Public Policy and Good Governance cannot be discussed outside the context of culture and you will soon find out why. Part of the reason is that public policies are "values" and "beliefs" laden.
Scholars and researchers are not in agreement on one definition for culture. That said, when one looks at the various definitions available, they can draw their own conclusions as to what culture is. The following section is one of definitions.
What Is Culture?
Hofstede, G. (1984). National cultures and corporate cultures. In L.A. Samovar & R.E. Porter (Eds.), Communication Between Cultures. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another. (p. 51).
Author Unknown
Modern term "culture" based on term used by Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputations, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi," using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development.
Samuel Pufendorf
Culture, "refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human.
Richard L. Velkley
Originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of "modern liberalism and Enlightenment". Thus a contrast between "culture" and "civilization" is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such.
Edward S. Casey
The very word culture meant 'place tilled' in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, 'to inhabit, care for, till, worship' and cultus, 'A cult, especially a religious one.' To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensive to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly.
University of Minnesota Center for Advanced Research On Language Acquisition (CARLA)
Culture is defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group.
Banks, J.A., Banks, & McGee, C. A. (1989). Multicultural education. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Most social scientists today view culture as consisting primarily of the symbolic, ideational, and intangible aspects of human societies. The essence of a culture is not its artifacts, tools, or other tangible cultural elements but how the members of the group interpret, use, and perceive them. It is the values, symbols, interpretations, and perspectives that distinguish one people from another in modernized societies; it is not material objects and other tangible aspects of human societies. People within a culture usually interpret the meaning of symbols, artifacts, and behaviors in the same or in similar ways.
Damen, L. (1987). Culture Learning: The Fifth Dimension on the Language Classroom. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Culture: learned and shared human patterns or models for living; day- to-day living patterns. These patterns and models pervade all aspects of human social interaction. Culture is mankind's primary adaptive mechanism (p. 367).
Kluckhohn, C., & Kelly, W.H. (1945). The concept of culture. In R. Linton (Ed.). The Science of Man in the World Culture. New York. (pp. 78-105).
By culture we mean all those historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational, and nonrational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behavior of men.
Kroeber, A.L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Harvard University Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology Papers 47.
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action.
Lederach, J.P. (1995). Preparing for peace: Conflict transformation across cultures. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Culture is the shared knowledge and schemes created by a set of people for perceiving, interpreting, expressing, and responding to the social realities around them (p. 9).
Linton, R. (1945). The Cultural Background of Personality. New York.
A culture is a configuration of learned behaviors and results of behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society (p. 32).
Parson, T. (1949). Essays in Sociological Theory. Glencoe, IL.
Culture...consists in those patterns relative to behavior and the products of human action which may be inherited, that is, passed on from generation to generation independently of the biological genes (p. 8).
Useem, J., & Useem, R. (1963). Human Organizations, 22(3).
Culture has been defined in a number of ways, but most simply, as the learned and shared behavior of a community of interacting human beings (p. 169).
Samovar and Porter (1994)
Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
Gudykunst and Kim (1992)
Culture as the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people
Gary Wederspahn
Culture is the shared set of assumptions, values, and beliefs of a group of people by which they organize their common life.
Clyde Kluckhohn
Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting. The essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values.
Richard Brislin & Tomoko Yoshida
Culture consists of concepts, values, and assumptions about life that guide behavior and are widely shared by people.
Robert Kohls
Culture is an integrated system of learned behavior patterns that are characteristic of the members of any given society. Culture refers to the total way of life for a particular group of people. It includes [what] a group of people thinks, says, does and makes—its customs, language, material artifacts and shared systems of attitudes and feelings.
Tyler (British anthropologist) 1870: 1; cited by Avruch 1998: 6
Culture ... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Noah Webster 1828 Dictionary
CULTURE, n. [L. See Cultivate.]
- The act of tilling and preparing the earth for crops; cultivation; the application of labor or other means of improvement.
- The application of labor or other means to improve good qualities in, or growth; as the culture of the mind; the culture of virtue.
- The application of labor or other means in producing; as the culture of corn, or grass.
- Any labor or means employed for improvement, correction or growth.
In summary, culture is made up of many elements including:
- Knowledge
- Factual history versus revisionist [programming]
- Experience
- Beliefs
- Values
- Attitudes
- Meanings
- Hierarchies
- Religion
- Notions of time
- Roles
- Spatial relations
- Concepts of the universe
- Material objects
- Possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving
- Art
- Sport
- Festivals
- Language
- Customs
- Clothing
- Moral Codes
- Laws. Rules
- Constitution or Holy Scripture
- Cuisine
Etymology
Like with our study on governance, let's find out the etymology of the word culture as we attempt to define it.
