Question: From your perspective, what is Taiwanese or Chinese culture?

PS: Feel free to take a look at the posts for 2022 if you need some inspiration :)

The question is of course unanswerable with a tool as clumsy and imprecise as natural or constructed language; it would take too long to try to explain even if we knew everything we waned to say, and there would always be a gap between what we can verbalize and express to others or ourselves and what we can personally and implicitly know or feel ("Polanyi's paradox" and Wittengstein's "private language" speculations) — and even then another equally unbridgeable gap between what we can know, feel, and represent and what actually *is* (cf. Derrida's concept of différance, or Kant's philosophy of cognition and their relation to putatively real "things in themselves"). 

However, knowing that this is, one some level, the question we're trying to answer in considering Chinese culture primes us for what to pay attention to and what to absorb when we begin exploring specific contexts where the answers to these questions—which exist in some (possibly/likely unrepresentable/ineffable) embodied way within all social agents and may also find their way into abstract ideological and concrete legal-institutional social structures—exert some guiding or even coercive influence on intersubjective action and, in so doing, expose themselves to our perception.

Why this is required to understand culture is related to the reason why culture exists everywhere and in so many different forms: at base, we have at any given moment (in theory) total freedom about what to do, be, think, feel, etc. Again, this is true of literally *every moment* of our lives. Our brains and bodies cannot handle choosing from among an uncountably infinite range of options — the cognitive load is too great, and there's also always the threat of devolving into nihilism when we begin to realize just how groundless we are as individual subjects. The situation is untenable, so we have to reduce the degrees of freedom somehow. (Cf. Sartre and other French existentialists views, and social scientists ideas about "coordination problems" and first-order theories of social construction.)

The selection of a particular set of default actions, thoughts, feelings, etc., or of default algorithms for the generation of such ideas/thoughts/feelings/units/actions/practices/people etc. all help us survive this existentialist freedom as each of us an individual — and together as well, once the inculcation of other individuals and the institutionalization within enduring social structures of those defaults begins. Moreover, that these defaults are being created (and performed, modified, reinterpreted, retrospectively legitimated, etc.) intersubjectively (and by something we perceive to be a community) offers the side benefit of bridging those gaps of ineffability separating individuals conscious experiences, as well as emotional tethering us to the others, both of which serve to imbue all those contingent, even random and potentially fungible, choices of defaults with a sense of import beyond themselves (which derives ultimately from recognition of shared authorship and subjectivity over this part of our existence and a resultant communion in lived experience — cf. Hegel's Geist).

(To be fair, the physical environment also exerts some level of influence by conditioning the still uncountably infinite choices available — Sichuan food culture could not exist and would certainly not have developed had the Sichuan pepper not been a part of the physical environment in which that culture developed, and its presence in that region no doubt contributed to distinguishing that region; likewise, natural and inherited built environments also stimulate or reinforce certain aspects of culture, not least in the form of socializing us into certain aesthetics.)

Anyway, if we bring this back down to earth and focus on China, we can get away with saying that "Chinese culture" is an vast web of symbolic and embodied arrangements (between both abstract and concrete things) originally given form, continually lived, and progressively developed by those for whom the symbol "Chinese" constitutes a part of their identity. Foods, cultural icons, accepted hierarchies, thought and communication patterns, etc. all exist within this web.

Will individuals differ on what constitutes Chinese culture depending on their relative placement within that web to others belonging to that social unit? Yes, but that's a feature, not a bug. What matters more is that specific features will be understood by many to distinguish Chinese culture from others, and indeed, features with that characteristic are often the most cherished by or important to members of that culture precisely because of the fact that they help distinguish their group from others while at the same time unifying their group against a foil (cf. Bateson's idea of 'schizmogenesis', also used by Graeber).

This I think is the only comprehensive context in which we can understand the relationship between those distinctive points: huoguo/malaxiangguo, kaoya, and yuebing; shufa, jingju, and sishuwujing/sidamingzhu; kongzi/rujiao, feizi/fajiao, and laozi/zhuangzi/daojiao; xiaoshun, mianzi, guanxi — all these artifacts are constitutive of "Chinese culture" not because they are things in themselves that are naturally/necessarily Chinese, but it's also not the case that they "just happen to be Chinese" (and that they're therefore nothing special). Rather, they exist interrelatedly within that web and have a connection with actual embodied and conscious Chinese people past and present, serving to congeal their (collective) inaccessible, ephemeral, and limitless spirits in external, enduring, and intersubjectively accessible "things".