Who are you?

What culture do you belong to?

http://youtube.com/v/DWynJkN5HbQ

What is culture?

‘Despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately,

there was in the early 1990s no agreement among

anthropologists regarding its nature.’

M Apte, The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2001).

Culture is shared by at least two people

• Large groups - national/country (or countries if migrated)

• Regional/ethnic/religious/language groups

• Gender groups

• Generation groups (child/parent/grandparent)

• Role group (student/teacher)

• Social class (education/wealth/occupation)

• Work organisation

Which means everyone is a member of several different

cultural groups at the same time

A cultural group constructs an environment

A cultural group has certain behaviour patterns

A cultural group behaves the way it does

because it holds certain ‘values’

which we see as:

Beliefs

Attitudes

Cultural meaning of some practices often lies only with

those who are ‘on the inside’, for example some gestures

and clothing might have different meanings to people

from different backgrounds

How do we demonstrate our ‘cultural

membership’?

Artefacts and Creations

Values

Underlying Assumptions

• Taken for granted• Invisible• Not thought about

Visible but the meaning is not always understood

Thought about, but not always visible

Behaviours and environments produce

Beliefs and attitudes generate

Exploits of words and deeds are expressed as

Cultural Identity

The way we know someone – or the way we want

to be known - because a social ‘group’ influences

the attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviours that

are understood and observed

But

• Culture is not the same for all

• Culture is not a thing

• Not all members of a group have the same

understanding of the group’s culture

• A person has or exhibits more than one culture

• Culture is not ‘custom’

• Cultures change, die, are born anew