Culture

Introduction to Culture
• Hall said, “Culture is communication and Communication is culture.”
• Reason for the duality of culture and communication: you learn culture via
communication, while at the same time communication is a reflection of your
culture.
• Each culture presents its members with ways of thinking and ways of behaving.
• The heart of culture involves language, religion, values, traditions and customs.
• In order to improve Intercultural communication skills, we need a clear
understanding of what is culture.
• According to Rodriguez, “culture consists of how we relate to other people, how
we think, how we behave and how we view the world.
Cont...Introduction to Culture
• Hall, “there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and
altered by culture.”
• Wood, “…. We acquire attitudes as we interact with others and we
then reflect cultural teachings in the way we communicate.
Definition of Culture
• According to Harrison and Huntington , the term ‘culture’ has had
multiple meanings in different disciplines and contexts.
• Popular culture: when people discuss current trends within the
culture.
• Triandis: culture is a set of human-made objective and subjective
elements that in the past have increased the probability of survival
and resulted in satisfaction for the participants in an ecologic niche,
and thus became shared among those who could communicate with
each other because they had a common language and they lived in
the same time and place.
Characteristics of Culture
Culture is shared
Culture is shared with others who have been exposed to similar
experiences.
Culture unites people with a collective frame of reference.
Characteristics of Culture
• According to Nolan, “culture is a group worldview, the way of
organizing the world that a particular society has created over time.
• This framework/web of meaning – allows the members of society
make sense of themselves, world and experiences in that world.
• This sharing of common reality – gives people of a particular culture
common fund of knowledge, sense of identity, shared traditions and
specific behaviours that are often distinct from other collections of
people.
Characteristics of Culture
2. Culture is transmitted from Generation to Generation
• For a culture to endure, it must make certain that its crucial messages and
elements are not only shared but are passed to future generations.
• The numerous values, norms and behaviours that are considered
fundamental to a culture need to be handed down from one generation to
another.
• This process of transmitting culture is a kind of cultural inheritance.
• Example, infants, held and touched by parents, celebrating religious and
secular holidays.
• The need for culture to bind each generation to past and future generations.
Cultural Dance
Characteristics of Culture
3. Culture is based on Symbols
• Cultural symbols gestures, wedding rings and chain, dress, objects, flags and religious
icons have message value.
• The mind, books, pictures, films, computer, memory chips and videos enable a culture
to preserve what it deems important and worthy of transmission.
• Individuals have a massive repository of information that has been gathered and
maintained in anticipation of his or her entry into the culture.
• According to Ferraro, symbols tie together people who otherwise might not be a part
of a unified group.
• Words, written and spoken most often used to symbolize objects and thoughts.
• Language that enables to share speculations, observations, facts, experiments and
wisdom.
Characteristics of Culture
4. Culture is learned – it is not innate; it is learned.
• Babies born into the world – culture that assist in sense-making
process.
• Learning through formal and informal.
• Informal learning – often very subtle and normally takes place
through interaction, observation and imitation.
• Formal teaching – more structured and often left to the various social
institutions of the culture such schools, mosque, temples and
churches.
 Characteristics of Culture
• What the school teaches is consider important in the culture.
• Much of cultural learning is subconscious, and in most instances you are
rarely aware of many of the messages that it sends.
• Wood said, we learn a culture’s views and patterns in the process of
communicating. As we interact with others, we come to understand the
beliefs, values, norms and language of our culture.
• As a conclusion on culture is learned, first learning cultural perception, rule
and behaviour usually take place without our awareness
• Second, the essential messages of a culture get reinforced and repeated.
• Third, we learn about culture from a variety of sources, with family, schools
etc.
Characteristics of Culture
a. Learning culture from proverbs – through proverbs, we learn about a
people’s values and beliefs.
• Why understanding cultural proverbs is a valuable tool for
intercultural communication students?
• Roy believed that examination of these orally transmitted traditional
values offers an excellent means of learning about another culture
because these often repeated sayings fuse past, present and future.
• These sayings focus our attention on basic principles accepted within
the culture.
Characteristics of Culture
• All people regardless of culture, share common experiences, also
share common meanings through their proverbs. Example, degree of
thrift and hard work.
• In Germany, “one who does not honor the penny is not worthy of the
dollar.’’
• In U.S., a penny saved is a penny earned.
• Value of silence, “Loud thunder brings little rain.”
Characteristics of Culture
b. Learning through Folklores, legends and myths

• Deal with narratives that are intended to transmit the important messages each culture
seeks to teach its members.
• These “tales” are frequently simple morality lessons focusing on good and evil and right
from wrong.
