In Defense of ‘Culture’
Anna Wierzbicka
Australian National University
Abstract. The concept of ‘culture’, as used in anthropology and related
fields, has been under continual and mounting criticism for several decades. This paper argues that while this concept needs indeed to be
scrutinized and problematized, we are nonetheless much better off with it
than without it. By rejecting it, we would jeopardize, in particular, the vital
interests of immigrants, refugees and other crossers of cultural boundaries,
who need to learn about cultural differences to be able to flourish, or even
survive (socially), in a new environment. Drawing on autobiographical
cross-cultural literature, the paper shows how the experience of transcultural lives and transcultural ‘selves’ vindicates the ‘culture’ concept,
despite its limitations, and how this experience points to a need for crosscultural education, rather than for the abandonment of the concept of
‘culture(s)’. At the same time, the paper shows how the results of linguistic
semantics and pragmatics, and especially those of the so-called ‘natural
semanticmetalanguage’ (NSM) theory developed by the author and colleagues, allow us to better identify different cultural assumptions, values
and understandings associated with different languages and to articulate
different ‘cultural scripts’ in a way which would reflect the perspective of
cultural insiders while being intelligible to outsiders. It also shows how the
theory of ‘cultural scripts’, which is an offshoot of the NSM theory of
language and thought, helps to refine the ‘culture’ concept and to make it
more theoretically viable and more workable in practical applications.
Key Words: cross-cultural communication, cross-cultural education, crosscultural experience, cross-cultural literature, cultural scripts, natural semantic metalanguage (NSM), universal human concepts
The Psychology of Cross-cultural Experience
Recalling her shared experience of living in England with her close friend
and fellow European Israeli Assia Wevill, the Polish-born Israeli film-maker
Mira Hamermesh remarked:
We were driftwood . . ., postwar driftwood. Living in an English country
where people don’t ask—it’s good manners not to question. So they would
never know about me or her, the real core of our being, what is ticking
behind that beautiful, poised exterior. (cited in Feinstein, 2001, p. 121)
Theory & Psychology Copyright © 2005 Sage Publications. Vol. 15(4): 575–597
DOI: 10.1177/0959354305054752 www.sagepublications.com
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Mira Hamermesh’s perception of England as a country where people
‘don’t ask’ is consistent with that of many other foreigners. Let me quote
just one other similar testimony, that of the American war correspondent
Martha Gellhorn. When Jeremy Paxman, the author of The English—A
Portrait of a People (1999), asked her why she had chosen to live in
England, she explained that ‘she loved England for its absolute indifference’:
I can go away, spend six months in a jungle, come back and walk into a
room, and people won’t ask a single question about where I’ve been or
what I’ve been doing. They’ll just say, ‘Lovely to see you. Have a drink.’
(p. 129)
Paxman suggested to Gellhorn that ‘it might be natural reticence or a wish
not to intrude, but she called it “the privacy of indifference”’ (p. 129).
Comments such as those offered by Mira Hamermesh or Martha Gellhorn
can be dismissed as anecdotal, and it is true that they need to be treated with
caution. It is also true that one must be suspicious of publications offering
unsupported generalizations about ‘the French’, ‘the English’, ‘the Dutch’,
and so on, such as, for example, Richard Hill’s book We Europeans (1995),
where the French are described as ‘the inquisitive individualists’, the
Germans as ‘the methodical mystics’, the Spanish as ‘the egocentric
egalitarians’, the Dutch as ‘the democratic dogmatists’, the Swedes as ‘the
rational realists’, and so on.
The blurb on the cover of the second edition of Hill’s book says that ‘the
original book rapidly became a non-fiction bestseller in a number of
European countries and is now used as course material at over 50 universities in Europe and North America’. What this success of Hill’s book
reflects is the great interest that most ‘ordinary’ people have in understanding cross-cultural differences, and their intuitive sense that these
differences are real. At the same time, it must be noted that Hill does not tell
the reader how he has reached his generalizations, and that the idea of
evidence of any kind does not seem to come into the picture at all.
But popular books such as Hill’s should be distinguished from an
important new genre of literature which has an entirely different status:
cross-cultural autobiographical literature. There is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, the common practice of making generalizations
about ‘them’ (the French, the Dutch, etc.) and, on the other hand, giving an
account of one’s own experience of crossing cultural boundaries (‘what
happened to me when I came to live in country x’). The emergence of
autobiographically based cross-cultural literature, fiction and non-fiction, is a
relatively new phenomenon, whose relevance and value for both psychology
and anthropology can hardly be overestimated. What emerges clearly from
that literature is that immigrants crossing cultural boundaries often discover
that their own assumptions and expectations, which they shared with others
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in their home country and which they used to take for granted, clash with the
assumptions and expectations of the new country. These discoveries are not
abstract and theoretical but highly concrete and highly relevant to the
practical problems of existence (cf. Besemeres, 1998, 2002).
For example, Eva Hoffman, who emigrated with her family from Poland
to North America at the age of 13, writes of her cross-cultural discoveries as
follows:
I learn that certain kinds of truths are impolite. One shouldn’t criticize the
person one is with, at least not directly. You shouldn’t say, ‘You are wrong
about that’, though you may say, ‘On the other hand, there is that to
consider.’ You shouldn’t say, ‘This doesn’t look good on you’, though you
may say, ‘I like you better in that other outfit.’ I learn to tone down my
sharpness, to do a more careful conversational minuet. (Hoffman, 1989,
p. 146)
The idea that there are new ‘rules’ of speaking in the new country surfaces
in one cross-cultural autobiography after another, often accompanied by the
same sense of wonder. It is a discovery which makes sense of the
immigrant’s personal experience. It is a lived truth, derived directly from his
or her own experiences in the new country.
