So what exactly is culture

A brief review.

So we’ve all heard of this thing called culture in day-to-day life used in conversation or academic discourse. But what is it really?

Whenever we talk about culture, people seem to be referring to various things, whether it may be a type of food, a way of dressing, a type of music, a group of people, etc.

However, a good definition for culture is that it is a set of historically transmitted principles to interpret the world and acting within it:

Now, what does that mean?

First things first, we can’t look at culture without looking at communication. In essence, communication forms the fundamentals for all culture. Without the commonality of communication between distinctions of groups of people, culture wouldn’t exist.

So let’s break down the definition.

Principles: in this definition, principles mean our norms and values. Principles organize the things we call culture, and they differ across different societies and (yes) cultures. In theory, principles are guidelines to interpret the world and how to act within it. However, these are just guidelines and can always be circumvented. Yet, we cannot ignore the norms of our culture — to do so is perilous. This is known as cultural bias.

But why does this matter?

Principles are a way of talking about certain irregularities shared amongst a joint group. We are interested in principles insofar as we are interested in interpreting the social and physical world, and in doing so, we must look at historically transmitted principles. These historical principles are a way of telling us that culture is not a static thing. For example, think about whatever culture you currently identify with, and think about that culture 50 years ago. It was probably different, right. I can attest to this. For example, I am Canadian, and life for a Canadian woman of colour 50 years ago would have been significantly different from life for me now. This is because the fundamental principles presented in Canadian culture at that time — the normalization for women and people of colour to be marginalized — are different than the principles present in today’s society.

The reason why culture is not static is that it exists through transmission from person to person. When I was younger, I loved to play broken telephone with my friends because the result was drastically different from the original message. For context, broken telephone is a game where one person whispers a message to another, and the message gets passed through a line or a circle of people. Once the last person receives the message, they announce it (or usually some modified version of it as it has gone through many renditions of people) to the entire group. In essence, this is what culture is — a gigantic game of broken telephone. People interpret cultural norms and principles differently over time. Thus, the principles evolve to be drastically different over the years, similar to how my game of broken telephone was played.

Now let’s talk about communication.

I’m going to be a little bit fancy here and talk about etymology. The word communication originally comes from the Latin word communicare, which means to make something common. This is precisely what communication is! It’s the notion of transmission or the passage of messages from generation to generation. And this ties heavily back into culture as well. Like before, when I talked about principles. If there’s no communication, there’s no culture since it is through communication that intergenerational culture, tradition, and principles can be passed down.

However, communication also separates people — not everyone can understand everyone or can necessarily reach everyone.

Let’s take the example between immigrants and a host country. There is a primary language barrier if the immigrant in question doesn’t speak the common language in the country. This creates difficulty and exacerbates degrees of separation between peoples and groups. Another example is if I wanted to talk to someone difficult to reach — say the prime minister of Canada. Since I am just a student, I can only get to them through intermediaries. Whatever I may want to tell the prime minister will inevitably get transformed by these intermediaries, i.e., a big important adult game of broken telephone. My point is, while communication does involve making something common, it also fractionally separates people into degrees of understanding.

Now let’s look at communication concerning society. Jim Carey (not the actor, the anthropologist) says that the underpinning of society is interaction, and interaction requires communication. To talk about society is not just to talk about the collection of people. This collection of people have to be potential communicators — if they aren’t, they don’t form a society. For example, let’s take a group of people waiting at a boarding gate for an international flight. Chances are, the majority of the people at the gate don’t speak the same language and thus cannot easily communicate. Therefore, they don’t form a society; instead, they form simply a group of people.

Okay, that was a lot of information. But, if you took anything from my article (other than the fact that the game of broken telephone has applications in the real world), remember the definition of culture: a set of historically transmitted principles to interpret the world and acting within it:

Well, that’s it for me! If you liked this article feel free to connect on Linkedin or send me an email!