Culture Wars

"What's your favorite thing about Colombian culture?"

Someone asked me this recently, and I was like a deer caught in headlights. My brain worked overtime to try to come up with something, anything, just a little bit of some positive experience that I could grab a hold of and use.

Fortunately, someone mercifully changed the subject, and I was off the hot seat, but the experience stayed with me, and I kept thinking about it

I started to wonder: Do I in fact like nothing about Colombian culture? Though as soon as I posed myself this question, I felt its lack of truth. If I hated being in Colombia so much, why is it that I have no desire to leave?

Then I tried another line of questioning: What is Colombian culture? I had no idea how to answer that. How does one even begin to define a culture from nothing more than their own subjective experience? Considering the uniqueness of each successive experience in a day, how do I begin to organize them into data sets about which generalizations can be made? And is total objectivity even possible? Are we only able to say something is cultural by comparing it to our own?

For example, if I am in the mall, and people seem to be completely and utterly spatially oblivious, do I chalk that up to:a) Colombian culture?
b) a pan-cultural thing wherein everyone automatically forgets how to walk in malls?
c) a characteristic of Colombian culture that also, by chance, is similar to American culture?
d) or is the vividness of my frustration in these instances causing me to remember those more than all the times that someone actually acted like I existed and let me pass by without saying con permiso three times?

I started to really think about this the more I heard people try to discuss Colombian culture. It seemed that often someone would recount a particular instance and then end it with "Yeah, Colombians are really _____." Because I sometimes wish I were a mentat and can't help to automatically think about sets of premises and a conclusion in terms of what little training I have in logic, I realized that:

1) Ca (Ana is a Colombian.)
2) La (Ana arrives late.)
3) Ca>La (If Ana is Colombian, then Ana arrives late.)
∴ ∀x(Cx>Lx) (Therefore all Colombians arrive late.)

is a total fallacy. A "hasty generalization" to be precise, which is a fitting name.

I think part of the problem is that statements about culture tend to be too narrow. "X culture likes this," "X culture doesn't really eat that," and so on. The problem with these sorts of statements is that they don't leave a lot of room for an individual's manifestation of a particular cultural characteristic. It takes a lot more work, time, and compassion, but I think there's a way to rephrase these thoughts in a way that are not only free of judgement but allow them to maintain their truth as each individual in that culture expresses them in a certain way.

The problem with this is that it takes significant time to gather a lot of data and effort to think through it without falling prey to some sort of mental bias. And patience and work are things that humans are often adverse to. We'd much prefer to leave it as something simple and move on to the next thing. But I've come to penetrate Colombian culture, among other things, and this is my strategy.

Yeah, sorry...

It's something I'd recommend even within the United States, with all our different cultures trying to coexist peacefully and, truthfully, not doing to great of a job at it. This is how the capacity for empathy is built, little by little, and this is how I'll be able to one day not be so frustrated by all sorts of little things here. In fact, even just yesterday, I caught myself thinking, as I walked down Calle 5 from the mall to my home, "Maybe this isn't so bad. Maybe I am getting used to this after all."

So what is my favorite thing about Colombian culture? Maybe it's ability, more so than other cultures I've experienced, to challenge me to think about myself, to realize that perhaps I wasn't as open-minded and free-thinking as I used to believe I was, and it's gift of an opportunity to push those bounds a little farther.

Oh, and the food. I mean, an aborrajado with a jugo de mora en leche.... ♥...