Needless to say, the different rules for speaking, thinking and feeling are
often linked with different ways of behaving. This applies, most obviously,
to non-verbal communication—the Japanese bow, the Thai wai (a gesture of
folded hands), the Russian bear hugs and kisses, and so on. In Hoffman’s
account, some of the differences which struck her early and stayed vividly in
her memory concern the rules of ‘emotional display’ and spatial distance
from other people. To quote:
My mother says I’m becoming English. This hurts me, because I know she
means I’m becoming cold. I’m no colder than I’ve ever been, but I’m
learning to be less demonstrative. . . . I learn my new reserve from people
who take a step back when we talk, because I’m standing too close,
crowding them. Cultural distances are different, I later learn in a sociology
class, but I know it already. I learn restraint from Penny, who looks
offended when I shake her by the arm in excitement, as if my gesture had
been out of aggression instead of friendliness. I learn it from a girl who
pulls away when I hook my arm through hers as we walk down the street—
this movement of friendly intimacy is an embarrassment to her. (Hoffman,
1989, p. 146)
There is a striking contrast between, on the one hand, the certainty and
self-confidence with which autobiographical writers like Hoffman talk about
different ‘cultural rules’ for speaking, thinking and feeling and, on the other
hand, the uncertainty and doubt of many theoretical writings on culture: Is
‘culture’ a valid concept? Can one speak meaningfully of different cultures,
in the plural? Can one speak of ‘a culture’ as if the term could be linked with
well-delimited, stable, countable entities? As Goddard (2005) notes, the
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‘culture concept’, as used in anthropology and allied fields, has been under
continual and mounting criticism for decades, to the point where Duranti
(1997) could observe that ‘never before has the concept been so harshly
scrutinized and attacked from all sides’ (p. 23).
The reason why autobiographical cross-cultural literature does not suffer
from any similar angst over the ‘culture concept’ is that this literature is
grounded in personal knowledge (cf. Polanyi, 1958). For immigrants who
have arrived at such personal knowledge through their own lived experience,
arguments of anti-culture theoreticians, no matter how sophisticated, are
likely to sound hollow. The question arises: how relevant are these questioning accounts of ‘culture’ to transcultural experience, and how do they speak to
their interests, which of necessity include cultural adaptation?
In Becoming Intercultural, the Korean-American scholar Young Yun Kim
(2001) writes: ‘Millions of people change homes each year, crossing cultural
boundaries. Immigrants and refugees resettle in search of new lives. . . . In
this increasingly integrated world, cross-cultural adaptation is a central and
defining theme’ (p. 1).
Theoreticians ‘contesting culture’ (cf. Bauman, 1996) tend to ignore not
only the personal knowledge of immigrants, grounded in their own experience, but also the degree to which cultural adaptation is experienced as a
necessity. To flourish, and even to survive (socially) in a new environment,
immigrants need to learn the unwritten rules or scripts of the culture within
which they have to build their new lives. To be told instead that the ‘culture
concept’ has become discredited and that the host society has no ‘cultural
rules’ that could be identified for them is the least helpful advice they could
be given (as well as one that goes right against their own experience). Crosscultural autobiographical literature suggests that, with time, immigrants
often decipher ‘cultural rules’ of the new society themselves, but the process
can be long and painful. What can facilitate that process are, for example,
cultural induction courses, rather than an ideology rejecting the very idea of
such courses as one involving ‘essentialism’, ‘reification’, ‘stereotyping’,
and so on (cf. discussion in Shweder, 2001). From the point of view of the
needs of immigrants, the most important question is not how ‘cultural
scripts’ can be problematized, but, rather, how they can be identified,
articulated and made available for cross-cultural education.1
Subjective and Objective Evidence for the Existence of
‘Cultural Scripts’
Before I define the notion of ‘cultural scripts’ more precisely, let me reiterate
the point that in every society there are some unspoken assumptions about
‘normal’ ways of speaking, thinking and feeling, which may reveal themselves, often quite painfully, in the experience of immigrants. The very
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experience of clash brings subjective evidence for the existence of such
unspoken assumptions which complements and corroborates objective linguistic evidence. Let me explain what I mean by the latter kind of evidence
by means of a number of examples.
To begin with, take the English word privacy, which plays a key role in
law as well as in everyday language in many English-speaking countries. As
has often been pointed out, this word has no exact equivalent in other
languages, not even in those in many ways close to English, such as French
and German. For example, the Collins Robert English–French Dictionary
(1990) offers for privacy the gloss ‘intimité, solitude (“intimacy, solitude”)’,
which bilingual speakers of French and English recognize as absurdly
inadequate. For that matter, even a monolingual speaker of English can
appreciate that privacy is not the same as either intimacy or solitude.
The very existence and wide use of the word privacy in English testifies to
the existence of the value of ‘privacy’ in the shared conceptual world of the
speakers of English. The point is that a word like privacy does not give a
name to something existing in the world independently of the English
language but rather reflects a way of thinking shared by the English speakers
and passed on to their children and to other newcomers to English by means
of this very word.
Similarly, the common English words fair and unfair (in their meanings
expressed also by the nouns fairness and unfairness) reflect and promote a
way of thinking familiar to (if not shared by) all users of these words.
Again, these words do not have exact equivalents in other languages (other
than loans from English). For example, Collins Robert (1990) offers for
fairness the obviously inadequate gloss ‘justice, honnêteté (roughly, “justice, honesty”)’.
To take one example from Australian English, an important Australian
concept is that reflected in the verb dob in, which can be regarded as an
Australian cultural key word (cf. Wierzbicka 1991/2003, 1997a). Roughly
speaking, to dob someone in means to break the solidarity of a group of
equals to which one belongs by denouncing another member of that group to
an authority figure. For example, a child may dob in a classmate to the
teacher by telling the teacher that the other child ‘has done something bad’,
knowing that the teacher may, as a result, ‘do something bad’ to that other
child. The word dob in wears the social evaluation of such behavior on its
sleeve: the assumption enshrined in the meaning of this word is that it is
always bad to do something like that regardless of whether the information
provided is true or false. The traditional abhorrence of ‘dobbing in’ in
‘Aussie culture’ is reflected, in particular, in the noun dobber, which
categorizes perpetrators of acts of ‘dobbing in’ as a particular kind of people,
deserving of contempt and derision.
