The Elusiveness of Culture
The table setting at Emily's host family's home. Photo 2011 by Emily Granger
While in Thailand this past year, Emily’s host-family invited us to dinner at their house–a treat consisting of six or so dishes, a soup, a chicken, a fish, prawns, and a couple of veggie dishes, plus rice. Her host-mother told Emily she would retrieve us from the Suan Doi House at 5:30, so Emily, knowing these things, began promptly at 5:40 to prepare for her host-mother’s 6:10 arrival. Sabai-sabai–Thailand’s unofficial theme translates roughly to “whatever,” and life is easier once one understands the broader implications of this term.
Perhaps Emily’s host-mother drives with great skill when alone, but the act of maneuvering a motor vehicle through the crowded, narrow streets of Chiang Mai becomes secondary when passengers pose conversation opportunities. When the lights turn green and all of the other cars are changing lanes and tooting horns to avoid our car, it is only after a current thought is expressed that she shifts into first-gear and again begins forward progress.
Emily, in her four and a half months here, has been given a glimpse of cultures far removed from our own—what with paddling down the Mekong River in Laos, visiting the Karen people in the area of Mae Hong Son, and visiting the fishing villages in the south–worlds spawned by rivers, forests, and oceans, respectively. Emily and I both engaged in many cross-cultural interactions during the time our family sailed around the world on Faith. We learned then, and continue now to avoid areas solely engaged in the business of tourism, especially tourism by Westerners. We used to think we were in search of more ‘traditional’ places, but find that term increasingly incorrect. In both of our accumulated observations one constant emerges: The concept of culture is a fluid outcome of interrelationships between changing men, each other, and their changing political, economic, and physical environs. For one to say, “I am in search of traditional areas,” is similar to that one saying, “I am in search of a living dinosaur,” the latter being sure to be met with more raised eyebrows.
Kayaking the Mekong River in Laos provided Emily insight into the impact that dam construction places on the environment and on the lives of thousands of persons displaced by their construction. The dams themselves are political constructs to increase Laos economic base with the export of hydroelectric power, in addition to serving the demands of a growing population and changing agricultural processes. Lives and culture in flux.
The Karen people that hosted Emily and her classmates in the area of Mae Hong Son have themselves been displaced from the Karen states of Burma over the past five or six centuries, and are in a state of flux from the current political pressure—refugees crossing into Thailand in search of asylum. Lives and culture in flux.
Thailand’s south is conspicuously Islamic, Islam having followed trade from the Middle East to this part of the world centuries ago. The fishing vessels are powered by diesel or petrol, the cooking is with gas. Lives and culture in flux.
Yet underlying all adaptation to life today, in all places, thought carries a thread of foundations—call them values, beliefs, or perspectives—germinated in the most ancient of times. Faith of our fathers–Iman, in the Quran, of our fathers–so to speak, as these foundations, both that distinguish us from others, and those that we have in common based more on the unproveable concepts in which we believe to the point of claiming knowledge. Can cultures and cultural differences be summed up this simply? Faith of our fathers?
Yes, faith of our fathers is an additional cultural determinant, but regardless of its defining factors, culture is a fluid concept.
