Communication, Language, and Culture

Why do we need to study communication and culture on our chosen field?

In your own words, how would you define culture?

How is language interrelated to culture

Explain the cultural relativism.

   

     1. Communication is a vital tool is our society. Without it, transfer of ideas will be impossible as well as the learning process and development among us. Culture is how people live in a certain society. It is anchored with the norms, customs, and traditions. We need to study communication and culture in order to understand the way of life of our students, to know how to deal with them and how to communicate to them successfully especially in teaching-learning process.

   

      2.Culture is the way of life and the totality of a person or society. Culture reflects the real face or identity of a certain group of people. Culture is dynamic and perpetually shifting in order to adapt into the changing world. Every society has a culture, no matter how simple the culture may be, and every human being is cultured in the sense of participating in some culture or other (Vega, V. 2009).

      3.Just like culture, Language also serves as the identity of a certain race. We could easily identify or know the persons behavior or race by hearing the way they speak, the language they uses and the words they  say or write. Behavior is a product of culture.

   

      4.Cultural relativism is a principle that was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: "...civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes." However, Boas did not coin the term. (Wikipedia.org,2012)

      Self-identity usually depends on culture to such a great extent that immersion in a very different culture—with which a person does not share common ways of life or beliefs—can cause a feeling of confusion and disorientation. Anthropologists refer to this phenomenon as culture shock. In multicultural societies—societies such as the United States into which people come from a diversity of cultures—unshared forms of culture can also lead to tension.

      Members of a society who share culture often also share some feelings of ethnocentrism, the notion that one’s culture is more sensible than or superior to that of other societies. Ethnocentrism contributes to the integrity of culture because it affirms people’s shared beliefs and values in the face of other, often contradictory, beliefs and values held by people of other cultural backgrounds. At its worst, ethnocentrism has led people to commit ethnocide, the destruction of cultures, and genocide, the destruction of entire populations. This happened, for example, to Jews living in Nazi Germany in the 1940s (see Holocaust; National Socialism).

     Anthropologists, knowing the power of ethnocentrism, advocate cross-cultural understanding through a concept known as cultural relativism. Someone observing cultural relativism tries to respect all cultures equally. Although only someone living within a group that shares culture can fully understand that culture, cultural relativists believe that outsiders can learn to respect beliefs and practices that they do not share.

      However, most anthropologists believe that cultural relativism has its limits. In theory, an extreme relativist would uncritically accept the practices of all cultures, even if those practices harm people. For example, anthropologists have debated over whether they should accept or approve of the practice of female circumcision, performed in many African societies. Female circumcision involves removing part or all of a woman’s labia and clitoris and is usually performed on girls entering adolescence. This practice is painful, and often harmful, to the women of societies that perform it, but many of those societies claim that the practice is important and deeply rooted in their culture. (Bodley, John H. "Culture." Microsoft® Encarta® 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008)