Before introducing a definition of ‘culture’, I would emphasize again that
the meanings of words provide the best evidence for the reality of cultures as
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ways of living, speaking, thinking and feeling widely shared in a particular
society. Of course every society is internally diversified and in every society
there is a great deal of individual and collective variation (e.g. across
genders, generations, occupational groups, etc.). But there is also a degree of
stability and unity. It goes without saying that, as Strauss and Quinn (1997)
put it, cultures are not ‘bounded, coherent, timeless systems of meaning’
(p. 3). At the same time, however,
Our experience in our own and other societies keep reminding us that some
understandings are widely shared among members of a social group,
surprisingly resistant to change in the thinking of individuals, broadly
applicable across different contexts of their lives, powerfully motivating
sources of their action, and remarkably stable over succeeding generations.
(p. 3)
The point which I want to particularly stress here is that both the variation
and the ‘shared understandings’ can be studied, objectively and accurately,
through the meanings of words.
The meanings of words are social facts which can be accessed by the
methods of linguistic semantics. They provide insight into the ways of
thinking of those who use them. They also provide insight into the shared
understandings of all members of a linguistic community, including social
rebels, radicals, dissidents, eccentrics, and so on. For example, even those
speakers of English who do not personally believe in the value of ‘privacy’
belong to a conceptual community and a ‘community of discourse’ (cf.
Porpora, 2001) of people who understand this concept.
Generally speaking, ‘cultural scripts’ reflected in a particular language are
not so much shared attitudes as shared understandings. Or, rather, they can
be thought of in terms of two concentric circles: a smaller circle of those
who share a particular attitude or assumption reflected in a common word or
expression, and a larger circle of those who share the understanding of that
word or expression, and, therefore, the understanding of the attitude or
assumption reflected in it.
For example, in Australia there are those who use the words dob in and
dobber and share the attitudes reflected in them (roughly speaking, that ‘it is
bad to dob someone in’ and that ‘it is very bad to be a dobber’), and there
are those who do not think in such terms themselves but who are nonetheless
thoroughly familiar with the meanings of these words and who therefore
share the understanding of the assumptions reflected in them.
By analyzing the meanings of words like privacy, unfair or dobber, we
can document widely shared ways of thinking prevailing in a given society
and explain those ways of thinking to outsiders and newcomers, including
immigrants. By listening to the voices of immigrants and other ‘crossers of
cultural boundaries’, we can better appreciate that words matter in people’s
lives. For example, we can appreciate that to be a successful immigrant to
Australia one has to learn the concept of ‘dobbing’: one doesn’t have to start
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using the words dob in and dobber oneself, but one has to learn to
understand the ‘local’ way of thinking reflected in them.
What Does ‘Cross-cultural’ Mean?
So far, I have been using the adjectives cultural and cross-cultural in a pretheoretical way, without definitions. For example, I have been talking about
‘cross-cultural communication’, ‘cross-cultural education’, ‘cross-cultural
literature’ and ‘cross-cultural autobiographies’. What do I mean by the word
cross-cultural when I use it in such collocations?
I think I have to admit that the adjective cross-cultural (as I use it here,
and as it is normally used) is derived, not only morphologically, but also
semantically, from the noun culture, in one of the meanings that it has in
contemporary English. For example, I would characterize Monica Ali’s
autobiographical novel Brick Lane (2003), describing the life of a Bangladeshi woman in London, as ‘cross-cultural’. In doing so, I would be implying
that in her life the heroine, Nazneen, is living between two cultures, and thus
that the concept of ‘a culture’ and ‘two cultures’ is meaningful and useful for
understanding the lives of people like Nazneen.
Nazneen herself does not talk about ‘two cultures’, but she and her friends
repeatedly contrast two ways of living and two ways of thinking. For
example, when her friend Razia finds out that her teenage son is on drugs,
she worries greatly about the reactions of other Bangladeshis in the same
neighborhood: ‘What do they say about me?’, she asks. Nazneen tries to
comfort her friend: ‘Let them talk if they have the time.’ In response, ‘Razia
hooted, a strange sound came down her nose. “Oh yes, I don’t need anyone.
I live like the English”’ (p. 297).
Evidently, Razia doesn’t want ‘people’ to say bad things about her. What
‘people’ say about her matters to her a great deal. She perceives ‘the
English’ as people who don’t care what other people say about them because
they can ‘live without other people’. By contrast, people like her can only
live ‘with other people’.
In this sense, Nazneen appears to have moved further from the ‘Bangladeshi way of thinking’ to the ‘English way of thinking’. In the final scene of
the novel, however, it is Razia who identifies with the ‘English way of
thinking’, whereas Nazneen worries about ‘what people will say’. In that
final scene, Nazneen’s daughters, born and raised in England, have taken
their mother, as a surprise, to an ice-rink:
Nazneen turned round. To get on ice—physically—it hardly seemed to
matter. In her mind she was already there. She said, ‘But you can’t skate in
a sari.’ Razia was already lacing her boots. ‘This is England,’ she said.
‘You can do whatever you like.’ (p. 413)
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Here, Razia expresses her perception of Anglo (English) ways of thinking
and living, which can be portrayed as follows: if a person wants to do
something, this person can do it; other people can’t say to this person: you
can’t do it; this person doesn’t have to think like this: ‘If I do it, other people
can say something bad about me; because of this, I can’t do it.’
The language in which these ‘cross-cultural’ perceptions have been
formulated here is a special, highly reduced mini-language, relying exclusively on very simple words and very simple grammar. It is called
NSM, from ‘natural semantic metalanguage’. I will explain the advantages
of using this metalanguage for thinking about ‘culture(s)’ in the next
section. To close this section, I would like to address directly one of the
questions proposed for discussion by the editors of this special issue: ‘What
is the rationale for using the term “culture” in your overall theoretical
framework?’.
