Culture A powerful resource for the development of societies
Culture is the set of distinctive, spiritual, material and affective features that characterize a social society or group. She encompasses, in addition to the arts and letters, the ways of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, the systems of values, beliefs and traditions.Forming what cultural diversity is is the multiplicity of ways in which the cultures of groups and societies express themselves. These expressions are transmitted within and between groups and societies. The cultural theme is discussed from several aspects: the economic one, where culture is linked to the market and consumption and is manifested in the so -called cultural industries (editing companies, music houses, television, cinema, etc.);The human, where culture plays a role of social cohesion, self – esteem, creativity, historical memory, etc.;The patrimonial, in which there are public activities and policies oriented to conservation, restoration, value, social use of patrimonial goods, etc. Through the meanings of culture, cultural heritage and its relationship with the territory we will find the meaning of a cultural identity.
Including the cultural content that is the symbolic sense, the artistic dimension and the cultural values that emanate from the cultural identities that express them since they are the expressions resulting from the creativity of people, groups and societies, which have a cultural content. Cultural activities, goods and services are seen from the point of view of their specific quality, use or purpose, embody or transmit cultural expressions, regardless of the commercial value they may have.
Theoretical framework
The concept of cultural identity contains a sense of belonging to a social group with which cultural features are shared, such as customs, values and beliefs. Identity is not a fixed concept, but is recreated individually and collectively and continuously feeds on external influence. According to anthropological and sociological studies, identity arises from differentiation and as reaffirmation against the other. Although the concept of identity transcends borders, the origin of this concept is often linked to a territory.
Culture being a social construction, arises from several social relations that are not harmonic relations or are away from conflicts, because culture makes possible social interactions that give meaning to the life of a group.
On many occasions, when we talk about landscape we are referring to the most intimate of the relationship of a town with a vital space, or a town with their own country. It should not be forgotten that one of the fundamental characteristics is the construction of symbolic universes, which are those that allow the legitimation of relations between individuals in a world.
Most of our culture, for a long time, is structured from alphabet technology. The alphabet introduced the possibility of memory beyond people’s mental abilities: the possibility of leaving something written text that survives beyond its author. The introduction of the alphabet is itself revolutionary: where the sources of authority and knowledge could have been before the elderly, the wise, the writings now become. At the same time, the possibility of spreading the same idea as far as writings appears taking that idea. The introduction of the alphabet ends with the oral order of our culture to give way to a more "efficient" communication way.
But the transformation becomes even more radical with the introduction of the printing press, which is for McLuhan "the architect of nationalism". The Print. In the medieval world, this basically meant monasteries and universities, both under the direct influence of the Catholic Church. For this reason, medieval system was structured around religion, since all access to knowledge was mediated in some sense by some dimension of the clergy. Only monks had enough free time, and the necessary knowledge, to read, study, and reproduce, very slowly, the few existing books.
In the social construction of the term culture it is forced to start with what we will call humanist construction. In it, the term culture alludes, in the western tradition, to the Latin word colleague, which means cultivating, therefore designates the process of taking out some fruit from the seed and in its origin it is related to the word agriculture, by metaphorical extension Cicero Lo LoHe uses for the first time in allusion to the cultivation of the human spirit, in his work Tusculanae Disputations, where he alludes to the cultivation of the soul or “animi culture”, using an agricultural metaphor to describe human development. The culture thus understood is a kind of seed that well paid produces the development of the spirit. The evolution of the term led to its humanistic meaning, according to which, culture consists in the accumulation of knowledge and knowledge. Rousseau in his famous speech on the origin of inequality among men, defined culture as something of human beings that distinguishes them from animals and nature opposes. This first dichotomy of the term culture as opposed to nature, will definitely mark its conceptual trajectory to romanticism, culture is seen as something artificial, acquired by man to be able to survive but that moves him away from his own biological state that is the natural.
Returning to the humanistic paradigm we see that the understanding of culture as the development of human nature crosses the Renaissance, Enlightenment and reaches German romanticism.
Culture is a very powerful resource for the development of societies and in the current knowledge society its expansion as an economic resource and as a channel for the dissemination of symbolic products is very large. The United Nations Conference on Commerce and Development (UNCTAD) in its 2013 Creative Economy Report document, already warns us of the appearance of a new economic paradigm resulting from the union of the economy and culture that brings a DNA in whichcultural, economic, technological and social elements recombine. Culture, in this new scenario of the creative economy, is a generating factor of wealth and development.
This article will examine the notions of active culture in our society and the construction of culture today as a resource for human development, socialization and citizen participation will be analyzed. An important social value to generate public space, social cohesion, in short, construction of cultural citizenship. Culture is an extremely complex term. Most of the studies on culture begins with the useless task of fixing the limits of its meanings, of limiting the field of their versatals, guided by the scientific currency that any object of knowledge worth its salt needs a precise wordand rigorous that allows scientific analysis and research.
But nothing further from the idiosyncrasy of this word that precision and rigorous analysis. The fact is that the term culture is multidimensional (it applies to almost all dimensions of human life: scientific, socialist, artistic …), versatile (social, scientific, economic, political value …), polysemic (culture alludes toHuman creations, to the development of capacities, to the life forms of the different societies …), dichotomic (opposes nature, civilization, society, barbarism …) and fluid (Bauman, 2013) as water, subject to sudden changesof state … This complexity makes us affirm, first, that perhaps to think about the transversality, inaccuracy and fluidity of this term closer to human reality than any unified theory. And second, that the diversity of its social constructions, the plurality of its historical trajectory and the versatility of its meanings is in itself the reality of the concept we try to specify. Thus, the approach of this chapter will focus both on the complexity of its diverse meanings and the socio-historical constructions of the concept.
Culture covers a close relationship with social construction by being included in the human being in all its cognitive and social development, since it is everyday elements that society imparts from the beginning of life that keep the individual soaked in traditions andbehaviors typical of their culture.
Throughout world history there have been no number of different cultures in different places. Many of them remained isolated from the rest of the world, but all that changed when colonizations began, the new land inhabitants came with their own culture, their own beliefs and their own religion and under an excuses of ´ culture ‘what they didIt was to impose their own culture on that of the natives of these places, thus causing a great loss of cultural diversity to the world.
This imposition was mainly in two ways:
- Teaching his own culture as the correct one and claiming that the native was wrong.
- Eliminating natives.
It was until the year of 1993 that it was known as ´Genocidio Cultural´ and although it does not have a specific definition it is understood as the destruction of cultural inheritance.
UNESCO recognizes the destruction of culture as a crime. Article 7 of a 1994 draft of the United Nations Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples is read as: indigenous peoples have collective and individual right not to be subject to ethnocide and cultural genocide, including prevention and repairby:
- Any action that has the objective or effect of depriving them of their integrity as different peoples or their cultural values or ethnic identity;
- Any action that has the objective or effect of stripping them of their lands, territories or resources;
- Any form of population transfer that has the objective or effect of violating or impairing any of its rights;
- Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them for legal, administrative measures, among others.
- Any form of propaganda directed against them.’
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