CULTURE

Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages
culture
/ˈkʌltʃə/
noun
1. the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded
collectively.
"20th century popular culture"
Similar: the arts, the humanities, intellectual achievement(s), intellectual activity, literature,
music, painting, philosophy
2. the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people or society.
"African-Caribbean culture"
Similar: civilization, society, way of life, lifestyle, customs, traditions.

A Definition
https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/mph-modules/PH/CulturalAwareness/CulturalAwareness2.html

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") generally refers to
patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activities significance and
importance. Cultures can be "understood as systems of symbols and meanings that even their
creators contest, that lack fixed boundaries, that are constantly in flux, and that interact and
compete with one another."

Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a
population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the
way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language,
religion, rituals, art. norms of behavior, such as law and morality, and systems of belief.

What is Culture?
https://myusf.usfca.edu/wise/intercultural-learning/what-is-culture

UNESCO defines culture as “the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional
features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only art and literature but lifestyles,
ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs” (UNESCO, 2001).

Definitions of Culture
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/globalpad-rip/openhouse/interculturalskills_old/core_concept_co
mpilations/global_pad_-_what_is_culture.pdf

Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define. In 1952, the American anthropologists, Kroeber
and Kluckhohn, critically reviewed concepts and definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164
different definitions.
Much of the difficulty [of understanding the concept of culture] stems from the different usages
of the term as it was increasingly employed in the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking, it was
used in three ways (all of which can be found today as well). First, as exemplified in Matthew
Arnolds’ Culture and Anarchy (1867), culture referred to special intellectual or artistic endeavors
or products, what today we might call “high culture” as opposed to “popular culture” (or
“folkways in an earlier usage). By this definition, only a portion – typically a small one – of any
social group “has” culture. (The rest are potential sources of anarchy!) This sense of culture is
more closely related to aesthetics than to social science. Partly in reaction to this usage, the
second, as pioneered by Edward Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870), referred to a quality
possessed by all people in all social groups.

What has been termed the classic definition of culture was provided by the 19th-century English
anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in the first paragraph of his Primitive Culture (1871):

“Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom,
and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Whereas the evolutionists stressed the universal character of a single culture, with different
societies arrayed from savage to civilized, Boas emphasized the uniqueness of the many and
varied cultures of different peoples or societies. Moreover he dismissed the value judgments he
found inherent in both the Arnoldian and Tylorean views of culture; for Boas, one should never
differentiate high from low culture, and one ought not differentially valorize cultures as savage or
civilized.

Talking about Culture

https://myusf.usfca.edu/wise/intercultural-learning/what-is-culture

Cultural Generalizations vs. Stereotypes: Good Cultural Generalizations are based on

systematic cross-cultural research. They refer to predominant tendencies among groups of
people, so they are not labels for individuals. A given individual may exhibit the predominant
group tendency a lot, a little, or not at all.

Stereotypes are not descriptive, but judgemental. Rather than being a broad generalization that
is flexible, stereotypes are narrow and limiting, unable and not intended to invite an additional
perspective or growth in knowledge.

Culture is manifested at different layers of depth

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/globalpad-rip/openhouse/interculturalskills_old/core_concept_co
mpilations/global_pad_-_what_is_culture.pdf

In analyzing the culture of a particular group or organization it is desirable to distinguish three

fundamental levels at which culture manifests itself: (a) observable artifacts, (b) values, and (c)
basic underlying assumptions. When one enters an organization one observes and feels its
artifacts. This category includes everything from the physical layout, the dress code, the manner
in which people address each other, the smell and feel of the place, its emotional intensity, and
other phenomena, to the more permanent archival manifestations such as company records,
products, statements of philosophy, and annual reports. (Schein 1990: 111). This level [visible
artifacts] of analysis is tricky because the data are easy to obtain but hard to interpret. We can
describe “how” a group constructs its environment and “what” behaviour patterns are discernible
among the members, but we often cannot understand the underlying logic – “why” a group
behaves the way it does.

To analyze why members behave the way they do, we often look for the values that govern
behaviour. But as values are hard to observe directly, it is often necessary to infer them by
interviewing key members of the organization. However, in identifying such values, we usually
note that they represent accurately only the manifest or espoused values of a culture. That is
they focus on what people say is the reason for their behaviour, what they ideally would like
those reasons to be, and what are often their rationalizations for their behaviour. Yet, the
underlying reasons for their behaviour remain concealed or unconscious.

To really understand a culture and to ascertain more completely the group’s values and over
behaviour, it is imperative to delve into the underlying assumptions, which are typically
unconscious but which actually determine how group members perceive, think and feel. Such
assumptions are themselves learned responses that originated as espoused values. But, as a
value leads to a behavior, and as that behaviour begins to solve the problem which prompted it
in the first place, the value gradually is transformed into an underlying assumption about how
things really are. As the assumption is increasingly taken for granted, it drops out of awareness.
Taken-for-granted assumptions are so powerful because they are less debatable and
confrontable than espoused values. We know we are dealing with an assumption when we
encounter in our informants a refusal to discuss something, or when they consider us “insane”
or “ignorant” for bringing something up. For example, the notion that businesses should be
profitable, that schools should educate, or that medicine should prolong life are assumptions,
even though they are often considered “merely” values.

