Beyond Culture

Human beings are cultural by nature. Regardless of where a person is born and raised, her culture – the ideas, customs and social mores of her community – will inevitably have an effect on the way she acts and thinks throughout her life.

From birth, we begin to learn from the people around us. In this way, a person’s actions are changeable, as they suit the cultural context in which the person exists. Over time, learned actions develop into ingrained habits. Eventually, these habits become second nature, almost automatic.

By the time we’ve reached adulthood, these learned actions have become internalized, unconscious behaviors, specific to the culture in which we were raised.

A good example of this can be found in the way people greet each other. While the Japanese bow, Inuits rub noses. Such behaviors are taken for granted within each culture and are performed automatically. Both actions, however different, convey respect or gratitude, yet only when performed in the context of each respective culture.

So what other practices does a culture carry with it? Different cultures usually speak different languages. Some researchers have argued that the language a group speaks has a big effect on the way a group thinks.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, formulated in 1929 by anthropologist Edward Sapir and linguist Benjamin Whorf, supposes that the way people see the world is significantly influenced by the language a people speaks.

In English, you can tell someone, “It rained yesterday.” Yet from that statement, it’s unclear whether you know it rained because you got caught in a downpour; whether you saw puddles on the ground last night; or whether someone told you that it had rained, and you were just passing on that information.

In contrast, the Hopi of Arizona encode such details through verbs in its spoken language. This communicates to the listener not only information, but the source of the information.