0917 IDEA OF CULTURE

Culture is a strange inheritance. We are born into it before we even know how to name it, before we can choose it, before we can resist it. In this sense, culture feels inherent, not because it is encoded in our blood, but because it is folded into the atmosphere we breathe. It clings to us as if it were natural and undeniable. Yet, culture is also a fabrication. It is a set of stories we repeat so often that they harden into truth. Flags are stitched, myths are written, ceremonies are rehearsed, and suddenly a collective performance is mistaken for eternal essence. What we call tradition might be a fairly recent invention, assembled by power or nostalgia. The danger lies in forgetting that culture is not the ground itself but the scaffolding we have built upon it.

Terry Eagleton reminds us that culture occupies this unstable ground between inheritance and invention. To call it purely inherent is to risk essentialism, to fall into the traps of purity and authenticity. But to call it purely created is equally shallow, as if culture were nothing more than costume or lifestyle choice. Culture is both the soil we inherit and the architecture we assemble on top of it.

On one hand, I feel the weight of what precedes me: the languages I did not choose, the rituals that shaped my sense of time, the quiet codes that dictate belonging. On the other hand, I cannot deny the inventiveness of culture: how subcultures spring from basements and back alleys, how artists twist old forms into strange new shapes, how identities are constantly rewritten. Culture is alive because it refuses to stay still; it remakes itself at the same time it roots us in place.