Title: A past relationship with cultural meanings
Source: Childhood with grandparents and cultural experiences
Relation: Discovering roots of a cultural identity and exploring definition
Commentary: Culture is a difficult word to define, because it has so many different meanings. For example, it could mean the way people view the world, or it could mean what they take from it. It is an extremely vague term. However, since it isn't so "black and white", we can analyze it to no extent! The grey area is massive, allowing us to interpret "culture" as we wish, and use it in different contexts appropriately. True, everybody experiences some of the same events like birth and death, the way we experience these things makes us unique, and different than people with a "different" culture.
I definitely have a culture, although I almost feel that should be plural. So many aspects of my life and childhood have shaped my beliefs and the knowledge that I have come to acquire over the years. Unlike the examples in the textbook, I do not eat dead humans and I do not check for bloodstains from the bed of a virgin. Sorry. I guess I'm just not all that interesting. However, my life contains many rituals and beliefs that help shape my own culture. When I was living in Los Angeles, I would drive with my mom every weekend through the canyon to visit my grandparents. My grandparents are from Poland and are Holocaust survivors. The way they do things is different than what most American families are used to. We would eat soup prepared in a European way, and have a very different dinner ritual when with my grandparents. But these things shaped the way I viewed things like religion, hate crime, and all sorts of aspects of life. They helped create my culture.
