Valentina Valbuena Mantilla, U00105770

WHAT IS CULTURE?

Defining culture means analyzing all it’s type of definitions, from anthropological to
political, involving all patterns of human behavior inside the society and what their
assumptions of reality, life and environment are.
Also, it has all different levels that complement each other and affects behavior and
interpretations through different social groups and characteristics, helping to make more
understandable how culture works, while it’s definition remains ambiguous.

It remains this way since the invisible aspects such as “assumptions” affect values, which
expresses what underlying desires and beliefs of the people are.
But not only this affects what people tend to express, it also reflects in the behavior and how
the ones that are surrounding have their own interpretation according to cultural patterns.

On a scenario that shows off two different and remarkable cultures, there’ll be a constant
share of information that creates new assumptions of the way ​they express ​what they think,
eventually creating cross-cultural issues.
And to avoid those issues it’s important to analyze the coexistence of etic (universal) and
emic (individual) aspects inside the behavior and the reasons behind it. For example, in
Santander, using “usted” instead of “tú” means respect to the older ones or unknowns, while
in Cundinamarca, it’s not “common” to hear somebody talking to some other using “usted”.
This ​way of expressing ​is what emics are about, the different ways that many cultures have to
express the same purpose, in this case: respect and politeness.
As the respect is an owe to the older ones in every culture, we recognize this value as an etic,
therefore the combination of this two is expressed in a unique cultural behavior.
That’s when American anthropologist Edward T. Hall needs to be mentioned, according to
his “low and high context cultures” different groups of people are able to understand each
other by listening to them actively, having a sense of empathy and gathering information in
the first place so when an encounter comes there’ll be nothing to worry about than stay open
minded.
Valentina Valbuena Mantilla, U00105770

And being open minded also implies understanding that defining ​culture not only involves
proxemics and geographical issues, it also involves personality, biological and human nature
aspects that are inherently attached to each human being.
By biological, it understands that some reactions such as disgust, pain, fear, etc. are majorly
inflicted by beliefs of a certain culture, which allows its members to express their human
nature (accept those feelings) in a specific way, one that is “common” for that culture.
Also, there are different levels of this social mental programming, which draws a line in
every way of connection that people can have, such as kinship, creeds, ethnicity, gender, age,
affinities, etc. and defines what it’s called a subculture.

And not only subcultures are one of the layers that make culture more hard to define, it also
involves psychogenic issues that must be taken seriously, specially in a negotiation between
people that share the same socio-economic level, gender, religion and other similarities, thus
the way one individual receives and transforms information also has to do with their previous
experiences, beliefs or values (some learned from their individuals with whom they share
subcultures) and even if cultural information (laws, regulations, what is “normal”) is spread
the same way it won’t mean the same inside the head of two differently raised people.
But explaining culture is not only about marking the biggest differences between groups of
people; instead, the evolution of a culture comes from a constant cultural diffusion, which is
clearly a selective process between cultures that allows not only “primitive” ones to take
inventions, norms and ideas from “advanced”, but it helps the last ones to develop a new way
of adapt their thoughts and transform them way better. This process selects the most
adaptable, easily understandable and superior techniques that other culture has and starts
adapting them to whatever they normal social behavior is.

So one first-short meaning of culture in this order of ideas, could be: the constantly changing
system of a socially organized group of people (with different personalities since this is an
individual attribute) that share interrelated characteristics (from political to gender and
geographical, to their values and context) so they’re able to communicate and understand
using its own —accepted —social codes and manners, learned by their interactions with the
environment, mixed with their beliefs or assumptions of the reality.
Valentina Valbuena Mantilla, U00105770