In response, I would like to say that I need the term ‘culture’ to try to
make sense of the experience of people like Monica Ali, Eva Hoffman and
indeed myself (cf. Wierzbicka, 1997b). Or if I don’t need the noun ‘culture’
I need (that is, find useful) the adjective cross-cultural and the expression
cultural scripts. Of course if I really had to do without all these words, I
could find other ways of talking about the phenomena in question, but those
other ways would be more complex and less clear. My rationale, then, for
using these terms is that they allow me to speak simply, clearly and
concisely about phenomena which matter greatly in my own life and in the
lives of millions of other people—immigrants, children of immigrants, men
and women in mixed marriages, and many other categories of people living
and working ‘cross-culturally’, ‘in this increasingly integrated world’.
To take one further example, here is how the bicultural Burmese-English
writer Pascal Khoo Thwe (2002) writes in his autobiography about the
experiences of elderly tribal women from Burma who were taken to England
for a few years to be shown in circuses as freaks because of their ‘giraffenecks’ (artificially elongated by neck-rings):
They suffered from the cold of England. ‘The English are a very strange
tribe’, said Grandma Mu Tha. ‘They paid money just to look at us—they
paid us for not working. They are very sick, but they cannot afford to drink
rice-wine. . . . They say “Hello,” “How are you” and “Goodbye” all the
time to one another, they never ask, “Have you eaten your meal?” or
“When will you take your bath?” when they see you.’ Grandma Mu Tha
gave up trying to account for these strange habits, which afforded her great
amusement. If we had had the notion of ‘freaks’, I suppose she would have
put the whole English race into that category. (p. 78)
Unlike Grandma Mu Tha, Pascal Khoo Thwe lived in England long enough
to come to think that the English were, after all, not any stranger than the
Padaung of Burma, to whom both he and Grandma Mu Tha belonged; but
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the reality of the different ‘cultural scripts’, Padaung and English, is for him
simply a fact of life.
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage and the Theory of
‘Cultural Scripts’
The editors of this special issue have also invited the participants to address
the following question: ‘How is the concept of “culture” described, defined,
interpreted and discussed from your disciplinary perspective?’ To answer
this question, I will have to present, in a highly abbreviated form, an
approach to language and thought which was first put forward in my 1972
book Semantic Primitives, and which my colleague Cliff Goddard and I have
been developing jointly, in collaboration with other colleagues, for almost
two decades.
The NSM theory of language and thought, developed on the basis of
wide-ranging cross-linguistic investigations, affirms that alongside many
complex and language-specific concepts like those encoded in the English
words privacy and fairness, or in the Australian English words dob in and
dobber, there are also some simple and universal concepts that are lexically
encoded in all languages of the world. These include concepts like GOOD
and BAD, TRUE, DO and HAPPEN, and sixty or so others, which are listed
in Table 1 (for discussion and justification, see Goddard, 1998; Goddard &
Wierzbicka, 2002; Wierzbicka 1996).
The mini-language of universal conceptual primes (which have their own
universal mini-grammar) can serve as a natural semantic metalanguage
(NSM) for analyzing all meanings, all ideas, and, for making them potentially
intelligible for anyone both within and across languages and cultures.
Essentially, then, this is the universal conceptual keyboard, on which
different speech communities can play their own melodies. By using the
universal set of conceptual primes as our basic tool, we can give an account
of different conceptual systems encoded in different languages that is
consistent with the experience of people crossing linguistic and cultural
boundaries. We can show how concepts can be ‘lost in translation’ and how
new concepts can be gained, because the set of universal concepts gives us
a common measure for comparing concepts across language boundaries.
The theory of cultural scripts is an offshoot of NSM semantics. The key
idea of NSM semantics is that all meanings can be adequately portrayed in
empirically established universal human concepts, with their universal
grammar. The key idea of the theory of cultural scripts is that widely shared
and widely known ways of thinking can be identified in terms of the same
empirically established universal human concepts, with their universal
grammar (see, e.g., Goddard. 1997, 2000; Wierzbicka, 1994, 1996, 2002a,
2002b).
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TABLE 1. Universal semantic primes—English verion
Substantives:
I, YOU, SOMEONE (PERSON), SOMETHING (THING),
PEOPLE, BODY
Determiners:
Quantifiers:
Attributes:
Mental predicates:
Speech:
Actions, events, movement:
Existence and possession:
Life and death:
Logical concepts:
Time:
THIS, THE SAME, OTHER
ONE, TWO, SOME, MANY/MUCH, ALL
GOOD, BAD, BIG, SMALL
THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR
SAY, WORDS, TRUE
DO, HAPPEN, MOVE
THERE IS, HAVE
LIVE, DIE
NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF
WHEN (TIME), NOW, AFTER, BEFORE, A LONG TIME,
A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME
Place:
WHERE (PLACE), HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR,
SIDE, INSIDE, TOUCHING (CONTACT)
Instensifier, augmentor:
Taxonomy, partonomy:
Similarity:
VERY, MORE
KIND OF, PART OF
LIKE (HOW, AS)
* exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes * they can be
formally, i.e. morphologically, complex *they can have different morphosyntactic
properties (including word-class) in different languages * they can have
combinatorial variants (allolexes).
Source: Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2002.
The theory of cultural scripts describes cultural norms and values from
within rather than from the outside. Thus, the researcher does not bring to
the description of a culture external conceptual categories such as ‘individualism’ or ‘collectivism’, as is usually done in the literature (cf.
Hofstede, 1980; Schwartz, 1994). Rather, norms and values are always
identified from within—that is, from the point of view of those people who
are the bearers of the postulated norms and values (and in their own
language). At the same time, these unique norms and values are presented in
a way which makes it possible to compare them: not through identical labels
applied across the board, but through identical building blocks out of which
the different formulas are built. As a result, the proposed formulas are both
unique and comparable: each is qualitatively different from all others, and
yet each constitutes a configuration of the same elements—non-arbitrary,
universal and universally understandable. For example, as mentioned earlier,
Monica Ali’s observations suggest an Anglo cultural script which can be
formulated along the following lines:
[people here think like this:]
‘if a person wants to do something this person can do it
other people can’t say to this person: “you can’t do it”’
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What Does ‘Culture’ Mean? Places and ‘Kinds of People’
‘Culture’ is an English word. It has several meanings in contemporary
English, which have recently been differentiated and carefully analyzed by
Goddard (2005). Of all these meanings, the one which interests me here is
that which occurs in ordinary language in collocations like Chinese culture,
Japanese culture or Russian culture, that is, with what Goddard calls ‘placerelated descriptors’. The word culture can also be used in this sense without
an overt ‘place-related descriptor’, for example in phrases like ‘child-rearing
across cultures’, where the reference to different places is implicit. In fact,
judging by the data from the COBUILD ‘Bank of English’ (a large corpus of
contemporary English, spoken and written), in ordinary colloquial English
the most common collocation with culture(s) in the relevant sense appears to
be different cultures. Used in this way, the word culture in its ordinary
meaning corresponds, by and large, to the classic anthropological concept of
‘culture’. It is also this ordinary meaning of culture which underlies the use
of the word cross-cultural.
