What Is Culture? Identity, Diversity, and the Art of Being Human, people in park

What Is Culture? Identity, Diversity, and the Art of Being Human

UN & UNESCO Programs
Culture Topics

We All Live Inside It

You didn’t choose your first language. You didn’t choose the food at your childhood table. You didn’t choose the stories that told you who heroes were.

Yet those things shaped you. They still do.

That invisible architecture — the shared values, rituals, symbols, and stories of a community — is culture. It is everywhere. And most of the time, we can’t see it.

Understanding culture is one of the most powerful things a student or development professional can do. It explains why people behave the way they do. Why nations conflict. Why peace is so difficult to build. And why it is possible at all.

History Women’s Suffrage, Women's March Amsterdam
2017 Women's March in Amsterdam, Museumplein — Photo: RYB

A Short History: How Culture Became a Science

The word culture comes from the Latin colere — to cultivate, to tend the earth. For centuries, it simply meant refinement. The educated person was “cultured.” Art, philosophy, and classical music defined it.

Then came a revolution in thinking.

In 1871, British anthropologist Edward Tylor published Primitive Culture. He offered the first scientific definition: culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Tylor made culture a subject of study, not just a mark of status.

German-American anthropologist Franz Boas pushed further. In the early 20th century, he argued that every culture deserves study on its own terms. This principle — cultural relativism — transformed the field. No culture is superior. All are complex. All deserve understanding.

His student Margaret Mead brought cultural anthropology to the public. Her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa showed how behavior society calls “natural” is actually cultural. Gender roles. Adolescent conflict. Sexuality. All shaped by culture, not biology.

Meanwhile, sociology took its own path. Émile Durkheim showed how cultural norms hold societies together. Max Weber explored how cultural values — especially religion — drive economic behavior. His Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is still taught in universities worldwide.

In the 20th century, culture became interdisciplinary. Psychologists, historians, linguists, economists, and political scientists all claimed it. Today, Cultural Studies is a field of its own — born in Birmingham, England in the 1960s, at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Stuart Hall, one of its founders, showed how culture is always about power. Who gets to tell the story? Whose identity is represented?

Where Students Study Culture Today

Culture is taught across many disciplines and institutions. Students encounter it in:

Anthropology and Sociology — at universities like Harvard, Oxford, the University of Amsterdam, and the London School of Economics. These departments study how cultures form, change, and interact.

Cultural Studies — at Birmingham, Melbourne, NYU, and Toronto. This field examines media, identity, politics, and representation.

Peace and Conflict Studies — at Uppsala University (Sweden), Notre Dame (USA), and the European Peace University. These programs connect culture directly to peacebuilding.

Development Studies — at the ISS in The Hague, SOAS in London, and Sciences Po in Paris. They ask how culture shapes development outcomes.

Gender Studies and Women’s Studies — at virtually every major university worldwide. These programs examine how culture constructs gender, power, and identity.

If you are studying global development, international relations, or peace — you are studying culture whether it says so in your course title or not.

The Psychology of Culture: Who Are You, Really?

Here is where it gets personal.

Culture does not just surround you. It builds you. Psychologists call this cultural identity — the sense of belonging to a group based on shared values, practices, and symbols.

Geert Hofstede, a Dutch social psychologist, spent decades studying cultural differences across more than 70 countries. He found cultures differ systematically on dimensions like individualism vs. collectivism, and power distance (how much people accept hierarchy). His framework is widely used in international business, development, and conflict research.

Henri Tajfel developed Social Identity Theory in the 1970s. People derive a significant part of their self-concept from group membership. Your culture is part of your ego. Threaten the culture, and people feel personally threatened.

This is why cultural conflict runs so deep. It is not just about ideas. It is about who you are.

Erik Erikson introduced the concept of the identity crisis — the struggle to form a coherent sense of self. Culture provides the raw material for that self. When cultures collide or change rapidly, identity becomes unstable. Anxiety, tribalism, and nationalism often follow.

