Why Does Culture Mean Much More than We Think?
From the very first day of our lives, we start learning about ourselves and the world that surrounds us. We learn about different objects and their uses, various phenomena that determine our lives, and relationships that people have between themselves. All of this foundational learning we receive is extremely limited and conditioned by the historical moment we are born into, the geographical location, and by the people who we interact and their views on life. Therefore, our experiences in life must first pass through the prism that is our culture and its beliefs before they can reach us, and thus the prism of culture determines the colors in which we see the world, and the opinions which we then form. We learn to do things and interact with others in the way that our culture expects and requires.
Since most of us only have the experience of living in a single culture, we build a strong system of beliefs that is shaped by our culture and, whether in agreement or not, is in response to various cultural ideals and expectations. Therefore, each of us thinks that our beliefs are the right ones. If at some point in our life, we meet or interact with representatives of other cultures who, by definition, act in a different way, we think they are wrong and need to be corrected. We all want to believe that we are unique and what we think and do is also unique. Consequently, we fail to realize that, for the most part, we carry out our cultural traditions and values the same way that any of our compatriots would do. We want to correct representatives of other cultures because humans, by their very nature, have a difficult time adjusting to novel and unusual things.
The idea of cultural knowledge as a determiner of all kinds of human perception is well described by the principle of ethnocentrism, as originally suggested by the American sociologist William Graham Sumner, who showed the negative influence of culture on limiting human perception and favoring one’s own cultural vision as the center of everything. Here is his definition of ethnocentrism: “Ethnocentrism is the technical name for this view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it. Folkways correspond to it to cover both the inner and the outer relation. Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only rights ones, and it observes that other groups have other folkways, these excite its scorn... ethnocentrism leads people to exaggerate and intensify everything in their own folkways which is peculiar and which differentiates them from others.”
One might conclude that the way to fight ethnocentrism is to attempt escape from the dominance of your culture upon your vision and perception, if not in a physical sense, then in an intellectual one, by studying other ways of living and attempting to understand, at least superficially, the beliefs of other cultures. The role of language in this process is instrumental. Without learning a language, it is impossible to truly understand another culture that operates in that language. If we really want to explore various perceptions of the world and of the humans living in it, we must start with language and its acquisition.
