Wendell Berry says that without agriculture, there is no culture (not for long, anyway). Human culture, according to Jane Goodall, is "tool-using behavior passed from one generation to another". I tend to think of that as "craft", but really they're the same thing… how we shape our environment. The root of culture is the Latin "cultus" meaning "to cut". Coulter is a direct cognate.

We don't actually have a lot of real culture in America, losing it faster than we know. The survival of culture depends on history and context, and I don't believe that culture can survive in a glass case, or in an intellectual vacuum. If we don't feed it, it dies.

You and I may have more common ground than you think. My guess is that you're a Southerner. I am too … but generations of westward movement … losses to fire, poverty, early deaths… have left me picking up scattered bits, trying to understand who I am and how I got here.