Culture, the super convenient word

Living and working in Nicaragua for almost an year, surely, I notice numerous cultural differences between Japan and Nicaragua.

Cultural difference is a key to live in other countries.

By the way, the word culture is such a vague and ambiguous word, isn't it?

The other day, I was talking to my nicaraguan friend and she said "Guys always make a pass at me on the road and that should not be considered as culture, it is just a consequence of bad education or lack of respect."

It is true that here in Nicaragua, guys always make a pass at girls on the road saying something rude.

(To avoid misunderstanding, I would like to add that not all of the nicaraguan guys are like that, of course. It goes without saying that there are lots of respectful guys and we can never generalize the situation of one country. I am just talking about the general situation in Nicaragua.)

I experience this often too. People say me "Los Chinos comen raton", which means "Chinese eat rats."

First of all, I am not chinese and I do not understand what the problem is even if I eat rats....hahaha (well, I have travelled a lot and Im already used to this kind of , so I do not care those sayings though...hahaha)

Another example is that when I go to meetings or events, almost every time it starts later. But people say that it's a product of culture.

Should unpunctuality be considered as part of culture?

The word culture is such a convenient word because it neutralizes every aspect of our life. Everything could be considered as part of culture and when we use the word culture, we cannot think whether its a bad thing or not anymore because it is generally accepted that there is no superiority or inferiority between culture.

This is the controversy of cultural relativism.

I completely agree with that every culture has its own beauty and all of us have to accept its values. We cannot impose our culture or way of thinking upon other culture.

HOWEVER, we also need to decompose the word culture so that we can think about each component of culture and consider which component should be modified and developed.

In general, the word we use in our daily lives has powerful effect on our mentality more than we think it does.

If we keep using the word culture everyday and do not try to think deeply and precisely about the word, we end up stop thinking about what the word really means or should really mean.

We sometimes need to revise the word that we use in our daily lives and re-think what the word really means.