingdom with a perfectly defined territory and a single existing culture spanning across and ending at its borders is a nice idea and the most common type of kingdom in fiction, but for now has only ever existed as an ideal for some to try and make possible and not something that's ever occurred organically. And unfortunately we in the biz like to call making an ethnocentric kingdom out of a multi-ethnic territory, uh, a war crime. But there are some ways that existing cultures can learn to cooperate with one another in a similar way to a single culture, and maybe even grow to be seen as one over time. The ancient Greek city-states were a great example of that. Despite the separate states always at war with one another, they define themselves as a single cultural identity, the Hellenes, meaning the ones who speak Greek, as opposed to everyone else who didn't, who they named the Barbarians. Remember from earlier? And in complete contrast, there are enormous empires in human history, such as the Persian Empire, that incorporate multiple smaller cultures and groups. Sometimes a dominant culture becomes a sort of glue that links together various cultures. For example, a Syrian in the 2nd century ACE could define himself as Levantine, Greek, and Roman simultaneously. And social classes can sometimes create divides in culture, as the rich grow more and more removed in their lifestyles from the common folk. In fact, the elites tend to share a common culture even between various countries. The European nobles and knights of the 12th century, despite often being in constant conflict with one another, all read the same stories, shared similar values, and more often than not spoke French, which was seen as the language of the great secular culture. Another very particular case is that of English nobility. At some point, William the Conqueror, who was previously Duke of Normandy, conquered the Kingdom of England and installed his men as nobles throughout the kingdom, supplanting many of the Anglo-Saxon nobility who either merged with their new usurpers or disappeared into history. For centuries, the English were ruled by a nobility that sometimes couldn't even speak English, even after the King of England lost his French possessions. Why the English language today retains some French here and there, like pig being the name for the animal while pork is the name of its meat. So we keep bringing up material culture, so we might as well do it one last time. Again, art, science, agriculture know-how, paintings, sculptures and artifacts are part of material culture, but that also includes things we use every day that we may not think of as cultural. like computers, TVs, and ovens. All of them are material cultural artifacts. But as you should know by now, there's more. The existence of material culture implies the existence of immaterial culture. And there's exactly that. Overall, culture is made up of both the material and the immaterial. Knowing what material culture is now, you've probably got an idea of what would make immaterial culture. It's the things you can't see that often get lost to history. It's abstract common knowledge, insights of a religion, tradition, rituals, state organizations, spoken language, word of mouth stories and myths. It's the things that get lost once a culture dies out and is almost impossible to recover. But again, there's a lot of gray areas and uncertainty when observing and learning from material culture, as far as real life is concerned. Both material and immaterial culture travel between people and places and can spread out across countries. And sometimes it's hard to tell if that vase you've dug up is authentic China. or some knockoff made by someone outside the culture to sell to someone else who's also outside the culture. But for now, that's neither here nor there, and we're getting off topic. Even if there's a lot of fun facts I want to share, like Phoenician art copying ancient Egyptian art as perfectly as possible to sell to the Assyrian Empire who love the aesthetic and pretty much everything about Egypt, the original weebs if you will, it's just lucky that we have written records from the time saying so. Otherwise, who knows the chaos that finding a bunch of pseudo Egyptian artifacts throughout the Mediterranean and the Near East could have wrought. But again, that's neither here nor there. So we've covered a lot in this video, even if it may all seem a bit muddled right now, but we still have one of the most interesting topics left. How is a culture made? Well, it actually isn't. Get made, I mean. Or at least it hasn't for as far as we've been able to trace back into our past. Culture develops and evolves over time, and it's impossible to say when the first true culture was born. If- it ever was. Maybe we've always had it. Maybe it grew along with our brain size. Maybe it's an evolution of ape behavior. It's an interesting discussion that we could have. But for now, as far as we know, there's no way for a culture to be born in a vacuum. Cultures always change and grow and diverge within the context of their surroundings and interactions with other cultures. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context. of all in which you live and what came before you. And it's not a regular process. Cultures can change slowly over thousands of years like the ancient Egyptians, or within a single generation like in the French Revolution. There are thousands of little ways a culture can change and be changed by the cultures and people both around and within it, always in extremely specific ways that are incredibly hard to reconstruct. With the exception of the Sentinelese who have been living isolated for about 60,000 years, this mixing and merging and diverging of cultures in this continuous exchange for all of human history makes it practically impossible to remove any culture from its context and try to study it in isolation. So let's talk instead about a few common examples that can shape a culture. Sometimes a different cultural group establishes itself as a dominator of a pre-existing population, imposing its own language and customs. This is called colonization and I'm sure you're all familiar with the main example I would use. This type of domination of a culture really takes the form of an extermination but you rather an external group conquering and imposing their own culture on a people in a more or less forcible manner. A group of Indo-Europeans in Europe found themselves on both sides of the problem in the 4th millennium BCE. There's a theory that the first groups of Indo-Europeans that settled in Europe, in the area between the Carpathians and the current Czech Republic, subjugated the native pre-Indo-European population that was already there, and it It is possible that these first Indo-Europeans, once they were settled, were then later supplanted by brand new groups of Indo-Europeans in the third millennium, who wiped out the first group and then went on to impose themselves on the rest of Europe. But don't worry, a lot of those conquered cultures of course don't take their oppression lying down. And sometimes colonization just doesn't stick. Particularly when the conquerors are smaller in number or the culture being conquered is simply too popular and closely held by the population to be stifled. Our example of the occupying nobles under William the Conqueror works here as well. Despite being under another culture's rule, in the long run, the culture of the conquerors was consumed instead. In fact, sometimes the conquest of a culture acts as a catalyst to create something completely different. Like the Vikings that conquered the Slavic territories bordered by the Volga and Dnieper. The Vikings didn't impose their language or muffle the local cultural identity. After all, there simply weren't that many of them to do so. But their presence acted as a catalyst that made the smallest Slavic potentates within the territory to coagulate and transform into a new and unprecedented cultural identity that would one day shape itself into Russia. But outside of traumatic takeovers and population insertions, most people prefer to operate in a more peaceful way, leading to much calmer changes to society and culture. The USA is a clear example of how migration of peoples changes their culture. Now, while the USA's culture overall is anything but peaceful, there's a specific slice of it I'd like to focus on for this example, and it's the way that American culture as we know it today was built on the Anglo-Saxons being the first settlers, and how it formed the base on which every other immigrant culture grew and built upon. Migrant groups like the Germans, the Irish, Italian, Polish, Mexican, and multiple African cultures, despite in some cases being brought along unwillingly, all brought their contributions to the base group, and in turn have been influenced by it as well, with their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. grandchildren carrying their home culture with them in small ways, even as they weave them in together with the rest of their larger local culture. Even of those who identified as the original immigrants weren't thrilled about it. So of course cultural influences pass not only through immigration or conquest. In fact, often cultural elements like religion, technology, and artistic canons radiate out through close proximity with others and end up becoming a part of it. A fantastic literary example of culture passing to other peoples is the Chinese epic Journey to the West, which has steadily spread throughout the whole world and influenced thousands of people, particularly back in the 80s, where the story would inspire one