hallmarks of cultural maturity

The Pund culture of the Loraschrelleng Highlands (above the 104th antiparallel and west of Iyt Gallango) got so exasperated with the dozens of cultural anthropologists and various ex-pats that would settle amongst them that Zrillmaya Araspongbent volunteered for the nonexistent position of "ad hoc official cultural ambassador".

The Pund culture is one of the few cultures where "not identifying oneself with one's own culture" is a core value. Araspongbent sez:

"In a culture where members of the culture conflate themselves with the culture, there is the opportunity for unrestricted cultural warfare, viz.: by such a conflation, the person mistakenly percieves attacks on their culture to be attacks on their person. We, the Pund, generally recognize a few hallmarks of cultural maturity. First, in a mature culture, members of that culture do not conflate themselves with the culture, and feel no need to defend their culture from attacks in word. Mature cultures have strong enough internal epistemology that they can weather this kind of interference demurely. Secondly in a mature culture, the culture itself has achieved a sort of cultural self-awareness that is absent in previous stages and one of whose ramifications is that cultural self awareness and personal self awareness are distinct. Thirdly, in a mature culture there is recognition that comparing one's culture to others for the purposes of self-aggrandizement is an ultimately fruitless endeavour. Fourthly, in a mature culture there is recognition that every culture has its flaws, including whichever culture this is.  Immature cultures are very bad at boundary management, and two typical pathologies are being really leaky and amorphous, or being really tight and disciplined. A mature culture recognizes that in order to retain vitality, it must actively shape a kind of fluid mosaic boundary between itself and others. Mature cultures generally prefer a kind of self-deprecatory gatekeeping to an explicitly "ministry of culture" approach, wherein there is some central authority for certifying various cultural arts and products as authentic and marking as deficient those which are percieved by some bureaucracy as inauthentic and invalid"...

"There are reasons that my culture, the Pund, do not participate in the Valpongent Hypercluster Intergalactic Goss Culture competition, and we are heartened that the the recent winner, Gs. Culture 301,309, the Arask of the Cherengerell made a point afterwards by throwing their winnings (twenty grams of memory diamond containing all of Roswep Clandelsky's unwatchable sitcom The Schralang Diaries) into the magnetar K390-2 and then declared that it would never again participate in the competition"