Communication Between Cultures

characteristics facilitates your appreciation of the importance and influence of culture

on human behavior. Second, as we review these commonalities, the strong connec-

tion between culture and communication will become apparent. Most experts agree:

“The heart of culture involves language, religion, values, traditions, and customs.”^20

These are some of the topics treated throughout this book. Finally, this may be the

first time you have been asked to seriously look at your own culture. Reflect for a

moment on just how often you and your friends sit around and discuss culture. We

are not talking about“popular culture”but rather those aspects of culture that often

differ from your own. Learning about culture—yours and others—can be an energizing

awakening. Shapiro offered such a pep talk when he wrote,“The discovery of culture,

the awareness that it shapes and molds our behavior, our values and even our ideas,

the recognition that it contains some element of the arbitrary, can be a startling or an

illuminating experience.”^21

Culture Is Shared

It should be clear at this point that one of the most distinctive features of culture is

that it isshared. Whereas your personal experiences and genetic heritage form the

unique you, culture unites people with a collective frame of reference.“Culture is to

a human collective what personality is to an individual.”^22 Nolan reaffirms this idea

when he suggests that“culture is a group worldview, the way of organizing the world

that a particular society has created over time. This framework or web of meaning

allows the members of that society to make sense of themselves, their world, and

their experiences in that world.”^23 It is this sharing of a common reality that gives

people within a particular culture a common fund of knowledge, a sense of identity,

shared traditions, and specific behaviors that are often distinct from other collections

Early in life children
learn about
appropriate and
inappropriate ways of
acting so that they will
know how to adapt to
their culture’s formal
and informal“rules.”

Courtesy of Edwin McDaniel

40 CHAPTER 2•Communication and Culture: The Voice and the Echo

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