Living in Culture

Think about the meal you ate that felt distinctly tied to culture or the last word you used without a second thought. Chances are, if you traced it back enough it did not start where you think it did. The taco truck staple of the cilantro lime bowl, the coffee you drink every morning, the jeans in your closet all came from somewhere else before they became “ours.” This is the strange truth about culture: almost nothing in culture evolved in isolation. Instead it evolved through diffusion that is simply the way ideas, beliefs, foods and objects move from one society into another, sometimes through friendly contact and sometimes through unpleasant ways. No culture, no matter how distinct it feels today developed in isolation. Every tradition we keep is really the result of years of borrowing, blending and reinventing.

Anthropologists usually split diffusion into a few clear types and once you know them you begin to see them everywhere. Direct diffusion happens when two cultures meet in life through trade routes, migration or even war and each culture takes small parts of the other culture almost by chance. Forced diffusion is a type, where one culture forces its language, religion or customs onto another culture as happened during colonialism and empire rule in many places. Indirect diffusion is where a practice or idea moves through a third culture or through media without the two original cultures ever meeting face to face. A trader carrying spices between empires, a government banning a native language in schools, or a Korean skincare routine that goes viral on TikTok are all doing the same basic thing, just in very different situations and with very different power forces.

If you want to see diffusion in its tastiest form, look at your dinner plate. Tomatoes and chili peppers in many Italian and Indian dishes are actually from the Americas and only crossed the Atlantic after Columbus’s voyages started many years of trade between the Old World and New World. Imagine food without tomato sauce or Indian curry without chili heat. That would be almost impossible.

Coffee tells a story starting in the highlands of Ethiopia and then moving through Ottoman trade lines into European coffeehouses, where it eventually became as important to French and Viennese culture. Even the endless debate over whether pasta came from Italy or was brought back from China by Marco Polo (though that legend is shaky) shows how much people want to claim ownership over foods that were never truly anyone’s alone to begin with.

Cultural diffusion does not live in kitchens, it also lives in our conversations. The word algebra comes from the Arabic al jabr, tea comes from trade words, and safari is a Swahili word that entered English through colonial travel writing. We use these words casually, and we forget they originated from cultures we may never have visited. The same is true for objects we think of normal. Pajamas started in South Asia, the necktie comes from military dress, and the simple button, something we rarely notice, moved through many cultures before ending up on your shirt. This is why cultural diffusion is so fascinating and easy to miss. It rarely is discussed and quietly influences aspects of our daily life until they become normal.

Of course, it would be dishonest to talk about cultural exchange as if it has always been gentle or equal. There is an important difference between natural cultural diffusion, where communities freely take and change each other’s practices over time, and forced assimilation, where a powerful group takes a culture’s language, religion or customs and replaces them with its own often in a violent way. This is where the modern discussion about appropriation comes in and it is truly complicated. Wearing a garment or learning/celebrating a tradition from another culture can be a sign of respect, openness, or eagerness to learn. However, it can also turn centuries of meaning into a simple costume or trend especially when the culture being borrowed from has historically been mistreated or exploited for the same practices that outsiders now profit from. There is no rule that solves this problem, but staying with the discomfort of it instead of ignoring it is part of taking culture seriously.

Maybe the best way to think about all of this is to stop seeing cultures in isolation. Recognizing this does not erase what sometimes feels clearly ours. If anything, it should make us more curious, more willing to ask where a tradition really came from and who brought it to us. Culture was never meant to be a box. It has always been a current. We are all, whether we realize it or not, standing somewhere downstream.