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Culture and Developing Countries
Anne Pellowski
Culture has many definitions, but here the term will be defined as the means people use
to structure and express their experience conceptually so that belief, knowledge, or
information can be transmitted from one generation to the next. One of the chief means
is day to day behaviour, but this essay will concentrate on hand-made or machine-
produced objects (or a combination of the two), all of which have a three-dimensional
physical reality, with a ‘double’ or ‘spirit world’ or ‘psychic’ reality often implied within
the same object. It will also consider at some length such means as oral story-telling or
information sharing, often accompanied by body movements, music, or creation of
pictures that are immediately erased or dissolved. These ephemeral means often have
their own kind of permanence, depending on such factors as the number of times they
occur and the way in which the next generation is trained to recreate them.
Developing countries are usually defined in economic terms such as per capita income
or gross national product. Here they are defined as those countries in the process of
using more and more machine-based methods of structuring and expressing culture,
instead of, or together with, those methods that involve hand-made objects and direct
interpersonal contact. This definition does not imply that technological media such as
printing, film, video and radio are per se superior to oral and/or visual story-telling and
information sharing. Indeed, there are some cultures that insist on the superiority of the
oral, even though they have print available to them. What is implied is the movement
toward the ‘new’ that seems to pull many cultures. And the definition also implies that
each of these media is different, as are the cultural effects of ideas and information
expressed by means of each of them.
Virtually all peoples have transmitted part of their culture to the children in their
groups by means of language play, story and what can be called enhanced information.
Language play here includes those forms such as nonsense rhymes or tongue twisters
that occur in most languages, and that appear to have little meaning or purpose other
than playfulness. It has been shown that infant babbling is a prerequisite for language
development. The playful speech that follows, usually after the age of two, may well be
another necessary step toward full language competence, but probably it is expressed
also simply because it is fun.
Story is defined here as an account of a connected series of events, not necessarily in
a linear order. Story includes tales, myths, legends, parables, sacred explanations,
drama, biography, autobiography, and even much of what is often called non-fiction in
English. The lifecycle (story) of a plant or animal, for example, can be as dramatic as that