Communication Between Cultures

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

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