Japanese mangaka to create another work that too would spread around the world. Dragon Ball. Another kind of cultural change is an internal upheaval and here we get to go back to the French Revolution. The culture of France before and after the revolution changed so drastically and in such a short period of time that it sent shockwaves throughout the world and to today stands as a shining example of what the working man and woman can do when the world they're living in is blatantly corrupt and any avenue for justice or upward mobility is crippled beyond repair and our world leaders are doing nothing to fix it simply because they too have everything to benefit from keeping the system the exact same way it is, just saying. But the interesting thing is that that kind of a drastic internal shift has happened before, more than two millennia ago. Between the end of the Bronze Age and the 5th century BCE, the Hallstatt culture had developed in central Europe, stretching from France to Bohemia. However, in the 5th century, the material culture of Hallstatt was completely overturned, with many of their most important centers being destroyed or abandoned, and it was replaced by another culture. the so-named Latine culture. For a long time, it was assumed that the upheaval was due to some kind of invasion, but the evidence suggests a different series of events. The Halstead culture seemed to have been based on a system of redistribution of valuable objects by figures sometimes known as princes who ruled over a large layer of lower nobility. It seems that once the Greek center of Massalia declined after the battle of Alalia, the system went into crisis and the noble warriors revolted against the princes, creating a completely new cultural system from the ashes based on warrior values. There are many cases in which a culture and a people's identity are born as a result of external threats or under pressure from intrusive neighbors. In fact, it happens that divided populations, often fighting each other, come together to form federations or states to fight or even just negotiate with powerful enemies. There were various Germanic populations that invaded the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries ACE. Those populations didn't exist until the 3rd century after contact with the Roman Empire led them to join together to fight back against this new larger foe. And it was only after time passed that they lost their individual group identities in favor of becoming a larger community. And that's a rundown of a few ways culture can change or be changed. I hope it was helpful, if not at least informative. And now finally, we're at the summary stage. So what is a culture? It's a way of life in attitude toward the world and others. It's the values, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, habits of thoughts, and activities a group has. Those within a cultural group tend to think a certain way as a result of being taught that way. To those within it, their culture takes on the feeling of wallpaper, unnoticed until it's brought to attention, and often is seen as the logical default. And similarly, this creates an us versus them understanding of the world. A culture is made up of multiple different little subcultures, and while it's always being defined by those within it, sometimes those definitions can harm or cut out some subcultures by trying to dictate or outlaw their beliefs, partners, or lifestyles. And these definitions have to be debated from within the culture itself. Groups and cultures also like to make other rules and superstitions for themselves in an attempt to solve the world around them and remove random chance and the unknown from their everyday lives. And those take the form of beliefs. and knowledge, with belief often taking the shape of knowledge until firmly proved otherwise. And even then, it can still be considered knowledge by parts of the culture. And this mixture of internal beliefs and knowledge manifest in physical actions and material results. A group is made up of material and immaterial culture. and language uses both to affect how a group interprets certain concepts and change themselves through those interpretations. A single culture is a part of the fabric of its environment and cannot exist without its surroundings and neighboring societies and it is constantly being changed by its surroundings whether it's being assimilated or doing the assimilating into a larger culture or being affected in small ways by the people within it. there that wasn't so hard video could have been a minute long if i just said that but yeah culture is complicated and hard to define and difficult to summarize but it's really really important because it affects everyone alive you and me and every person we've ever met and i think it's vital to learn about what exactly culture is and the factors that influence it for both writers and creatives and just everyone because something i think we as people always have trouble with you is seeing the forest for the trees. So, so much of what the average person focuses on today in the world, whether it be the woke mob or immigration or left versus right or languages using the singular they or AI creators, not the non-imprisonable machine, but the real people behind it who made it by stealing human-made art for their own gain, and I'm seeing the trees again, or government atrophy leaving world leaders at a standstill, or... the rich taking everything for themselves and leaving us with nothing but a rotting planet. All of it can seem so impossibly insurmountable and unprecedented at times. And so in a way, it's easier to focus on the trees because the forest is terrifying. And a small thing I love about history is seeing these little moments, these exchanges, these times in history that assure me that this has happened before, that it isn't some strange unknowable new thing. This isn't the fault of iPhones or electricity or microwaves. We've always had the ignorant rich, the big talking salesmen and the bigoted idiots. The locals always hate tourists and when a country hits hard times, they almost always lean more towards fascism and blame their problems on minorities. It's unfortunate and it sucks and I wish it was different, but at least it's happened before. And if we can finally... finally learn from our history and understand why we are the way we are, maybe there's still time to change that, you know, before all the rainwater on earth becomes undrinkable or something. Wouldn't that suck? Sorry, hang on, this wasn't supposed to be the conclusion. I was supposed to talk about the human spirit. Yikes, this is the most political I've ever been in a video. But that's everything for now. Feel free to leave a like on the video if you feel it's earned it, and if you want to, you can subscribe and be notified of the next one, because I am planning on taking this and the society video and compiling them together into a guide on writing culture, based on all the research we've done. And lastly, before I go, I want to sincerely thank Vincent, who I am promoting to co-creator for this video, because believe me when I say he wrote 95% of the script. When picking topics for videos, I tend to just pick what sounds interesting to talk about and then get into the research afterwards. And since I typically don't know everything about a topic before I start, sometimes his videos just grow out of control with the amount of stuff about it that I just didn't know was there. And unfortunately, in this case, it kind of landed on him to dig me out of that ditch. He told me at the end of his write-up that what we've now covered in this video alone is at least five university courses worth of summarizing. And I fully believe him. And if you'd like to show your thanks, we've got a story out on Tapas that we've been collaborating on together. It's a fantasy epic telling the tale of a world that is inexorably changing, where the great course of history overwhelms everything and everyone. From the tribes beyond the borders of the civilized world, to the sumptuous halls of the nobility and a collapsing empire, the plot of destiny unites distant people and places, bringing about the end of a cycle, and the beginning of a new one. But for now, thank you so much for watching, and see you next time. Honestly, I have tried to rewrite the script so many times. I'm always torn with these videos, whether I should tailor them more to help writers, like what this channel was originally about, or if I should maybe focus on a single standalone topic, like the lithic industry, and leave it at that. Actually, this is version two of the script. I came back to it after scrapping version three, which was a lot longer, and I tried to tailor it more to writers and sprinkle in some writing advice here and there. Because the main problem I've faced with using real life to build fiction is that real life is really, really complicated and it's only logical for writers and world builders to narrow things down and simplify them. I will never again criticize the Planet of the Hats trope, at least not too harshly if it's done like decently, because the alternative seems to be creating spreadsheet after spreadsheet of culture and subcultures. So the next video will hopefully be a guide on how to make a happy medium between the Planet of the Hats trope and the dreaded spreadsheets. So wish me luck and have a great day. um i'm sorry this took so long to come out and thank you again so much for watching and sticking around and still watching it even though i've been inactive for way too long um it's been a crazy couple months um and uh yeah but thank you so much there will be more coming soon

