Callum: Hello and welcome to Talk about English. Today we have the second in our series on culture, Who on Earth are we? In this programme presenter Marc Beeby tries to answer the difficult question: what is culture? Here’s Mark.
Marc:‘Culture’ is a difficult word to define, but that’s what we’ll be attempting to do today – trying to answer the question: what is culture? More importantly, perhaps, we’ll also be thinking about why culture is so difficult to talk about. But let’s start with a definition. Here’s Rebecca Fong who teaches a course in intercultural communication at the University of the West of England.
Rebecca Fong
When you think about it , culture is really a very difficult thing to define and if you ask yourself the question ' What is culture?' and you try to come up with a definition I think you'll find that all of us will come up with a slightly different type of definition. One very broad definition suggests that culture consists of ideals, values and assumptions about life that are widely shared among people and that guide specific behaviours. So we're talking here about shared assumptions or patterns of behaviour within specific societies.
Eilidh Hamilton
En-shala is a very popular phrase in the Middle East it means 'if it is the will of God' literally. Now it doesn't necessarily have such overt religious connotations as we might expect. But what it does reflect is a certain fatalism amongst many people. They feel that life is, to an extent, controlled by external factors. So the concept of the Westerner as someone who is constantly striving to improve themselves and their situation is an anathema to people there who don't feel that there's very much in a practical way they can do to change that.
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Marc:Eilidh Hamilton with an example of a view of life shared by people in one particular part of the world. But perhaps this idea that culture can be defined by the ideals, values and assumptions that a group of people share is too general. What about art, food, language, sex? Here’s Rajni Baldani from India, Dionne Charmaine from Jamaica and Kyung-ja Yoo from Japan helping Rebecca Fong with a more detailed way of thinking about culture.
Rebecca Fong
Quite a practical way of looking at culture is to divide it into three groups : products, behaviours and ideas and in the first group - products -we think about all those things that a culture produces -its architecture （建筑学）and its food, its music and folklore and literature - those are the visible（可见的） products of a culture.
Rajni Baldani
I would describe my culture, the Indian culture as being extremely vibrant（有活力的）, and diverse, complex, in every aspect - art, literature, folk, the oral tradition. We are really very rich in all aspects.
Rebecca Fong
In the second group we'd find behaviours - that's either verbal behaviours -language - or non-verbal behaviours such as gesture and communication. Also habits, routines, social etiquette（礼仪，礼节）, all of these things would come under the heading of behaviour.
Dionne Charmaine
Silence in Jamaica is a good thing -it's very much a sign of respect and if you're basically being spoken to -especially by someone that's older than you and so on and you raise your voice then that's being disrespectful （无理的，不尊重的）
Rebecca Fong
And then in the third group we'd find ideas or our world view and all the things that go to make up our world view. So in this group we'd be thinking about things like our attitudes and our beliefs and the way that we organise such things as our societies - are they class based societies, what are the relationships and roles within our societies - between men and women for example.
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