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classic metaphors and ideas about "culture"

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classic metaphors and ideas about "culture" Empty classic metaphors and ideas about "culture"

帖子 由 Admin 周三 三月 20, 2013 4:34 am

What is Culture Like?

We can understand the characteristics of culture better through the following images.

Culture is like an iceberg.

Culture is like an iceberg. It’s very beautiful but very dangerous. Only a small part of culture is visible. For instance, food, dress, paintings, architecture, and dance, etc. are apparent to the eyes. But a greater part of culture is hidden under the water, such as views, attitudes, preference, love and hatred, customs and habits, and so on. They are out of our awareness. This makes our study of culture difficult.

Culture is like an onion.

Geert Hofstede states that the following four levels embody the total concept of culture like an onion with 4 layers: symbols, heroes, rituals, and values. These have been depicted like the skins of an onion which indicates that symbols represent the most superficial and the easiest to perceive by an outsider and the least important to an insider. Words, gestures, pictures, or dress hairstyles, flags, status symbols, etc. belong to this category. The second “skin of the onion” is heroes, referring to what kind of people you worship. Batman in the USA, and Wukong (the monkey king) in China can serve as cultural heroes. The third “skin of the onion” is rituals. Rituals are those collective activities that are considered socially essential within a culture. sporting events, for instance, are rituals. Symbols, heroes, and rituals (the three outer layers of the onion) have been included in the category of practices. Practice means what people do. They are visible and obvious to an outside observer. They are determined by the core of culture ---- values, which are the deepest manifestations of culture and the most difficult to understand by an outsider.

Culture is our software.

Geert Hofstede refers to culture as “the software of the mind.” We all know that computers do what programs ask them to do. Human beings do according to their culture. in this sense, humans are similar to computers. But we are not exactly the same as computers. We are creative, but computers can not create. To be more exact, we might as well take that computer analogy further and say that culture is the basic operating environment that enables software programs to run. Culture is like DOS or Windows ---- culture is a mental set of windows through which all of life is viewed. Humans around the world are physically pretty much the same. We can think of our physical selves as the hardware, but we cannot be said to be human until we are programmed and each of us is programmed by our home culture. At birth an infant is only a potential human. It must learn how to be human and it learns that in a culturally specific way. It is the culture that provides the software. As with any good software, we are only vaguely aware of it as we use it. (it fades into the background and we just know that we can be, that the computer works,) or perhaps sometimes does not work because it is incompatible with someone else’s software.

Culture is like the water a fish swims in.

Like any creature, a fish scans its environment to find food, reproduce and protect itself from danger. It notices everything except the water it is swimming in. the fish takes the water for granted because it so totally surrounds the fish that it really cannot imagine another environment. The same is true for us. Our culture is so much a part of who we are and what the world is like for us that we do not notice it. We take it for granted.

Culture is the grammar of our behavior.

Culture is what people need to know in order to behave appropriately in any society. In learning to speak, everyone learns to use the grammar of their native language, but they use it automatically with little or no conscious awareness of the rules of grammar. Similarly people learn their cultural grammar unconsciously and apply its rules automatically. Just as native speakers of a language are usually unable to describe the grammatical rules of that language unless they have specifically studied grammar, most people find it difficult to describe the meaning system of their own culture. Like the grammar of a language, cultural grammars are repetitive. They are made up of basic patterns that occur again and again. For instance, an important pattern in Chinese culture is the distinction between inside and outside. This pattern shows up in the language, traditional architecture and in social relationships.



These images all point to the idea that culture is largely out-of-awareness. Usually when people talk about culture, they mean some part of the iceberg that can be seen above the water. The purpose of cultural studies is to raise the hidden part of the iceberg so that more of it becomes visible; to enable us to add new software to our basic operating systems to increase its power and flexibility.

To do these things, we need to look on our own culture as a system of meaning, as a grammar of our experience and behavior. We need to become software engineers and become aware of the water we are swimming in, using another image. With greater awareness of our own culture, we will better understand the meaning systems of other cultures and vice versa.

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