Culture defines a group of people who all think, look. and act the same, right? And you are right, but it's more complicated than that.

Whether you're a writer or just interested in the topic, culture is a fascinating and complicated thing. It's an all-encompassing living behemoth that envelops almost everything that defines us as humans. There isn't a single human being who does not belong to at least one culture, because there's no way for a human being to not be born into one. And there is no human group that doesn't have their own culture.

A fact so obvious that it's how we've separated ourselves from animals since ancient history. So today we are going to be doing one simple thing. Define culture.

Last time I used the definition of society to kick us off into the video, and we'll be doing the same thing this time around. Google, and by that I mean Oxford Reference Dictionary, defines culture as follows. The way of life of a people, including their attitudes, values, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, and habits of thought and action.

activity. Cultural features of forms of life are learned but are often too pervasive to be readily noticed from within. Now this is just one definition of course, but it helps to look at this and break it down piece by piece. Here they've listed several parts of a person's way of life, and it's nice to look at them as a series of individual building blocks coming together to form the concept of culture. Attitudes, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, habits of thought, and activity are all their own subjects with their own meanings, and and all of them are small parts of a larger construction, the culture.

Let's take another look at those building blocks and talk about what they mean for both the group and the individual, namely how a group of people think, what they know, what they believe in, and what they do. Imagine a very young river running down a mountainside. At first the stream will simply travel down the path of least resistance, changing whenever something gets in its way and prevents it from moving forwards.

But as the river continues to run its same exact path for more and more years, the river wears down the mountainside below it, making a trench that gets deeper and deeper. Eventually the river has met a path that it could never deviate from even if it tried, because now that riverbed is its only path. This is exactly how the human brain works too. The brain is an extremely complex thing, capable of great plasticity and change, but also with the tendency to form biases and make preferential connections.

This leads to the brain reacting to certain stimuli in a certain way, sometimes regardless of logic or reality. These preferential channels in our brains are formed over our lifetimes, instilled through education, life experience, and simply existing in an environment with people who think similarly. Maybe you've already pictured an example of these channels already, since with With most of the English-speaking world currently experiencing a culture war, and with constant miscellaneous infighting online, there's definitely no lack of examples.

But let's try an old favourite. Ahem. Communism.

Depending on your age, where you grew up, your education and social circles, you conjured up an image of what your brain deemed communism to be just then. Was it the hammer and sickle? The democrats? Socialism? Republicans?

The far left? The far right? Dictatorships? the cold war, the memes, Karl Marx, maybe advances in space travel, and most importantly, was this image a positive one or a negative one?

A lot of society's biases and stereotypes come from these preferential connections, often formed through cultural osmosis, leaps in logic and generalizations, or second or first-hand experiences. And it is incredibly difficult to deviate from a bias once you've grown used to a certain line of thinking. But it's important to remember that these trenches we make in our minds are not carved in stone.

They can be overcome and changed with conscious, consistent effort. But this is talking about the individual. Let's talk about the group. First, let's take a single individual and inflict them with an opinion.

Now that person has the capacity to influence the people around them with that opinion. And those people then influence those around them. And so it goes on and on. echoes of the same thought bouncing along a web of connections over and over again until it becomes an opinion held by an entire group.

Humans, especially when they form groups, are very good at these sorts of generalizations and jumping to conclusions. Well why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it. A person is smart.

People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. And again, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It can keep a lot of people alive if word gets around that a certain mushroom kills you instantly or that stepping a single foot in the bog will erase your entire existence.

It's only when these jumps in logic cause us to create rules that aren't actually there where things can get dicey. And a lot of these entrenched preferential connections is the idea of us versus them. Humans are social animals with base instincts, whether we like it or not, and we are not above our design, at least not when we don't challenge it. And one of these base instincts is to form groups. There's an inbuilt divide in our minds between those within our group and everyone else, who are then classified as other.

And often these others are split into groups in our minds as well. Group A across the river, group B in the mountains, group C from the desert, etc. This identification is how we define ourselves and the people in our world, all on the foundation of this deeply ingrained mindset.

But what does that mean? To have this us versus them manifest in our everyday lives? Well, unfortunately, mostly not good things. Because this belonging, this identification with a group, any group, is one of the very few things that can completely suppress the individual. Our need for and sense of belonging is stronger than our sense of self, to the point that we would surpass our core instinct of self-preservation in order to protect our group, or in some cases just our place within our group.

