Atomic Apes - Who owns culture?

Who owns culture?

Let me define this, we are literally apes. Just a bunch of atoms stacked into bodies that like to think they matter, fighting over chunks of rock (sculptures) and metal (tools) and air (sound) and worms (fabric) and whatever else, and somehow we pretend it belongs to us.

Culture itself is just atoms arranged in patterns, and yet we try to put rules around it, say it’s ours or theirs, if it makes sense. We apes draw lines on the earth and call it ownership, as if a piece of crust can ever be claimed by one, as if pulling a rock out of the ground, carving it, painting it, shaping it into something that mattered to someone once somehow belongs to anyone now and forever.

Compared to the age of the universe, it’s all stardust, and yet here we are, trying to feel more special than another group of atoms by assigning meaning (humans are really just meaning seeking creatures), by creating rules, by saying that some ape gets to keep (be closer to) the culture and some other ape doesn’t.

The point I’m trying to make is that nobody owns culture. But if anyone did, it belongs with the ape who created it, and the future ones closest genetically related. For the one (or ones) who poured 180°C heat, labor, H2O and NaCl, and life into moving, shaping, carving, digging, sweating over it until it existed as more than just atoms, it belongs to them.

Although ownership is a social construct, creation is real. The act itself carries weight.

The people who just transport it, protect it, move it to a museum thousands of years later…those still work, but they do not outweigh the original creation, energy, or the thought. Even if moving or keeping a piece meant preventing it from ruin, the first act, the original hands that touched it, that is the ownership that matters.

And when I say the people most genetically related, I mean the lineage that traces back to the creator ape. Often that becomes regional variants, the descendants who share the most direct biological connection to the ones who first made it. Those are the apes who inherit that culture in the deepest sense, because the story, the energy, the struggle all flows through them in ways no one else can really claim.

Culture in general is abstract as it exists only in the arrangement of atoms, in energy. However, genetic and ancestral continuity is as close to defined ownership as it gets.

And the argument that it belongs to the world is often just a convenient excuse. A way for people who didn’t do the work to keep the prize.
Because when you zoom in, we are all just stardust, temporary arrangements of atoms. So the only law that makes sense is the simplest one. We should let the atoms stay with the people and the land that shaped them. Let the energy and matter and the thought live where it started. They’ve been rocks for millions of years, art for thousands, and eventually they will return to stardust, and all of this, all of this claiming and arguing and ownership, is temporary.

But for now, for this moment, culture stays with the apes who made it. It belongs with the group that first gave it meaning.