Culture is tricky: a commentary on culture emergent in occupation.

Culture is tricky. A recent encounter with the word culture in the Sunday newspapers illustrates just how tricky it can be. In one article, culture referred to classical music, dance, and art—sometimes called highbrow culture. Another section listed cultural events—each of them celebrating one or another ethnic group. In a third instance, a reporter wrote about how religious organizations were marketing books and music through retail chains, ensuring the place of these materials in the popular culture. Each of these articles wrote of culture, but the cultures they addressed only hinted at the thing we call culture. None provided a picture of culture as a central part of daily life for most people. Perhaps a recent encounter with a child and his father is more illustrative of culture at work. As I entered a grocery store with an empty cart, a small Black boy of about 4 put up his hand as if to stop me. I perceived a game, and exclaimed with a smile, “Oh, do I have to stop?” He grinned widely and put up both hands. “Oh, no, I can’t go yet!” I responded. He laughed, and a man I assumed to be his father looked up from feeding coins into a sorting and counting machine and smiled before he returned to his task. The boy waved me on in the best traffic police style, and I thanked him as I, an older White woman, went on to do my shopping. How was this experience cultural? Obviously, the boy and I shared knowledge of a traffic officer (or crossing guard) and an understanding of games of pretend. We recognized signs each of us gave the other of being ready to play. The man (who in my culturally constructed view was probably his father) understood the signs as well—I was not going to harm his child, nor was the boy causing trouble. We were all interacting with each other in a shared understanding. There were other cultural things going on here as well, thrifty behavior by the man, a woman perhaps fulfilling a stereotypic role of provisioning for the family, the license granted a child to engage in mildly disruptive behavior in the spirit of play. Despite our differences in age and ethnicity, each of us knew the rules and played the game spontaneously and correctly. This was culture at work, and while it might seem like a common enough interaction, it was embedded in Western views of childhood and play. Comparing this episode to Bazyk, Stalnaker, Llerena, Ekelman, and Bazyk’s (2003) account of the play of Mayan children in Belize, it becomes apparent that what happened to me was not a universal adult–child construction