It's an incredibly dangerous thing to believe in your group too strongly. And it's also shockingly easy to manipulate people through withholding or putting them at risk of losing the group they want to be a part of. I'm sure you're imagining examples again because I certainly was while writing this, but I find the first that comes to mind for me is that many alpha male and manosphere groups tend to do this by convincing young men that they never had, have lost, or are at risk. risk of losing their masculinity, they can create a sense of panic and despair in their audience that they can then sell a solution to. It's so prevalent in fact that I'm sure if you're an AMAB viewer, you've probably experienced some form of this in your life.

And you know, it sucks. It's a terrible thing to experience no matter who you are. And there are examples of this almost everywhere you look, from primary school girls othering a fellow student as a form of bullying. to many militaries requiring complete assimilation of the self. Whoops, got a bit political there.

But moving on. Since we love restricting ourselves into groups, we also tend to obsess over defining what exactly is our group. Because if I, a self-identified pizza enjoyer, consider pineapple on pizza to be a pizza, but another pizza enjoyer doesn't, how do you think that will impact our shared community? If we define ourselves through our gender, our jobs, our generation arc, country, our religion, and our language, eventually we're going to disagree on what our definitions of a culture or a gender or a language are. And these disagreements come from both within our groups and the outside world.

In fact, this is one of the fundamental characteristics of a culture, that it will always try consciously or subconsciously to define itself. Fascinatingly enough, this also leads to a lot of internal paradoxes or dissonance within groups. For example, a lot of USA Americans, sorry for picking on you so much but you're the ones I consume the most media about, largely define themselves through their individuality and independence. But they all form groups of people that bond to over, agree with, and follow those same creeds, forming a single group mentality and therefore, ironically, making them a collective. But just as the US is relevant in our everyday lives, the them is just as important.

And for our entire species throughout history, the threat of the they has been the source of endless conflicts, condemnations, and excuses to erase the humanity of those other groups. Because as much as we can humanize, empathize with, and even be willing to die for the us, we are also almost always trying to strip away all the humanity we can from those we deem other. In fact, the comfort we find in the inhumanity of the other is so strong that it's one of the reasons pop culture tends to get such a kick out of creatures in fiction. Like the TV version of Frankenstein's monster, ghosts, zombies, the fae, vampires.

It's so much easier to characterize the bourgeoisie in fiction as inherently evil, blood-sucking monsters, or a billionaire as a biologically evil, manipulative lizard person from the center of the earth, rather than to recognize and come to terms with the fact that they're not evil. with the idea that they're just an admittedly power drunk extremely rich but still just a flawed human unwilling to care for the needs of the poor or downtrodden or even their own workers because from their perspective you too are other a them and undeserving of the wealth reserved for the us with all that having been said otherness does not inherently equal hostility we aren't all hardwired to hate those we see as other. There are many ways we can perceive the groups that don't belong to us. If a hunter-gatherer tribe comes into contact with a strange new kingdom, they don't immediately see those other people and their language and customs as hostile, just other. In fact, they're probably more worried about the known hunter-gatherer tribe across the river, who look like them and act like them and speak the same language as them, but who are a real and known threat with probably a long history of conflict attached to them too.

After all, they're close enough to you to attack you, your shared language allows them to sow treachery within your ranks, and they know the land well enough to sneak up on you when you least expect it. Just like your grandfather used to tell you they would. This actually is how a lot of colonization stories go. Smaller native groups in an area that have generations of history, feuds, and wars and alliances to worry about, wind up completely blindsided by the sweeping wave of colonization simply because their first instinct wasn't to view those invaders as a threat while they had their own local politics to worry about.

But on top of the us versus their mentality, there are also other mental passages that are thought to be inherent to our nature and as a result heavily influence our cultures. For example, and this is slightly controversial so I'll put a disclaimer in a little bit, monogamy. Generally, we bond with one partner at a time, but due to a lot of factors, infidelity is pretty common across our species, so every society generally has a method of dealing with this behavior.

There's also an interesting trend showing that the higher up a person is on the social ladder, the more likely they are to search for other partners. This is... Something that our chimpanzee cousins do as well, since they build their hierarchy on the number of partners they mate with.

So there's a theory that in our minds, we as a species associate promiscuity with a higher hierarchical position. Harems operate on the same principle. It's that same promiscuity combined with the desire for monogamy. But even if, for some people out there, a harem sounds like heaven, we aren't really made for that.

There is a... difference between intercourse and love. Even for a culture where polygamy is expected, the man, because let's face it, when we're talking harems, it's always a man with a lot of wives and or concubines, tends to either find a favorite with whom he really bonds with, or he just doesn't love any of them, using and collecting them as objects.

That's why even in pro-polygamy cultures, their love stories are always between two people, as shown throughout all the various love stories compiled in A Thousand and One Nights, which contains plenty of stories featuring cultures that are pro-haram. And disclaimer here, love between two or more people is really complicated and deeply personal, and I have no strong opinions on the sanctity of monogamy. My rule is that if it's not hurting anyone and it's all consensual, you should be allowed to live your life however you want, okay?

Okay, moving on. Our last universal rule is that humans hate randomness. Not in the funny 2014 way, though that's certainly been showing its age for a while now, but... in the universe as a cold and knowing chaos god kind of way. Not knowing what causes a certain event is extremely stressful for human beings who will always, always try as best as they can to find an explanation for and predict the world around them.

This is great for things like science, but it's also the root cause for pretty much every superstition and belief. The more beyond our understanding something is, the more we will work for a way to understand it and guarantee a positive outcome. first with science, then with internal knowledge, then with hearsay, and then finally with superstition.

As an example, Polynesian tribes have rituals for fishing, but when working in a safer local area like a lagoon, there isn't a need for them, as they can rely on their own knowledge and expertise with the task. but when fishing in the open ocean, the rituals are seen as necessary, since there are so many more factors that can't be controlled with experience. Now, this isn't the be-all and end-all of the human mind. There's a lot we haven't covered, and a lot that we've kind of glossed over for the sake of brevity. But since we've still got a lot to cover, consider this the basics, and let's move on to our next section.

But first, this video is sponsored by Skillshare. How neat is that? The channel's first sponsor.