• These stories are designed to explain some of the really big issues of human existence
such as where we came from, why we are here, and how we can account for the things
in our world.
• Folklore reinforces important cultural lessons.
• Campbell urge us not only to understand our own stories but also to read other
people’s myth. When you study the myths of a culture, you are studying that culture.
Bardic Tales (Penglipur Lara)
Stories of love and romance of princes and
princesses, kings and queens, and heroes and
their damsels in distress (and often, damsels
and their heroes in distress) have long filled the
imaginations of ethnic Malays. Although many
of these tales are replete with additions (or
reductions) and may contain a certain measure
of exaggeration as well as the expected
variations that existed from one storyteller to
another, the value and the wisdom behind each
story cannot be ignored.
Characteristics of Culture
c. Learning through Art
• Art has been a mirror of a society.
• When the art is destroyed than its like destroying the culture.
• In 2010, Egypt, Greece and Italy launched an international campaign to retrieve
their cultural treasures taken by the German government during WW11.
• Long before people would read, it was art that recorded and carried the crucial
messages about a culture.
• Nanda noted that, “art forms do not reflect a society and its culture, but also
heighten cultural integration by displaying and confirming the values that
members of a society hold in common.
• Example, African art depicted children and nature.
Characteristics of Culture
d. Learning culture through media – according to Wood, media is a
major source of information and entertainment.
• We get ideas about who we are and should be and we form
impressions of people, events, issues and cultural life.
• Cultivation theory by Gerbner and Gross, the theory asserts that over
time television fosters the viewer’s notion of reality.
• The greater the amount of television you watch, the more your
worldview comes to accord with the beliefs, values, and attitudes you
see on the screen.
Characteristics of Culture
5. Culture is Dynamic
• Cultures do not exist in a vacuum; they are subject to change.
• Countless changes in culture – not only changes in fashion and music,
but changes in culture due to new technology and globalization.
• Cultural changes – altered perceptions about immigrants and various
religion.
• Changes – rise of American capitalism, world wide population growth,
large movements of immigrants and information systems.
Characteristics of Culture
Two types of Changes:
Innovation – discovery of new practices, inventions, tools or concepts
that may produce changes in practices and behaviours for a particular
culture (technology, new art forms and new ideas).
Diffusion – spread of various ideas, concepts, institutions and practices
from one culture to another.
Technology has greatly influenced worldwide diffusion.
Characteristics of Culture
Adoption of elements that are compatible with values and beliefs that
can be modified without causing major disruptions.
The assimilation of what is borrowed accelerates when cultures come
into direct contact with each other.
E.g. Americans and Japanese engaging in commercial exchanges,
assimilating the business practices of each other.
Although many aspects of culture are subject to change, the deep
structure of a culture resists major alterations.
Characteristics of Culture
Many of the changes – popular culture which includes music, food,
hairstyle, clothing constantly changes but backstage culture – the
values, attitudes, and cultural dimensions – learned from birth changes
very slowly.
• This continual embracing of one’s culture is called culturally boundary
maintenance.
The Elements of Culture
• Culture is composed of countless elements (food, shelter, work,
defense, social control, perceptions of illness, forms of governing etc)
• Five particular aspects of culture: worldview, religion, history, values,
social organizations and language.
• Worldview: the way people interpret reality and events including their images
and how they relate to the world around them.
The Elements of Culture
• Religion: used by people to assist them in understanding the universe,
natural phenomena, what to die for and how to dwell among other
people.
• In many way religion is like culture itself, since it provides the followers of
faith with a set of values, beliefs and even guidelines for specific behaviours.
• These guidelines consciously and unconsciously impact everything from
business practices, to politics to individual behavior.
The Elements of Culture
• History: all cultures believe in the idea that history provides stories about the
past that serve as lessons on how to live in the present
• Common culture creates a strong sense of identity
• As historical events get transmitted from generation to generation, people perceive
“where they belong and where their loyalties lie.
• The stories of the past – also provides values and rules for behaviour,.
• All cultures use history to transmit important messages about that culture, each set of
messages is unique to a particular culture.
• These stories and events carry a unique meaning and varied level of importance for their
respective cultures.
• Values: according to Bailey and Peoples, values are critical to the maintenance
of culture as a whole because they represent the qualities that people believe
are essential to continuing their way of life.
The Elements of Culture
• The key word in discussion about of cultural values is “guidelines”
• In other words, values help determine how people within a particular culture
ought to behave.
• To the extent that cultural values differ, participants in intercultural
communication will tend to exhibit and to anticipate different behaviours under
similar circumstances. E.g. elderly
Social Organization – represents the various social unit within the culture.
