A recent google search revealed that there is yet little clarity in the understanding of how individuals are related to culture. While there are a few sites that talk about cultural processes at the individual level, most still seem to assume that culture is essentially collective and that individuals are subsidiaries of social collectivity in the culture they acquire. In case anyone is interested enough in this topic to search for and discover this blog post, I will briefly clarify this issue by addressing what collectivity and individuality really are, what culture is, and how they are related.
Individuals have a body, brain, and senses, among other things. They communicate with each other in various ways but whatever method they use to think, feel, and act, that method has to be first uploaded (or downloaded, depending on how you look at it) to the individual. So while culture gets 'shared' among individuals, it has to be internalized, or at least interfaced, at the individual level to be acted upon by individuals. What's more, individuals have the power to modify existing culture or create their own cultural ideas and techniques. So without recognition of this ability for individuals to act relatively independently, at least in some situations, culture is inadequately explained as a group phenomenon. While it may be popular to identify cultural patterns with reference to group identities, this does not mean that groups are the material basis for culture.
Collectivism is an interesting social phenomenon and ideology (various ideologies are collectivist, actually) in that it can only exist through the volition of individuals to conform, yet conformity is done with regard to 'collectivities,' which are imagined as actual entities whose existence goes beyond (and is even responsible for) the individuals who are identified as part of the group. The culture of collectivism is very popular among individuals precisely because it allows individuals to attribute responsibility for their actions to an external entity. Since informal collective entities have no single individual who could dispute claims about the collective, individuals can usually construe collectivity without resistance. Disputes can arise with regard to collective-attributions, but as popular attributions gain acceptance, individuals can stick with attributions that tend to escape dispute and thereby avoid conflict. This is just one form of collectivist cultural behavior among many.
Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on your perspective), there is a cultural tradition of collective representation and attribution within various social sciences to which many writers conform. Because of this, it seems, few writers are either willing or able in their writing style to describe culture and other social interactions in truly individual terms. Notice that even at the beginning of this paragraph, I used the phrase, "there is a cultural tradition . . ." instead of saying that many individuals use collective representation and attribution. Describing the situation in terms of individuals would be more accurate, considering that individuals can be empirically observed while cultural traditions can only be inferred as patterns based on analysis of other observations, yet stylistic habits and assumptions of what will appeal to readers leads me to talk in terms of institutions instead of individuals. 'Institutional realism,' the term I use to describe language that describes and treats institutions as empirically observable objects, is a curious extension of collectivist ontology.
So in order to properly understand how culture actually works at the empirical level, it is necessary to understand how culture gets created, how it gets institutionalized, how institutions get communicated, and what the parameters are for humans to think, feel, and act. While it is necessary to perform at least some detailed thought experiments/explorations regarding specific cultural practices in the various applicable social contexts, I will cut to the chase here for the sake of brevity about the individual's relationship to other individuals, culture, and the so-called collectives/groups.
The individual is ultimately the site/level at which culture happens. There are aspects of culture that emerge through social interactions, which could be described as "collective behaviors" but even these can arguably be broken down into components that occur at the individual level. The reason it is important to break these things down to the individual level is because individuals are never directly determined by forces external to themselves. While they may feel like that is the case sometimes, closer analysis will reveal that social forces are never determinant unless, perhaps, they are physical. A person can be pushed or carried physically without their volition but non-physical force requires coercion, manipulation, or some other technique that necessitates their cooperation. They may cooperate unhappily, but without cooperation, nonphysical social forces can't function.
Culture, therefore, works as an interface between/among individuals. Often non-human delegates such as media and other technologies are involved. Often institutions and habitual behavioral patterns are involved. But in the end, individuals are the site of cultural implantation and expression. Even the thought of collective existence can only occur in the individual mind because there is no collective mind for it to occur in, that is unless individuals formulate a conception of what a 'collective mind' might be and interpolate thoughts according to that framework. Yet, until now at least, no direct connectivity has been devised to allow individual brains to think each others' thoughts or perceive through the physical senses of another body. It may be possible to wear electronic glasses that display video images of cameras mounted on someone else's head allowing the simulation of interindividual vision, but none with a direct biological nerve connection, as far as I'm aware.
So clearly the relationship between the individual and culture must be a direct one, whereas the relationship between individual and collective identity is a more complex one that relies on culturing the subjectivity and identities of individuals so that they think, feel, and act in terms of the collective entities they imagine existing outside of themselves. Of course, the social negotiation of such collectivist culture can be very insistent and violent, which is why Emile Durkheim described culture as "obligatory." Social pushing, sanctions, violence, and so forth might install such high levels of fear in individuals as to prompt them to oblige whatever cultural programming they feel obliged to accept, enact, or reproduce - but this nevertheless cannot make it true that culture is by nature collective. If it were possible to make something true simply by intimidation or preference, there would never be any doubt about any claim as being less than true. Individuals manage culture at the individual level and the collective appearance of culture is the result of individuals perceiving patterns at the social level and/or second-hand accounts of culture described in collective terms.
