Culture
Much about the Chigs' society and culture remains unknown throughout the series, presenting them as mysterious and therefore terrifying alien enemies trying to destroy humanity. Their specific command hierarchy and general social structures remain unexplained. From the Chig ambassador's claims in the final two episodes, it seems that they consider the moon they evolved on (codenamed "Anvil" by humans) to be "sacred" in some sense.
One curious practice observed since early in the war with humanity was that whenever Chig infantry encountered the grave of a dead human soldier, they would dig up the body and mutilate the corpse, typically by completely dismembering it. At first, the human military thought this was a terror-tactic, meant to frighten human soldiers with the Chigs' brutality. As the war progressed, it was eventually discovered that while the Chigs may possess some form of "religion" (given that they consider their breeding grounds to be sacred), they never developed a concept of an afterlife. As it turns out, humans are just as much mysterious, terrifying aliens to the Chigs as they are to humans. As the Chigs encountered snippets of human culture, through intercepted radio transmissions or recovered personal effects from dead soldiers, etc., they drastically misinterpreted this alien concept of an "afterlife". This led the Chigs to believe that dead human soldiers will literally spring back to life sometime after their death, and that burying a corpse aids this process. Genuinely terrified of this human "army of zombies", Chig infantry then began to dig up the graves of human soldiers they came across and completely dismember their corpses, to make sure they stay dead.
Just as humans have applied the derogatory slang-nickname "Chigs" to the aliens, they have their own derogatory slang term for humans. According to their Silicate allies, the term loosely translates as "Red Stink Creature". Chigs have green instead of red blood, and smell like sulfur. As it turns out, humans' red blood and non-sulfur smell strikes the Chigs as just as disturbingly "unnatural" as their alien biology seems to us.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)