First of all, I must confess that I have read this piece with a lot more interest than I have read the other articles. It was like an exploration of culture through several perspectives and discussions. It had a sense of sociology or a psychology book. I realized that all three meanings or uses of culture are actually actively used, Arnold’s ‘high culture’, Tylor’s ‘beliefs, customs, and capabilities of a social group’, and Boas’s definition which dismisses value judgements.
I agreed with the quotation cited by Adler in that culture does give us clues about future actions, and Hofstede’s quote in that, culture does actually in a way condition us. Yet, I disagreed with Spencer-Oatey’s claim. Culture, no matter how influential it is, cannot determine each person’s behavior.
Mainly, the fact that the concept ‘culture’ is complex, difficult to define, and can be interpreted and analyzed in various ways was the notion I gathered about the gist of the article, which I had previously thought about. What it covers may be about a domain of values, assumptions and interpretations of beliefs and behaviors, and can be used for rationalization of some beliefs and behaviors, while it doesn’t necessarily decipher all practices since there will always be individual differences to explain people’s reactions. And I agree with the writer that it is so deeply embedded by all the other factors affecting human behavior and beliefs that it is difficult to draw the line where customary, genetic, racial, age-dependent or national practices that cultural traits are attributed to, end and where individual choices start. To distinguish culture from the other variants mentioned, one must bear in mind that culture is ‘learned’.
It was very interesting for me to read about how culture can affect a person’s biological system. The people throwing up after having heard that they have eaten snake meat was appalling.
I disagreed with the statement on the bottom of page 8, which reads culture resides in you if you act in accordance with its values. I found myself acting in accordance with a culture that definitely doesn’t reside in me (American culture- when I lived in the States), and I found myself not acting in accordance with Turkish culture although it is supposed to reside in me. I believe that I have been successful in de-familiarizing myself from the culture I was born into by sometimes being extremely critical to the norms it has imposed on me.
I enjoyed the epidemic analogy talking about culture. Individuals do feed the culture back although one generally assumes that our schemata is shaped by the culture we live in.
I am glad I won’t be using ethics to mean emics, now that I have read about the difference.
I’m not sure I agree with the writer when he said certain programs can be offered to foreign workers to help them integrate into the culture they have moved into, to enable them to be more successful at their jobs. I doubt that the acquired traits of culture can be artificially thought as explicit norms in class.
Change in a culture is called ‘discovery’ which I loved, because it implies that a group of people can actually discover the ridiculousness of a belief or practice, and can succeed to give it up. Diffusion, refers to how cultural items can be borrowed from other cultures, which is a common and inevitable phenomenon in today’s global world.
It was interesting to read about psychology, sociology and their relation to economics, since all the definitions, assumptions, and findings can be used to develop strategies that get people to buy products.
It was also, surprising to read that developing technology can change the readiness of children to read, for example.
I’m not sure that reifying culture is a notion to avoid. After all, although complex and with various controversial meanings, ‘culture’ is still a concept discussed and actively used in social sciences and lay-man contexts.
Reference:
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2012). What is culture? A compilation of quotations. GlobalPAD Core Concepts. Retrieved from http://go.warwick.ac.ul/globalpadintercultural