Culture Is Created and Socially Constructed
As discussed previously, culture often is thought of as a product-in- place, and as something handed down that must be kept the way it is. Not only does this result in a static view of culture, but it also implies that culture is already finished. As we have seen, culture is constantly evolving, and the reason that it evolves is because human beings change it. The action of people on culture takes place in big ways and small, by everyday people and by those who have power. When Jonathan Kozol went to Cuba in the mid-1970s to research the successful massive literacy campaign that had just taken place, he spoke with young people in schools, many of whom had been the teachers of the peasants who learned to read. He was awed by the young people’s responses when he asked them what was meant by history. He recounted that when he had asked that same question of students in Schenectady, New York, the answers had been fairly uniform: “History is everything that happened in the past and is now over. . . . His- tory is what is done by serious and important people.”23 In contrast, when he asked young people in Cuba the same question, their answers were starkly different: “It is the past, but there are things that we do now which will be part of history someday.”24 These young people saw that history was not just what was written in history books, or the actions of “impor- tant people” in conquest, war, or politics. What they had done in the literacy campaign was also history.
In the same way, culture is what we do every day. Cultures change as a result of the decisions that we, as cultural agents, make about our traditions, attitudes, behaviors, and values. Were it not so, we would forever be mere pawns or victims of the actions of others. Sometimes, of course, cultural values develop as a result of victimization. The previous example of short-grained rice is a case in point. But even here, people took what they were given and made it a positive value. Without such valuing, short-grained rice would not have become part of the culture. The cuisine of poor people throughout the world is another illustration of how culture is created. Poor people often get nothing but leftovers, the parts of animals or plants that nobody else wants. What they have done with these remains has sometimes been nothing short of extraor- dinary. This is cultural creation in action. Put another way, in the words of Frederick Erickson: “Culture can be thought of as a construction—it constructs us and we construct it.”25 Culture, then, is not a passive legacy, but an active operation that takes place through contact and interactions with others. Culture is a social construction because it cannot exist outside of social contact and collaboration.