Who has the authority to describe, represent and define a culture, and whose understanding becomes the version that others recognise?
Culture does not fit a fixed definition, nor is it waiting to be pinned under one. It is a lived experience, contested, moulded and continuously interpreted by those who participate in it. Despite this, certain voices, be they rooted in academia, media or institution, often have greater power to make their interpretations of what it is visible and authoritative.
So when we encounter a culture through someone else’s description, whose understanding are we actually receiving?
The definition that often becomes an unjustifiably permanent record is regularly rooted in a specific moment — or a series of them — in which a cultural practice, object, tradition or community is described or presented to a wider audience. A museum exhibition can introduce a cultural tradition, and a media story can describe a community through a singular identity. Admirable as it is to spotlight elements of cultural significance, it is the common implication that they encompass more of a culture than they truly do that leads to derivative, incomplete representations and, consequently, interpretations.
There is a lot to be said about the significance of culture as a lived experience and the limitations that come with paying too much attention to a singular individual or institution trying to place it into a framework it will inevitably defy. The authority to define culture as a whole and place the elements that create it under digestible labels is arguably non-existent, yet its presence is continuously perpetuated by those whose narrative the end result supports.
Bearing in mind the omnipresent insistence on defining the notion of culture, we must ask: when it comes to an idea that never asked to be defined, who is it that gets to define it?
I — Lived first, explained later
Before it ever becomes subject to being explained, culture must be lived. It is made up of practices, relationships and rituals that shape everyday life. Before it is articulated, it is practiced — through habits, celebrations, food, music, language… The elements that make up our every day, regardless of what culture we come from.
Yet, individuals can belong to the same culture at its core and disagree about what it means. Be it about restrictions, celebrations, cuisine or historical intricacies, many debates have been sparked intra-culturally, time and time again. This is partly because cultural meaning morphs with time, reshaped by different generations, communities and individuals — it is a natural progression, and yet there is still an expectation for cultural observation coming from a singular person, text or institution to encompass enough of its significance and complexity.
There is, too, a difference between how individuals within a culture will experience a cultural practice and how they will explain it to outsiders. The creation of a more palatable definition of a culture — and especially non-Western culture — for those who aren’t in the know, is an uncomfortably common occurrence. This working in tandem with the fact that participation in culture doesn’t necessitate having the vocabulary to articulate the significance of certain practices, results in loss of information and weight as cultural information is passed along.
Each simplification comes at the price of losing half of the story: there is an immense difference between living something and knowing how to explain it, and the latter doesn’t inherently mean a more sophisticated form of knowledge, yet it is often treated as such. While scholars such as Stuart Hall define culture in terms of shared meanings and conceptual maps, when it comes to observing and defining culture, there is an overarching danger of mistaking what is legible for what is meaningful.
The translation of cultural practices, symbols and overall significance into an explanation designed for an unfamiliar audience, the tendency to treat cultural practices as objects of study only after someone has documented, categorised or named them (often without consideration of whether they have the authority, knowledge, respect or genuine understanding to do so), the demand to explain and justify certain cultural aspects — these are all occurrences far too common in today’s landscape.
How does one begin to explain the internal inconsistencies and subconscious acts of preservation that are crucial to even beginning to understand a concept as complex as that of a culture? The roles of traditions that survive through repetition rather than deliberate decisions to maintain them — the part played by a metaphorical muscle memory which guides us to inherit ways of doing things without being fully aware of when, why or from whom they entered our life — transcend the need to be interpreted.
II — Who gets to speak, and who gets heard?
The opportunity to define a culture publicly is not equally distributed. Academics whose research complements certain perspectives and theories are more likely to be brought to the forefront of cultural discourse. Investors in museums and exhibitions may get more of a chance to speak than the curators, artists or historians behind them. Prominence on social media may provide more of an opportunity to speak on cultural developments than years dedicated to studying it.
The knowledge presented consistently has to be palatable to specific individuals and institutions, leading to certain forms of knowledge being recognised as expertise while others are dismissed as informal or anecdotal. Yet, those “informal”, “anecdotal” instances are what forms culture. There is a reason oral history remains prominent even in a time when everything is on the record in one way or another, a reason why immense amounts of significant information and historical accounts are passed down from family members and friends instead of from scholar to scholar.
Labelling things as informal, and consequently historically or culturally insignificant because they don’t come wrapped in the formatted paragraphs of an academic essay or written on a museum label, results in the loss of information that isn’t perceived as lost in the moment. It isn’t until we look back on gaps in the story that we understand what pay attention solely to the formalised information that has been specifically curated to represent culture in a specific way has taken away from us.
Choosing who gets to be heard in culturally pivotal moments, whose interpretation will circulate and be seen as “valid”, and how widely it will be known is determined by factors that are culturally significant — class, language, education, nationality, gender, institutional access. Yet, the factors in question are often misused; the wrong categories of each are chosen and widespread concepts of superiorities and inferiorities interfere with authenticity.
Those who should be at the forefront are commonly heard as evidence for somebody else’s argument, instead of being understood on an individual level, while institutions and the media are given the starring role in determining which stories and whose accounts are considered cultural significant, credible, or worth preserving. Even if the source of a story or a viewpoint is trustworthy, there are countless elements that can reductively influence how it is presented in the end. The externally attributed commercial appeal of a cultural narrative decides whether it is worthy of funding, attention or exhibition space. Visibility may cost someone agency — being the subject of a documentary, an exhibition or an interview never comes with indisputable control over the representation that ultimately comes out of it. Choices made in processes of translation, subtitling, editing and framing are integral to outreach and interpretation.
