So What is Culture?

Culture...

“that which …makes you a stranger when you are away from home. It includes all those beliefs and expectations about how people act which have become a kind of second nature to you as a result of social learning." Philip Bock & Edward Hall

“Culture is the more or less integrated system of ideas, feelings, and values and their associated patterns of behavior and products shared by a group of people who organize and regulate what they think, feel and do." Paul G. Hiebert, in Anthropological Insights for Missionaries, Baker, 1985

Do you eat “lumache”?, my friend Philip is asked in Italy. Yes, he answered. He did not want to disappoint them. Two days later he comes across an English-Italian dictionary. He looks up the meaning of lumache and finds that it means “snails”. It is too late for him to vomit since two days have gone by. Food is part of culture and the ways of eating differ from culture to culture.
This shows that when we are out of our own cultural environment such an exposure will be a disturbing feeling of disorientation and helplessness which is termed as culture shock. Philip wonders how the Italians have a different culture from his own from West Nile.
There are today expressions such as “Lugbara A” or “Lugbara B”. The “Lugbara As” are those who are back in the villages and regarded as those who are genuine custodians of the Lugbara culture. The Lugbara Bs are then those who could refer to as in diaspora. They have got in touch with other cultures and have adulterated the real and authentic lugbara culture. Tualu will set out to unite us by spelling out the cultural knowledge and indicate certain commonality despite distances that may separate us.
As a human body is composed of body and soul, we shall also say that culture has both body and soul. The body will refer to manifestations such as: food, music, dance, drama, art, literature, buildings, dress, etc. These are cultural objects. The soul of culture then is reason why people in such a particular way. We are closer to the DR Congo. We could copy their ways of dance without understanding what they intend to express with that dance wants to express. We may then have the body without a soul and this could then be a corpse. Many Lugbara As are illiterate and are not writing down the soul of our cultures down for the future. Are the working towards rendering the cultures of the Lugbari a corpse? Or those Bs who are in contact with other cultures are forgetting the reason behind (the philosophy) certain behaviours etc?
Culture relates to “ideas, feelings and values”. TUALU will enable us to explore the dimension of knowledge as a conceptual content of culture. TUALU would like to facilitate the principle that cultures are held together not only by economic, social and political organisations, but also by fundamental beliefs and values shared by the people. We are the members of the cultures from West Nile who can tell about our cultures. We should attempt to capture the common world view (the basic assumptions about reality which lie behind beliefs and behaviour of a culture) of a culture adds stability to the culture, and a resistance to change. We are aware that all cultures are constantly changing. Some rapidly and others more slowly. New traits are added and old ones are dropped.

“The more they have in common the greater are the possibilities for interrelating”.

By Ruffino Ezama, mccj