Anthony Carambot
Professor Brandon
ENGL 210
5/8/2025
Culture Is Ordinary: Because It’s Unordinary
Culture is ordinary not only because it is simple and common to everyone but because it derives from the close, idiosyncratic manner that people live their lives day in day out. Rather, he recommends that culture is essentially existence determined by personal memories, social status, inherited traditions, and personal ingenuity. I agree with the perspective of Williams and demonstrate that the “ordinary” dimensions of culture are very often amazing in themselves. While cooking traditional Colombian dishes, taking part in Assyrian ceremonies or organizing my PC or changing languages, I show how culture is composed of subtle differences and unexpected subtleties. “There are no masses” says Williams, “There are only ways of seeing people as masses” (Williams 12), which really implies that ordinary cultural behaviors also have small, multilayered nuances behind them. Culture lives in the details.
There was a period when I could help my mom make ajiaco, the traditional Colombian soup with chicken and potatoes and the night seemed to leave traces in my brain. There was no holiday, nor company, but the process of making ajiaco seemed as formal as any traditional ceremony. While she prepared the corn cobs and carved the chicken meat I was peeling potatoes. It was the smell of guascas drifting into the kitchen that told me that moment was more valuable to my cultural sense of identity than any piece of knowledge I should learn from a history book. What was important was not food, but preserving moments, place, and who I was. Williams insists, “Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact” (11). He argues that culture includes everyday meanings/values (not just the cultured expressions of art and intellect, 11). Making ajiaco to me was a cultural experience, because it involved shared practices, traditions recited for time, and actions that were so well known that they themselves meant something. These are the little unattended traditions which sustain our cultural heritage.
Those sleepless nights of hardcore gaming and music booming through my headphones and my mixtape moving from Assyrian chants to Colombian reggaetón are flooding me once again. That night, my head was divided between polishing FiveM movie edits and writing a server plugin immediately. It seemed both strange and impressive to observe how my music and tech were merging until I paused to reflect on the process. Williams notes that culture is dynamic and balances classic and novel methods (13). He writes, “Forming community is never fixed; rather what we share shifts as we seek out and discover it” (13). That thought resonated with my understanding of what was going on. I wasn’t simply emulating cultural customs of the past; I was generating something new from that background. What I used for the music and tech, gathered from multiple sources, didn’t fit into one lineage, and the programming and gaming I do are also a combination of various backgrounds. Williams proposes that culture consists of the ways the individuals construct and construe meaning instead of a passive experience with it. Although some may say it’s just “just gaming”, I am creating my own culture.
Williams also contests the idea that society splits culture into elite “high” and popular “low” forms such as between opera and TikTok or Shakespeare and streetwear. He declares that “There are no masses;” Williams argues that “the idea of ‘the masses’ is only a viewpoint we employ for people” (12). He shoots at the cultural elitism which asserts that only specific cultural manifestations, e.g. Shakespeare or classical music, are actual culture. I’ve felt this division firsthand. Academics usually consider traditional literature as something more authentic, but if I refer to the stories in Latin trap music or the inventiveness in a Valorant video, it’s typically dismissed as mere entertainment. What Williams would oppose and what I agree with is that all modes of expression are equal. The stuff I find in TikTok, the memes I love to share with my friends, and the ways we use to remix, edit media – they all have their particularities. Williams explains that the term culture is used in the following two senses: …to convey everyday living – those we typically link to culture; to describe artistic and intellectual achievements – the peculiar processes of discovery and creative work” (15). My ordinary life blends both: the common and the creative. That balance is culture.
He further asserts that class in part determines how our cultural practices are shaped. He claims “Culture is a common part of life, and understanding it is simply a regular human process” (16). Grown up in a working-class immigrant family, I realized culture was about life or death. Making do with what we had, lending our neighbors Wi-Fi, and working multiple jobs, we weren’t economically disadvantaged; we were merely existing and dealing. This was our culture out of necessity. It wasn’t in formal lessons that my mom passed culture to me; rather. Through her actions she demonstrated to me how to stretch a single dish for several dinners, how to connect languages for relatives, how to move through Colombian and American, Assyrian and digital worlds. That practical wisdom can not be learned from examples in galleries or school books. That unvoiced knowledge that was passed down from generation to generation Williams would call “structures of feeling”. That’s where real culture lives: in the common sense and the creativity as used in our daily lives.
In his last point, Williams demands that scholars consider culture as something other than just “observed” from a distance. Williams writes, “The notion of culture, the notion of an elite or accomplished group, is essentially a reflection of ruling-class power” (14). Rather than viewing culture from an impossible position, we should participate in it. This is why I am so concerned about the writing of this essay. Instead of just recording the culture, I’m actually living a part of it. I’m in it. Translating messages into three languages, switching between Fairuz and Feid, and working from a client’s computer while listening to Spotify—it is all an example of the everyday ordinary culture I have. It is due to Williams that I learn that everything about my culture is precious and worth exploring. They’re meaningful. They’re worth analyzing. He prompts us to connect culture with the common life of people, which is what I try to do with these narratives.
Finally, culture is ordinary not because of its simplicity, but because it influences all our daily actions. It’s ordinary because it’s personal. Raymond Williams rewrote what culture means to us by blurring the lines between elite and everyday life, scholarship and work, and art and routine. My Colombian & Assyrian American upbringing has taught me about the culture blurring the lines between traditions and creativity & permanence and change. Whether it is cooking ajiaco every now and then during the week or simply messing around with some FiveM scripts or creating a playlist which effortlessly incorporates different languages, I keep adding to my cultural activities. Culture is common, according to Williams “. We have to begin there” (11). When we look at the small we find the truly remarkable nature of our everyday lives.
Works Cited
Williams, Raymond. Culture is Ordinary. 1958. Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, edited by Robin Gable, Verso, 1989, pp. 3–18.