And interpretation in its own right is a conflicting concept in the context of culture: an outsider’s interpretation can be treated as more objective or authoritative than an insider’s. Simultaneously, there is often a default assumption that an insider’s perspective must be all-encompassing, authentic and beyond criticism. Regardless of how comprehensive a cultural narrative may be, neither side of the spectrum can be considered objectively correct.
III — The problem with a single cultural representative
In his 1966 book “The Order of Things”, Michel Foucault looks at Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and argues that it creates an illusion of a fixed, singular subject-position in front of it — the perspective from which the sovereign, the artist, and the audience are forced to look on. Foucault’s concern with the production of knowledge and meaning through discourse rather than depending on simple, direct semantics, ties directly to his interpretation of Las Meninas. Consequently, his interpretation functions as a metaphor for a singular cultural representative, and the limitations that come with assigning one to cultural shifts and developments.
Much like the painting, assigning a singular individual, or a group of them that is too like-minded, creates an illusion of total vision and understanding, when in actuality, those outside of the selected few are left with a massive blind spot. The observers — or rather, participants creating a culture — organise the entire scene, create the entire culture, yet remain outside of it, with little to no say in how their lived reality will be curated or represented by the designated representative.
Just as we see only the blank, structured back of Velázquez’s canvas, giving him control over composition and representation, a cultural collective with a single representative is put in a position where they have no choice but to accept the scene as curated by the representative in question, without having any significant input on the structural framework behind it.
The perspectives of those within the painting are also reduced to a singular, central point where the viewer stands, paralleling the effect of a single perspective being chosen to represent a culture, and the entirety of said culture being flattened to cater solely to an external, dominant gaze — reducing a complex, internal cultural dialogue into a performance designed for outsiders.
Relying on a singular cultural representative feels complete, masterful, intelligent even — but it is ultimately a closed loop: one that tells the viewer where to stand and how to look, and intentionally and effectively blinds them to the realities happening outside the edges of the frame.
There is a pressure to make a culture comprehensible through one person, one tradition, one story; an expectation that an individual should work to represent an entire community. There is a preference for the familiar, the simplified and easily comprehensible — anything that goes beyond that is easily disregarded. Anyone who pushes past the boundary of presenting a singular culture as perfectly uniform risks not being taken seriously.
There is an immense difference between offering a perspective and laying a claim to speaking for everyone — and what happens when the person who happens to be most visible to an audience is not a person whose experience is most representative? Or when representativeness itself is impossible?
What should happen is conceding — accepting that a singular perspective is not sufficient, that a simplified definition doesn’t come close to encapsulating the complexities of cultural history and development, and trying to gather as many puzzle pieces as possible — maybe most, never all. Yet, what tends to happen is the path of least resistance, a choice to present the simplest interpretation as a correct, all encapsulating one: a forced viewpoint in which only the back of the canvas can be seen.
IV — Can culture be defined from within?
There are limits to both insider and outsider perspectives of cultural roots, growth and development. Being a direct part of a culture does not mean having the same relationship to every tradition or practice within it as others might.
Those who have left and returned, or grown up far removed from a cultural environment will have vastly different understandings of belonging to it. Outsiders, on the other hand, can contribute valuable research and interpretation, but come with limitations attached to their position, access and authentic knowledge and understanding.
Not every cultural practice is available for public interpretation — elements may be shared, protected, negotiated or withheld — and no culture is a monolith or has a single, unified perspective that is equally shared by every individual belonging to a community. In fact, the inescapable internal disagreements form part of a culture — they don’t stand as evidence that a culture lacks coherence or authenticity.
There are a million conflicts that happen within a cultural community. Generational gaps can lead to elders understanding something as preservation, while younger people see it as restriction; alternatively, what younger people see as reinvention, elders may see as a crucial, painful loss. There is a consistent risk of treating tradition as timeless instead of simply significant, when it is continuously adapted, revived, formalised or reinterpreted. Factors such as class, gender, age, geography or political influence can play a substantial role in shaping interpretations, and their interference can lead to debate about whose is right, or, at least, closest to fact.
But someone can challenge a cultural norm or concept and remain deeply connected to the culture in which it exists: belonging does not inherently demand agreement. Among likely every culture in the world, there are debates of what constitutes within: diasporic communities, mixed-background families, religious converts, or people who have left and ultimately made their way back. This in and of its own encapsulates the negotiatory nature of culture, a concept which is constructed and renegotiated in real time rather than a fixed inheritance that can or should be retrieved perfectly intact by the next addition to a community.
Ultimately, the question isn’t whether culture can be defined, but whether any definition should be allowed to stand without revealing who created it, whose experiences it encompasses and acknowledgment of what remains outside of its frame. Culture is not a thing to define; if anything, it is a relationship to negotiate, one that prompts meanings to emerge through practice, memory, argument, inheritance and change. The overwhelming institutional insistence on producing a static definition of what it means is something to question, not something to succumb to.
The simplest explanation is almost never the most accurate one. Representation cannot be neutral: each account of cultural history, practice or development involves choices made about what to include, what to omit and what to spotlight as most meaningful.
There is no perspective that comes from nowhere: insiders and outsiders to a culture can both interpret culture from a particular position, and each of these interpretations comes with its own access and its own blind spots — elements that shouldn’t be ignored in pursuit of logistics. Additionally, the right to interpret, one that intrinsically belongs to everyone, does not equate to the right to define: one can offer a valuable reading of or insight into a culture without claiming authority to settle what that culture is.
As a collective, these are things we must accept about the practices of preserving and understanding culture, instead of attempting to force it into a mould it was intended to outgrow.
Sources
Encoding/Decoding - Stuart Hall
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization - Arjun Appadurai (1996)
Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices - Stuart Hall & Sean Nixon
The Order of Things - Michel Foucault (1966)
