Understanding Cultural Identity and Philosophical Perspectives

Cultural Identity

The idea that occurs when a culture enters contact with another. Cultural identity is the set of common features that identify a group of people. There are two types:

1. A series of material elements.
2. Components of subjective social identity.

Identity and culture do not correspond univocally with national identity. Keep two ideas about cultural identity:

• Policy essentialist: The elements that constitute the identity of a cultural group, and seeks to preserve customs, attitudes, institutions... This essentialist concept considers the cultural area itself homogeneous and tries to defend it from external contamination.
• Historical concept: Culture is considered historical products subject to change. It is considered a dynamic process that supports new items while preserving its own tradition.

Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Philosophy born of the dynamic elements of the whole. Aristotle refers to the beings that move according to their way of being or their purpose. Scholasticism maintained that reality is subject to change. The scientific revolution discovered that there are laws of motion. To exclude nature is to see it as a machine that operates in accordance with the law. From Romanticism, nature has a vision as an organic whole that looks to be alive. In the 19th century, the opposition between nature and culture intensified.

Culture

1) Subjective: Refers to when a subject is related to education.

Cicero says that a person has been cultivated through education and knowledge; culture refers to a determinant historical context. Culture: Heritage acquires knowledge of a subject during the learning process in a social context.

2) Objective: In the Illustration, two types of culture are distinguished: formation as a personal (subjective), subject to its own laws (objective). Herder defines the concept as a goal achieved by humanity that must be permanent. Culture: Productions due to human exertion in a social context that make up their reality. (Subjective culture is the way culture is presented in a factual subject.)

Relations Between Nature and Culture

The Sophists in ancient Greece distinguished between culture and nature. Aristotle had to distinguish two types:

• The product of culture—the product of human actions.

Cartesian dualism distinguishes between body and mind:

• Body: Performs natural functions.
• Mind: Contains mental processes related to the ability to symbolize.

Rousseau accentuates the opposition, proposing a return to nature. Herder states that culture and nature are components of the human being; culture is a second nature. Marx argues that nature is a second nature; the human being is an animal that produces its own living conditions. Freud considered culture the source of oppression of nature; the human being is an animal with aggressive and sexual instincts. The Frankfurt School: Habermas claims that the risk for occidental culture is the domain of nature.