同济大学跨文化交流课文3 Culture(text A)

3. Culture

Text A

What Is Culture

We now move from communication to culture. The transition should be a smooth one, for as Hall reminds us, “Culture is communication and communication is culture.”

People learn to think, feel, believe, and act as they do because of the messages that have been communicated to them, and those messages all bear the stamp of culture. This omnipresent quality of culture leads Hall to conclude that “there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture.”In many ways, Hall is correct: culture is everything and everywhere. And more important, at least for our purposes, culture governs and defines the conditions and circumstances under which various messages may or may not be sent, noticed, or interpreted. Remember, we are not born knowing how to dress, what toys to play with, what to eat, which gods to worship, or how to spend our money and our time. Culture is both teacher and textbook. From how much eye contact we employ in conversations to explanations o f why we get sick, culture plays a dominant role in our lives. When cultures differ, communication practices may also differ. In modern society different people communicate in different ways, as do people in different societies around the world; and the way people communicate is the way they live. It is their culture. Who talks with whom? How? And about what? These are questions of communication and culture. Communication and culture are inseparable.

Because culture conditions us toward one particular mode of communication over another, it is imperative that we understand how culture operates as a first step toward improving intercultural communication.

As was the case with communication, many definitions have been suggested for culture. They range from all-encompassing ones (“it is everything”) to narrower ones (“it is opera, art, and ballet”), but none of them seems to be able to tell us everything about culture. The following definitions are just some of the well-known ones.

“Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks.” (Sapir, 1921)

“What really binds men together is their culture —the ideas and the standards they have in common.” (R.Benedict, 1935)

“Culture is man‟s medium; there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture. This means personality, how people express themselves (including shows of emotion), the way they think, how they move, how problems are solved, how their cities are planned and laid out, how transportation systems function and are organized, as well as how economic and government systems are put together and function.” (Edward T. Hall, 1959)

“By …culture‟, anthropology means the total life way of a people, the social legacy the individual acquires from his group. Or culture can be regarded as that part of the environment that is the creation of man.” (Clyde Kluckhohn, 1965)“A culture is a collection of beliefs, habits, living patterns, and behaviors which are held more or less in common by people who occupy particular geographic areas.”