What is meant by culture?

According to the definition of Ronald Inglehart (1997);

Culture is a system of attitudes, values and knowledge that is widely shared (passed on from generation to generation) within a society.

Culture is a collective phenomenon; in the case of the individual, we speak of personality.

So how did you get your culture?

Every person carries within him- or herself patterns of thinking, feeling, and potential acting which were learned throughout the their lifetime. Much of it was acquired in early childhood, because at that time a person is most susceptible to learning and assimilating. As soon as certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting have established themselves within a person’s mind, he or she must unlearn these patterns before being able to learn something different, and unlearning is more difficult than learning for the first time

Culture is learned not innate. Culture should be distinguished from human nature on one side and from an individual’s personality on the other. Where the borders are is hard to say.

Human nature is what all human beings, have in common. The human ability to feel fear, anger, love, joy, sadness, and shame; the need to associate with others and to play and exercise oneself; and the facility to observe the environment and to talk about it with other humans. However, what one does with these feelings, how one expresses fear, joy, observations, and so on, is modified by culture.

The personality of an individual, that needn’t be shared with any other human being on the other hand, is based on traits that are partially inherited within the individual’s unique set of genes and partially learned. Learned means modified by the influence of culture as well as by unique personal experiences.

Cultural differences manifests themselves in 4 main way; symbols, heroes, rituals and values.

Symbols words, gestures, pictures or tangible things that carry a particular meaning, Heroes, role models dead or alive, real or imaginary and Rituals, collective activities of primarily social importance, have been subsumed under the term PRACTICES. As such practices are visible to an outside observer; their cultural meaning, however, is invisible and lies precisely and only in the way these practices are interpreted by the insiders.

The core of culture is formed by Values (broad preferences concerning appropriate courses of actions or outcomes). Through their cultural norms they are the written and unwritten rules of correct and desired behaviour.

The basis of the values are formed by Assumptions such as;

fate or nature decides   <------> the world is makeable

man is good <------> man is bad

         people are equal  <------>  people are not equal

The when and where, we acquire our values and practices.

Our values with assumptions are acquired early in our lives. Our human physiology provides us with a receptive period of some ten to twelve years, a span in which we can quickly and largely unconsciously absorb necessary information from our environment. This includes symbols (such as language), heroes (such as our parents), and rituals (such as toilet training), and, most important, it includes our basic values. At the end of this period we gradually switch to a different conscious way of learning, focusing primarily on new practices.

Question

So, what would you do if you find yourself stranded on an uninhabited island with 29 unknown others from different parts of the world? And you have no common language or shared habits.     

Culture and National culture:

There are cultures that extend over multiple national borders and there are/were nations with multiple cultures. Example; e.g. the former USSR and Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Pashtun, the Kurds. Is there a Belgium culture or is there a Flemish culture and a Walloon culture? In a national culture there could be state /province cultures, in side that, there can be city/ town cultures and in there, there can be religious/ non-religious cultures and in there, there can be a culture of stamp collectors and tango dancers.

Question:                      What do you think, is there a FRONTEX culture?

Edward Hall Iceberg model

In 1976, Edward T. Hall suggested that culture was similar to an iceberg. He proposed that culture has two components and that only about 10% of culture (external or surface culture) is easily visible; the majority, or 90%, of culture (internal or deep culture) is hidden below the surface.

When one first enters into another culture, one is usually first interacting only with the top 10%, literally, the tip of the iceberg! Sometimes, people make assumptions or develop ideas about another cultural community without really understanding the internal or deep culture that makes up the majority of that culture’s values and beliefs.

What this model teaches us is that we cannot judge a new culture based only on what we see when we first enter it. We must take the time to get to know individuals from that culture and interact with them. Only by doing so can we uncover the values and beliefs that underlie the behaviour of that society.