Interpretive Frame
This essay approaches culture not as a static collection of shared meanings, but as an ongoing narrative produced through interaction, memory, and response. By examining how stories, symbols, and practices are lived, contested, and transformed, it invites reflection on our own participation in meaning-making—and the responsibilities that participation entails.
Culture is often spoken of as though it were a settled thing: a body of traditions, values, symbols, and practices handed down intact from one generation to the next. In everyday discourse, meanings are treated as fixed—either “what something really means” or what it is supposed to mean. Disagreement, then, is framed as ignorance, hypersensitivity, or bad faith.
But culture does not function this way. Meaning is not inherited whole. It is produced—again and again—through human interaction.
Stories are told and retold. Symbols are invoked, defended, challenged, and repurposed. Practices are repeated until they feel natural, then questioned when they no longer fit lived experience. What comes to feel obvious or unquestionable is, in fact, the result of long histories of interpretation and reinforcement.
To understand why some cultural forms are widely embraced while others are experienced as deeply offensive, we must shift how we think about meaning itself—not as a fixed property of objects or traditions, but as something that emerges through lived experience, interpretation, and response.
Meaning Is Not Given—It Is Made
Every symbol—whether a flag, a phrase, a ritual, or a public monument—acquires meaning through use. It comes to stand for something because people respond to it, tell stories about it, and organize behavior around it. Over time, these meanings can feel self-evident. They sink below the level of conscious reflection and become “just the way things are.”
This is why cultural meaning often feels stable even when it is not. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity creates legitimacy. Legitimacy creates the illusion of permanence.
Yet the same symbol can carry radically different meanings for different people. A public monument may evoke pride and continuity for some, while representing exclusion or violence for others. A word spoken casually within one community may land as an injury within another. A ritual experienced as sacred by one group may be felt as oppressive by those who have been harmed in its name.
These differences are not simply matters of opinion. They arise from distinct histories of experience—personal, collective, and systemic—that shape how meaning is perceived and felt.
Understanding this does not require us to relativize everything or deny harm. It requires us to recognize that meaning is not lodged in objects themselves, but in the web of relationships, memories, and narratives through which those objects are encountered.
Multiple Levels of Meaning-Making
To make sense of cultural conflict, it is not enough to stay at one level of analysis. Meaning operates simultaneously across several interconnected dimensions.
At the personal level, individuals encounter symbols and stories through lived experience. Meaning is felt in the body—through memory, emotion, and identity. Offense, pride, grief, or belonging are not abstractions; they are phenomenological realities.
At the cultural level, shared narratives circulate through language, media, education, and tradition. These narratives tell us what is normal, honorable, shameful, or sacred. They offer scripts for interpretation long before we consciously choose them.
At the behavioral level, meaning becomes visible in action. What people repeat, defend, avoid, or protest reveals how symbols are functioning in practice, not merely in theory.
At the systems level, meanings are stabilized—or disrupted—through institutions, laws, policies, and power structures. Some interpretations are amplified and protected; others are marginalized or silenced.
When these levels align, meaning feels coherent and uncontested. When they clash, tension emerges. Cultural conflict is often the result of such collisions—when personal experience contradicts dominant narratives, or when long-standing symbols are reinterpreted in light of systemic harm.
How Meanings Persist—and How They Change
Meanings endure not because they are true in any absolute sense, but because they are continually reinforced. Experience leads to interpretation; interpretation guides response; response shapes future experience. Over time, this cycle gives cultural meanings their apparent solidity.
But this same process also explains how meanings change.
New experiences disrupt inherited interpretations. Alternative stories challenge dominant ones. Responses shift—sometimes gradually, sometimes explosively. What once felt unquestionable becomes controversial. What once went unnoticed becomes intolerable.
This is why understanding the origins of a symbol or practice matters, but is never sufficient on its own. Historical explanation can illuminate how meanings came to be, but it does not settle how they ought to function now. Nor does understanding automatically excuse harm. Meaning-making is not only interpretive; it is ethical.
The Responsibility of Participation
There is a temptation, especially amid cultural fatigue, to adopt a posture of detachment—to hope that time alone will resolve conflict, that progress will occur without deliberate effort. But culture does not drift toward justice on its own.
Participation in meaning-making is unavoidable. We are always responding—through silence or speech, through action or inaction. The question is not whether we are involved, but how consciously and responsibly we engage.
There is an old insight, drawn from religious tradition but not confined to it, that is worth recalling here: wholeness does not emerge without work. Transformation—whether named holiness, integrity, or becoming—requires deliberate practice. Reflection alone is insufficient. Interpretation must be followed by response.
In liturgical language, the work does not end with insight. It ends with dismissal: go forth. Meaning is not completed in contemplation, but in service—in how understanding reshapes conduct, relationships, and commitments.
This is not a call for moral purity or ideological certainty. It is a call to recognize that cultural change is not accidental. It arises from sustained engagement, from the willingness to remain present within tension, and from the courage to revise our own interpretations as we encounter others.
Living with Tension, Working Toward Change
Cultural conflict will not disappear. Nor should it. Tension is often the signal that inherited meanings no longer fit lived realities. The task is not to eliminate disagreement, but to interpret it well—to see what it reveals about the stories we are telling and the systems that sustain them.
When personal experience collides with systemic narratives, something important is happening. Whether that collision hardens into defensiveness or opens into transformation depends on how we respond.
Culture is a living narrative. It is written not only by institutions or movements, but by ordinary acts of meaning-making—by how we listen, how we speak, how we remember, and how we act. To engage that process responsibly is work. It is deliberate. And it is necessary.
How to cite this article
Green, R. K. (2025). Culture as a living narrative: Meaning, offense, and the work of interpretation. The Emergent Self. https://theemergentself.com/culture-as-a-living-narrative-meaning-offense-and-the-work-of-interpretation/
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