Lesson 3: Culture and Rationalities

What is a culture?

It is the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.

Clifford Geertz

Culture is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited
conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and
develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life” (Geertz 1973).

 According to Clifford Geertz, Culture is the system of symbols that allows people to give
meaning to experience. It bears all the accumulated knowledge of people coded into symbols
that will help them interpret what is happening to or around them.

INSTINCT

 Natural or inherent aptitude, impulse or capacity.

 systems of meanings that tells what is right and wrong and good or evil.

CULTURES CAN CHANGE

 Culture is superior to instinct because it is malleable or adaptable.

 It is both learned and inherited and readily determines how one understands and acts.

Culture can change when its system of meaning no longer serves human flourishing. We must
understand how culture can be changed so that the world becomes more just to women.

MICROAGGRESSION refers to hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults that can cause
potentially harmful or unpleasant psychological impacts on the target person or group.