Reading Culture
I’ve been thinking about the interplay between a person helping to shape a culture versus a culture helping to shape a person. “Culture” meaning the shared beliefs and values of any subset of people, I suppose. I ruminate on this kind of thing often, but it’s definitely on the forefront of my mind this week. We see this all the time in books (my last read — Iron Curtain by Vesna Goldsworthy — for sure), and it’s the kind of rich topic an author will run with, either in broad brush strokes or in a more tangible way.
And I wonder if people could remove themselves from their vantage point and look at their life and surroundings — their culture — as if they were reading a novel…what would they think? Would their culture feel as “normal”…and would the aforementioned interplay change?
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