What Is Culture

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We live in a vast area of multi cultural communities and culture exists in our societies all over the world. The meaning of culture is ambiguous in nature, it is used to describe many different things. Culture has been interpreted with lots of definitions over time by various research. For instance American anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckohn (1963 [1962] ) looked at the various meanings of ‘culture’ that was available in literature. They found 164 definitions of what the term ‘culture’ could mean. We can look at culture as having numerous elements consisting of values, norms, beliefs, ideas, language, tradition, symbols, history and tools of social order by passing down particular ways of behaviour in certain situations. Therefore it is a shared set of rules for behaviour, for what is right or wrong, or for what is desirable or undesirable. These values start from the day we are born from family around us, continuing to influence us throughout our life by means of religion, education, the state and economic system to name a few. Culture is what we learn and share socially, allowing us to relate with one another. It is transmitted from person to person through communication. Different races and societies all over the world have their own specific culture which is due to the above said elements and the geographical area, conditions and ways of life. Within cultural differences we need to be careful not to generalize or stereotype. For instance I could meet an asian lady and assume that she has a large family, this would be stereotyping her. Yet if I said to myself that asian women tend to have large families, I wonder if the asian lady does, then I would be generalizing. Cultural diversity is normal, but it does sometimes have elements which are universal. ‘How a particular group thinks about and does certain things is a function not of instinct but of

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