We are Culture 2

We are Culture 2

We tend to overlook the fact that a culture exists only within the people who make it up. Instead, we live as though individuals and cultures are separate events, as though somehow we exist apart from our culture. This is a bit like thinking a forest exists independently from the trees. When we look at it impartially, it’s plain that culture is purely conceptual – there is no culture outside the minds of the people who comprise one. Our culture is made up of our collective temperament and values, our assumptions and beliefs, our methods of thinking and our cosmologies. Our culture is found in every building, every word, every idea, every routine, every ritual, every method, every book, every mind, every emotion, every value, every action, every bias – in short, it’s made of up of everything we do and are.

Since we’re born into a culture, we can no more avoid being shaped by it and passing it along to our children than we can avoid being the product of a gene pool. The assumptions of our culture exist in our minds and perception, in our feelings and beliefs. Although they are “merely” conceptual, they live within each of us, as a very basic part of our experience, and they manifest in every activity we undertake and in every place we live. Our culture, our community, our society is you and I – and everyone else. Culture exists in us. It is one of the most basic factors in the framework from which we perceive the world around us.

Cultural assumptions are part of the foundation for our perceptions. We can’t help but take them for granted. We look out from them, which makes it difficult to look at them. No matter what we encounter, much of our interpretation of the event or object or person is predetermined by the assumptions that unconsciously shape our perceptions. One obvious example is gender stereotype. The bias, beliefs, and programming that exist in a given culture will be superimposed on an individual’s perception of every male and female. Core cultural assumptions bind us all and are as common and natural to us as the air we breathe. These assumptions are shared beliefs adopted not from personal choice but simply as a result of being part of a community.

The Book of Not Knowing

Peter Ralston