Examining Our Own Culture and Identity
A Definition of Culture
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines culture as “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. it is also the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization: the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic.” Encyclopedia Britannica adds that “ culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies.” If you read those definitions and thought to yourself, “so, everything?” You would be correct.
Hammond (2015), used a tree metaphor to describe how “everything” falls into the categories or surface culture, shallow culture, and deep culture. The leaves and branches on the tree represent surface culture, or the concrete things about people that you can observe like holidays, clothing, language, music, or hair styles. The tree trunk is shallow culture which is
Unspoken societal norms like eye contact, personal space, displays of emotion, and ideas about child rearing and attitudes about food and eating are located. The roots of the tree represent the aspects of deep culture l that you need a strong knowledge or connection with people to know about. This includes spiritual beliefs, conception of how the world came to be, notions of fairness, relationships to the natural world, world views, definitions of family and kinship, group identity, and independence vs. interdependence.
Humans are social beings. The cultures in which we live influence everything that we do and say, even those things we rarely think about. Most of our cultural practices are transmitted to us from our caregivers implicitly, through modeling. Implicitly taught practices include when to make eye contact or how to stand in an elevator. For instance, when I moved from Illinois to Massachusetts pre-pandemic, I remember being stunned by how differently people behaved in grocery stores here. People in Massachusetts stood so close to me in line, and no one spoke to each other. Back in Illinois, shoppers stood much farther away from each other while idly making small talk. Prior to my move, I never would have thought that regional culture impacted something like how people stand in line because I had never given any thought to how to stand in a grocery store checkout line, nor did anyone ever explicitly teach me how to stand in line. This was just a behavior that I had observed so many times as a young child that I internalized and replicated it without conscious thought.
Other cultural practices need to be taught more explicitly. Learning some of these practices, like learning to read from the Torah or taking communion, comes with rituals or rites of passage. Others, like what to wear to a funeral or how to find a graduate school advisor, are taught when the need for that skill arises.
There are some cultural practices that we become aware of and make intentional choices about. For example, when my husband and I had our daughter, we discussed what we wanted her to call our friends. Many of our peers allowed their children to call adults by their first names, but I had spent a lot of time teaching and doing EI in environments where children addressed adults using Mr., Ms., Auntie, or Uncle. We wanted to be intentional about teaching our daughter to address adults in ways that most adults would find respectful, so we taught her to call our close friends Auntie or Uncle and adults we don’t know well as Ms./Mr, with their first names. This decision reflects our cultural values of respecting one’s elders. It also reinforced the gender binary as we provided gendered words to use when addressing adults. As our family broadened our experiences and came to know people with nonbinary identities, we added the title Mx to be more inclusive of nonbinary and agender folks. While our core value of respecting elders remained, our shared family values of inclusion and acceptance meant we had to adapt our behavior and language just a bit.
Knowing how to speak, dress, and behave in certain situations is called cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1973). As a direct result of our nation’s history of racial and social stratification, the cultural practices of the White, English-speaking, dominant culture are seen as more desirable and carry more capital. Thus, those of us who know how to abide by the cultural norms of the dominant American culture hold more cultural capital. Cultural capital gives us access to educational and career opportunities and other resources.
