what is culture?

Focus Paper
I believe that answering a question like “what is culture?” requires a concise and concrete background about myself in order for people to understand me. For this reason, excuse me if you think I am getting off the subject when reading my essay. To begin, my name is Edvín Hernandez and I am a Guatemalan Indian native. I was born into a large impoverished Indian peasant family, and raised in the Quiche branch of the Mayan culture in Guatemala. My original idiom is Quiche, which was one of the Mayan languages centuries ago. Besides my native language, Quiche, I mastered Spanish and English in my early teenage years after I migrated to the United States in February of 1997. Culture according to the Webster’s New World Dictionary is the ideas, customs, skills, arts, etc. of a people or group that are transferred, communicated, or passed along, as in or to succeeding generations. Similarly, I defined culture as the total pattern of human behavior that includes a specif...