Understanding Culture: Symbols, Traditions, and Values
Culture is essentially a learned system of meanings, a value ladder system, that helps you to make sense of and explain what is going on in everyday intercultural surroundings. It fosters (encourages or promotes the development of something, typically something regarded as good) a particular sense of shared identity and solidarity among its group members. It also reinforces the boundary of “we” as an ingroup and the dissimilar “others” as belonging to distant outgroups. Ingroups’ identity basically refers to the emotional attachment and shared fate that we attach to our selective cultural, ethnic, and social categories. Outgroups are groups from which we remain psychologically and emotionally detached, and we are skeptical of their intentions. Culture is a learned meaning system that consists of patterns of traditions, norms, values, beliefs, meanings, and symbols that are passed on from one generation to the next and are shared to varying degrees by interacting members of a community.
Surface-Level Culture: Pop Culture
Culture is like an iceberg: the deeper layers (values, beliefs, traditions) are hidden from our view, and we tend to see only the uppermost layers of cultural artifacts (pop music, art, fashion, cinema). At the most superficial level, we often learn about other cultures via the representation of their pop culture. Popular images, as portrayed in TV, cinema, pop music, and advertisements, often reinforce cultural and gender ideologies of the society. It’s important to remember that all popular media are businesses that aim for mass consumption and profit. In this case, US pop culture tends to dominate the global market and represents only the surface level of US culture.
Films like Titanic and Indiana Jones promote adventures, romance, the spirit of exploration, and discoveries—images that reinforce the notion of the US as an action-oriented and adventure-seeking culture. Beyond films, people also receive images via magazines, TV shows, newspapers, and radio. US-exported TV shows such as Friends and Sex and the City reinforce the stereotypic notions of the US as a free-sex, drug-prone, violence-prone, and fun-seeking culture. Furthermore, icons such as McDonald’s, Disneyland, Apple, and Coca-Cola brand names, in conjunction with TV shows and films, are some prime pop culture examples. Pop culture is often driven by an economic industry with a targeted audience in mind. Individuals consume a particular form of pop culture as a way to be informed, entertained, and included in their cultural community (CNN). Of course, individuals can also resist the one-sided brainwashing effect of a particular pop culture by staying away from it.
Although having some information is better than no information, before we visit a culture, all of us need to remain vigilant, questioning the sources from which we receive our ideas or images about other cultures. Sometimes we get information from second-hand sources, which create our system of stereotypes (e.g., recently about Russia, Ukraine). We should remain mindful that a culture exists on multiple levels of complexity and that pop culture represents only the surface level of the embedded richness of culture.
Intermediate Culture: Symbols, Meanings, and Signs
A symbol is a sign, artifact, word, gesture, image, non-verbal behavior, or brand name that stands for something meaningful. We use language as a symbolic system that contains rich culture-based categories to organize the world around us. Expressions and proverbs such as “When there is a will, there is a way” (US) and “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” reveal something about that culture’s attitude toward self-determination or group-value orientation (Armenian: “Gekh kangni, geran kkotri”). Intercultural frictions (clashes) often arise because of the way we label and attach meanings to different expressions and behaviors around us.
The meanings that we attach to a symbol can cue both objective and subjective reactions. We can recognize a particular culture by its national flag because of its design and color (objective meaning). Each personality, however, can also hold a subjective meaning of what the flag means to them. It can be a sense of pride or pressure. Other examples of symbolic meaning can include the use of different non-verbal gestures (e.g., the “OK” sign). Cultural norms refer to the collective expectations of what constitutes proper or improper behavior in a given interaction scene (e.g., greeting patterns like bowing or shaking hands). However, to enact a proper “getting-acquainted” interaction script, we have to take the setting, interaction goal, relationship expectations, and cultural competence skills into account.
Setting can include the consideration of cultural and physical context. Cultural context refers to where the interaction scene takes place. Physical context includes locations like a university, office, or restaurant. Intercultural goal refers to the objective of the meeting (e.g., a job interview is quite different from a chance meeting in a cafe or on the street). Relationship expectation refers to how much role formality or informality, or task or social tone, you want to approach in the interaction. Cultural competence skills refer to the cultural knowledge you have internalized and the operational skills you are able to apply in the communication scene (e.g., when you don’t know how to greet). To understand a culture, we need to master the operational cultural norms of that culture.
Deep-Level Culture
On a communal level, culture refers to a patterned way of living by a group of interacting individuals who share a common set of history, values, traditions, and even fate. This is known as a normative culture for a group of individuals. On the individual level, members of the culture can attach different degrees of importance to the layers of cultural beliefs and norms. This is known as subjective culture.
Key Elements of Deep-Level Culture
- Culturally shared traditions: These can include ceremonies, rituals, and legends that are passed from generation to generation by oral or written form. Culturally shared traditions can even include celebrations of birth, wedding ceremonies, etc.
- Culturally shared beliefs: These refer to a set of fundamental assumptions or worldviews that people hold in their hearts without question (e.g., the concept of space, the existence of supernatural powers).
- Cultural values: These refer to a set of priorities that guide good or bad behaviors, desirable or undesirable practices, and fair or unfair actions.