0910AW[dies in the flames]issue207 by seiranzcc

seiranzcc1UID: 2514067

之前又之前，应该还是存在说理不清的混乱，猛拍猛拍

From the very beginning that one is born into a group, the culture of it influences him on every aspect. It is the culture that helps people form their beliefs, values and emotional response, which are usually regarded as an important part of the original and fundamental ideas about who they are. So what on earth is the culture? In human societies, rituals and ceremonies play a crucial role of defining the culture. Reflecting and embodying the traditional beliefs and emotion, the rituals and ceremonies open a window for people to see the face of their culture. But is it the whole body of the culture itself? Our sense of who we are largely depends on those ideas and thoughts that the culture has cultivated and nourished for a very long time. Although rituals and ceremonies do help us remember some specific aspects of the culture, it is just one part of human's cultural consistency. Without them, people still have opulent accesses to approach the root of themselves without the sense of self-definition diminished.

The sense of who they are of societies or groups of people is largely up to the culture background they come from. Even with the similar appearance, two people from different cultural backgrounds can be easily distinguished from their behavior and attitudes towards the same thing. Culture begins to influence one from the very beginning of his birth. The education he gets will shape his behaviors and ideas, with which he will gradually know where he belongs to and hence, who he is. During the period of the individual development, cultural ethos has permeated into every pore of us. No one will see the world with pristine eyes. We live, think and judge things in specific modes which are actually provided by the culture we are bathed in. From all these unique characters, we are different when we are among people from other backgrounds. Due to these differences, we won't lose ourselves in this fast moving world.

Since the culture is the crucial factor determines one’s self-definition, the rituals and ceremonies, which are usually one way to keep people close to their culture, are often regarded as the necessary way to ensure people’s sense of who they are. Admittedly, rituals and ceremonies help peole remember the most essential ideas of our culture. To some extent, they do remind us of our ingrained thought of the culture in a vivid or even magnificent way. Yet rituals and ceremonies are just fraction of the culture. After all, most of them are just celebrated usually one time or several times each year, and a lot of people ignore them due to the high working pressure in modern times. So compared with the subtle influences people get from the social cultural ethos and education for decades, the effects rituals and ceremonies bring to people is not obvious. Moreover, quite a lot of rituals and ceremonies are merchandized and buried in all kinds of business ads today, and the function of conveying traditional cultural ideas has been minimized. Therefore, perhaps during some earlier time, rituals and ceremonies act as an important part of influence people's cultural sense of themselves, but today, the situation is quite different.

In this age, we are bathed in the sea of information. Besides those certain rituals and ceremonies, we have a lot more other approaches to keep close to our culture, including books, movies and TV performances. Since the world today encourages preserving the national culture, we are in a perfect environment to keep close to our culture. In addition, the traditional and modern culture has been knotted together, which convey the cultural pattern in various and complete new ways. Therefore, rituals and ceremonies, relatively simple and constant, are no longer the most important way to remind people of who they are, because it cannot satisfy the fast changing ideas of people now. To keep the sense of who we are in mind, the most critical factor is not whether we are still celebrating some rituals and ceremonies, but whether we can remember the real essence of our culture and spread it to some lager extent.

Culture has always been the main factor to form people's sense of themselves. Yet to preserve the culture and keep that sense, rituals and ceremonies are far beyond enough. In modern times, people will have a diminished sense of who they are if they do not concern with the true ideas the culture has shaped during his life, to which rituals and ceremonies no longer devote a
lot.