![]() Thirty years ago, what did Canadians typically eat? Who prepared the food? Who did people eat with? Where did they eat? What were they doing while they ate? How do the habits of 30 years ago compare with habits of today? Culture Combines the Visible and Invisible. To understand more fully how cultures can change over time, consider Canadian culture and eating habits. These considerations add to their total cultural outlook, and they represent major expressions of a person’s self-identity. When North Americans make choices in education, career, place of employment, and life partner, they consider certain rules, manners, ceremonies, beliefs, language, and values. People build their identities through cultural overlays to their primary culture. Culture Is the Basis of Self-Identity and Community.Ĭulture is the basis for how we tell the world who we are and what we believe. Cultural values and beliefs, which form the blueprint for behaviour, are closely aligned to the human needs of the group and support how the group lives. Culture is universal in that every human group has a culture. Acknowledging the inherent logic of a culture is extremely important when learning to accept behaviour that differs from our own cultural behaviour. Rules about how close to stand may be linked to values about sexuality, aggression, modesty, and respect. ![]() The rules in any culture originated to reinforce that culture’s values and beliefs. These cultural rules of behaviour, which are learned from your family and society, and which act as a kind of blueprint for how people live, are conditioned from early childhood. But in Western cultures, if a person stands too close, the other may feel uncomfortable. In Arab cultures, conversations are often held in close proximity, sometimes nose to nose. For example, in many Middle Eastern and some Asian cultures, same-sex people may walk hand in hand in the street, but opposite-sex people may not do so. In other words, cultural rules of behaviour are taught. They are learned and passed down from generation to generation. The rules, values, and attitudes of a culture are not inherent. Understanding basic characteristics of culture helps us make adjustments and accommodations. Sometimes it is only when we come in contact with other cultures and are made aware of differences in our efforts to communicate that our own ever-evolving cultures come sharply into focus. So, too, are our thinking and reasoning patterns and our approaches to problem-solving. How and what we learn can be, and frequently are, culturally determined. What we value, how those values influence our behaviour, how we perceive the world, and even how we communicate are all determined by the culture in which we grow up and by which we continue to live into adulthood. It is something dynamic, constantly changing, that is passed from one generation to the next. Although culture provides us with our identity and sense of self, culture is not part of our genetic code. Meyer (2017) says this about culture :Ĭulture, like language, is something that we learn. ![]()
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