A thought provoking statement rather than a question in the general sense. I see culture as being collective, of knowledge and values, and also customs and social behaviour within a particular group, while human thought, although shaped by the influences of culture, is individual and private.
It will be so interesting to read how others respond.
Culture exhibits the ways humans interpret their environments. It reveals that some needs are common to all people—at all times and in all places: they are the need to make a living, the need for social organization, the need for knowledge and learning, the need for normative and metaphysical expression, and the need for aesthetic manifestation. So, there is much to learn from applications of culture theory, a short note on which is at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254583153_Culture_Theory.
Article Culture Theory
The Interpretation of Cultures
Selected Essays
by Clifford Geertz
Basic Books, Inc., Publishers
NEW YORK ©1973
Chapter 2
THE IMPACT OF THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE
ON THE CONCEPT OF MAN
I
Toward the end of his recent study of the ideas used by tribal
peoples, La Pensée Sauvage, the French anthropologist LéviStrauss
remarks that scientific explanation does not consist,
as we have been led to imagine, in the reduction of the complex
to the simple. Rather, it consists, he says, in a substitution
of a complexity more intelligible for one which is less.
So far as the study of man is concerned, one may go even
further, I think, and argue that explanation often consists of
substituting complex pictures for simple ones while striving
somehow to retain the persuasive clarity that went with the
simple ones.
Elegance remains, I suppose, a general scientific ideal;
but in the social sciences, it is very often in departures from
that ideal that truly creative developments occur. Scientific
advancement commonly consists in a progressive complication
of what once seemed a beautifully simple set of notions
but now seems an unbearably simplistic one. It is after this
sort of disenchantment occurs that intelligibility, and thus
explanatory power, comes to rest on the possibility of substituting
the involved but comprehensible for the involved but
incomprehensible to which Lévi-Strauss refers. Whitehead
once offered to the natural sciences the maxim “Seek simplicity
and distrust it”; to the social sciences he might well
have offered “Seek complexity and order it.”
hese are solid, perennial reasons to look up “culture” in the dictionary. But why did more people than usual look it up this year? The editors at Merriam-Webster decline to speculate. They note, merely, that “the term conveys a kind of academic attention to systematic behavior.” Here’s my theory: more people looked up “culture” this year because it’s become an unsettling word. “Culture” used to be a good thing. Now it’s not. That isn’t to say that American culture has gotten worse. (It has gotten worse in some ways, and better in others.) It’s to say that the word “culture” has taken on a negative cast. The most positive aspect of “culture”—the idea of personal, humane enrichment—now seems especially remote. In its place, the idea of culture as unconscious groupthink is ascendent.
culture is a practice of living life in ethical manner. as subjects of one place we project our culture.in modern times as distance became less, we are trying to adapt other cultures to along with ours.we can welcome other cultures also by taking good from them while preserving ours.
Ismail Noori Mseer Sir,
culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. Culture is also defined in terms of intercultural communication. Culture adds to the notion of communicative competence and enlarges it to incorporate intercultural competence. It builds understandings about their own and others’ cultural traditions, values and beliefs. It involves processes that may lead to an enhanced ability to move between cultures and to cultural change. As Language teacher,culture can be viewed as the customs, traditions or practices that people carry out as part of their everyday lives. Culture refers to knowledge and skills that are more generalize in nature and transferable across cultures. This body of knowledge includes among other things, the concept of culture, the nature of cultural adjustment and learning, the impact of culture on communication and interaction between individuals or groups, the stress associated with intense culture and language immersions , coping strategies for dealing with stress, the role of emotions in cross-cultural, cross-linguistic interactions and so forth.
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