|
I. What
Is Culture?, continued
Table 1.
Some Good Definitions of Culture
| Definition/Framework |
Author |
| “Culture is a set
of meanings, behavioral norms, and values used by members of a
particular society, as they construct their
unique view of the world.” |
Alarcon, Foulks, & Vakkur
(1998) |
| “Culture is conceived
as a set of denotative (what is or beliefs), connotative (what
should be, or attitudes, norms and values),
and pragmatic (how things are done or procedural roles) knowledge,
shared by a group of individuals who have a common history and who
participate in a social structure.” |
Basabe, Paez, Valencia,
González, Rimé, & Diener
(2002) |
| “The term culture
refers to social reality. It can be defined as a complex collection
of components that a group of people share
to help them adapt to their social and physical world.” |
Yamamoto, Silva, Ferrari, & Nukariya
(1997) |
| “Culture is a shared pattern of belief, feeling, and knowledge
that ultimately guide everyone’s conduct and definition of
reality.” |
Griffith & González
(1994) |
| “Culture is a shared
organization of ideas that includes the intellectual, moral and
aesthetic standards prevalent in a community
and the meanings of communicative actions.” |
LeVine (1984) |
| “Culture is a person’s/group’s
beliefs, their interactions with the world, and how they
are affected by the environment in which they exist.” |
Lotrecchiano (2005) |
| “Culture is an integrated pattern of human behavior which
includes but is not limited to—thought, communication, languages,
beliefs, values, practices, customs, courtesies, rituals, manners
of interacting, roles, relationships, and expected behaviors of an
ethnic group or social groups whose members are uniquely identifiable
by that pattern of human behavior.” |
National Center for Cultural Competence (2001) |
| “Culture is a system
of collectively held values, beliefs, and practices of a group
which guides decisions and actions in patterned
and recurrent ways. It encompasses the organization of thinking,
feeling, believing, valuing and behaving collectively that differentiates
one group from another. Values and beliefs often function on an unconscious
level.” |
Sockalingam (2004) |
Because human beings
in different parts of the world and in very different environments
developed distinctively different
cultures, they “see” and
respond to the world in widely varying ways. Social scientists often
call a group of people who share a culture an ethnic group. According
to Byrd and Clayton, writing in Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial
and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare (Institute of Medicine, 2003), an
ethnic group is a group socially distinguished or set apart by others
or by itself, primarily on the basis of cultural or national-origin characteristics.
Most medical anthropologists
and sociologists tend to emphasize the cultural and social aspects
of groups and often use the terms “ethnic group” and “cultural
group” interchangeably. However, both terms tend to be used somewhat
loosely. For example, the term “culture of poverty” was used
for many years to identify norms and behaviors common to groups of people
forced to live in poverty wherever in the world they happened to live.
Most cultural groups
tend to believe that how they see the world is correct, and how they
believe and behave is what is most natural to human beings,
that is, “human nature.” However, in learning about culture,
we need to understand that to have culture is human nature, but no specific
culture is human nature!
When people insist
on their own culture as the only correct way to understand the world,
they are said to be demonstrating
ethnocentrism. It is easy to fall into this fallacious way of thinking.
We all do it from time to time; however, the culturally aware person
is far less likely to unthinkingly fall into this cognitive trap.
|
