Cultural Reflection

So I’m researching the discipline of Disability Studies in search of theoretical framework and some smart passages I can site in my research essay. Naturally, the idea of how individuals and groups perceive their surroundings enters the picture; with that, a nice over view of culture. I read it a couple times. By the second time I realized I wasn’t reading it for my research anymore; this was personal.

It defined culture as a ‘purposeful act’ which imposes an artificial order upon social life, calls that order natural, right and desirable, and works to maintain that order at the expense of alternatives which it represents as inferior and disorderly.” It is an activity that imposes “certain frameworks upon the ways in which we relate to each other, to establish boundaries between what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, proper and improper, normal and abnormal”. Perhaps that is part of the deep sense of loss and intense loneliness I feel. I have in many ways left the safe and familiar confines of my culture.

But it reads to add something else I find apropos and timely. It then goes on to say that culture is “a necessary activity; without culture there would be no guidelines for understanding either who we are, where we have come from, what we should do, or where we are going.” I know where I came from and who I am because of the rich and profoundly important relationships I've had, and continue to have. I am deeply grateful for that. It continues to say that “what distinguishes us from those around us is much less that what connects us.” Even while on another continent.