What Is Culture?

Culture may be defined as the unique lifestyle of a given human society: a distinctive way of thinking, perceiving, feeling, believing, and behaving that is passed on from one generation to another. Anthropologists agree on three features of every human culture.1 First, culture is not something that is inherited; rather, it is learned by individuals as they grow up in their society, a process called enculturation. Second, the knowledge, values, be­liefs, customs, and mores that make up the culture are interrelated to form a more or less integrated whole. Third, culture consists of learned behavior traits that are shared by members of a social group, and distinguish that group from other groups with different cultures. In sum, a given culture offers a complete set of rules for living that enable its members to cope with physical and social environments. As a total way of life with existential values that shape perceptions of the world and with norms that guide social behavior, culture patterns not only our behavior but also how we expect others to behave.

1. Cultural Personality

Different cultures foster different personality types. They do so by postulat­ing an ideal personality type (“the good person”) and then rewarding behavior consistent with the ideal type while punishing behavior inconsis­tent with it. For the most part, a culture’s desired behavior is learned early in life, and the totality of the resulting behavior traits constitutes the core of the individual’s personality, which persists throughout his life. Conse­quently, personality norms vary from one culture to another. That is why one can speak of a French personality, a Japanese personality, an American personality, and so on. This does not mean, of course, that, say, all French nationals have the same personality; genetic inheritance and individual life experience also influence the formation of personality. It is for that reason that the members of a given culture exhibit a range of personality types that matches the range in other cultures. But the representative personality type differs from one culture to another, because different cultures encourage different personality types.

2. Cultural Universal

Despite their profound differences, all cultures have many general features in common, the so-called cultural universals, which reflect the common biological nature of humans and their common needs to cope with physical and social environments. Some of these universals are age grading, commu­nity organization, cooking, dancing, education, ethics, family, funeral rites, games, government, greetings, housing, marriage, medicine, mythology, personal names, property rights, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, tool making, and trade.2 Probably the most important single universal is language, for much of culture is transmitted by word of mouth. Indeed, some anthropologists, notably Hall, define culture as a total com­munications system: words, gestures, facial expressions, posture, and other behavior that convey meaning, including the use of time, space, and ma­terials.3

Cultural universals are similarities across cultures in types of behavior rather than in specific behavior traits. These traits may be classified into different systems, such as political, economic, religious, kinship, educa­tional, health, and recreational.

Another approach to cultural universals is to consider the limited num­ber of questions which all peoples need to answer in one way or another. Five fundamental questions are listed, followed by some alternative re­sponses enclosed in parentheses.4 (1) What is the essence of human nature? (Good? Evil? A mixture of good and evil?) (2) What is the relationship of man to nature? (Subject? Master? Part of?) (3) What is the temporal focus of life? (The past? The present? The future?) (4) What is the modality of man’s behavior? (Spontaneous expression? Self-actualization? Measurable accomplishment?) (5) What is the relationship of man to man? (As an individual? As a member of a permanent group? As a member of a transi­tory group?) The preferred responses of a society to these questions make up its ideal cultural values that shape the thinking, feeling, and behavior of its members.

3. Cultural Self-Awareness

The cultural patterns that govern our perception of the world and our social behavior function mostly below the level of conscious awareness. Only when we come into contact with persons of other cultures who have different perceptions and behavior traits do we become aware of cultural differences and in that way of our own cultural uniqueness. To achieve cultural self-awareness, therefore, we must learn about other cultures and how they differ from our own. In a nutshell, those who know no other culture cannot know their own.

In the absence of cultural self-awareness, we unconsciously assume that people in other cultures experience the world as we do, an assumption termed projective cognitive similarity or, more popularly, the self-reference criterion.s Unconscious references to our own cultural values cause no problem when we are interacting with persons of our own culture; indeed, they facilitate social interactions by creating congruent expectations. But the self-reference criterion can play havoc when we interact with persons of another culture. We shall say more about this when we discuss cross- cultural communication. Suffice it to say at this point that cultural self- awareness is a necessary condition for successful intercultural relations.

Cultural self-awareness goes beyond the mere recognition of cultural differences. It also requires the abandonment of the belief, often accompa­nied with strong emotions, that one’s own culture is superior to others. All cultures tend to breed ethnocentric people. When such people encounter a foreign culture, they observe behavior that not only makes little sense to them but also appears “wrong.” “Why can’t these people behave like we do, like reasonable humans should behave?”

Ethnocentric attitudes of superiority, disdain, and rejection are a po­tent, and all too common, source of barriers in cross-cultural relations. Moreover, they are simply wrong. It makes no sense to judge a foreign culture inferior to one’s own, because each culture is unique. Hence the assignment of inferiority to a foreign culture is nothing more than a projec­tion of one’s own cultural values, which are also unique. This is not to gainsay that the values of a given culture may be more or less congruent with the values, say, of Western-style science or Western-style economic organization. But that is a question of cultural distance, not one of cultural inferiority.

Cultural self-awareness makes us conscious of the norms and rules that govern our thinking, feeling, and behavior. It is a process of learning about our own culture through learning about other cultures. In this way we gradually gain an outsider’s perspective on our culture and some release from an emotional attachment to our cultural values. Cultural self- awareness is an affirmation, not a rejection, of our own culture. For by knowing our culture, we know more about ourselves and in that sense become liberated persons. We put aside our “cultural blinders.”

How do we achieve cultural self-awareness? Ultimately, only through personal interactions with individuals who belong to other cultures, which is to say that cultural self-awareness is experiential learning. But this learn­ing can be facilitated by gaining intellectual knowledge of foreign cultures, most notably through language study. Table 11 offers a modest contribu­tion to such knowledge by comparing some Sinic culture traits shared by the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese to American culture traits. Although the comparison is superficial, it should make evident that Ameri­cans need to understand their own cultural uniqueness if they are to relate successfully with persons of other cultures.

Source: Root Franklin R. (1998), Entry Strategies for International Markets, Jossey-Bass; 2nd edition.

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