Reflections: What Does it Mean to Understand a Culture?

I’m biracial, which I feel has given me an interesting perspective on understanding culture. I’ve grown up in America, a country in which mainstream culture is also associated with whiteness. Thus, growing up, I saw my Indian background as something unique and exotic—I brought bindis for my American friends, enjoyed sweets at puja, and gazed at the fruit vendors and balloon salesmen on the streets from a Calcutta balcony every few years.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to understand Indian culture as something more complicated than sweets and saris. I’ve begun to notice values that seem to permeate Indian culture around interdependence, spirituality, and daily life that I don’t notice often among white Americans. These values are hard to define and hard to describe, especially since I try not to make generalizations about entire cultures. But I’m at least certain that, to understand what Indian culture is really like, one must understand more than its physical representations.

I appreciated this class because it’s the first time I’ve had the chance to deeply study the history, geography, food, and other aspects of a place before first travelling there. Even this summer, when I travel back to India to visit family, I will probably know less about the country than I do about Namibia. I think it’s really important to have learned all we did, from the behaviors of animals we might expect to see, to the role of Namibia’s national parks. I spent both my quarters off-campus in the U.S.,  so I’ve never spent long in a foreign country, and never travelled further than Canada without my family. I’m glad that, when I do, I will be equipped with so much knowledge.

But I wonder if we dig could deeper. After all, little that we learned about Namibia made me feel uncomfortable; meanwhile, in learning about the differences between mainstream Indian and mainstream American culture, I’ve often struggled wrestling with my own beliefs and with other lifestyles. For many of us, we feel like we understand a place when we understand the landscape, the ceremonies, the wildlife, and the cuisine—but to understand a culture we also need to know why those things are as they are.

I worry that classis like this (by nature of their focus) might tempt me into seeing Namibian culture and people as subjects to study; I hope instead I can view Namibia as a place full of people like me, complicated people. I want to remember that understanding Namibia is as large as a task as understanding America; though I might learn a lot of facts about it, I will never really be able to pin down the country’s defining features. What I can hope for is to deepen my understanding through first-hand experience.

By Mini Racker