Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CULTURE
Culture is the broadest ethnographic concept. Definitions of culture typically
espouse either a materialist or an ideational perspective. The classic materialist
interpretation of culture focuses on behavior. In this view, culture is the sum of a
social group's observable patterns of behavior, customs, and way of life (Harris,
1968, p. 16; Murphy & Margolis, 1995; O'Reilly, 2008; Ross, 1980). The most
popular ideational definition of culture is the cognitive definition. According to
the cognitive approach, culture comprises the ideas, beliefs, and knowledge that
characterize a particular group of people (Strauss & Quinn, 1997). This second—
and currently most popular—definition specifically excludes behavior.
Obviously, ethnographers need to know about both cultural behavior and cultural
knowledge to describe a culture or subculture adequately. Although neither defi-
nition is sufficient, each offers the ethnographer a starting point and a perspective
from which to approach the group under study. For example, adopting a cognitive
definition of culture would orient the ethnographer toward linguistic data: daily
discourse. A cognitive ethnographer would ask members of the social group how
they define their reality, what the subcategories of their existence are, and what
their symbols mean. This cognitive researcher might create taxonomies to distin-
guish among levels and categories of meaning.
Both material and ideational definitions are useful at different times in
exploring fully how groups of people think and behave in their natural envi-
ronment. However defined, the concept of culture helps the ethnographer
search for a logical, cohesive pattern in the myriad, often ritualistic behaviors
and ideas that characterize a group. This concept becomes immediately mean-
ingful after cross-cultural experience. Everything is new to a student first
entering a different culture. Attitudes or habits that natives espouse virtually
without thinking are distinct and clear to the stranger. Living in a foreign com-
munity for a long period of time enables the fieldworker to see the power of
dominant ideas, values, and patterns of behavior in the way people walk, talk,
dress, eat, and sleep. The longer an individual stays in a community, building
rapport, and the deeper the probe into individual lives, the greater the proba-
bility of his or her learning about the sacred subtle elements of the culture:
how people pray, how they feel about each other, and how they reinforce their
own cultural practices to maintain the integrity of their system. Interestingly,
living and working in another culture helps one objectify the behaviors and
beliefs not only of people in a foreign culture but also of individuals in one's
native culture. After a period away, the returning ethnographer often feels like
a stranger in a strange land—in the midst of what is most familiar. This expe-
rience is often referred to as “culture shock.”
