Chapter 2: Culture and people Flashcards
It is difficult to define the concept of culture, therefore many defintions exist.
* All defintions have the following in common:
- culture is pervasive (alomtegenwoordig, doordringend) in human life & culture governs people’s behaviours.
- people use methaphors to describe cultures.
People use methaphors to describe culture
for example: people see the world through a window/ cultural glasses,
culture is the luggage we carry, the air we breathe, culture is like the water fish swim in.
Another metaphor: culture is like a web people have spun’’
Culture confines members to their social reality and facilitates their functioning in it: culture is product and process.
Culture provied context for behaviour
Another metaphor for culture: Iceberg view from Hall
visible: above the surface
(symbols, rituals)
invisible: below the surface
(values, norms)
Another metaphor for culture: culture is like an onion
Hofstede:
Symbols, heroes, rituals, values
Another metaphor for culture: culture is like a software of the mind
Culture as hardwired program which needs to be installed
Another metaphor for culture: culture is like a tree
Roots below the surface, hidden values, its dynamic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Culture may be defined as:
- The particular way of life of a group of people and the meaning-making process by which people make sense of their social world.
- Culture comprises the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, traditions, relgion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, world views, material objects, and geographic territory.
Dodd’s model of culture, viewed as ‘‘layered’’ (like an onion)
Inner core of culture aspects: underlie and shape a culture and behavior in that culture
it consists of:
* History:
* Identity
* Beliefs:
* Values:
* Worldview
History
carrier of cultural heritage, provides continuity
Identity
a sense of ‘‘who we are’’ or ‘‘who I am’’
Beliefs
what a culture believes as true or false
Values
What a culture regards as good or bad
Worldview
what a culture believes about nature and the working of the universe.
Intermediate layer of culture
Observable activities as manifestations of culture.
- expressed in material objects, roles, rules, rituals, customs, communication patters, and artistic expressions.
They reflect the behavioral and social rles and communication patters a gropu shares and agrees on.
* Popular culture: the daily interactions, needs and desires that make up the everyday lives of the mainstream. It includes practices pertaining to for example coocking, clothing, sports, arts, mass media.
Outer layer of culture
involves** institutions of culture**, which are the formalized systems that structure and govern a culture or society.
- it includes relgious, economic, political, family, healthcare and educational systems and infrastructures.
- it comprises numerous aspects of a culture that are generally accepted and often sanctioned by law.
Characteristics of cultue
- Holistic
- Learned
- Dynamic
- Ethnocentric
Culture is holistic
All components make up integrated and interrelated whole. You need to look at all aspects (of an event) to fully understand a culture: none of the individual components makes sense on its own.
Culture is learned
We are socialized into our culture: its learned through instruction (conscious learning) and culture is absorebed, e.g. through exposure to our envornment (unconcioous learning): it passes from generation to generation & is a lifelong process.
Culture is dynamic
it is not fixed or static but dynamic: it changes over time, though influence from other cultures in contact or from changes in its enviornment (political, etc.) aspects of culture may change at different rates (inner core aspects are most resistant to change).
Culture is ethnocentric
Means that our own culture is superior to other cultures: it is found in every culture. It builds barriers between cultures: it gets in the way of/ affects intercultural understanding.
Emic approach to investigate culture
views each culture as a unique entity that can only be examined by constructs developed from inside the culture.
Etic approach
Assumes that culture can be examined with predetermined categroies that can be applied to all cultures in the search for cultural universals.