I absolutely love drawing, as you could probably tell already. but it's still something I'm trying to improve on every day, which is why I was delighted to be given a chance to work with Skillshare and get a leg up on my own independent learning. Skillshare, if you don't know yet, even though they've been around longer than this channel, is the largest online learning community for creatives like you and me, with hundreds of classes led by industry experts that cover art, editing, animation, design, DIY crafts, and way more. Using Skillshare, I was able to really work on some of my weaker points when it comes to art, like focusing on realism and the human figure, as well.

As well as refresh myself with a lot of the basics, which my art teachers always told me to do, but I would immediately forget to and so never did. For beginners there are plenty of options to choose from to learn the basics, like Mimi Chow's very aesthetic Learn to Draw introductory class. But for the more intermediate gang like myself, I highly recommend Brent Everston's Introduction to the Art of Figure Drawing, which not only covers a lot of the stuff I learned in a formal academic setting, but the simple fact that I can rewind and rewatch a lesson if I need to has done wonders for my retention. So if you want to learn a real tactile craft, improve on a hobby, or simply learn something for fun one lesson at a time, Skillshare is definitely the right choice. Best of all, the first 500 people to use my link in the description will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare.

Get started today and thank you so much Skillshare for the sponsorship. And back to the video. What a People Knows covers the wide range of what we call material and immaterial culture.

These are a group's stories, myths, maps, environmental memory, crafts, domesticated animals, etc. and covers everything from their understanding of agriculture to how they explain the sun and the stars and the birds and the bees. As societies and cultures become more complex though, it becomes literally impossible for every person to know everything within it. But as long as a subsect of people within the culture do know it, then that knowledge can be passed along throughout the culture.

For example, I don't know how to build a smartphone. But as long as there's a group of people out there in the world that do, then our entire society has access to smartphones. Or at least until my six-year-old Huawei dies, then none of you will ever see me again. But Back on topic, for all of human history, the material knowledge a group accrued became an identifiable part of their culture. For example, Roman concrete and Roman architecture, or Damascus steel, or Chinese paper.

These are all examples of material culture. But it's not all of them. always real factual knowledge like those examples. It's also knowledge of a language or symbols or abstract localized concepts like monsters and legends. You don't even have to believe in something to know it and make it a part of your material culture.

Just like how renaissance artists drew and took inspiration from Greek myths despite not believing in the figures or gods themselves. And today we still remember the renaissance as a time where people became interested with Greek plays, architecture, myths, and legends. But there's a difference between knowing what something is within the context of its culture and just recognizing certain images within that culture. For example, and this is a bit of a self-report, I can recognize the crescent moon as one of the symbols of Islam, but I don't understand the context that makes it one of the symbols. This brings us to another fundamental part of culture.

the language. It's important to note that language doesn't define a culture in its entirety. There can be multiple cultures with the same language and a single culture that has multiple languages.

But there is no culture without a language because all humans communicate through sound. The transmission of knowledge and meaning within a culture is essential and languages are built around the knowledge that they express as their people understand it. And in many ways, language becomes a mirror to its culture, showing insight into how how the people who speak think, while simultaneously being able to influence the way that a culture can interact with other new or recurring concepts, because of the associations and understandings that languages can give them. It's a bit complicated of a concept, but it's actually utilized a lot in marketing, and a cool modern example comes from the video game console market.

After the market crashed in the 80s, thanks to ET and nothing else, the average buyer was extremely skeptical about the market. buying any game consoles at all. And it was only once Nintendo swept in with their new gaming console that they cleverly marketed as an entertainment system were they able to dodge around the bad PR of the game console market and find a foothold in American homes again, despite their product being just the same thing but newer. As an older example, Homeric texts don't have the word blue in them. describing the famously azure ocean as a wine dark sea leading to the idea that there just wasn't a word for ultramarine in the ancient greek language so imagine how a lack of even a word for blue could have affected how art and design was approached in ancient greece and people also define themselves and their cultures by the languages they speak the word barbarian even originated as an onomatopoeia for someone who does not speak greek given of course by the ancient greeks who did speak greek Um, so yeah, language can do a lot of heavy lifting for a culture.

A culture's belief is hard to define. A group may believe in a certain religion, but they also believe in certain rules, that some things are right and some things are wrong, or that others have more or less value depending on factors both outside of and within their control. And in most cases throughout history, it can become pretty difficult to find the separations between what a person knows and what they believe.

In the late middle ages, blacksmiths knew about tempering and understood that doing it in fresh water yielded pretty poor results. But they believed that um... the urine of red-haired boys was the best liquid to use to produce quality metals. To us modern geniuses nowadays, who of course know that fresh water evaporates more quickly and produces more varied bubbles that make the tempering less uniform, the use of urine is completely unnecessary and the result of a belief. I mean, the blacksmith could have just used oil or salt water, but to that blacksmith in the 1500s using Urine would have been technical knowledge and a vital a part of the metalworking process as the fire or the anvil.

And obviously this confusion between fact and old wives tale is very much still around today. Even knowledge obtained through the scientific method could be wrong, for reasons we couldn't have ever considered. Who knows how many things that we assume are fact today could be myth tomorrow.

That having been said... Please believe science and doctors. But moving on, I think it goes without saying that beliefs were fundamental in keeping groups together, especially in the ancient world. Religion and religious beliefs were important to support and hold together a community, especially when those communities grew into kingdoms and countries and empires, since they no longer had local familial bonds or direct relationships with their leaders to keep each other united. Even now, though the importance of religion in our daily lives has diminished in the last 300 years, there are plenty of other myths that modern states and empires uphold that hold them together, whether they be political values, a historical legacy, an origin story of the country, or the belief that your country contains people that are superior to everyone else.

You know, harmless little myths that make up our day to day lives depending on the geographic location we're randomly born into. Definitely not the kinds of things that start civil wars or hate groups or ingrained societal despair or anything. So most of what we've covered in this video so far have been talking about the internal machinations of a culture, but Internal thoughts and beliefs give way to external manifestations of that society. We've already mentioned how it comes in the form of artistic expression, architectural styles, local celebrations and rituals in the form of material culture, but it also manifests in just the generic way people act in their day-to-day lives. All these elements that make up their society and worldview influence how they speak to their family and to strangers, if they avoid certain foods or prefer particular games, how they spend their evenings or their favorite time of year.