Since the classic anthropological concept of ‘culture’ has been for a long
time under attack, it is important to note that this concept has become part of
ordinary English. Whatever one thinks of the ‘culture’ concept as an
analytical tool for anthropology and related disciplines, it is surely important
to understand it as it functions in ordinary English. Since English is now the
language in which hundreds of millions of people communicate and, to a
greater or lesser extent, think, the concept of a place-related ‘culture’
embedded in present-day English has potentially an extraordinary importance in the contemporary world.
The use of the natural semantic metalanguage has allowed Goddard to
explicate the concept of ‘culture’ embedded in present-day English with
unprecedented clarity and precision (although the unconventional character
of his explication may strike the reader at first as somewhat shocking in its
kindergarten-style simplicity). In what follows, I will cite his explication
(Goddard, 2005) in two parts (A and B), following each part with some
discussion.
culture (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc.)
A. people live in many places
some of these places are far from here
many kinds of people live in these places, one kind of people in one
place, another kind of people in another place
these many kinds of people don’t live in the same way as people here
live
they don’t think about things in the same way as people here think
about things
they don’t do things in the same way as people here do things
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This part of the explication makes it clear that ‘cultures’ in the relevant
sense are thought of primarily in the plural, and that this concept includes a
point of view: roughly, ‘there are many kinds of people in other places, some
of these places are far from here, and people in those places live, think and
do things not in the same way as people here live, think and do things’. The
‘here’ is the speaker’s own place, which does not enter his or her field of
vision as one place among many others. Similarly, the speaker’s own ‘kind
of people’ does not enter his or her own field of vision as one kind of people
among many others. In a sense, the speaker’s own place and ‘kind of people’
are taken for granted as the invisible norm; it is other peoples who are
‘different’—from each other and from ‘the norm’.
Does the concept articulated in part A of the explication ‘essentialize’
cultures? In a sense, it does, because it refers to ‘kinds of people’ (e.g. the
Japanese, the French, the Russians) and does not explicitly provide for either
change or variability, although, as pointed out by Goddard, it doesn’t
preclude them either.
At the same time, the idea that there are many different ‘kinds of people’,
and that this diversity is not unrelated to the places where different groups
of people live (or have lived for a long time), reflects a simple folk wisdom
which in my view it is unwise for an intellectual to deny and reject. If
scholars working in the humanities and social sciences want to understand
ordinary people’s perception and experience, then they need to acknowledge the psychological reality of ‘different kinds of people’ (e.g. the
Japanese, the French, Russians) related in a special way to certain parts of
the world (e.g. Japan, France, Russia), and to supplement it with the
recognition of other realities, especially the reality of change and variation,
rather than to deny and reject altogether the shared understandings reflected
in ordinary language.
Granted, some perceptions embedded in ordinary language do need to be
opposed and exposed as false and harmful. This applies, in particular, to the
idea, still wide-spread in many parts of the world, that some kinds of people
are worse than some others, an idea reflected, for example, in pejorative
words like nigger, wog, Abo (for Aboriginal, used in Australia), and so on.
But this is different from the idea that despite their fluidity, human groups
such as, for example, ‘the Japanese’ or ‘the French’ can be seen as in some
elusive but real way different from one another.
As discussed earlier, with all the necessary provisos (recognizing possible
‘hybridity’, lack of sharp boundaries, etc.), it does make some sense to say
that ‘Japanese people’ share a familiarity with the assumptions and expectations embedded in the Japanese language (Strauss and Quinn’s ‘shared
understandings’), ‘French people’, with those embedded in French, and
‘Russians’, with those embedded in Russian. Of course it has often been
pointed out, and rightly so, that concepts like ‘the Japanese language’, ‘the
French language’ or ‘the Russian language’ are abstractions, but it is
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obvious that these abstractions have proved themselves useful for practical
purposes, and very few linguists would be willing to reject them on
ideological grounds.
Undoubtedly, the concept of ‘culture(s)’ embedded in present-day English
is also an abstraction which requires all sorts of hedges and qualifications. I
would argue, however, that this concept, too, is useful, and that rejecting it
altogether would be foolish and harmful. I would also argue that to
understand this concept—like any other concept—we need a suitable
methodological framework, and that the NSM semantics provides such a
framework.
Places and Times: Historical Transmission of ‘Cultures’
Before discussing further the place-related character of ‘culture’ in the
relevant sense, let me reproduce part B of Goddard’s explication (2005),
focusing on the historically rooted character of the traditions which make up
‘cultures’ in that sense.
culture (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc.)
B. people in one place live in one way, not in another way
because other people of the same kind lived in this way before for a
long time
people in one place think about things in some ways not in other
ways
because other people of the same kind thought this way before for a
long time
they think some things are good, they think some other things are not
good
because other people of the same kind thought this way before for a
long time
people in one place do things in some ways, not in other ways
because other people of the same kind did things this way before for a
long time
In essence, part B of the explication says that the ways of living, thinking
and doing things referred to by the word culture are transmitted across
generations by people ‘of the same kind’ living in the same place.
