How to get our own meaning of English culture?

To find out what culture is, and have our proper meaning of this term, we should recognize what represents the word ‘culture’ in our society. In order to study this term, we had an interesting discussion, in which ideas about possible synonyms of the word ‘culture’ were shared.

The most prominent terms found were concepts like: behavioral patterns, social interactions, symbols, facial gestures, among others...

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath” F. Scott Fitzgerald

After we acquired and shared ideas that were related to the term of ‘culture’, Professor Julio invited us to read some definitions by important sociologists as Kluckhohn, Damen, Useem, and others...

From the readings we could obtain a large amount of bibliographic material. Due to the way the information was structured, there were more than 25 short meanings that sociologists offered from different perspectives.

How to classify useful information?

When we started to read, Professor Julio gave us excellent advice to take advantage of in order to make the most of the reading comprehension. For instance: to classify information according to its relevance, highlight main ideas, write a short concept about culture, and lastly discuss your findings with a classmate. 

“You have to taste a culture to understand it.” Debora Cater

After reading the different meanings and making the discussion groups, a concept was generated, which brought together all of our ideas, and also the concepts originated by sociologists.

“A nation´s culture resides in the hearts and soul of its people” M.K. Gandhi

Our concept was: “culture is represented through symbols which can represent other things, like values, behaviors, manners, beliefs, knowledge, art, laws, customs and many others. Those symbols are learned through social interactions such as perception, interpretation, expression and response. Symbols can be learned implicitly and explicitly according to the process of socialization.”

“Once you understand and appreciate other people’s cultural backgrounds, then you can also connect with them more” Anonymous

Now we will explain the reasons how we arrived at this meaning. When people talk about certain symbols in a specific culture, this must take into account all the physical movements we make to communicate or express an idea.

In the majority of cases, there is much variety in the way people greet each other. For example, at the moment of introducing oneself, introducing a new person in a social link, or a sporadic greeting with someone we know or close friend. Certain actions, verbal communication, facial and physical gestures help us to express our greetings to another person.

These manifestations often vary according to the country we are in and there are some cultural traits that appear in every social interaction that a person has. We apply the term ‘symbols’ to those manifestations, which implicitly and unconsciously accompany each society.

“Our culture, our traditions, our language are the foundations upon which we build our identity” Anonymous

As human beings we do not just use our mother tongue to communicate and there are traditional aspects that appear in every social interaction. A facial gesture of pleasure or displeasure to any person can communicate an effective message. But there is a bigger question we can ask of ourselves. How could we possibly learn all those various cultural expressions? How can we recognize the identity of English-speaking cultures? This is the main objective of this subject.