But don't assume that you and everyone else you know is just a product of their environment, because this influence goes both ways. The people living within a culture have the capacity to change it every day through their own actions. Whenever a person paints a painting or writes a book, it expresses their own way of thinking out into the world.

Others can protest or provide goodwill or education. And when their actions and creations are perceived by others, it can influence and sway them. and lead to them interpreting the work in their own way. And eventually the art or action becomes a part of the culture, shifting it and changing its shape ever so subtly as it does so.

It's all an interconnected web of outside and inside influences that come together to shape both the society and the individual. And they both change one another in a constant to and fro and have done so since the dawn of humanity. It's all a beautiful thing, really.

In fact, that's what I've been doing this entire video and for every video I've made even if I don't think it's going to change society I think it's going to change you who watch it so thanks for that So we've talked about how a culture makes you think, affects what you believe and what you know, what you create and how you live your life. But don't worry dear viewers, it gets even more complicated than that. Human beings are of course all different from one another. We all have our own lives, histories, and families. Sometimes those families are deeply rooted in a culture and location to the point where it cannot be removed from the fabric of the people within it.

But for others, the water gets a bit murkier. And here we come back to the main problem with culture. It's really, really hard to define. The concept of a culture is intrinsically collective. It omits the idea of the individual to instead pretend that a simplified common denominator of the people within it is the entire culture.

But at the same time, when we start defining culture, we must stretch the concept out to encompass these incredibly specific situations and individuals on the fringes of that culture. And there is a lot of grey area between what is and isn't a part of a specific culture. If for example, a daughter of an all-American Christian family converts to Buddhism, does that mean she's no longer a member of the United States of America culture? No. what does it mean to be a part of the USA?

Is it a core part of American culture to be a Christian? Well, I think a lot of people, including me, would say no. Sure, Lisa changed her religion, but she still spoke the language, dressed in the local styles, and had a family within the culture, and was raised within that culture. But the question here is, how many parts of yourself do you have to change before you forfeit your culture? Okay.

Maybe the last example was a bit too political. Let's talk about me instead. I walk like a South African, I talk like a South African, and my entire family were born and raised in South Africa. So I'm South African, right?

Well, almost. See, I was actually born in Seattle, Washington. And as a result, I have a lot of paperwork saying that I'm not actually a South African. And I only got dual citizenship after I turned 18. So am I still a South African? But.

Also, I'm, well, a white South African. The British first landed in South Africa in 1820. That's barely over 200 years of history. Does that mean I'm just British?

And how South African can I call myself if I don't speak the native language of the area or know how to cook any of the local food? Or even know much about my local politics, sorry. So really, am I still a South African when every factor is considered? Well, here's the thing. By now you should know that we humans love sorting concepts and people into boxes.

And we again try to do that with culture too, clearly. But truth be told, there is no one out there who belongs to only one single culture. And that's because of what we think a group's culture is. One single solid definition containing everything that makes up a specific culture.

standing as a single monolith one-size-fits-all block. But you should also know by now that that's not the case at all. Culture is more like a stone wall. There are various blocks overlapping and building on one another until they form a big wall of culture. Less in the shape of an actual wall, but more like a spiraling galaxy of stones clustering together under a generalized definition.

My family and friends call us South African and... We are, but we are a subculture within the overall South African culture, and we are part of multiple overlapping subcultures that influence our holidays, our cuisine, our home decor, our relationships with one another. I come from an Anglo-Saxon United Kingdom family. Which means that while I didn't personally follow it, I treated Christianity as the default belief system for most of my life. Celebrate both Christmas and Easter every year, and I have performed more than one nativity play in my lifetime.

I relate a lot to those living in the UK, the USA, Australia, Canada. Because my upbringing was very similar to those of every other white person in a predominantly Christian English-speaking country. I am South African, but I'm a very specific flavor of South African.

I'm... not the only one like me, and there are plenty of us within the country, but we are only a small brick that exists alongside many in the South African brick wall. So what does that mean for you poor souls out there still trying to figure out what a culture is 5,000 words into the script? Well, we've now established that culture does not necessarily correspond to a specific state or group. In fact, it almost never does.

The idea of an ethnocentric kingdom with a perfectly defined territory and a single existing culture spanning across and ending at its borders is a nice idea and the most common type of kingdom in fiction, but for now has only ever existed as an ideal for some to try and make possible and not something that's ever occurred organically. And unfortunately we in the biz like to call making an ethnocentric kingdom out of a multi-ethnic territory, uh, a war crime. But there are some ways that existing cultures can learn to cooperate with one another in a similar way to a single culture, and maybe even grow to be seen as one over time.

The ancient Greek city-states were a great example of that. Despite the separate states always at war with one another, they define themselves as a single cultural identity, the Hellenes, meaning the ones who speak Greek, as opposed to everyone else who didn't, who they named the Barbarians. Remember from earlier?

And in complete contrast, there are enormous empires in human history, such as the Persian Empire, that incorporate multiple smaller cultures and groups. Sometimes a dominant culture becomes a sort of glue that links together various cultures. For example, a Syrian in the 2nd century ACE could define himself as Levantine, Greek, and Roman simultaneously. And social classes can sometimes create divides in culture, as the rich grow more and more removed in their lifestyles from the common folk.

In fact, the elites tend to share a common culture even between various countries. The European nobles and knights of the 12th century, despite often being in constant conflict with one another, all read the same stories, shared similar values, and more often than not spoke French, which was seen as the language of the great secular culture. Another very particular case is that of English nobility. At some point, William the Conqueror, who was previously Duke of Normandy, conquered the Kingdom of England and installed his men as nobles throughout the kingdom, supplanting many of the Anglo-Saxon nobility who either merged with their new usurpers or disappeared into history. For centuries, the English were ruled by a nobility that sometimes couldn't even speak English, even after the King of England lost his French possessions.

Why the English language today retains some French here and there, like pig being the name for the animal while pork is the name of its meat. So we keep bringing up material culture, so we might as well do it one last time. Again, art, science, agriculture know-how, paintings, sculptures and artifacts are part of material culture, but that also includes things we use every day that we may not think of as cultural. like computers, TVs, and ovens.

