Culture Is Ordinary...huh?

Hey everyone, I'm Elise but as you might notice, my "blogger" name just reads 'E' because most people call me that on account of them not remembering my name or not being able to spell it, so feel free to call me E. I was once in the Computer Science field as well as Business but now I'm in the Industrial/Organizational psychology major.

As with a few of my classmates, I also found Raymond Williams’ article confusing until he got to his point. Upon reading just the title, I disagreed with Mr. Williams and thought him to be culturally naive and slightly unsophisticated. I mean, how can one say that culture, which is the epitome of existence, is ordinary? The desks that we uncomfortably sit in for fifty minutes or an hour and twenty minutes are ordinary. The classrooms with pale white walls and temperatures that are either too hot or too cold are ordinary, but culture, how can it be?!

Every individual is comprised of many different cultures as a result of race, creed, gender, region, dialect(s), status, and the list goes on. So, to devalue my background to something mundane, I find offensive. However, I am an open-minded person who believes that there are multiple meanings in pieces of work. At first, I approached this article with simplicity, taking everything word for word and not taking into consideration other connotations for the word ‘ordinary,’—other than the ones that first came to mind, ‘average’ and ‘uninteresting.’ Yet, after reading his article a second time (with dictionary and thesaurus on either side) I found myself in complete agreement. I looked up the word ‘ordinary’ and found these synonyms, common, everyday, customary, and this definition, “of common occurrence.”

With this new information, I had to rethink Williams’ stance about culture using the new definitions of ordinary. To say, “culture is ordinary” is to say that culture is a forever-changing universal consequence of nature. Culture is “the shaping of minds, the shifting of relationships, the emergence of different language and ideas” and none can escape it (Reading Culture 5).