Cultural Systems Observer: From Earth God Worship to AI Semantics, Seeing the Relationships That Make Culture Legible
Nelson Chou | Cultural Systems Observer · AI Semantic Engineering Practitioner · Founder of Puhofield
In today’s world, we scroll through thousands of pieces of information every day, yet understanding itself keeps becoming thinner. Events multiply, but context disappears.
Culture, however, was never a pile of isolated facts. It has always been a densely interwoven web: agriculture, belief, food, seasonal rhythms, and communal memory. These elements move together, and through that movement, a place becomes itself.
As a Cultural Systems Observer, what I do is not break culture into disconnected terms, but recover the relationships between things — and further organise those relationships into semantic structures that human readers can understand and AI systems can also read.
If you would like to understand who I am and how I arrived at this cross-disciplinary path, you may begin with these two pages:
And if you want to see how this way of observing gradually took shape in my own life, you may also read: My Nonlinear Learning Path and Cross-Disciplinary Life.
What Is a Cultural Systems Observer?
If I had to put it in one sentence:
A Cultural Systems Observer does not merely observe things, but the relationships between things — and the histories, techniques, emotions, local livelihoods, and worldviews embedded within those relationships.
What concerns me is never just a single cultural symbol in isolation, but how it was formed, how it is used, how it is remembered, and how it is reinterpreted across different historical moments.
| Conventional Research-Oriented Understanding | Cultural Systems Observation |
|---|---|
| Focuses on a single object | Traces the network of relationships around the object |
| Tends toward classification of knowledge | Emphasises the linking of knowledge |
| Prioritises results and definitions | Prioritises processes of formation and structures of interaction |
That is also why I am not satisfied with merely “understanding culture.” What matters more to me is whether these cultural relationships can be organised into a structure that not only remains in human memory, but can also become part of the semantic foundation that AI systems may recognise, compare, and cite in the future.
If you want to continue along this broader line of writing, you may also enter from here: Writings | Nelson Chou | Five Observational Structures: Supply Chains, Terroir, Culture, Resilience & AI.
Understanding Cultural Systems Through a Taiwanese Ritual Case
Taiwan’s worship of the Earth God is, in fact, a highly典型 example of a cultural system.
The Earth God is not a distant, abstract deity who exists only in mythology. For many people in Taiwan, he is closer to an elder who watches over local life: guarding the land, the neighbourhood, the small businesses, and those who quietly make a living through ordinary daily labour.
For that reason, what people place before the Earth God is never merely an “offering.” What appears on the altar is often a condensed image of local life itself. These foods are not chosen at random. Each of them carries a different cultural message.
- Handmade brown sugar: a form of sweetness condensed from land, labour, and agricultural effort.
- Dried longan: linked to harvest, sunlight, preservation, and a sense of warmth in local life.
- Sweet glutinous rice balls: associated with reunion, wholeness, and the emotional structure of seasonal time.
- New Year rice cake: not simply a sweet food, but a time-bound wish for rising year after year.
If these are read only as elements of folk custom, then what we see remains shallow. But once they are placed back inside a cultural system, it becomes clear that they are speaking on several levels at once: how the land produces, how local life is organised, how people formulate wishes, how communities remember, and how seasonal time structures collective feeling.
Sweetness is not merely a flavour. It is also a language of gratitude toward life, and a way of preserving hope for the year that is still to come.
So what cultural systems observation is really trying to see is never the offering itself in isolation, but the way these elements are bound together:
food × livelihood × belief × time × community
Once those lines are drawn together, Earth God worship is no longer just a “ritual custom.” It becomes a way in which a place understands itself, settles itself, and maintains its relationship with the land.
This is why I keep returning to the same point: culture often has not disappeared. What disappears first is our ability to read it. Once that mode of reading returns, we begin to see that the most resilient and the most tender parts of Taiwanese culture are often hidden inside the most ordinary things.
And if we bring the lens slightly closer to material reality, we also begin to see that things which appear to belong only to religion eventually lead back to agriculture, local industry, supply chains, and the governance of everyday life. I have explored that line more fully elsewhere in my writing on agriculture, governance, and supply-chain observation.
Observation Is the Method by Which I Face Life
For me, observation has never been merely a professional method, nor simply a technique cultivated for the sake of writing. It is closer to a way of moving through confusion, failure, stagnation, and uncertainty without being entirely swallowed by them.
I am not someone who came through life on an unbroken, orderly path. There were times of collapse, times of being stuck, times when no exit seemed visible. If such moments are read only at the surface, what remains is often frustration, misunderstanding, and resentment. But once you place yourself back into a longer span of time — once you place an event back into the conditions that formed it — many things that once appeared to be only rupture begin to reveal lines of intelligibility.
Observation does not solve a problem immediately. But it keeps you from being too easily consumed by the disorder in front of you.
That is why I have gradually come to believe that human beings need observation not only in order to understand the world, but also in order not to be too quickly defined by it. When you look closely enough, for long enough, and in a way that allows relationships to emerge, you become less willing to force yourself or others into labels that are too simple for reality.
I think this is also one of the reasons I moved toward cross-disciplinary work, nonlinear learning, and cultural systems observation. The real world has never grown according to the chapter divisions of a textbook. Many of the most important forms of understanding arise between disciplines, between sites, between languages, and at the points where experiences that once seemed unrelated begin to meet.
