Understanding Culture: Our Social Identity

What is culture?
Human beings are called the social creatures. Around 200,000 years ago, people had started to stay together as a big group to survive. People started having the common behaviors, such as raising a child, farming for food and exchanging the goods. For example, nowadays, in modern China, a lot of people are shopping every day at big malls to buy the meat, vegetables, organic food for the family meals from different specialty stalls. In western countries like Canada, the large number of people shop once a week at food markets. (What Is Culture?, n.d.)
Culture is the knowledge of the different groups of people, which include their languages, religions, values, cuisine, ideologies and social objects. Culture is very important because

However, what do these items mean? Let’s talk about the culture which is based on these components through the three main theoretical frameworks: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory.
From the functionalist's view, society is a system that all components can be worked and functioned together to create complete society as a whole part. In other words, a society needs the culture to exist and cultural function to operate and support the society. What’s more, cultural values give people chance to make choices on their own. Members in a society work together to fulfill the society’s needs, culture let members meet their basic needs. Functionalists also studied the cultural values, especially the education. Education plays an important role in the western countries. The culture of education, such as libraries and textbooks, supports the value of people’ education in a society. (Theoretical Perspectives on Culture, n.d.)
Symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective which highly focuses on the face to face interaction between the members of society. From interactionists’ view, symbolic interactionism was created by people from the different culture when they interacted with each other. (Theoretical Perspectives on Culture,

I still remember the first year I spent in Canada, which will be the most impressing memory in my life. The first day in Canada was started at the Pearson airport in Toronto. When I got off the plane and went to the train station, I felt an unspoken feeling inside my mind. There are not Chinese or Asian people around me anymore. There are so many people with different faces, skin color, hairstyle and eye color walking around me. People are so polite and some passengers will say “How are you?” to me that made me feel so comfortable. And I can go on the train without showing them the tickets at gates and show them the ticket when the train departed. Compared to the situation happened in China, I can feel people trust in each other