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The Constitution of the Republic of Estonia tells us to preserve the Estonian culture. What is it we should do when we wish to preserve a certain culture? And what do we mean by the word culture? These are the questions that Tõnu Viik, the director of the Tallinn University School of Humanities, will discuss.

Culture as a phenomenon is difficult to define, as it is a word that is used to describe so many different things. Culture is used to talk about language, beliefs and habits, material objects, works of art, as well as common values, collective memory, etc.

In the 18^th century, culture was believed to be the sphere of professional art, which encompasses painting, theatre, music, literature and other fine arts.

Ministries of culture tend to handle culture in the abovementioned sense. But disciplines researching culture started to widen the definition of culture to the whole human kind and its actions, which made the cleavage between “high” and “low” culture diminish.

Culture has acquired the meaning of a way of life of a nation. Culture is seen to describe the collective meanings, practices and institutions that separate one people from others, Christians from Muslims, or people from the middle ages from people from the antiquity.

The human being as a representative of a biological species is the same in all of these contexts, but his or her comprehension, manners and habits – the pattern of their behaviour, differs.

Naturally, every person differs from the others – they have a different view of the world and dissimilar behaviour. Nevertheless, their thinking and actions are much more similar to those they live with than those who are distant from them both in space and time.

In addition, groups of people have the power to create a collective memory from a common past, the future, or a reflective comprehension on the “we”. The individual thus gets the chance to feel themselves a member of a larger collective group. This is a good place to use Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities”.

What makes a person’s view of the world and the self similar to those around them?

This is only  made possible to a shared or collective meaning, which a person uses daily to understand things and see meaning in their own actions. Let’s take the specks of light in the night sky – they can be seen as the souls of our forefathers, angels, tears in the fabric of the sky, or anything else.

People with an education from the modern society will see them as far-away celestial bodies, as this is what we learn in school. Very few of us have had the chance to see the proof with our “own eyes”. This is the same reason why older cultures and societies have different interpretations of this.

The human being perceives the world through the meanings they give to things. Mostly they give things the same meaning the other members of their community do, as this seems correct and self-evident.

Therefore, every group of people decomposes the world via certain common meanings. This is why there were no black holes in the world of Ancient Greece, as there are no Gods of Olympus in ours. Cultural umwelten vary in different places and times, as they are created according to the possibilities of sense-making in a given culture.

Thus, a culture could be defined as an interwoven pattern of commonly accepted meanings, which articulates itself through the behaviour, thinking and lifestyle of the members of the group. Culture means commonly shared meanings. Obviously, the language is the most important holder and enabler of meanings, as most meanings are given through language.

If this is in fact the case, then the richness of a culture is directly linked to the richness of its semiosphere. The more collective meanings it has, the more possibilities for meaning-making the members of this culture have, bringing them more variation in behaviour, thinking and lifestyle.

The increase in possibilities increases the wealth and attractiveness of the culture, reeling in more and more people. Preserving a culture, therefore, means enriching the collective semiosphere.

How could this work? We have to look closer into the origin of collective meanings. Almost none of the meanings a group shares belongs to them, originally. Most collective meanings are loans from other cultures.

The Christian God Jehovah is the reflection of the Israeli God Yahweh; the Muslim prophet Ibrahim is none other than the Israeli Abraham. The Estonian song festival tradition comes from the German culture. The semiosphere of each culture comprises of successful translations and take-overs. Of the foreign, that has started to function as our own.

Preserving a culture does not mean closing it up, but keeping a steady traffic at the borders. A successful transfer across the border can be called cultural translation: this is a process during which foreign meanings become our own and start to form and compose our life and thinking.

This result surpasses the laws of natural mechanics: it turns out the viability of a culture does not lie in the defence of it from alien cultural influences, but in the intensity of the dialogue and the ability to translate.

A characteristic of a viable culture is the increased integration of the foreign into our own. When the translation mechanism weakens, the culture will slowly wane. Ergo, preserving a small culture means contributing into the capabilities of the translation mechanism.

If we look at the current refugee scare and consider the result above, we can deduce that if a few hundred or even some tens of thousands of immigrants are a danger to the culture of Estonia, it is clear the viability of our culture has already died down.

The refugee scare presupposes that the culture of Estonia is not attractive to them and they are not motivated to become part of it. Another presupposition is that our culture cannot absorb the alien culture that the refugees bring, and therefore will not become wealthier.

The speed and capacity a culture is able to transform the foreign into our own shows the viability of the culture. The more it clams up, the lower is its translating capability, making the chances its global survival slim.