Ask Culture meets Guess Culture

tangerine, A classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture

Culture, the embedding of norms/ideas into a place/relationship/society/etc, enthrals me.

Cultures are emergent, responsive to history, geography, climate, fortune, adversity. Culture is the sum of place and people, and a people are the product of culture, and a place is borne of (and reinforces) both people and culture, round and around in a fascinating and nauseatingly infinite loop of achingly slow iteration and sometimes deafening inertia. Cultures represent stability — good and bad — they are the seemingly unshakable bedrock of society, until they crumble.

Culture can exist between two people or eight billion, Culture is present at the scale of individual cells all the way up the relations of nations. It is everything, and it is everywhere. But what makes a culture?

It’s almost midnight, I’ve barely slept for two days — for good reasons, don’t worry. I’m in no fit state to answer a question of such unbounded consequence but all I’m really getting at is that I just read something: buried deep in a far away forum, a reply (to a question of no particular interest), written by a user called tangerine, that introduced me to a whole new lens for looking at culture, particularly at the scale of nations.

What happens when Ask Culture meets Guess Culture? And what other similar dichotomic comparisons can be drawn between cultures large and small?

Goodnight.