What is culture?
Some definitions
Culture as Knowledge
• “Culture is the acquired knowledge people use to interpret
experience and generate behavior.” -- James Spradley,l
anthropologist
A word that means several different things
• National / ethnic culture (meanings and behaviors groups
of people develop and share over time)
• Secondary or subgroup culture
Elements of Culture
• HISTORY
• RELIGION
• VALUES
• SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
• LANGUAGE
Characteristics of Culture
• CULTURE IS LEARNED
• CULTURE IS SHARED
• CULTURE IS TRANSMITTED FROM ONE GENERATION
TO ANOTHER
• CULTURE IS BASED ON SYMBOLS
• CULTURE IS DYNAMIC
• CULTURE IS AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM
Nitza Hidalgo’s Concept of Culture
as an Iceberg
Surface Culture
Surface level (Concrete)
Deep Culture
Unspoken Rules (Behavioral)
Unconscious Rules - Symbolic
Hidalgo, N. 1993. Multicultural teacher introspection.
In Perry, T. and Fraser, J. (Eds.) Freedom's Plow: Teaching in
the Multicultural Classroom. New York: Routledge.
Deep Structure of Culture –
Roots of Reality – the “how” and “why”
•Deep Structure Institutions carry a culture’s most
important beliefs (family, state, religion)
•Deep Structure Institutions and their messages endure
•Deep Structure Institutions and their Messages are
deeply felt
•Deep Structure Institutions supply much of a person’s
identity (one of its most important roles for a culture is to
assist a person in their sense of identity)
Deep Structures of Culture
FAMILY – definition and forms of family (nuclear,
extended), changing families in the US; mixed
families.
“The family is the most basic unit of government…” (Charles Colton).
Functions of Family: teach socialization; core values;
worldview; identity development; communication
training; gender roles; individualism vs. collectivism;
aging; social skills
HISTORY -- economic, social development of a
region/grouping of people
Surface Culture
Food, dress, music
visual arts, drama, crafts, dance,
literature, language, celebrations
games
Deep Culture
Courtesy, contextual conversational patterns, concept of time, personal
space, rules of conduct, facial expressions, nonverbal communication,
body language, touching, eye contact, patterns of handling emotions,
notions of modesty, concept of beauty, courtship practices, relationships to
animals, notions of leadership, tempo of work, concepts of food, ideals of
childrearing, theory of disease, social interaction rate, nature of friendships
tone of voice, attitudes toward elders, concept of cleanliness, notions of
adolescence, patterns of group decision-making, definition of insanity,
preference for competition or cooperation, tolerance of physical pain, concept
of “self,” concept of past and future, definition of obscenity, attitudes toward
dependents, problem-solving, roles in relation to age, sex, class, occupation,
kinship, and so forth
What sunk the Titanic?