Culture

The term culture covers a wide spectrum of meanings, from physical elements in a society such as buildings and architecture to abstract and metaphorical elements such as myths, values, attitudes, and ideas about spirituality. The concept of culture is so indeterminate that it can easily be filled in with whatever preconceptions a theorist brings to it. For example, culture has been defined as knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits that are acquired by individuals as members of society. Related terms such as subculture, popular culture, counterculture, high culture, ethnic culture, organizational culture, mass culture, political culture, feminist culture, and deaf culture indicate the complexity, dynamism, and evolving nature of the concept of culture within the disciplines of social scientific and humanistic study. This understanding suggests that the concept of culture, like race, is neither linear nor fixed. It must be seen as dynamic and continuously evolving, producing its own meaning in specific contexts.

Since its earliest meanings, which were derived from the Latin word colere–to till, cultivate, dwell, or inhabit–culture, and its close ally colonize, have been powerful organizing influences in producing and reproducing a dominant worldview among Europeans. In other words, the process of colonization was clearly linked to the production and reproduction of a particular culture. Its ethnological origin appears to describe a process of expressing European power through colonization, domination, subjugation, and diaspora. During this time, the noun culture became a verb–a doing word–through which Eurocentric ideologies were formulated to cultivate not just crops and animals, but other humans, too. This was culture representing itself as civilization.

[Page 130]Although there is very little agreement among cultural commentators about the meaning of culture, it is generally accepted that culture is a process that is not static but constantly changing in time and space within a society. Although individuals tend to express or display cultural traits, culture appears to be understood as a coherent or incoherent phenomenon in human society. Human beings belong to thousands of different ethnocultural groups, each of which, through the specific interaction of their biological, psychological, and cultural natures, shapes each human being in a unique way, and these interactions are transmitted from one generation to another to promote individual and group adjustments and adaptation. Therefore, all individuals are cultural beings and have a cultural, ethnic, and racial heritage that can be best described as the embodiment of a worldview learned and transmitted through beliefs, values, and practices, including religious and spiritual traditions.

However, at the same time, culture should not be treated as a global entity but should be disaggregated as far as possible into a number of discrete variables (values, ideologies, beliefs, preferences) to avoid vagueness, multiple meanings, and circular definitions.

According to Jenkins and Karnos, culture is thought to provide an orientation for a person's way of feeling, thinking, and being in the world–an unself-conscious medium of experience, interpretation, and action.

It is the universal and global characterization of culture that offers methodological difficulties when an attempt is made to link it causally to individual behavior. This latter point is particularly important in understanding cross-cultural psychology. A contemporary critique of psychiatry contends that psychiatric discourse tends to link culture with now-outdated pseudoscientific theories on race and the Western sociobiology of the culturally different client. These approaches have often resulted in particular treatments for visible minority clients, some of which are now recognized as racist.

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