Defining cultures
Different cultures?
Culture is generally something we all feel we know something about, whether it is our own culture or another culture we are familiar with. However, arriving at a definition of culture is difficult. As Eleanor Ochs has remarked “while culture is considered important to fathom, it is obscure and difficult to analyse. You can’t see it; you can’t count it in any obvious way” (2002: 115). Nevertheless, there are a number of characteristics of culture and especially its relationship to language which can be drawn out from the various definitions offered.
In these activities you will explore a variety of definitions of culture.
Activity 1: Defining culture: part 1
There are almost as many definitions of culture as there are books on the subject. In this activity you are going to consider a number of the more influential definitions of culture from a linguistic perspective.
Instruction
Read the definitions of culture and decide if you agree or disagree with them. Then read the feedback. The sources of the definitions are given in the feedback.
1. A particular form, stage, or type of intellectual development or civilization in a society; a society or group characterized by its distinctive customs, achievements, products, outlook, etc.
2. The cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
3. Culture can be thought of as ‘Big C’ culture—history, geography, institutions, literature, art, music, and the way of life, and ‘Little c’ culture—culturally influenced beliefs and perceptions expressed mainly through language, but also behaviour including; beliefs, values, customs and habits. Much of this is unconscious.
4. Mind is actually internalized culture. Culture is not innate but learned behaviour.
5. Our world and our culture are built by the language that we speak.“ the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group”
6. Language is a semiotic system (a system of symbols) that express the culture and society that we live in. The relationship between language, culture and society is interrelated; language influences culture and culture influences language. Language as a social semiotic means, “interpreting language within a sociocultural context, in which culture itself is interpreted in semiotic terms.”
7. “[I]t denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”
8. Whether one begins or ends with language, thought, or culture, the other two are woven in; the circular pattern holds, with each influencing and being influenced by the others.
9. Culture is much more than food, or singing and dancing, or traditional costumes...it refers to a set of ‘agreements’ among a group of people, determining how they will behave, how they like to present themselves, how they communicate, what they feel is important, how they see themselves and how they see the world. In short, it is their way of being.
How is culture managed? In other words, how are all these things put into action—all this behaviour and interaction and identity? Through language of course. Language not only expresses culture, it also brings it about.
Activity 2: Defining culture: part 2
The previous definitions of culture emphasised the central role culture plays in understanding beliefs, values, world views, behaviour and communication, and the close relationship between language and culture. However, many of these definitions take a ‘static’ perspective on culture and language viewing culture as a describable and bounded entity that is out there in the world. Such conceptions of culture are typically associated with nationalist characterisations of culture where the English language, English people and England would all be considered inexorably linked together.
More critical ‘post-modernists’ notions of language and culture while building on the insights of earlier cultural studies, and especially semiotic accounts, regard such language-culture-nationality associations as essentialist and naïve. This is particularly true of languages such as English that are used on a global scale in many different contexts and by a huge variety of users.
One approach to understanding culture and language from a more post-modernist perspective has been to view culture as a discourse system or community which operates alongside many other interrelated discourse communities.
In this activity you are going to explore definitions of culture from a discourse perspective and critical conceptions of culture.
Instruction
Read the definitions of culture and select whether they are best categorised as a culture and discourse definition or a critical conception of culture. Then read the feedback. The sources of the definitions are given in the feedback.
1. Culture is “1 Membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and a common system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting. 2 The discourse community itself. 3 The system of standards itself”
2. An inter discourse approach- in analysing discourse between individuals culture is too broad a concept and contains too much variability to be of primary use. It may be more productive to look at different discourse communities at the sub-cultural level such as generation, gender, profession and corporate discourse. Wider understandings of culture are influential at this sub-cultural level.
3. Discourse “is the principle site for language and culture studies” and “research on language and culture has increasingly come to concentrate on discourse as the basic research site”
4. Culture is not something static as suggested by its classification and use as a noun, but rather dynamic, “Culture is a verb”.
5. “Culture is not something fixed and frozen as the traditionalists would have us believe, but a process of constant struggle as cultures interact with each other and are affected by economic, political and social factors.”
6. “[S]et aside any a priori notions of group membership and identity and… ask instead how and under what circumstances concepts such as culture are produced by participants as relevant categories … [w]ho has introduced culture as a relevant category, for what purposes, and with what consequences?”.
Would you like to review the main points?
© Will Baker/Modern Languages, University of Southampton, 2009. All rights reserved. Image courtesy of c_chan808, flickr