Characteristics of Culture

Sometimes people talk of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.1) It is not that some cultures are advanced and some backward, some more civilized and polite while others are coarse and rude.

Culture manifest itself in three fundamental levels:A: Observable 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.B: Values,  values that govern behavior... in identifying such values, we usually note that they represent accurately only the manifest or espoused values of a culture.C: Basic underlying assumptions, Typically unconscious but which actually determine how group members perceive, think and feel. As the assumption is increasingly taken for granted, it drops out of awareness. 

Although certain aspects of culture are physically visible, their meaning is invisible: ‘their cultural meaning ... lies precisely and only in the way these practices are interpreted by the insiders.Example:1) 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.2) The first time I saw coconut-skating I was so sure it was a joke that I laughed out loud. The scowl that came back was enough to tell me that I had completely misunderstood the situation.

 Culture 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 other1) Human nature is what all human beings, from the Russian professor to the Australian aborigine, have in common.2) Human nature is not as ‘human’ as the term suggests, because certain aspects of it are shared with parts of the animal world.3) 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.

If we stop to consider it, the great majority of our conscious behavior is acquired through learning and interacting with other members of our culture.1)  She then explained that what they had eaten was not chicken, not tuna fish, but the rich, white flesh of freshly killed rattlesnakes. The response was instantaneous – vomiting, often violent vomiting.2) Clearly there is nothing in rattlesnake meat that causes people to vomit, for those who have internalized the opposite idea, that rattlesnake meat should be eaten, have no such digestive tract reversals.

Culture is shared by at least two or more people, and of course real, live societies are always larger than that.1) 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.2)So in this sense, everyone is simultaneously a member of several different cultural groups and thus could be said to have multicultural membership.

Cultures should be thought of as integrated wholes – that is, cultures are coherent and logical systems, the parts of which to a degree are interrelated.1) If, in fact, cultures are coherent systems, with their constituent parts interrelated with one another, it follows logically that a change in one part of the system is likely to produce concomitant changes in other parts of the system.2) ... cultures tend to be integrated systems with a number of interconnected parts, so that a change in one part of the culture is likely to bring about changes in other parts.

There are no cultures that remain completely static year after year. 1) Students of culture change recognize that cultural innovation (that is, the introduction of new thoughts, norms, or material items) occurs as a result of both internal and external forces.2)  Mechanisms of change that operate within a given culture are called discovery and invention.3) ...  most innovations introduced into a culture are the result of borrowing from other cultures. This process is known as cultural diffusion, the spreading of cultural items from one culture to another.

Culture is learned from the people you interact with as you are socialized. 1)  For example, some babies are taught to smile at strangers, whereas others are taught to smile only in very specific circumstances.2) First, such an understanding can lead to greater tolerance for cultural differences, a prerequisite for effective intercultural communication within a business setting.3) 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.

Humans have largely overlapping biologies and live in fairly similar social structures and physical environments, which create major similarities in the way they form cultures.1) Phonetics deal with sounds that occur in all languages. Phonemics are sounds that occur in only one language.2) For example, all humans experience social distance from out-groups (an etic factor). T3) To summarize about emics and etics, when we study cultures for their own sake, we may well focus on emic elements, and when we compare cultures, we have to work with the etic cultural elements.

Culture is a ‘fuzzy’ concept, in that group members are unlikely to share identical sets of attitudes, beliefs and so on, but rather show ‘family resemblances’, with the result that there is no absolute set of features that can distinguish definitively one cultural group from another.1) One sociogenic (having to do with social groups and institutions) and the other psychogenic (having to do with cognitive and affective processes characteristic of individuals). 2)  Psychogenic, reason culture is never perfectly shared by individuals in a population (no matter how, sociologically, the population is defined) has to do with the ways in which culture is to be found “in there”, inside the individual.

To some extent, culture exists in each and every one of us individually as much as it exists as a global, social construct.1) While the norms of any culture should be relevant to all the people within that culture, it is also true that those norms will be relevant in different degrees for different people.2)  Compared with the older approach, which connected a singular, coherent, and integrated culture to unproblematically defined social groups, this approach makes the idea of culture more complicated.