My Dear Lady Disdain

newwavefeminism:

honestly, I don’t think “the west” has the same definition depending on who you talk to. But i’m going to just copy & paste things from wikipedia that coincide with my understanding of the term.

the term itself

Though the term originally had a literal geographic meaning and contrasted Europe with the cultures of the Orient or Asia, today the term West does not imply geographic location, as most of Europe and Oceania, major components of the West, lie in the Eastern Hemisphere.

western “culture”

The term “Western culture” is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs,religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies.

Specifically, Western culture may imply:

• a Biblical-Christian cultural influence in spiritual thinking, customs and either ethic or moral traditions, around Post-Classical Era.
• European cultural influences concerning artistic, musical, folkloric, ethic and oral traditions, whose themes have been further developed by Romanticism.
• a Graeco-Roman Classical and Renaissance cultural influence, concerning artistic, philosophic, literary, and legal themes and traditions, the cultural social effects of migration period and the heritages of Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and other ethnic groups, as well as a tradition of rationalism in various spheres of life, developed by Hellenistic philosophy, Scholasticism,Humanisms, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment.

The concept of Western culture is generally linked to the classical definition of the Western world. In this definition, Western culture is the set of literary, scientific, political, artistic and philosophical principles that set it apart from other civilizations. Much of this set of traditions and knowledge is collected in the Western canon.^[13]

The term has come to apply to countries whose history is strongly marked by European immigration or settlement, such as the Americas, and Australasia, and is not restricted to Europe.