Cultural identity

Cultural identity is the perception of belonging to a group culture. Group cultures can be defined by many factors, including ancestry, appearance, attitudes, behavior, family, education, ethnicity, health practices, history, locality, nationality, political attitudes, profession, religion, skills, and social class. Cultural identity includes markers that offer validation that a person is associated with a particular group, belief system, or race, such as clothing, grooming styles, or diet.

Historically, paradigms such as tribes, nations, and other boundaries have provided frameworks that foster the growth of cultural identities. While some value these structures, others view them as externally imposed barriers at odds with their personal authenticity, chosen directions, and choices made available through globalization, emigration patterns, and technological access to emerging frameworks. People with diverse cultural backgrounds and wide ranges of experience may reject the limitations inherent in specific cultural types and instead define and adopt their own cultural identities.

Background

Cultural identity provides an underlying road map for people to navigate through conditions surrounding them. It forms the basis for rules, laws, morals, superstitions, and codes of ethics to which people adhere. Cultural identity is a potent tool for connecting generations through the ages. It assigns individuals a group to which they belong. It tends to form when individuals adhere to agreed-upon social norms and behavior adopted by their ancestors. It determines what people choose to ingest—both food and content. Cultural identity can dictate social norms, including which days people can work, what they choose to wear, and how they represent themselves both in person and online.

Cultural identity is viewed as crucial to maintaining heritage, traditional beliefs, and other aspects of indigenous cultures at risk from conquering or dominant cultures. People who have emigrated from their ancestral homelands to new cultures often fear that their cultural identity and values are at stake. When the cultural identities of people within a culture erode, individuals can lose their sense of self, place, and belonging. People living within a minority or marginalized population are often encouraged by members of their groups to hold fast to traditional ceremonies and belief patterns to maintain cultural identity, as traditions, once dead, are extremely difficult to revive.

Cultural identity historically defines which tribes or ethnic groups people associate with and which they choose to avoid and discriminate against. Issues of cultural identity can lead to conflicts or acceptance, depending in large part upon whether individuals and groups choose to examine and attempt to understand other groups and reasons for perceived differences. Refusing to accept how people culturally identify can result in limited worldviews, lack of communicative fluency, and uneducated perceptions of others.

Worldwide, diversity education in classrooms teaches understanding and acceptance of divergent thoughts and practices. Cultural identity is at the forefront of many educational discussions in courses and academic conferences. With issues such as politics, terrorism, and differing ideologies in the media, the need for understanding of cultural identity and adherence is viewed as important.

Topic Today

When people identify with a culture, they tend to embrace traditions that have been passed down over time. Cultural identity can link people to their heritage and to others who have the same traditions, basic belief systems, interests, and ways of living. In populations that have been colonized by other cultures, people may think their cultural identity is threatened by forced assimilation or gradual change within their primary culture. It can be challenging to include and consolidate, or even fuse, global and local identities. Critics of cultural identity contend that preserving distinct cultural identities based upon differences leads to partisan dysfunction and fractured societies. In contrast, cosmopolitanism, or the idea that all humans belong to a single community based on a shared morality, offers regional inhabitants a greater sense of shared community.

Groups can discriminate or be discriminated against based on cultural markers and can be challenged to remove cultural identifiers if they are part of a minority representation of a culture within a larger majority cultural framework. For example, in 2004, France banned girls from wearing headscarves, along with other religious emblems such as crosses and turbans, in state schools. In 2011, President Nicolas Sarkozy banned the niqab, a full-face Muslim veil, from all public places, arguing that such Islamic markers are incompatible with French values. Such rejections of minority cultural identifiers remain controversial. French education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem argued that banning articles of clothing infringes on freedom of choice and religious liberty. Still, in 2023, the country's education minister at the time also announced a ban on wearing robe-like abayas in public schools. Immigrants often feel forced to adapt or change their cultural identities to relate to or be accepted by other members of their adopted region or country. This poses a conflict between an immigrant's inherited belief system and their adopted home and can cause people to commit to two or more cultures, thus broadening and changing the scope of their own unique cultural identity.

The speed at which people can communicate using new media, or content available on-demand through internet access, including online newspapers, blogs, wikis, video games, and other social media, allows for dialogue across conventional borders that transcend traditional frameworks. It makes it possible for people on one side of the globe to culturally identify with people on the other.

Language learning, being able to communicate in more than one language, shapes cultural identity and can broaden a person's sense of belonging to more than one cultural group. Like languages, cultures change over time through use and by the people who participate within them. Cultural identity is being redefined by the social network, with people imitating and adopting social norms presented by the media and by other people and cultures to which they would not otherwise be exposed.

Instead of learning behavior, knowledge, and belief systems from local or inherited cultural and religious groups, individuals can now choose their own social norms and develop their own cultural identity through media. Furthermore, an individual's online social environment affects the culture that the person chooses to adopt. Surroundings, environment, and people within these places play a role in how people develop. Cultural globalization arises in which ideas, commodities, and cultural expressions become standardized and homogenized through access to media, the internet, and popular culture.

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