Symbols to promote cultural identities.

Our world is full of diversity. People have developed and live their own ways and created their own cultures. Each area has developed their own way of life based on their environment; they have created their own language, own religion and that led them to become a tribe, an ethnic group or a nation as a whole. Although we live in the same, one world, each of us inhibits our own identity- physical, spiritual and cultural. It is due to culture sharing that we are able to develop and educate ourselves. Diversity has become our source of enrichment and strength.

Language was one of the symbols of our cultural identity that has allowed civilisation to develop. Nowadays, we think of language as talking and writing, however linguistically language is anything that you can use to communicate. Symbols, such pictograms have been used as language and that was the way people have symbolised their cultures or tribes. The influence on other people was very limited because it was very much dependent on the physical environment and it could not be spread out on a larger scale. People were restricted in movement because of the landscape that surrounded them, so cultures remained enclosed. It was only later on, mainly during the period of Industrial Revolution, that everything started to speed up and developed on a larger scale due to technology and scientific discoveries. Now the symbol of our culture that promotes our identity is dependent on us and what we believe and consider to be part of our lives. We are much more interconnected, and therefore our cultures become intertwined and influence each other more, so in some ways we can be more selective in what we believe and have in our lives.

Artist often explore the characteristics that determine our personal and social identity. They create a sense of who we are as individuals, questioning stereotypes and conventions while exploring attributes such as nationality, heritage or traditions. During the time of Renaissance, art wanted to capture the experience of the individual in their natural environment and culture. Artists such as Giovanni Boccaccio looked at ancient Greece and Rome and wanted to revive languages, values and intellectual traditions.

We have to accept that global communications will become even more powerful in potentially influencing our cultures, and that our identities will evolve into something new, perhaps a completely new culture due to interaction between countries worldwide- globalisation .We, as human being, can often be resistant to change and don’t like to come out of our comfort zone. This idea also extends to traditionalism and how we look at our past to form some kind of identity for ourselves. This is part of what culture is- a shared past and shared history. Tribalism means that we distrust things that are foreign to us, as a way of self-preservation, even though this can slow down development and progress. We are afraid that something new will potentially be worse than what we have already so we keep ourselves in this ‘bubble’ because we are scared of the consequences that will come with the change. We constantly wish for some improvement and something better, although we cannot change the world by being like the world. We have to stand alone as individuals to make change and put up a symbol of our own identity that will start a development of something new... something big.