Referring to contemporary critics of the ‘culture’ concept such as Bhabha
(1994), Lutz and Abu-Lughod (1990) and others, Goddard (2005) comments
that his explication
. . . helps explain why this particular concept of culture does not sit well
with modern urban multiculturalism, in which many different groups are all
living together, and not only that, mixing all the time in school, in shops,
and on the street. This is not really consonant with the notion of
geographical separation (implying social separation) which forms part of
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the classical culture concept. The explication also makes it clear why those
who believe that the world, or at least their patch of it, has passed into a
fragmented, globalized postmodern condition, where cultural influences are
interpenetrating and cross-cutting, and in constant flux, no longer believe
that the concept of culture has any applicability. Not only is there no longer
any stability implied by the explication, but equally there is no longer any
‘localisation’, any grounding in ‘place’. (p. 58)
I agree with Goddard’s explanations: it is true that ‘modern urban
multiculturalism’ does not fit in with the concept of ‘culture’ as a stable
complex of ways of living, thinking and doing things, linked with a place
and transmitted across generations from older to younger people living in the
same place. But it is hard to see how else this ‘urban multiculturalism’ could
be understood if not in terms of a ‘mixing’ of different ‘cultures’, in the
classic anthropological sense of the word.
For example, if we think of the ‘multicultural London’ evoked in
contemporary novels such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) or Zadie
Smith’s White Teeth (2001), it would be difficult to explain in what sense it
is ‘multicultural’ without references to an amalgam of different ‘cultures’.
For instance, in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, the heroine’s place of origin,
Bangladesh, is clearly a key factor in the kind of life she leads, the kind of
person she is and the way she relates to the people around her. While
Nazneen is a unique individual, different from each of her Bangladeshi
friends and acquaintances also living in London, and while she is undergoing a transformation living in London, it would be impossible to understand the person she is and the person she is becoming without taking into
account her memories of life in Bangladesh and the way of thinking that she
brought with her from Bangladesh to England.
In recent anthropological literature it has often been argued that, as
Immanuel Wallerstein (1994) puts it, ‘races, cultures and peoples are not
essences. They have no fixed contours. They have no self-evident content.
Thus, we are all members of multiple, indeed myriad, “groups”—
crosscutting, overlapping, and ever evolving’ (p.10).
I agree that ‘cultures’ are not immutable essences and that they have no
fixed contours. I also agree that their content is not self-evident. But to deny
the reality of that content altogether, and reduce us all, as social beings, to
members of myriad ‘groups’, shifting and indeterminate, means to overlook
a significant reality. No one is more aware of this reality than an immigrant
who lives his or her life in two languages and two ‘cultures’; and extreme
assertions such as Wallerstein’s are at odds with the experience reflected in
autobiographical literature such as Eva Hoffman’s memoir or Monica Ali’s
novel. At the same time, it must be recognized that the traditional concept of
‘culture(s)’, while eminently useful, is a construct crystallizing some aspects
of human experience and ignoring others, and embodying a particular point
of view. It is useful as far as it goes, but it can only go so far.
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‘Culture’ as a Specifically Anglo Concept
The anthropologist Gerd Bauman starts his book Contesting Culture (1996)
with the following observations:
No idea is as fundamental to an anthropological understanding of social life
as the concept of culture. At the same time, no anthropological term has
spread into public parlance and political discourse as this word has done
over the past twenty years. (p. 9; quoted in Goddard, 2005, p. 52)
Two further observations could be added here: first, that the term culture (in
the relevant sense) has spread not only in public parlance and political
discourse but also, to some extent, in everyday English; and, second, that
this concept of ‘culture’ has not similarly spread into other European
languages, for example French or German.
To begin with the first of these points, here are some examples of the use
of culture(s) from the COBUILD (2004) corpus of contemporary English
(‘UK Spoken’):
Welcome to the Festival. Glasgow is truly a melting pot of people and
cultures. About once a month optional EF excursions can take you farther
afield to other countries and cultures. We want you to really make the most
of your Academic Year Abroad.
Adventure Travel is, as the phrase implies, a powerful challenge. It
includes cultures, lifestyles and conditions that are totally different from
your own. If you have an understanding of cultures it increases your
empathy.
Jedda [film]–the story of a teenage Aboriginal torn between two cultures.
The dictionaries of English produced in the last few decades routinely
include ‘culture(s)’ in the sense under discussion. For example, Collins
Cobuild English Language Dictionary (1991) includes the following definition in its entry for the word culture: ‘A culture is a particular society or
civilization, especially one considered in relation to its ideas, its art, or its
way of life, e.g. Infanticide was practised by many early cultures . . . the rich
history of African civilizations and cultures.’ Similarly, Longman’s Dictionary of the English Language (1984) defines ‘culture’ as: ‘the patterns of
human behaviour and its products that include thoughts, speech, action,
institutions, and artefacts and that is taught to or is adopted by successive
generations’. (While neither of these definitions mentions place overtly, in
both it is clearly assumed.)
As for the second point, we can start with a look at the treatment of the
French word culture in the Collins Robert French–English Dictionary
(1990). The entry distinguishes four meanings of culture, glossed in English
as (a) ‘cultivation’, (b) ‘land under cultivation’, (c) [esprit ‘mind’] ‘improvement, cultivation’, and (d) culture physique, ‘physical culture’. Under
heading (c) ‘improvement/cultivation of the mind (l’esprit)’, collocations
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like culture genérale ‘general culture’ and culture classique ‘classical
culture’ are mentioned as illustrations. Clearly, none of the four meanings
distinguished by the French–English part of the dictionary bears any relation
to the anthropological concept of ‘culture(s)’. On the other hand, the
English–French part includes expressions like culture shock and culture-fair
test (the latter defined as ‘examen conçu pour ne pas défavoriser les
minorités éthniques’, ‘a test designed in such a way as not to disadvantage
ethnic minorities’), both clearly closely related to the canonical anthropological concept. Monolingual French dictionaries tend not to include definitions of culture in the relevant sense either. This virtual absence of
‘culture(s)’ in the anthropological sense in ordinary French is confirmed by
the absence of the expression cultures différentes, ‘different cultures’, in the
COBUILD corpus of contemporary French.
If I am right in suggesting that apart from academic and political
discourse, ‘culture’ in the classic anthropological sense of the term has
spread mainly in English, it is worth considering both the likely causes and
the likely consequences of this fact.
