We have been talking about culture and communication, but what is culture exactly?
Let’s start by defining this tricky concept.
There are, as always, many definitions in the field.
Some see culture as an internalized and shared set of unstated assumptions,
procedures, ways of doing things,
that have been internalized to the extent that people do not argue about them.
Other definitions focus more on the fact that culture identifies us.
It creates a feeling of belonging or not-belonging,
for instance this definition by Hofstede who sees culture as
“the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes one group,
nation, society, from another”
One of the earliest and most influential definitions is by Edward B. Tylor
who defined it as “that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals,
custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
Important elements in this definition are the fact that people share culture.
This process of sharing makes us belong in society or in a group.
So culture has everything to do with our own individual identity,
with a feeling of belonging to society, to a larger group and to a cultural framework.
The study of human culture, and the differences between cultures,
became a core research theme of the scientific discipline of Anthropology.
One of the questions anthropologists, and most notably Franz Boas raised was
how universal is human culture and how can we study it?
Boas introduced the principle of cultural relativism,
which meant that there is not one universal human culture
but in fact there are many different ones,
each equally valid in it’s own context.
Scientists should, according to Baos, acknowledge this diversity,
which is difficult because we intuitively tend to see our own culture as ‘right’.
Still we can overcome this cultural bias by studying,
observing and participating in different cultures.
And what then should they study, or observe?
Basically everything!
Since culture is communicated through all kinds of cultural acts:
dance, song, literature, interpersonal interaction, daily routine, behavior, et cetera.
It’s all part of the cultural framework that identifies a society.
These ideas became the dominant approach of cultural and social anthropologists
in the twentieth century.
Their influence spread out to other scientific disciplines,
like communication science, in the nineteen sixties.
This culminated in the foundation of the very influential
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964.
This centre inspired scientists all over the world to study cultural aspects of communication.
And it prospered under the leadership of it’s foremost scientist
and later he also became the director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies:
Stuart Hall.
You might remember from last week that he was also the leading scholar
in the field of Reception Theory,
the theory that focused on the recipients of communication
and how they give meaning to a message and use those messages
to give meaning to the world around them.
This idea fitted neatly within the Cultural Approach.
Let’s further explore this in the next section of our MOOC.