All of them are material cultural artifacts. But as you should know by now, there's more. The existence of material culture implies the existence of immaterial culture.

And there's exactly that. Overall, culture is made up of both the material and the immaterial. Knowing what material culture is now, you've probably got an idea of what would make immaterial culture. It's the things you can't see that often get lost to history. It's abstract common knowledge, insights of a religion, tradition, rituals, state organizations, spoken language, word of mouth stories and myths.

It's the things that get lost once a culture dies out and is almost impossible to recover. But again, there's a lot of gray areas and uncertainty when observing and learning from material culture, as far as real life is concerned. Both material and immaterial culture travel between people and places and can spread out across countries.

And sometimes it's hard to tell if that vase you've dug up is authentic China. or some knockoff made by someone outside the culture to sell to someone else who's also outside the culture. But for now, that's neither here nor there, and we're getting off topic. Even if there's a lot of fun facts I want to share, like Phoenician art copying ancient Egyptian art as perfectly as possible to sell to the Assyrian Empire who love the aesthetic and pretty much everything about Egypt, the original weebs if you will, it's just lucky that we have written records from the time saying so.

Otherwise, who knows the chaos that finding a bunch of pseudo Egyptian artifacts throughout the Mediterranean and the Near East could have wrought. But again, that's neither here nor there. So we've covered a lot in this video, even if it may all seem a bit muddled right now, but we still have one of the most interesting topics left.

How is a culture made? Well, it actually isn't. Get made, I mean. Or at least it hasn't for as far as we've been able to trace back into our past. Culture develops and evolves over time, and it's impossible to say when the first true culture was born.

If- it ever was. Maybe we've always had it. Maybe it grew along with our brain size.

Maybe it's an evolution of ape behavior. It's an interesting discussion that we could have. But for now, as far as we know, there's no way for a culture to be born in a vacuum. Cultures always change and grow and diverge within the context of their surroundings and interactions with other cultures.

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context. of all in which you live and what came before you. And it's not a regular process. Cultures can change slowly over thousands of years like the ancient Egyptians, or within a single generation like in the French Revolution.

There are thousands of little ways a culture can change and be changed by the cultures and people both around and within it, always in extremely specific ways that are incredibly hard to reconstruct. With the exception of the Sentinelese who have been living isolated for about 60,000 years, this mixing and merging and diverging of cultures in this continuous exchange for all of human history makes it practically impossible to remove any culture from its context and try to study it in isolation. So let's talk instead about a few common examples that can shape a culture. Sometimes a different cultural group establishes itself as a dominator of a pre-existing population, imposing its own language and customs.

This is called colonization and I'm sure you're all familiar with the main example I would use. This type of domination of a culture really takes the form of an extermination but you rather an external group conquering and imposing their own culture on a people in a more or less forcible manner. A group of Indo-Europeans in Europe found themselves on both sides of the problem in the 4th millennium BCE.

There's a theory that the first groups of Indo-Europeans that settled in Europe, in the area between the Carpathians and the current Czech Republic, subjugated the native pre-Indo-European population that was already there, and it It is possible that these first Indo-Europeans, once they were settled, were then later supplanted by brand new groups of Indo-Europeans in the third millennium, who wiped out the first group and then went on to impose themselves on the rest of Europe. But don't worry, a lot of those conquered cultures of course don't take their oppression lying down. And sometimes colonization just doesn't stick.

Particularly when the conquerors are smaller in number or the culture being conquered is simply too popular and closely held by the population to be stifled. Our example of the occupying nobles under William the Conqueror works here as well. Despite being under another culture's rule, in the long run, the culture of the conquerors was consumed instead. In fact, sometimes the conquest of a culture acts as a catalyst to create something completely different. Like the Vikings that conquered the Slavic territories bordered by the Volga and Dnieper.

The Vikings didn't impose their language or muffle the local cultural identity. After all, there simply weren't that many of them to do so. But their presence acted as a catalyst that made the smallest Slavic potentates within the territory to coagulate and transform into a new and unprecedented cultural identity that would one day shape itself into Russia. But outside of traumatic takeovers and population insertions, most people prefer to operate in a more peaceful way, leading to much calmer changes to society and culture.

The USA is a clear example of how migration of peoples changes their culture. Now, while the USA's culture overall is anything but peaceful, there's a specific slice of it I'd like to focus on for this example, and it's the way that American culture as we know it today was built on the Anglo-Saxons being the first settlers, and how it formed the base on which every other immigrant culture grew and built upon. Migrant groups like the Germans, the Irish, Italian, Polish, Mexican, and multiple African cultures, despite in some cases being brought along unwillingly, all brought their contributions to the base group, and in turn have been influenced by it as well, with their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. grandchildren carrying their home culture with them in small ways, even as they weave them in together with the rest of their larger local culture. Even of those who identified as the original immigrants weren't thrilled about it.

So of course cultural influences pass not only through immigration or conquest. In fact, often cultural elements like religion, technology, and artistic canons radiate out through close proximity with others and end up becoming a part of it. A fantastic literary example of culture passing to other peoples is the Chinese epic Journey to the West, which has steadily spread throughout the whole world and influenced thousands of people, particularly back in the 80s, where the story would inspire one Japanese mangaka to create another work that too would spread around the world. Dragon Ball.

Another kind of cultural change is an internal upheaval and here we get to go back to the French Revolution. The culture of France before and after the revolution changed so drastically and in such a short period of time that it sent shockwaves throughout the world and to today stands as a shining example of what the working man and woman can do when the world they're living in is blatantly corrupt and any avenue for justice or upward mobility is crippled beyond repair and our world leaders are doing nothing to fix it simply because they too have everything to benefit from keeping the system the exact same way it is, just saying. But the interesting thing is that that kind of a drastic internal shift has happened before, more than two millennia ago.

Between the end of the Bronze Age and the 5th century BCE, the Hallstatt culture had developed in central Europe, stretching from France to Bohemia. However, in the 5th century, the material culture of Hallstatt was completely overturned, with many of their most important centers being destroyed or abandoned, and it was replaced by another culture. the so-named Latine culture. For a long time, it was assumed that the upheaval was due to some kind of invasion, but the evidence suggests a different series of events. The Halstead culture seemed to have been based on a system of redistribution of valuable objects by figures sometimes known as princes who ruled over a large layer of lower nobility.

