The Software Called Culture

By

Obododimma Oha

It may surprise some people that an advocate of culture like me should metaphorize it as “software” which can be installed and uninstalled. Worse still, a software, belonging to the language of modern computer technology, already warns us that it could get bad or incapable of running on some systems! It could get “virused,” to use a word from a back-derivation strategy of morphology. If it gets virused, you just have to uninstall it, quickly, too! It also needs an updating, in order to run on some systems or to function properly. Now, culture for me, in a non-computer imagination, is just an expression of values that can be assigned to identify a group in a social or temporal context. Those values may only be verbal (i.e. transmitted by language) or may be concrete (i.e material).

In that case, culture is context-sensitive and a cultural value good for a given context may not be good for the other. It it is that problematic, it has to be uninstalled or updated. What we call culture is therefore something that a given society or time context installs into people’s heads. If it cannot work in the person or serve the person’s context, because it is out-dated, it needs to be uninstalled or upgraded before it cripples the host!

Whether culture is intangible or tangible, it is transmitted. Means of signification (linguistic or other) transmits it, to other members of the group (mainly), outside it, including people of other age. Now, it is left for that set of another age or context to modify it in its use or discard (uninstall it) all together. The transmission at the interpersonal level may be by influence, by indoctrination or imitation (copying) by an individual or group. A software could be pirated and made to circulate legally or illegally. What is important is that it is circulating and can touch somebody’s life.

Since culture as a kind of software can touch and transform somebody’s life, it is often in general focus. One culture could be wrestling to dominate another, to control the space and lives of many people. One culture may even deceive another or pretend to be friendly or to be promoting the other's interest. An effective weapon: using the culture against itself indirectly!

When a culture controls the lives of many, it could be seen as a means of holding the group together, of (re)inventing group identity. In other words, it is already weapon, not only a tool. The group, in its psychology, desperately looks for this weapon (a case where the tool is turned into a weapon and used against outsiders). In other words, as a weapon of identity, culture becomes something used in discriminatory practice, but some of its users hardly know!

Emerging from this line of thinking, therefore, is the attitude to culture. Some, schooled or indoctrinated, may cling tenaciously to a culture, even if they are its direct victims. Their emotional attachment or chauvinism affects their reasoning, makes them blind, and to object to modifications or outright discarding! In our computer parlance, they conservatively object to uninstalling or upgrading. They may be Luddites and you just have to stay out  of the ways of the cultural nationalists at conferences, workshops, or any public discussion on the subject.

They would be the last to accept that culture is only one software installed into our heads at creation and is not made-in-heaven or the irrevocable thought of the wise ancestors. So, if your ancestors, their cultural practice, got it wrong, you also get it wrong in your own time, all in the name of the maintenance of culture. If your ancestors thought that twins were monsters, you retain that funny idea or justify it, even if your PhD is from Oxford and you are teaching at Harvard. In that way, you ask that the blood of twins slaughtered should also be upon your head!

Nobody is assigning culture to the past or to the dustbin of time. But I would like to see your culture launch satellites and make you a player in the exploration of deep space and the International Space Station. Don’t hide inside that raffia skirt and begin to answer an “ancestral spirit” or flog defenceless women while hiding behind a mask.  Or even to continue playing the blame game in the global ilo, hoping that we would always express our sympathies for your victimhood. Use your ancestral powers to dethrone dictators and draw the future scientifically to your village.