What’s culture anyway?

After having gone through several very interesting ‘discussion’ sessions with my fellow ‘travelers’ I started thinking hard about this issue we had discussed about yesterday. We were talking about several things. One was this idea of ‘culture’. The other was about society and our role (or many roles) in it as members of society. Ok lets deal with this culture thing first.

According to the imminent scholars of whose texts we have been reading, culture is a shared ‘code’ which governs how a group of people think, act, speak etc. generally a way of regulating behaviour in society. The textbook way of looking at culture further adds that it is divided into two areas, material and non-material. Objects which can be touched and physically handled, such as flags, constitutional texts and even national cars may be seen as being part of our physical culture. A fellow traveler even mentioned that musical instruments such as the kompang could also be part of Malaysia’s culture. On the other hand non-material culture is a little bit more difficult to fathom. It’s difficult to try to put our finger on things such as values, norms, folkways, mores. Values are ideas that a community or society truly treasures and which it believes will help them achieve higher potentialities, such democracy, human rights, freedom etc, norms on the hand consists of mores; moral regulations that guide an individuals’ choice and folkways, rules that govern how you act, prohibiting you from being either rude or inconsiderate to your fellow human beings.

However looking at today’s world its hard to imagine or to think about culture as something which is ‘pure’ and ‘unadulterated’. The reality of modern societies that we live in is that, everything is mixed, campured or mixed up into a salad and somehow made to gel together with some sticky sweet black sauce (ala rojak). We cannot also forget about this thing called globalization which further complicates the picture. MTV, AXN, media, radio, internet, technology, Gerhard Lenski, whatever it is you want to name, are the very channels which bring many cultures right into your living room. Many a times, our government have made announcements about how important it is to maintain our culture. The Tourism Malaysia advertisements also continuously showcased Malaysian ‘culture’ to sell this image of our country as modern and yet anchored in many cultures. But how many of us would wear our baju kurung, kebaya, samfu, cheongsam and sari on a daily basis? From my perspective these ‘cultural’ costumes seem to be worn only on religious festivals and celebrations. For the most part we’d rather wear our jeans, t-shirts or our shirt and tie when at work. But then again what is Malaysian culture? Malaysia is home to many ethnic groups, all hailing from different cultural backgrounds. The number of languages spoken in Malaysia alone would give Sopir-Whorf a huge headache! That’s also why I was very surprised when the Indonesians were up in arms over the tarian pendet issue and in response, recently, were trying to claim rights to the batik, a form of cloth making which is also common in Malaysia. Indonesian itself is home to a myriad of cultures that span the thousands of islands within its borders. So its difficult to define what is culturally Indonesian. It should instead of making the batik exclusively theirs, market it to the world through teaching the fine art of batik-making thus spreading its ‘culture’. Therefore, Malaysia should celebrate its multi-culturalism and not claim the exclusive rights to a particular way of speaking, cooking or dressing. But still, I have not yet answered what Malaysian culture is. It’s something hard to pinpoint, but like I said earlier, our culture is rojak, a mix of everything congealed together in thick, sweet sauce. I mean being able to relate to our culture through the analogical use of food, I mean isn’t that a Malaysian trait already?