• these are institutions such as family, government, schools tribes etc.
• This “living with others” means that there are patterned interactions that are “rule
governed” which all members of these organizations have learned and display.
• These social systems establish communication networks and regulate norms of
personal, familial and social conduct.
The Elements of Culture
• According to Nolan, social structures reflect our culture, for example, whether we
have kings and queens or presidents and prime ministers. Within the social
structure, culture assigns roles to the people – expectation about how individuals
will behave, what they will stand for, and even how they will dress.
• Language – language is fundamental to the functioning of human culture.
• How the language being used, the meanings assigned, the grammar employed,
and the syntax bear the identification marks of a specific culture.
• Language underlies every other aspect of a people’s way of life – their relationship
with the natural environment, family life, political organizations, worldview etc
• Most socialization of children depends on language, which means language is the
main vehicle of cultural transmission from one generation to the next.
Developing Intercultural Competence
What is Intercultural Competence (IC)?
According to Spitzberg, intercultural communication competence is
“behavior that is appropriate and effective in a given context.”
Kim’s definition on IC, “the overall internal capability of an individual to
manage key challenging features of intercultural communication:
namely, cultural differences and unfamiliarity, inter-group posture, and
the accompanying experience of stress.
Interculturally competent communicator means analyzing the situation
and selecting the correct mode of behavior.
The basic Components of Intercultural Communication
Competence
a. Motivation - A communicator wants to be part of a successful
intercultural encounter.
• Motivation – being motivated and having a positive attitude can bring
positive results.
• According to Morreale, Spitzberg and Barge, “Goals are particularly
relevant to communication competence because they are a way of
assessing your effectiveness.”
• The goals that motivate you might be extrinsic (financial gain, respect or
power) or intrinsic (personal and harder to access).
• E.g. Your reaction when you heard someone you know injured seriously in an
accident compared to 1 million people suffering famine.
The basic Components of Intercultural
Communication Competence
b. Knowledge – works in tandem with motivation.
• Motivated enough to gather a fund of knowledge of other cultures.
• Cognitive flexibility – the ability to augment and expand knowledge
about people of other cultures.
• Chen describes cognitive aspect is represented by intercultural
awareness, which refers to the ability to understand cultural
conventions that affect how people interact with each other.
The basic Components of Intercultural
Communication Competence
Scholars suggest two methods
i. Culture Specific – assume that the most effective way to improve
intercultural communication is to study one culture at a time and
learn all the distinct and specific communication features of that
culture.
ii. Culture General – to understand the universal influences of culture
on human behaviours based on assumption that there are some life
experiences and communication traits common to virtually all
cultures. Therefore, regardless of the culture you encounter, it is
important to have knowledge that enables you to adapt to any
culture.
The basic Components of Intercultural
Communication Competence
C. Skills – specific behaviours to make the communication encounter a
successful one.
- Develop intercultural listening skills- there are cultural differences in
how people engage in listening.
- Time spent on talking compared to silence and different orientations,
one favoring talk and one silence.
- The cultural variations in how speakers present themselves and their
ideas, for example, one that values a dynamic presentation and the
other passive, some tend to speak in soft voices and the other much
more intense.
The basic Components of Intercultural
Communication Competence
• Nonverbal responses that are appropriate and that can hamper – E.g.
“um-humm” and ”uh-huh” are sign of paying attention and other
cultures find it impolite and eye-contact.
• Direct or indirect communication style – In France, Germany and US,
people listen primarily listen for facts and concrete information and
listeners confront speakers directly and ask blunt questions. On the
other hand, people in Finland, Japan and Sweden, will not interrupt
when the speaker is talking and give emphasis to politeness.
• Accents – affects accents. Accents of people speaking English as second
language – need to be tolerant, pay attention and practice being
patient.
The basic Components of Intercultural
Communication Competence
• Open-mindedness – accessible to new ideas. Giving another person a
fair hearing.
Develop Communication Flexibility - to be flexible when deciding how
to present yourself to another person who is from different culture.
Flexibility means you have a large range of behaviours to enable you to
regulate, change and adapt your communication behavior appropriate
to various people, setting and situations.
Spanish proverb, “I dance to the tune that is played.”
The basic Components of Intercultural
Communication Competence
Develop the Skill to tolerate ambiguity – many intercultural encounters
are unpredictable and often involve dealing with a new set of values
and customs, confusion and ambiguity can often proliferate during the
interaction. To develop a tolerance for ambiguity is to expect the
unexpected, be nonjudgmental and practice patience.