Culture affects behaviour and interpretations of behaviour

Example One I observed the following event at a kindergarten classroom on the Navajo
reservation:
A Navajo man opened the door to the classroom and stood silently, looking at the floor. The
Anglo-American teacher said ‘Good morning’ and waited expectantly, but the man did not
respond. The teacher then said ‘My name is Mrs Jones,’ and again waited for a response. There
was none. In the meantime, a child in the room put away his crayons and got his coat from the
rack. The teacher, noting this, said to the man, ‘Oh, are you taking Billy now?’ He said, ‘Yes.’
The teacher continued to talk to the man while Billy got ready to leave, saying, ‘Billy is such a
good boy,’ ‘I’m so happy to have him in class,’ etc. Billy walked towards the man (his father),
stopping to turn around and wave at the teacher on his way out and saying, ‘Bye-bye.’ The
teacher responded, ‘Bye-bye.’ The man remained silent as he left.
From a Navajo perspective, the man’s silence was appropriate and respectful. The teacher, on
the other hand, expected not only to have the man return her greeting, but to have him identify
himself and state his reason for being there. Although such an expectation is quite reasonable
and appropriate from an Anglo-American perspective, it would have required the man to break
not only Navajo rules of politeness but also a traditional religious taboo that prohibits individuals
from saying their own name. The teacher interpreted the contextual cues correctly in answer to
her own question (‘Are you taking Billy?’ and then engaged in small talk. The man continued to
maintain appropriate silence. Billy, who was more acculturated than his father to
Anglo-American ways, broke the Navajo rule to follow the Anglo-American one in leave-taking.
This encounter undoubtedly reinforced the teacher’s stereotype that Navajos are ‘impolite’ and
‘unresponsive’, and the man’s stereotype that Anglo-Americans are ‘impolite’ and ‘talk too
much.’ (Saville-Troike, 1997).

Culture can be differentiated from both universal human nature and unique individual personality

Culture is learned, not inherited. It derives from one’s social environment, not from one’s genes.
Culture should be distinguished from human nature on one side, and from an individual’s
personality on the other.

Human nature is what all human beings, from the Russian professor to the Australian aborigine,
have in common: it represents the universal level in one’s mental software. It is inherited with
one’s genes; within the computer analogy it is the ‘operating system’ which determines one’s
physical and basic psychological functioning. The human ability to feel fear, anger, love, joy,
sadness, the need to associate with others, to play and exercise oneself, the facility to observe
the environment and talk about it with other humans all belong to this level of mental
programming. However, what one does with these feelings, how one expresses fear, joy,
observations, and so on, is modified by culture.
The personality of an individual, on the other hand, is her/his unique personal set of mental
programs which (s)he does not share with any other human being. It is based upon traits which
are partly inherited with the individual’s unique set of genes and partly learned. ‘Learned’
means: modified by the influence of collective programming (culture) as well as unique personal
experiences.

Culture is associated with social groups

Culture is shared by at least two or more people, and of course real, live societies are always
larger than that. For an idea, a thing, or a behavior to be considered cultural, it must be shared
by some type of social group or society. (Ferraro 1998: 16).

As almost everyone belongs to a number of different groups and categories of people at the
same time, people unavoidably carry several layers of mental programming within themselves,
corresponding to different levels of culture. For example: a national level according to one’s
country (or countries for people who migrated during their lifetime); a regional and/or ethnic
and/or religious and/or linguistic affiliation, as most nations are composed of culturally different
regions and/or ethnic and/or religious and/or language groups; a gender level, according to
whether a person was born as a girl or as a boy; a generation level, which separates
grandparents from parents from children; a role category, e.g. parent, son/daughter, teacher,
student; a social class level, associated with educational opportunities and with a person’s
occupation or profession; for those who are employed, an organizational or corporate level
according to the way employees have been socialized by their work organization (Hofstede,
1991:10).

So in this sense, everyone is simultaneously a member of several different cultural groups and
thus could be said to have multicultural membership.

Culture is learned

Culture is learned from the people you interact with as you are socialized. Watching how adults
react and talk to new babies is an excellent way to see the actual symbolic transmission of
culture among people. Two babies born at exactly the same time in two parts of the globe may
be taught to respond to physical and social stimuli in very different ways. For example, some
babies are taught to smile at strangers, whereas others are taught to smile only in very specific
circumstances.

This notion that culture is acquired through the process of learning has several important
implications. First, such an understanding can lead to greater tolerance for cultural differences.
Second, the learned nature of culture serves as a reminder that since we have mastered our
own culture through the process of learning, it is possible (albeit more difficult) to learn to
function in other cultures as well.