Presumably, the most likely cause of the penetration of ‘culture(s)’ into
ordinary English is the wide spread of English in the world, and the
experience of many speakers of English with ways of living and thinking
other than their own. Presumably, Britain’s colonial past is also relevant
here: it is likely that the historical experience of the English with peoples
of many different ‘races’ (as they used to be called) made them more
aware of the existence of different ways of living and thinking than the
speakers of most other European languages and therefore more open to the
idea of ‘cultures’ (while still inclined to treat their own assumptions as the
norm).
Of course, in most other European countries there were outstanding
intellectuals who recognized such differences and took a great interest in
them: for example, Leibniz, Herder and Humboldt in Germany, Voltaire and
Montesquieu in France, Vico in Italy, and so on. But the awareness of
differing customs and values in different places around the world does not
seem to have spread in other European societies to the same extent as it has
among the speakers of English.
As noted by Goddard (2005),
Jahoda (1993: 29) records that according to one detailed study, the total
numbers of travel books in the French language in the 16th, 17th, and 18th
centuries were 21, 78, and 250, respectively: ‘a large proportion of such
books dealt with non-European cultures, either oriental or concerned with
the “savages” of America or Africa.’ (p. 55)
One wonders, though, to what extent the contents of such travel books have
penetrated the general consciousness of the speakers of French. In particular,
one wonders to what extent the notions of ‘les sauvages’ and of the
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‘mentalité primitive’ (cf. Lévy-Bruhl, 1926/1979) have been replaced in that
consciousness by the notion of ‘cultures’ in the sense of different ways of
living and thinking, with no implications of the inferiority of some and
superiority of others.
The concept of ‘culture(s)’, which has spread across a wide range of
registers in the English-speaking world, has its limitations, in so far as it
doesn’t reflect the changeability and variability of place-related ways of
living and thinking. But arguably, it has considerable explanatory power
with respect to some aspects of social life in the contemporary world and can
better serve the goals of increased mutual understanding, trust and cooperation between individuals and groups of different ethnic origins than the
denial of any identifiable differences between them can.
It is also worth noting that in ordinary English, the concept of ‘culture(s)’
has replaced an earlier concept of ‘race’ conceived of as ‘a kind of people
who look, live and think in a certain way’. For example, when John Locke
was described as ‘the pride of the English race’ (Oxford English Dictionary,
1989), the meaning of the word race included both cultural and biological
characteristics (especially the color of the skin). The concept of ‘race’ in that
sense was obviously germane to that of ‘the white man’ (as in Kipling’s
poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’). By contrast, the current concept of
‘culture(s)’, as used in ordinary English, is effectively color-blind and
reflects the relatively recent liberal western view that the color of a person’s
skin should not matter in social and interpersonal relations. As shown by
cross-cultural literature in English (with its frequent references to ‘white
people’ and ‘yellow people’, as well as ‘black people’), this view is still far
from universal.
I believe that on a theoretical level, the notion of specific ‘cultural scripts’
is more useful than that of ‘culture’, because ‘cultural scripts’ can be isolated
and identified clearly and precisely, whereas the term ‘culture(s)’ appears to
imply a bounded totality of characteristics. On a practical level, however, in
particular for the purposes of ‘cross-cultural’ education, the somewhat
simplistic construct of ‘culture(s)’ remains useful. There is no reason why
the continued use of this construct could not be combined with an emphasis
on the changeability and variability of ‘cultures’ (and on the relativity of
‘Anglo’ cultural assumptions)—just as there is no reason why the use of the
construct ‘language’ could not be combined with an emphasis on the
changeability and variability of place-related ways of speaking.
Culture and Self
The editors of the special issue asks: ‘What specific role does the concept of
culture play in the construction of the person, self, selves and subjectivities?’
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I think this question, too, can be usefully approached from the point of view
of autobiographical cross-cultural narratives.
As shown by Besemeres (2002), who has studied seven such narratives in
considerable detail, the immigrant experience throws a great deal of light on
the intimate relation between a person’s self and his or her language and the
linguistically encoded norms of their cultures. By learning another language
and especially by learning to live within the sphere of another language, the
‘language migrant’ engages in a ‘translation of their own self’. Besemeres’
major conclusion is that the seven narratives of language migration that she
has studied ‘attest to the centrality of natural languages to the growth and
substance of the self’ (p. 279); and when she says ‘languages’ she means by
it ‘linguacultures’ (cf. Attinasi & Friedrich, 1995). She notes ‘the emergence
of searching personal narratives of language migration in the second half of
the twentieth century’ and points out that the personal knowledge emerging
from them is not consistent with the tendencies rejecting the psychological
reality of both languages and cultures. To quote:
An obvious source of the contemporary rise of texts exploring selftranslation is the impact of globalization on what had been, comparatively
speaking, linguistically homogeneous communities. An epiphenomenon of
globalization in the West is the perception of ourselves as inhabiting a
‘post-modern’ condition, characterized by increasing fragmentation of
identity amidst a dizzying plurality of values. In Lost in Translation Eva
Hoffman contrasts the story that her own time ‘tells [her] to tell’ with Mary
Antin’s [1912] emphatically upbeat autobiography. Antin’s period was one
of confident assimilationism. Hoffman’s radically pluralist time calls for a
narrative marked by epistemological and ontological uncertainty. Yet the
works of these language migrants do not, on the whole, affirm a postmodern aesthetic of fragmentation. Some sort of personal unity is striven
for in disunity, even where this has been at the cost of suppressing one’s
native language—in this way giving rise to a truncated self or ‘mutilation
as a person’ in [Charles] Taylor’s phrase. There are, moreover, serious
limits to the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic understanding afforded by
the post-modern theoretical approach, which tends to affirm the category of
cultural hybridity in a way that elides actual differences between languages
and cultures. (Besemeres, 2002, p. 277)
As I have argued in this paper, the actual differences between languages
and cultures can be studied objectively by the methods of linguistic
semantics, and, in particular, by the use of the natural semantic metalanguage and the methodology of cultural scripts.