According to Douglas Harper (2001), Online Etymology Dictionary, the word culture comes from a Latin Word 'Cultura' which means "a cultivating, agriculture," It is connected to 'colere' which means to "tend, guard,
cultivate, till". So its first applications in the fifteenth century referred to agriculture.
Wolf, Eric R. 1994 Perilous Ideas: Race, Culture, People. Current Anthropology 35:1-12.
Culture was first used to talk about cultivating a field and only later transferred to cultura anima, 'the cultivation of minds or souls'
Transcript of a tape-recording of the first of three Gauss Seminars given by Sir Isaiah Berlin at Princeton in 1973
Cultura animi is the phrase used by Cicero. There is a sense in which Sophocles talks about it under another name: paideia in Greek refers to roughly the same kind of thing. What it means is cultivation of some kind of raw material. When Bacon talked about culture as the Georgics of the mind, or Holbach talked about education as the agriculture of the mind, these were perhaps not very delicate or very evocative expressions; nevertheless one knows what they mean. They mean that there is some raw material presented which is then to be improved in some way, to be tended, to be made something of. That is the original use of the word 'culture' – of 'cultus', 'paideia', 'humanitas', 'urbanitas', all these various words which are used for it in various ages".
The human soul comprises the mind, will, emotions and intellect. The aim of governance and government systems hopefully is to cultivate the soul of populations toward their benefit. This is what is sometimes referred to as propaganda.
Why Is Culture Important?
Culture or the cultivation / farming of the soul is important because the cultivation of minds, wills, emotions and intellects determine whether or not transformation takes place. Transformation and development is a consequence of the renewal of the mind towards ideals that inure to the public good.
Culture has a role to play in national transformation and development. Change process will be cosmetic unless the minds of citizens are farmed to agree, accept and own the transformation / change process. Culture is the resulting harvest from a habitual cultivation of the human or societal soul. Our culture is a photograph of our mindset.
This is what propaganda theory is all about—tending or cultivating the mind of the populace towards a particular national agenda. If the agenda is a good one and benefits the entire nation, then the agriculture of the soul of the populace will yield good and positive results for all. Examples of such results include a higher standard of values, ethics and living like that brought about by the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber.
Let us consider one more etymological definition from "Excerpts from Raymond Williams, Keywords". It reads,
"The fw is cultura, L, from rw colere, L. Colere had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor with worship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still with occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus 'inhabit developed through colonus, L to colony. 'Honor with worship developed through cultus, L to cult. Cultura took on the main meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in Cicero, cultura animi, though with subsidiary medieval meanings of honor and worship (cf. in English culture as 'worship in Caxton (1483)).
From the above, we see the connection between culture and colonies, colonization, religion, worship and cults.
Colony (n.) comes from Latin colonia and means "settled land, farm, landed estate," from colonus "husbandman, tenant farmer, settler in new land," from colere "to cultivate, to till; to inhabit; to frequent, practice, respect; tend, guard,".
I would stretch this definition of culture beyond only physical colonization or inhabiting to spiritual inhabitation. The culture of a people is the abode of their thoughts, ideas, customs, values etc.
Nations must farm souls in such a way as to restore values such as honesty, integrity, responsibility, righteousness and justice to the fore of national collective psyches.
Until the culture of governmental mismanagement is changed, we can expect anything we give the government to do to be many times less efficient and more expensive than it should be. How much better off would the needy be if all that is now being wasted in administration actually reached the needs? —Rick joyner
Acculturation & Culture Shifts
It is established that culture is a result of persistent cultivation of the soul but how does one go about cultivating the soul? In every farming activity, there is the need for three basic ingredients:
- Soil / Soul
- Seeds to be sown / Knowledge
- Farming implements / Media of Communication / Codes of Conduct or Ethics
The seeds sown are knowledge in the form of ideas, facts, thoughts etc.
Acculturation
First defined by Redfield et al. (1936)
Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals sharing different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups (p. 149).
Acculturation is a process in which members of one cultural group adopts the beliefs and behaviors of another group. Although acculturation is usually in the direction of a minority group adopting habits and language patterns of the dominant group, acculturation can be reciprocal--that is, the dominant group also adopts patterns typical of the minority group.
