Esiris
Sanguina Cruenta
Which, the closed or the distinct?
The closed bit if you could. I've seen this brought up elsewhere- but it wasn't explained in a way that made much sense to me and I think the people who were trying to explain it didn't have a whole lot of patience.
The explanation can get a bit wordy
wink and it can be a bit hard to explain.
Closed cultures are ones essentially in which outsiders don't have access to the bulk of the culture itself. So the living Celtic cultures (which is not the same as being, for e.g., Scottish or Irish), and I think Rroma as well, and most Native American cultures too. It's possible they become closed, looking at that list there, because of the tendency of these cultures to be shat upon and exploited.
At any rate. These cultures are also closed because the way in which they are learned. You have to speak the language, and essentially you need to be exposed from early childhood because the traditions are ingrained in the members of the culture to a degree that they know what is said when and why. Coming into that at an older age is like learning a tricky language as an adult: if you study long and hard you'll eventually click but you'll never speak it as well as a native speaker or as well as if you'd learned it as a child. It does happen, but it's not common, as I understand it. This is true of any culture generally, but the traditions are so large a part of the cultures themselves.
So, in an open culture, like Germanic cultures, you can look into it and take elements of the culture, so long as you do so respectfully and understanding the role of that thing in the culture, and so forth. In closed cultures, you can't do that. The role of the thing might be unclear or totally unknown to those outside the culture itself. It's essentially like Wicca, which I probably could have said at the beginning of this post and saved us all the trouble. There's some stuff available to the public, some stuff you can see, but it means something a little different in the culture itself because you have extra information, and it's information based on participation in traditions etc that other people aren't privy to. At the same time, there's a limit to outside influences, and the substance of the religion (and thus the culture) are maintained, they're not watered down or degraded by outside influences.
Things I've noticed about closed cultures so far:
Things don't get out, but things also don't get in. That is, the culture itself is protected from elements of other cultures being incorporated into it. Thus the culture itself is maintained, and survives....
.....because closed cultures tend to be smaller in number or very spread out (in the case of the Rroma, although iirc there are different types of Rroma as well...?), and....
.....they tend to be sort of
within another culture, one that might be similar to or very different from the closed culture in question. For example, the Gael culture in Ireland isn't the same as the Irish culture. There are definitely similarities because they come from the same place, but the Irish culture is more open and has other influences to it, including British and Viking and, nowadays, generic global culture, American culture etc etc.... So members of these cultures may be members of other cultures as well. It's like if you're a recent migrant, and the culture you participate in outside the home is a different one to the one inside the home.
....and they tend to be cultures generally persecuted or similar at different points in history.
I could essentially a way to preserve cultures that may not have survived had they been open.
Now there are probably closed cultures that don't fall into those points I just made up right now. I mean, I'm thinking of Japan and wondering how closed that culture is... but I think it's just occasionally and vaguely xenophobic more than anything else, because it's certainly open to other cultures and embracing of those outside influences, at least to a point.
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