Besemeres sums up her monograph by pointing out that
life-writing by language migrants can challenge the monolingual, monocultural assumptions of contemporary literary theory and philosophy of
language alike, which are not concerned, as immigrants must be, with the
impact of specific natural languages on actual lives: the most significant
way in which language is constitutive of the self. (p. 278)
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The phrase ‘specific natural languages’ is in my view crucial. As
mentioned earlier, it is common these days to speak of bilingual lives and
bilingual selves in terms of ‘moving and mixing’, ‘hybridization’, ‘hyphenated cultural identities’, and so on. For example, Hermans (2001) (who uses
all the above terms) advocates ‘considering both self and culture as dynamic
systems located in a field of tension between unity and multiplicity’ (p. 275),
and he even tries to enlist Montaigne as a supporter, by adducing in this
context the following quote:
We are all framed of flaps and patches, and of so shapeless and diverse
contexture, that every piece, and every moment plays its part. And there is
as much difference found between us and ourselves, as there is between
ourselves and others. (Montaigne,1580/1603, pp. 196–197; cited in
Hermans, 2001, p. 276)
This is a very fine quote, and despite the obvious rhetorical exaggeration,
one can agree that there is an insight in it which can illuminate every human
life. In bilingual and cross-cultural lives, however (which were not the
subject of Montaigne’s reflection), there is in addition a tension between two
specific languages and cultures. To say that languages and cultures are not
‘internally homogeneous and externally distinctive’ (as, for example, Hermans [2001, p. 10] does) is in my view a poor substitute for trying to
actually describe the different sets of concepts and scripts as they clash in
bilingual and transcultural lives.
It is, above all, the experience of transcultural lives and transcultural
‘selves’ which vindicates the concept of ‘culture’, despite all its limitations;
and the theory of ‘cultural scripts’, based on empirically discovered universal human concepts, is one way to refine this concept and to make it more
viable theoretically and more workable in practical applications.
Conclusion
The word culture(s) provides the speakers of English with a very convenient
way of referring to a complex conceptual construction which reflects some
important aspects of their collective experience of the world. First of all, this
experience (reflected in the English language) tells them that in different
places in the world people think differently. Second, it tells them that these
different ways of thinking are often associated with different values (i.e.
roughly, different sets of assumptions about what is good and what is bad).
Third, it tells them that such different ways of thinking (reflected in ways of
speaking) are often linked with different ways of living and different ways
of ‘doing things’ (different ‘practices’, different social institutions, etc.).
This experience, and this way of conceptualizing it, has proved useful to
the speakers of English. With the ever-increasing spread of English in the
world, the concept of ‘culture’ encoded in this language has also spread
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widely in the world, and is continuing to do so. The constant appeals to
‘cultures’ in the documents crafted, for example, by the United Nations and
various key UN agencies suggests that this concept is also widely perceived
as useful in the global context. At the same time, frequent references to
‘culture(s)’ in life-writing by immigrants and other people who have lived
for a long time in different places and ‘in different languages’ indicates that
this concept also captures an important aspect of such people’s experience
and helps them to make sense of it.
Most importantly, perhaps, the derived adjectives cross-cultural and
intercultural (combined with nouns like communication, understanding,
education, adaptation, training, literacy, etc.) are proving themselves to be
important tools in people’s thinking about the world, and in their efforts to
make it a better place for everyone.
As Deborah Tannen (1986) argued long before September 11, 2001, ‘the
future of the Earth depends on cross-cultural communication’ (p. 30).
Effective cross-cultural communication depends on cross-cultural literacy.
Relentless critiques of the ‘culture’ concept undermine efforts aiming at the
description of cultural norms widely accepted in different societies, and,
consequently, at viable cross-cultural education. As a result, they encourage
cross-cultural illiteracy and an unwitting absolutization of the assumptions
embedded in the English language. As argued vigorously by Catherine Lutz
(1985) and others, theoretical psychology needs to free itself from its
unconscious reliance on constructs derived from the English language and
from the unconscious absolutization of Anglo culture. The combined perspectives of cross-cultural semantics and the study of transcultural lifewriting can help it achieve those objectives.
These objectives are not incompatible with a conscious use of certain
constructs derived from the English language—such as, notably, the concept
of ‘culture’. If only for practical reasons, we cannot always speak exclusively in universal human concepts. But when we do use constructs
derived from the English language we should be well aware of what we are
doing, and why, and we should be prepared to back up their use with
explanatory formulas which are couched in such concepts. In this paper, I
have tried to set out the reasons why the culture-specific Anglo concept of
‘culture’ is worth preserving in the modern world.
Note
1. For example, when the Cambridge-educated Burmese writer Pascal Khoo Thwe
(see below), born and raised in the tiny Padaung hill tribe in Burma (famous for
their ‘giraffe-necked’ women), writes of ‘Padaung culture’ and contrasts it with
‘Burmese culture’, he is clearly looking at his smaller and larger homelands
through the prism of a concept acquired during his life in England, a concept
which he evidently finds useful in thinking about his earlier life. It would be odd
and presumptuous for a monocultural theoretician to dispute Khoo Thwe’s right
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to use this concept in this way to make sense of his wide-ranging experiences and
to accuse him of ‘essentializing’ the Padaung and the Burmese ways of living and
thinking.
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WIERZBICKA: DEFENSE OF ‘CULTURE’
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Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National
University, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, of
the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, and of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has
lectured extensively at universities in Europe, America and Asia and is the
author of numerous books, including Cross-cultural Pragmatics (Mouton
de Gruyter, 1991; 2nd ed., 2003), Semantics: Primes and Universals
(Oxford University Press, 1996), Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge University Press, 1999), What
Did Jesus Mean? Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in
Simple and Universal Human Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2001)
and English: Meaning and Culture (Oxford University Press, in press). Her
work spans a number of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology,
cognitive science, philosophy and religious studies as well as linguistics,
and has been published in many journals across all these disciplines.
Address: School of Language Studies, Baldessin Precinct Building #110,
The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.
[email: [email protected]]
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