demagogue on 24/5/2016 at 12:27

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Right. Just to address one thing, I misworded what is useful to look for. It's not what, e.g., a French person thinks defines Frenchness, but what actually defines it in the sense if you had that insight, you'd accurately predict distinctive patterns of behavior in that culture. But especially interesting are ideas that accurately predict behavior but you wouldn't expect it from the stereotypes unless you knew to look for it.

Also it's a game and doesn't really have to be any more meaningful than what song do you think defines a decade. But some are interesting to think about. Like that Americans are perpetually losing our innocence. That's interesting because it plays off the whole Puritan guilt thing that no matter how modern & cynical we get, we can't really entirely shake it off and want to romanticize some ideal purity in people.

Edit. Like with your list io, those seem stereotypical, but does it capture those groups?

- Artists I think are obsessed, driven to distraction by projects and tunnel-vision'd to the world around them.

- Entrepreneurs I think feel oppressed working for someone and would rather control a sinking ship than not control a floating one.

- Methodicalness for programmers, yeah, I can see that. And completionists. Something to do with knowing exactly the steps you need to take to make progress, so it can keep you up for 48 hours straight, always thinking just a few more lines to fix up and test...

- Buddhists in my experience (long term dating) are driven by a real sense of karma (and the samsarra part particularly) embedded in reality, and a constant need to exhibit mindfulness in the midst of it, including in the special kind of guilty delight in breaking it (which has a strain in Catholicism too, but you wouldn't see it in US Protestants or Jews like that. There's a thing with Islamic Inshallah like that too, but it's not so much my ken.) But you really need to distinguish different traditions and nationalities to say more. Buddhism in NEast and SEAsia are rather distinct.

- And Christianity, again sect and nationality matter. I'd say it's the idea that what a person personally believes, their worldview, is morally important, and they're responsible for it.

- Lifeforms... uh, maybe that's stretching things too far.

Well that's how I'd play the game for those things anyway.

nicked on 24/5/2016 at 14:40

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I think the cultural identity of England is largely based on the fallout from being a major empire. We either subconsciously think we're better than all the other countries, or we're ferociously self-deprecating of our own shameful country.

Sulphur on 24/5/2016 at 17:43

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Well, as faetal said (and I'm paraphrasing/simplifying/generalising here because it's a bit late and I'm tired enough that I can't word good), a culture is a shared general mindset for X attributes across a given population in a certain environment. Now these attributes seem to be arbitrary, and also can be highly subjective, so they at the very least belong to a broad enough bucket that determining your sampling method and analysis would amount to a lot of statistical posturing and not much else.

What I find interesting, though, is the meta-cultural aspect of observing a culture: you generally don't find, say, the French describing their own behaviour as 'French'. It takes a pair of foreign eyes to call it that, and that requires a base culture the observer belongs to which has enough differences for a compare and contrast to bring these behavioural trends to light. Like motion, culture seems to be a purely relative concept, one that you can't find a neutral or in-between state to belong to as a purely unbiased observer. And that's pretty damn fascinating when I think about it, on balance.

io organic industrialism on 24/5/2016 at 20:14

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I'm gonna have to side with faetal on this one...

We 'Muricans really like our right to have guns and such...

Sulphur on 25/5/2016 at 02:25

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Ah, that's fair enough. I was thinking of it more in terms of people defining their own attributes and agreeing on them as in 'these particular things are French/British/X nation' - the British generally acknowledge self-deprecation and sarcasm as theirs for example, but are those the only things that define the culture for someone in, say, Nottingham vs. someone in Glasgow?