- Some people in many parts of the world put dogs in their ovens, but people in the
United States put them on their couches and beds. Why? - Some people in Kabul and Kandahar pray five times each day while kneeling on
the floor, but some people in Jerusalem pray while standing erect and slightly rock-
ing back and forth. Why? - Some people speak Tagalog, but others speak English. Why?
- Some people paint and decorate their entire bodies, but others spend hundreds of
dollars painting and decorating only their faces. Why? - Some people shake hands when introduced to a stranger, but other people bow at
such an encounter. Why?
The general answer to all these questions is the same—culture. Each culture pre-
sents its members with ways of thinking and ways of behaving. That sentence can
serve as one of the basic premises of this entire book. Rodriguez punctuates the influ-
ence of culture on human perception and actions when she writes,“Culture consists
of how we relate to other people, how we think, how we behave, and how we view
the world.”^13 Although culture is not the only stimulus behind your behavior, its
omnipresent quality makes it one of the most powerful. Hall underscores this point
when he concludes,“There is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and
altered by culture.”^14 Wood further speaks to this notion when she writes,“We are
not born knowing how, when, and to whom to speak, just as we are not born with
attitudes about cooperating or competing. We acquire attitudes as we interact with
others, and we then reflect cultural teachings in the way we communicate.”^15 Wood
is reminding you that although you enter this world with all the anatomy and physi-
ology needed to live here, you do not arrive knowing how to dress, what toys to play
with, what to eat, how to deal with conflict, which gods to worship, what to strive
for, how to spend your money or your time, how to define the questions surrounding
death, or ways to determine“truth.”Those discoveries—and countless others—are
part of the domain and function of culture.
Perhaps at this stage in our discussion of culture, it is wise to ask the following
question:What is the basic function of culture?In its most uncomplicated sense, culture,
for over forty thousand years until today, is intended to make life unproblematic for
people by“teaching”them how to adapt to their surroundings. The English writer
Fuller echoed this idea in rather simple terms when he wrote,“Culture makes all
things easy.”A more detailed explanation as to the function of culture is offered by
Sowell:
Cultures exist to serve the vital, practical requirements of human life—to structure a society
so as to perpetuate the species, to pass on the hard-learned knowledge and experience of
generations past and centuries past to the young and inexperienced in order to spare the
next generation the costly and dangerous process of learning everything all over again from
scratch through trial and error—including fatal errors.^16
Culture serves a basic need by laying out a somewhat predictable world in which
each individual is firmly grounded. It thus enables you to make sense of your sur-
roundings by offering a blueprint for not only how to behave but also what results
you can anticipate from that behavior. While people in every culture might deviate
from this blueprint, they at least know what their culture expects of them. Try
to imagine a single day in your life without the guidelines of your culture. From how
to earn a living to how an economic system works to how to greet strangers to
38 CHAPTER 2•Communication and Culture: The Voice and the Echo
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