Culture: The beliefs, customs, values, and other characteristics that groups of people share. It also includes the things that people value or hold as sacred, such as artifacts and traditions.
Whether we are talking about human development or how to build relationships with people who are different from us, cultural issues play an important role. It is now widely recognized that culture matters and that cultural differences influence behavior and development. Continuing research on culture, however, will require going beyond simply showing that differences exist and identifying some of the specific ways in which cultural factors interact with developmental processes.
A big challenge in doing this is that it is very difficult to define what culture actually is. Geertz (1973) defined culture as “a pattern of symbols, heroes, myths, values, ideas and rules that are shared by a group of people.” But this definition is vague and overly broad.
Other researchers have viewed culture as the set of values, norms, or beliefs that a group shares or believes in. But this view also is overly broad and abstract. Beliefs and values are intangible, and we can’t easily observe them or measure them. Even if we could, it would be impossible to capture the full complexity and diversity of such a concept.
What is more useful is to take a different approach. In her book, Marie Suizzo uses the agricultural etymology of the word “culture” (as in tilling the soil) to see it as “the process of culturing or cultivating human behavior and development.” In other words, culture involves the continual maintenance and elaboratement of pathways of action that we use to meet our needs and goals. She then identifies three processes through which culture shows up in action and development: carving, categorizing, and communicating about those pathways. She illustrates her argument with examples from research on Parisian mothers’ childrearing goals, and the way that low-income Mexican American and African American parents talk to their children about school achievement.
Finally, many cultural expressions are shared and recognizable across boundaries of time and space. This is the case, for example, with the way that the neoclassical style of houses on plantations in America has influenced Liberian homes in Africa.
These different approaches to the nature of culture are helpful, but the real challenge is not defining what culture is. It is the interplay between these different dimensions that makes culture so important for human development. Understanding how these dimensions interact with developmental processes will help us to understand and promote the well-being of the world’s diverse population. The next section will examine some of the most pressing issues in this area of inquiry. UNESCO has set as its mission the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions. This is an enormous undertaking, but one that will be crucial for addressing global challenges such as climate change and economic development. We will discuss some of the pitfalls and challenges to this mission in the following sections.