Characteristics of Culture

Regardless of the definition employed, there is gen­eral agreement about the major characteristics of cul­ture. Examining these universal characteristics will help to understand the concept called cul­ture, and also to see how these characteris­tics influence communication.

Culture Is Not Innate; It Is Learned. We begin with the most important characteristic of cul­ture, and the one that is hardest to explain. It is the most important because it goes to the heart of what is called culture.

Without the advantages of learning from those who lived before us, we would not have culture. That is why learning is considered the most important of all the characteristic of cul­ture. All people are born with basic needs—needs that create behavior. But how they go about meeting those needs and developing other coping behaviors are a matter of learning.

Enculturation usually takes place through interac­tion (your parents kiss you and you learn about kiss­ing—whom to kiss, when to kiss, and so on), observation (you watch your father do most of the driving of the family car and you learn about sex roles—what a man does, what a woman does), and imitation (you laugh at the same jokes your parents laugh at and you learn about humor).

Most of us would have a difficult time pointing to a specific event or experience that taught us about such things as direct eye contact, our use of silence and space, the concept and importance of attractive­ness, our view of aging and the elderly, our ability to speak one language over another, our preference for activity over meditation, or why we prefer one mode of dealing with conflict over another. All of our examples show us that learning the perceptions, rules, and behaviors of cultural membership usually go on without our being aware of it.

One thing that should be clear to this point is the idea that we learn our culture in a great number of ways. As many of our examples have noted, most of what we learn is communicated through our interactions with other people. Early in life we receive normative instructions from family and friends. There are, how­ever, numerous other "teachers" that pass on the messages of culture.

A very powerful set of instructions comes from proverbs and sayings which create vivid images that are easy to learn and difficult to for­get. They are repeated with such regularity as we grow up they soon become part of our belief system. Let us look at a few proverbs from various cultures and note how the specific proverbs are linked to a cultural value or belief.

"One does not make the wind blow but is blown by it." This Asian view implies that people are guid­ed by fate rather than by their own devices. "Order is half of life." This is a German view that stresses the value of organization, conformity, and structure.

"The mouth maintains silence in order to hear the heart talk." This Belgian saying implies the value of intuition and feelings in interaction. "He who speaks has no knowledge and he who has knowledge does not speak." This saying from Japan demonstrates the value of silence. "How blessed is a man who finds wisdom." This Jewish expression states the importance of learn­ing and education. "A zebra does not despise its stripes." From the Maasai of Africa, this saying expresses the value of accepting things as they are, of accepting oneself as one is, and of avoiding the envy of others. "Loud thunder brings little rain." This Chinese proverb teaches the importance of being reserved instead of being boisterous. "A man's tongue is his sword." Arabs are taught to enjoy words and use them in a powerful and force­ful manner. "A single arrow is easily broken, but not in a bunch." This proverb is found in many Asian cultures as a means of stressing the group over the individual. "He who stirs another's porridge often burns his own." The Swedish are a very private people, and attempt to teach this value through the preceding proverb. "The duck that quacks is the first to get shot." The Japanese proverb stresses the importance of silence.

Culture Is Transmitted from Generation to Generation. For cultures to exist, endure, and perpetuate, they must make sure the crucial "messages" and elements of the culture get passed on. According to Brislin (1993), "If there are values considered central to a society that have existed for many years, these must be transmitted from one generation to another" (p. 6). This charac­teristic adds credence to the idea that culture and communication are linked. It is communication that makes culture a continuous process. For once cultur­al habits, principles, values, dispositions, and the like are "invented," they are communicated to each indi­vidual within that culture. The strong need for a cul­ture to tie each generation to past and future generations is demonstrated by Keesing (1965), who tells us, "Any break in the learning chain would lead to a culture's disappearance".

Culture Is Based on Symbols. The first two char­acteristics—that culture is learned and passed from generation to generation—leads us directly to the next idea that it is our symbol-making ability that enables us to both learn and pass on our culture from individual to individual, group to group, and genera­tion to generation. Through language, be it verbal, nonverbal, images or icons, it is "possible to learn from cumulative, shared experience" (Smith, 1986).

Language thus enables people to communicate what they would do if such-and-such happened, to organize their experiences into abstract categories ("a happy occasion," for instance, or an "evil omen"), and to express thoughts never spoken before. Morality, religion, philosophy, literature, science, economics, tech­nology, and numerous other areas of human knowl­edge and belief—along with the ability to learn about and manipulate them—all depends on this type of higher-level communication.

The portability of symbols allows us to package and store them as well as transmit them. The mind, books, pictures, films, videos, computer disks, and suchlike enable a culture to preserve what it deems to be important and worthy of transmission. In this sense, culture is historical as well as preservable. Each new generation might "write" more, but the notes from the past represent what we call culture. As the French novelist Proust wrote, "The past remains the present."

Culture Is Subject to Change. Cultures are a dynamic system that do not exist in a vacuum, and therefore are subject to change. We must make two points about cultural change. First, cultures are highly adaptive. History runs over with examples of how cultures have been forced to alter their course because of natural disasters, wars, or other calamities. Events in the last few hundred years have scattered Jews throughout the world, yet their culture has adapted and survived. And think for a moment about the adjustments made by the Japanese since the end of World War II. Their government and economy were nearly destroyed during the war, yet because they could adapt, their culture endured.

Second, although many aspects of cul­ture are subject to change, the deep structure of a culture resists major alterations. That is to say, changes in dress, food, transportation, housing, and the like, though appearing to be important, are sim­ply attached to the existing value system. However, values associated with such things as ethics and morals, work and leisure, definitions of freedom, the importance of the past, religious practices, the pace of life, and attitudes toward gender and age are so deep in a culture that they persist generation after generation.

Culture Is Ethnocentric. Like culture itself, ethnocentrism is mostly learned at the unconscious level. If, for example, American schools are teaching U.S. history, geog­raphy, literature, and government, they are also, without realizing it, teaching ethnocentrism. The student, by being exposed only to this single orienta­tion, is therefore developing the view that the United States is the center of the world, as well as learning to judge that world by North American standards—the standards he or she has been taught.

Culture is created by humans. Each different group or population cre­ates its own way of life, with the values, norms, behaviors, and material objects that they feel best fit their situation. The material objects produced by a cul­ture together with its musical and artistic productions, are referred to as cul­tural artifacts.

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