Nationalism is culture’s most volatile political expression. It tells a story: we are a people with shared history, destiny, and values — and they are different. At its best, nationalism builds solidarity. At its worst, it builds walls — and justifies wars.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that humans are deeply tribal by nature. Culture activates that tribalism. Understanding this is not pessimistic. It is realistic. And it is the starting point for building a Culture of Peace.

→ Read more: Cultivating a Culture of Peace

Is Having Many Cultures a Problem?

This is one of the most important questions in global development. And the honest answer is: it depends on who is asking, and why.

Diversity is measurable. Researchers use the cultural diversity index to map it. Highly diverse countries include Papua New Guinea, Cameroon, and India. Highly homogeneous ones include Japan, South Korea, and Iceland.

Some economists argue high diversity increases coordination costs. Different values and norms make cooperation harder. This can slow development — at least in the short term.

But diversity also drives innovation. Studies consistently show diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones in creative problem-solving. Diverse cities attract talent. Diverse economies are more resilient.

UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) takes a clear position. Cultural diversity is “as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature.” It is not a problem to be managed. It is a resource to be protected.

The harder question is this: diversity under what conditions? Diversity thrives when cultures have equal power, mutual respect, and shared institutions. It breaks down when one culture dominates and others are suppressed.

This is exactly where Culture of Peace becomes relevant. It does not ask cultures to merge. It asks them to coexist — actively, intentionally, and with dignity.

We built a world of sharp edges and precious surfaces. The spikes are real. So is the light caught between them. Culture is how we learn to touch what hurts — and still call it beautiful.

Fashion: Culture You Can Wear

Every morning, billions of people make a cultural statement. They get dressed.

Fashion is one of the most immediate and democratic forms of cultural expression. You do not need a gallery, a publisher, or a platform. You need only your body and your choices.

Fashion communicates identity. The hijab, the kente cloth, the kimono, the denim jacket — each carries layers of history, belonging, resistance, and creativity. Fashion tells the world who you are and where you come from. Sometimes it tells the world who you refuse to be.

Sociologist Georg Simmel wrote about fashion in 1904. He described it as a tension between imitation and differentiation. We dress like our group to belong. We dress differently to stand out. Both drives are cultural.

Coco Chanel liberated women’s bodies from corsets in the 1920s. That was a cultural revolution. Yves Saint Laurent put women in trouser suits in the 1960s. So was that. Fashion has always been political.

Today, fashion intersects with globalization, sustainability, and identity politics. Fast fashion homogenizes culture — the same stores, the same styles, in every city on earth. At the same time, slow fashion, ethical design, and indigenous textiles are pushing back. They insist that cultural specificity has value.

For RYB Global Development, fashion is not just aesthetics. It is one of the arts through which Culture of Peace can be communicated visually and viscerally. A garment can cross borders that a policy paper cannot.

→ Watch: NO MORE WAR — RYB on YouTube

Culture Is Not Static

One last thing is worth saying clearly. Culture is not a fixed object. It moves.

It absorbs new influences. It is contested from within. It changes across generations. What defined a culture in 1950 may barely resemble what defines it today.

This means culture can be cultivated intentionally. Communities, educators, artists, and policymakers can choose which values to strengthen. Which stories to tell. Which traditions to pass forward — and which to leave behind.

This is the deepest argument for a Culture of Peace. If culture shapes behavior, then transforming culture can transform the conditions for conflict. That transformation begins with understanding what culture is.

You have just made a start.

→ Next: Culture of Peace → Then: Women, Culture and Peace (WCP)

Sources and Further Reading

Foundational Texts

Psychology and Identity

  • Geert Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind — www.hofstede-insights.com
  • Henri Tajfel & John Turner, Social Identity Theory (1979) — available via JSTOR
  • Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012) — jonathanhaidt.com

Cultural Studies

  • Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997)
  • Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham — birmingham.ac.uk

UNESCO

Fashion and Culture

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