Learning Culture through Purposeful Observation-Sample

“Culture” is a term that we throw around more than we should.  If fact its overuse and misuse became so prevalent that in the 1990’s the discipline of cultural anthropology debated abandoning the word! We hear of corporate culture, church culture, consumer culture, culture wars, national culture, Western culture, and Harajuku culture (look that one up).  I will hear people refer to the culture of the university where I teach.  One author writes that, “culture is sometimes nothing more than a convenient and lazy explanation” (Ingrid Piller, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction 2011, 172).  We hope to avoid some of the misuses of this term and define it in a way that it will help us in our pursuit of understanding of how and why people live the way they do.  We can’t explore a deeper understanding of culture if we don’t know what we are looking for.  

The concept of culture that we will use focuses on meaning.  This view sees culture as a set of symbols which through the course of the history of a group of people have been invested with meanings.  Symbols include physical artifacts like cars, shirts and building architecture.  Behaviors like eating, talking, and sleeping.  Relationships like those between husbands and wives, teachers and students, colleagues at work.  These symbols are like another set of symbols that you are very familiar with: words.  Words are symbols which are invested with meaning and used together to make communication possible.  To understand a text requires that you interpret it, giving special attention to context.  The same is true for understanding culture, you must give attention to the social context.  We will look at culture as a collection of related symbols needing interpretation.  A helpful social theory related to this view of culture is Symbolic Interactionism.  The big idea of this view of society is that people act in, and respond to their world (people, words, objects, events) according to what it means to them.  As the eight-year-old daughter of an anthropologist once said, “Even the stupidest things have meaning” (Richard Shweder 1993, “Why Men Barbeque,” 296).

By focusing on meanings of culture we are not only considering superficial behaviors and tangible objects.  We want to get below the surface and consider what informs and drives those behaviors.  This includes values, morality and even conceptions of what is real.  Culture is an expression of worldview.  

There are implications to this understanding of culture.  First, we must remember that people behave meaningfully.  Another way to put this is to say people do things for reasons.  Our task is to uncover those meanings.  Second, in seeking to uncover these meanings we are sometimes our own worst enemy because we will tend to interpret the behaviors of people from the perspective of our own world of meaning i.e. our own culture.  The same behavior can have very different meanings in two different cultures.  Consequently, we are open to misinterpreting what is going on in another culture.  We all have a leaning toward ethnocentrism.  This is where method steps in to help us.  By being intentional about how we study culture we are more likely to get an insider's understanding of culture.