It seems that once the Greek center of Massalia declined after the battle of Alalia, the system went into crisis and the noble warriors revolted against the princes, creating a completely new cultural system from the ashes based on warrior values. There are many cases in which a culture and a people's identity are born as a result of external threats or under pressure from intrusive neighbors. In fact, it happens that divided populations, often fighting each other, come together to form federations or states to fight or even just negotiate with powerful enemies.

There were various Germanic populations that invaded the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries ACE. Those populations didn't exist until the 3rd century after contact with the Roman Empire led them to join together to fight back against this new larger foe. And it was only after time passed that they lost their individual group identities in favor of becoming a larger community. And that's a rundown of a few ways culture can change or be changed.

I hope it was helpful, if not at least informative. And now finally, we're at the summary stage. So what is a culture?

It's a way of life in attitude toward the world and others. It's the values, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, habits of thoughts, and activities a group has. Those within a cultural group tend to think a certain way as a result of being taught that way. To those within it, their culture takes on the feeling of wallpaper, unnoticed until it's brought to attention, and often is seen as the logical default.

And similarly, this creates an us versus them understanding of the world. A culture is made up of multiple different little subcultures, and while it's always being defined by those within it, sometimes those definitions can harm or cut out some subcultures by trying to dictate or outlaw their beliefs, partners, or lifestyles. And these definitions have to be debated from within the culture itself. Groups and cultures also like to make other rules and superstitions for themselves in an attempt to solve the world around them and remove random chance and the unknown from their everyday lives.

And those take the form of beliefs. and knowledge, with belief often taking the shape of knowledge until firmly proved otherwise. And even then, it can still be considered knowledge by parts of the culture.

And this mixture of internal beliefs and knowledge manifest in physical actions and material results. A group is made up of material and immaterial culture. and language uses both to affect how a group interprets certain concepts and change themselves through those interpretations. A single culture is a part of the fabric of its environment and cannot exist without its surroundings and neighboring societies and it is constantly being changed by its surroundings whether it's being assimilated or doing the assimilating into a larger culture or being affected in small ways by the people within it. there that wasn't so hard video could have been a minute long if i just said that but yeah culture is complicated and hard to define and difficult to summarize but it's really really important because it affects everyone alive you and me and every person we've ever met and i think it's vital to learn about what exactly culture is and the factors that influence it for both writers and creatives and just everyone because something i think we as people always have trouble with you is seeing the forest for the trees.

So, so much of what the average person focuses on today in the world, whether it be the woke mob or immigration or left versus right or languages using the singular they or AI creators, not the non-imprisonable machine, but the real people behind it who made it by stealing human-made art for their own gain, and I'm seeing the trees again, or government atrophy leaving world leaders at a standstill, or... the rich taking everything for themselves and leaving us with nothing but a rotting planet. All of it can seem so impossibly insurmountable and unprecedented at times. And so in a way, it's easier to focus on the trees because the forest is terrifying. And a small thing I love about history is seeing these little moments, these exchanges, these times in history that assure me that this has happened before, that it isn't some strange unknowable new thing.

This isn't the fault of iPhones or electricity or microwaves. We've always had the ignorant rich, the big talking salesmen and the bigoted idiots. The locals always hate tourists and when a country hits hard times, they almost always lean more towards fascism and blame their problems on minorities.

It's unfortunate and it sucks and I wish it was different, but at least it's happened before. And if we can finally... finally learn from our history and understand why we are the way we are, maybe there's still time to change that, you know, before all the rainwater on earth becomes undrinkable or something.

Wouldn't that suck? Sorry, hang on, this wasn't supposed to be the conclusion. I was supposed to talk about the human spirit.

Yikes, this is the most political I've ever been in a video. But that's everything for now. Feel free to leave a like on the video if you feel it's earned it, and if you want to, you can subscribe and be notified of the next one, because I am planning on taking this and the society video and compiling them together into a guide on writing culture, based on all the research we've done.

And lastly, before I go, I want to sincerely thank Vincent, who I am promoting to co-creator for this video, because believe me when I say he wrote 95% of the script. When picking topics for videos, I tend to just pick what sounds interesting to talk about and then get into the research afterwards. And since I typically don't know everything about a topic before I start, sometimes his videos just grow out of control with the amount of stuff about it that I just didn't know was there. And unfortunately, in this case, it kind of landed on him to dig me out of that ditch. He told me at the end of his write-up that what we've now covered in this video alone is at least five university courses worth of summarizing.

And I fully believe him. And if you'd like to show your thanks, we've got a story out on Tapas that we've been collaborating on together. It's a fantasy epic telling the tale of a world that is inexorably changing, where the great course of history overwhelms everything and everyone. From the tribes beyond the borders of the civilized world, to the sumptuous halls of the nobility and a collapsing empire, the plot of destiny unites distant people and places, bringing about the end of a cycle, and the beginning of a new one. But for now, thank you so much for watching, and see you next time.

Honestly, I have tried to rewrite the script so many times. I'm always torn with these videos, whether I should tailor them more to help writers, like what this channel was originally about, or if I should maybe focus on a single standalone topic, like the lithic industry, and leave it at that. Actually, this is version two of the script.

I came back to it after scrapping version three, which was a lot longer, and I tried to tailor it more to writers and sprinkle in some writing advice here and there. Because the main problem I've faced with using real life to build fiction is that real life is really, really complicated and it's only logical for writers and world builders to narrow things down and simplify them. I will never again criticize the Planet of the Hats trope, at least not too harshly if it's done like decently, because the alternative seems to be creating spreadsheet after spreadsheet of culture and subcultures. So the next video will hopefully be a guide on how to make a happy medium between the Planet of the Hats trope and the dreaded spreadsheets. So wish me luck and have a great day.

um i'm sorry this took so long to come out and thank you again so much for watching and sticking around and still watching it even though i've been inactive for way too long um it's been a crazy couple months um and uh yeah but thank you so much there will be more coming soon

Transcript for:Exploring the Complexity of Culture

Transcript for:
Exploring the Complexity of Culture