What is a cultureist anyway? Well, first and foremost it's a clumsy concatenation of "culutre" and the suffix "ist." Briefly, it describes a person who studies culture. Just like economists study the economy and ecologists study ecology, cultureists study culture.
Much like the economy, culture is an abstracted entity. Everyone agrees that it exists, but no one can say exactly where it is or what it looks like. "The economy" isn't merely the aggregate assets minus the aggregate liabilities of a given region, but a meta entity made up of the countless economic transactions that take place each second, and changes shape with each new transaction, defying attempts to pin it down for study. At the macro level, however, we can observe its organic behavior; expanding or shrinking, growing into new sectors while other sectors die out.
Similarly, culture is not merely the sum of all of the books in all of the libraries, but an abstract entity constructed by the countless cultural transactions that we continuously engage in. Cultural objects are produced, purchased, ignored, consumed, loved, hated, reviewed, commented on and parodied, all of which becomes part of the cultural landscape and is implicitly absorbed by other cultural objects. All of these individual transactions aggregate into a mysterious entity we call "culture." It behaves metabolically; consuming, growing and spreading in irregular and unpredictable ways.
People who study culture are often characterized as academics in an ivory tower, working in the unhelpfully named "humanities" field, writing papers about phallic symbols in Shakespeare's works. I have supplied the term "cultureist" here to reinvent that image. Cultureists are actively engaged in an attempt to understand the mysterious, dynamic entity that is loosely defined but universally recognized as "culture." It both reflects and impels our minds and imaginations. It can bind nations together or split them apart. It affects us all in profound ways, and cultureists struggle to illuminate glimpses of its inscrutable, organic movement. When they are successful they provide insights about its creators, humans, both as a group and as individuals.
