When we speak about culture in the general context, it’s very clear what part of culture we are talking about. Art, literature, poetry and other forms of culture enriches the mind and spirit. But as we speak about culture in a more general sense, it’s important to make room for more than just the narrow understanding of culture that is often associated with the word. In this article, we will therefore make an exception and talk about culture and the value of culture, in a broader sense, before tying it back to the more subtle understanding of culture.
Sport as part of culture
When talking about culture, especially given a societal context with budgets and governments, culture is a set idea, but the truth is that culture, in a more generous understanding, can include almost anything that creates a sense of belonging and community. An aspect of this that is rarely discussed as culture is sports, but sports is one of the things that truly brings people together. Whether it’s reading the predictions today and watching the game with your community, taking part in sports or just enjoying it at home on the TV with your close friends and family.
When it comes to culture, literature and poetry, sport seems like a mile away, but in truth they share a lot of the same elements, despite simultaneously being completely different. The commonness of these two ways of understanding culture is, among other things, the meaning and understanding that interacting with it gives us. And while the highbrow understanding of culture can feel as a bar too high to reach for many, it is consistently lower if we expand its definition and allow for more people to relate to the work that is being done.
Understanding the self through culture
Regardless of whether you define culture as poetry or the community surrounding watching sports games with your peers, there is a great opportunity to understand yourself deeper through the context of culture. Even though one seems more relevant than the other, they both draw on different parts of us that can be truly lovely to highlight. We understand ourselves better based on the things and the people we engage with, and this is true of sports and it’s true of art and poetry and literature. Therefore, culture defines us more than we define culture because everyone is entitled to their own unique perspective.