What is the Politics of Culture?

What is culture? Is it how we dress or act? Or is it what we like? Many would agree that our culture includes these things and more.  It’s also believed that culture is a political means of domination and to others a means of resistance to that domination. But what does that really mean? Does it mean that our American culture, for example, was set up in order to keep our class structure in line? Keep the upper class as upper class and the lower class as lower class with little to no wiggle room? I can see how many may think that and see that our American culture was built on a foundation of some political agenda; but I like to believe that there is more good in this world than meets the eye. So to me culture is who we as people decide to be. Sure there are influences everywhere, both negative and positive, but we as individuals ultimately decide which cultural values we adopt. We all have the ability to make our own choices and think for ourselves. A fashion statement is made when we wear whatever it is we chose to wear that morning with confidence, not just because the skinny “pretty” model wore it in the fashion magazine you found in line at the grocery store. Now don’t get me wrong I do know that often times that is the case; most people do chose to wear what someone in some magazine says looks good but my point is it is our choice to believe them and agree. More often than not when I look at those fashion magazines I see ridiculous outfits for outrageously ridiculous prices that I would not be caught dead wearing.

In America we get to see all different types of “culture” because we are just one big melting pot of religions, ethnicities, classes, and races. We can’t say that America has just ONE culture because we don’t. We have cultures that derive from the different classes: lower, middle, and upper. For example, many would say that graffiti art came from the “cultures from below”, meaning our lower and lower middle class citizens. But that seems to have such a negative connotation for a wonderful type of art that can express so much about the ways of life and struggles of the “common” people. Then we have shopping malls filled with shops like Burberry and Nordstrom that only those in the upper class can afford; I’d group this into the “culture from above”. Yet this makes it seem like it’s better than graffiti art and I must say I don’t believe that is the case. Our status within the class structure is based off of the amount of money we make not the type of person we are. Our social and/or economic status is not what makes us who we are, instead our life experiences and the choices we make, make us who we are. I don’t believe that there is some “Man” who decides how to make who into what he believes they should be. We as individuals choose what our “culture” or way of life is going to be. It is our choice whether we play into the politics behind it or not.