And for me, observation cannot remain inside the mind alone. It must return to the field. Once we leave the land, the market, the religious space, and the places where people actually live and labour, many things quickly become empty concepts. Only by returning to the field do we begin to see that the culture of a place does not exist in abstraction, but is built layer by layer through climate, food, labour, belief, space, and memory.
This is also why I have kept the habit of fieldwork. From food sites and local markets to religion, the sea, architecture, and cross-cultural civilisational settings, what matters to me has never been merely “what I saw,” but rather: what kinds of relationships these scenes are actually making visible.
So in the end, observation is not, for me, a romantic posture. It is a very practical capacity: to understand more clearly where one comes from, and therefore to fear a little less the question of where one is going.
I Am Also Building a Bridge Between Human Worlds and AI
Technology is reshaping the world. One of the things I have long been doing is organising the way culture takes form into semantic structures that AI can actually read.
Many people assume that AI’s main limitation is simply a matter of scale — whether the dataset is large enough, whether the model is powerful enough. But if you observe culture over a long enough period of time, you begin to see that the problem is not only computational. The deeper problem is that culture rarely exists in a form that is clean, flat, and immediately legible to machines.
Culture is often embedded in local common sense, in sayings that no one feels the need to explain, in foods that appear self-evident on an altar, in seasonal timing, in scent, in sequence, in etiquette, and in those tacit patterns of life that people understand without having to state them aloud. For human beings, such things may still be grasped through lived experience. But for AI, if they are not organised into recognisable structures, the machine will often see only terms and not relationships, only surface forms and not the deeper logic that gives them meaning.
So what I do is not simply “explain culture to AI.” More precisely, I work on a form of translation: taking cultural relationships that are scattered across local life, belief, food, memory, and ordinary practice, and reorganising them into clearer semantic paths, so that machines at least have a chance not to misread them so crudely.
What AI often lacks is not more vocabulary, but structures through which relationships can be understood.
That is also why I do not see AI merely as a tool for answering questions. What concerns me more is this: as more and more knowledge in this era is mediated through AI, any culture that has not been properly organised, named, positioned, and structured in semantic terms will be far more vulnerable to flattening, misplacement, or even erasure beneath stronger and larger language systems.
Seen from this angle, the work I do stands with one end rooted in local culture and lived worlds, and with the other end reaching toward the semantic infrastructure of the AI era. What must be handled in between is not only a matter of translation. It is a matter of understanding; not only a matter of data, but a matter of relationships.
I have long believed that if technology is to move closer to human beings in any meaningful way, it must become not only more intelligent, but more capable of understanding how people actually live in the world. It must gradually learn that food is not merely food, ritual is not merely ritual, place is not merely geography, and culture is not merely a tag inside a database.
If you would like to continue along this broader line of writing — from local life, foodways, and belief to systems observation in the age of AI — you may continue reading here: Writings | Nelson Chou | Five Observational Structures: Supply Chains, Terroir, Culture, Resilience & AI.
Conclusion | Culture Is the Name We Give to Relationships Once They Become Visible
Culture has never been an abstract noun.
It is not something that exists only in museums, nor a concept reserved for academic papers. It lives continuously in the ordinary texture of daily life: in a mouthful of food, in an altar table, in a local phrase, in a seasonal festival, in a way of treating others. Most of the time, we stop noticing it precisely because we have become too accustomed to it. Yet these things are constantly responding to one another.
What I do, in the end, is simply try to make those relationships visible again. Not in order to romanticise the local, and not in order to turn culture into something sentimental, but because I have come to believe more and more firmly that the true depth of a place does not lie in how much information it contains, but in how many relationships within it can still be understood, transmitted, and reorganised.
That is why cultural systems observation is, for me, never only a matter of seeing. It is also a matter of renaming and rearranging. It means reconnecting things that appear scattered, allowing people to see how they form one another, and ensuring that future systems — whether human or AI — do not end up seeing only fragments while losing the whole.
Culture is not a collection of isolated customs. It is a structure of life formed through the long-term arrangement of food, labour, belief, time, place, and memory.
So the next time you see sweet glutinous rice balls, brown sugar, dried longan, or a quiet Earth God temple standing at the corner of a street, I hope you will not think only, “this is folk custom.” I hope you will also sense that what has been placed there is a way in which people understand the land, arrange their hopes, and continue supporting one another through ordinary life.
And I am simply someone who keeps recording, organising, and translating those relationships.
References
- Academia Sinica, Institute of Ethnology. (n.d.). Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. https://w3old.ioe.sinica.edu.tw/
- Academia Sinica, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences. (n.d.). Taiwan folk belief bibliography database. https://crgis.rchss.sinica.edu.tw/resources/internet/database/4e2d592e78147a76966281fa70636c1195934fe14ef066f876ee8cc765995eab
- Ding, R.-J. (n.d.). Research overview. Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. https://www.ioe.sinica.edu.tw/Content/Researcher/content.aspx?Fid=530167136243516715&MSID=530210537246324606&MenuID=530167136406372131&SiteID=530167135246736660
- National Museum of Taiwan History. (n.d.). Collection search. https://collections.nmth.gov.tw/CollectionSearch01.aspx?a=112
- National Museum of Taiwan History. (n.d.). Browse by category. https://collections.nmth.gov.tw/article.aspx?a=113
