INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION – 1ST ASSIGNMENT (SUMMARY)

 

CHAPTER 2: WHAT IS CULTURE?

Culture is a word that has so many meanings already that one more can do it no harm. For anthropologists, culture has long stood for the way of life of a people, for the sum of their learned behavior patterns, attitudes, and material things. Most anthropologists tend to disagree however, on what the precise substance of culture is. Others, looking for a point of stability in the flux of society, often become preoccupied with identifying a common particle or element which can be found in every aspect of culture. ln sum, though the concept of culture was first defined in print in 1871 by E. B. Tylor, after all these years it still lacks the rigorous specificity which characterizes many less revolutionary and useful ideas. From the beginning, culture has been the special province of the anthropologist. As the fledgling anthropologist moved deeper and deeper into the life of the people he was studying he inevitably acquired the conviction that culture was real and not just something dreamed up by the theoretician. This frame of mind alone would have been enough to isolate the growing skills of the anthropologist from the everyday society about him which might have well used his special insights and knowledge. What technical training the anthropologists had was rather lengthy and detailed. It concerned subjects which seemed to have little relevance to the problems of the Layman engrossed in his own little society. Moreover, until the last war few Americans had even heard of the places the anthropologists frequented or the people they studied, who were generally small isolated populations with little place in the power politics of the modern world. Among this long-suffering population were the Indians, living miserably depressed lives on reservations as wards of the government. Most of these Indians had neither the dignity of their old ways nor the advantages of the now dominant society that surrounded them. it had been the government's policy to treat all the different tribes alike, as if they were ignorant and somewhat stubborn children- a mistake which is yet to be really rectified. A body of custom had grown up in the government's Indian Service we tried to point it out our explanations didn't make sense. Apart from having problems with laymen who often did not really care about a definition of culture, we had certain methodological difficulties in the field itself. way to gat her data that could be legitimately checked, no way to reproduce field procedures, no way to equate an event in culture A with culture B except to try to describe each and then say that they were different, as to how to handle Indians and Indian problems. The bureaucracy that grew up was more oriented toward the problems of the employees than those of the Indians. Under such conditions it was almost impossible to introduce the disturbing anthropological idea that the Indians were deeply and significantly different from European-Americans, for that would have t hreatened to upset t he bureaucratic applecart. Though the treatment of the Indians by the government still leaves much to be desired,it has been vastly improved during the years in. When the anthropologist stresses this point he is usually ignored, for he is challenging the deepest popular American beliefs about ourselves as well as foreigners. There is no way to teach culture in the same way that language is taught. Until recently no one had defined any basic units of culture. There was no generally agreed upon underlying theory of culture-no way of being specific-no way for B to get to the field and check A's results. Even today a volume examining the various concepts and theories of culture, written by the nation's two most distinguished anthropologists, A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn. This state of affairs had been a source of irritation for a number of years, and it drove me to work toward an integrated theory of culture which would overcome the shortcomings I have just sketched. In general I found that they are not too interested in the anthropologist's preoccupation with what culture is and tend to become impatient unless they have been abroad previously and have had some actual experience. Foreign Service officers in particular used to take great delight in saying that what the anthropologists told them about working with the Navajo didn't do them much good, for we didn't have an embassy on the Navajo reservation. Unfortunately the theory we were able to bring to bear at the time I began working in Washington simply had no relevance to the operator in the field. This book outlines both a theory of culture and a theory of how culture came into being. It treats culture in its entirety as a form of communication. It sketches in the biological roots from which most if not all of culture grew and outlines the ten basic foci of activity that combine to produce culture. Since man progresses from formal belief to informal adaptation and finally to technical analysis, a theory of change is also implied in this tripartite division which is at the heart of my theory. The next chapters specify and deal with the communication spectrum. Man learns to read different segments of a communication spectrum covering events of a thing about Benedict's book was that, while she had never been to Japan and could only work with Japanese who were in the United States , it showed extraordinary insight into the psychological processes of the Japanese. Just about this time George L. Trager and I began our collaboration to develop a method for the analysis of culture. Our ultimate objectives included five basic steps. To tie these isolates into a biological base so that they could be compared among cultures. We also stipulated that this comparison be done in such a way that the conditions be repeatable at will. Without this, anthropology can lay no claim to being a science. Finally, to find a way to make our discipline tangibly useful to the non·specialist. Trager and I felt that much of the preoccupation of anthropologists with statistics was having a stultifying effect on our discipline and that the methodologies and theories borrowed from sociology, psychology, and other biological and physical sciences had been ineptly used. The average reader who hasn't lived abroad, who finds the work of the diplomat and the Point Four technician exceedingly remote, maybe inclined to ask, What's this got to do with me? This point touches on the ultimate purpose of this book, which is to reveal the broad extent to which culture controls our lives. Culture is not an exotic notion studied by a select group of anthropologists in the South Seas. In my discussion of culture I will be describing that part of man's behavior which he takes for granted - the part he doesn't think about, since he assumes it is universal or regards it as idiosyncratic. Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own. I am also convinced that all that one ever gets from studying foreign culture is a token understanding. Simply learning one's own culture is an achievement of gargantuan proportions for anyone. By the age of twenty-five or thirty most of us have finished school, been married, learned to live with another human being, mastered a job, seen the miracle of human birth, and started a new human being well on his way to growing up. This means that when a middleaged man stops learning he is often left with a great drive and highly developed capacities. If he goes to live in another culture, the learning process is often reactivated. The problem which is raised in talking about American culture without reference to other cultures is that an audience tends to take the remarks personally. I once addressed for those who are familiar with the subject the remarks I have just made should be a clear indication that what follows is not simply a rehash of what previous writers on the subject of culture have said. It involves new ways of looking at things. He will discover that he is conveying ta others things that he never dreamed he was revealing. In some instances he will learn things that he has been hiding from himself. The language of culture speaks as clearly as the language of dreams Freud analyzed, but, unlike dreams, it cannot be kept to oneself. When I talk about culture I am not just talking about something in the abstract that is imposed on man and is separate from him, but about man himself, about you and me in a highly personal way. a group of school principals on the subject of culture. He did not seem to realize that a significant proportion of the material which was highly personal to him was also relevant cultural data. A knowledge of his own culture would have helped this same man in a situation which he subsequently described for the audience. If both the father and the son had had a cultural perspective on this common and infuriating occurrence the awkward quarrel which followed might have been avoided. Both father and son would have benefited if the father had understood the cultural basis of his tension and explained, Now, look here. One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.

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