What is culture?

When I think of culture, usually the first things that pop up about different cultures are the tangible things; you know, like food, music, dress, arts and culture and so on. And while these are indeed important and exciting manifestations and products of the cultures in which we live, they are not at the core of what culture is. If I take away these tangible things that I can see, taste, feel, hear, and sometimes touch, I would still be left with something very real and a powerful force that drives my thoughts and actions as a human. Culture is just as valuable to humans as language.Indeed, anthropologist Edward T. Hall says that culture is "the medium that we live in, like the air we breathe." As long as there are two humans around, there will be language and inevitably culture.

But what is culture? It is hard to define in a nice, succinct package. I'll let some of the heavy-weight thinkers of our recent times help me out with the definitions:

Culture is the acquired knowledge people use

to interpret experience and generate behavior. - James Spradley, Anthropologist

Let's break this down: Culture is knowledge, but it is not just innate knowledge, according to Spradley, but it is acquired. We learn it from factors in our environment, like family, school, and all socialization as we grow up. The geographical location and the ethnic group will determine in large part how we interpret experience, and we will also learn what is acceptable and unacceptable, behavior-wise. These sometimes are universal, but sometimes they differ from culture to culture.

Culture is the medium we live in, like the air we breathe.- Edward Hall, Author of Beyond Culture

This quote by Edward Hall seems to be saying that culture is important for us to survive as a human being. In the second class of ICC, I will show students a brief video about feral children. I want to point at that if a human grows up in isolation, partial isolation, or is (as some believe) raised by animals, then their behavior will not be like that of other humans. In fact, the "wild child" is usually without language and without any traits of culture. If we look at a human stripped of language and culture, then we can begin to formulate what is missing and then build a definition of culture. These feral kids don't have language, they don't wear clothes, they don't have any particular way of preparing food. But these are just the tip of the cultural iceberg. They also don't have any system of behavior or values, at least in the human sense. So, without culture, we can survive, but the question remains, will we be fully human? Cases of wild children such as Genie and John Ssebunya from Uganda show that until they were brought back into society, they weren't "civilized". And even after, they struggled for a long time to learn a little language and behave like others in the culture. So, there is no such thing as the "noble savage" like Tarzan, a fictional character that grew up in the wild but behaved human.

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties -- it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

Aime Cesair, Martiniquen writer

I like this quote. Culture is everything. It is the medium on which we think, act, behave, speak, and create.

Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don’t.
Lord Raglan, British soldier.

As I mentioned above with the case of feral or severely neglected children, we have behaviors that are distinctly human and set us apart from animals. But these behaviors are only learned in our cultural context.

Culture is considered to be group-specific behavior that is acquired, at least in part, from social influences. WC McGrew, Anthropologist and primate expert

Again, it is group specific. Someone from Korea will grow up learning differently than some growing up in Australia, for example. The culture becomes reality for the person who learns it. My perception of reality, my values, my opinions about what is right behavior and wrong behavior, all of these can be decided to a large extent by the culture that I am raised in.

This summer, I am teaching a one month course in Intercultural Communication. I have students from Korea, Australia, USA, Canada, Mexico, Turkmenistan, and Malaysia. I have decided to break the class into four concepts by asking the following questions:

1. What is culture?

2. Who am I as a cultural person?

3. Who are "they", as in other cultures?

4. How do we communicate and get along?

The idea is to use these questions as springboards to examine culture and it's role in their identities and perceptions. Questions 3 and 4 will be springboards to examine that there are other ways of perceiving reality and other identities that are different but just as valid and real to people as our own deepest held convictions are to us. Hopefully, at the end of the month, ours will be a community of mutual respect, curiosity, and willingness to learn and share among a very diverse group of individuals.