Communication Between Cultures

(Sean Pound) #1

CHAPTER 4


Worldview:


Cultural Explanations


of Life and Death


The creation of a worldview is the work of a generation, rather than of an
individual, but each of us, for better or worse, add our brick to the edifice.
JOHN DOS PASSOS

Whatever you are, be a good one.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one’s tradition with reverence
for different traditions.
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

T


he introduction to Chapter 3 pointed out that family (clans), state (community),
and religion (worldview) work interactively to transmit the most important values
and beliefs of a culture. Having earlier explained family and state, we now turn to the
topic of worldview and religion.

Worldview and Culture


There are perhaps as many definitions ofworldviewas there are definitions for the words
“communication”and“culture.”If you examine the word itself, you might assume that
worldview means a view of the world. And in a sense, you would be correct. For in its
broadest sense, worldview is“the way people interpret reality and events, including how
they see themselves in relation to the world around them.”^1 What makes interpretation
of reality important for our analysis is that this picture of reality is both created and
shared by the members of each culture. Schultz and Lavenda develop this idea further
when they write,“Members of the same society make use of shared assumptions about
how the world works. As they interpret everyday experiences in light of these assump-
tions, they make sense of their lives and their lives make sense to other members of the
103

Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

Free download pdf