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HOW DO CULTURES COMMUNICATE THEIR VALUES ?
– SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON CULTURE AND THEIR INTERPETATIONS OF CULTURAL VALUES
Culture as systems of ideas
The opponents of the sociocultural school emphasise a difference between social and
cultural systems, though they acknowledge their interdependence (Allaire & Firsirotu,
1984). This conceptualisation sees culture as a system of ideas or as “inferred ideational
codes lying behind the realm of observable events” (Keesing, 1974, as cited in Allaire &
Firsirotu, 1984. 197). The ideational system uses culture to refer to the “organised system
of knowledge and belief whereby people structure their experience and perceptions,
formulate acts, and make choices between many alternatives. This sense of culture refers
to the realm of ideas” (Keesing & Keesing 1971. 20).
The cognitive school views culture as a “system of knowledge” (Keesing & Keesing,
1971. 20) that includes “learned standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating and
acting” (Allaire & Firsirotu, 1984, p. 198); namely what people in a society must know to
function well. As an early representative of this tradition Goodenough claimed:
“A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to
operate in a manner acceptable to its members… Culture, being what people have to learn
as distinct from their biological heritage, must consist of the end product of learning:
knowledge … by this definition, we should note that culture is not a material phenomenon;
it does not consist of things, people behaviour, or emotions. It is rather an organization of
these things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating and otherwise
interpreting them” (Goodenough, 1964. 36).
More recent cognitive conceptions of culture retain the tenet of culture as knowledge.
This kind of knowledge is not a collective one, but is comprised of the knowledge of
the individuals belonging to the same community. Applying concepts from schema
theory, culture is seen as internal mental organisations or schemata used for interpreting
the world and deciding how to behave or how to say things (Holland & Quinn, 1987).
Schemata are built up from discrete items of knowledge gained from experience (Holland
& Quinn, 1987). Cultural schemata are created through socially mediated experiences
e.g., schooling, place of living etc. which enable members of the same culture to make
similar interpretations of social interactions (Holland & Quinn, 1987).
The symbolic or semiotic school provides “an interpretive view of culture as a system
of shared meanings and symbols” (Allaire & Firsirotu, 1984, p. 198). It views culture as
a public creation, saying that meaning is created in public (Geertz, 1973). Therefore the
semiotic school rejects the internal private view of culture. For Rohner (1984) culture is an
organised system of meanings attributed by individuals to the persons and objects which
make up the culture. It is through culture that people can “communicate, perpetuate, and
develop their knowledge about attitudes towards life. Culture is the fabric of meaning in
terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action” (Geertz,
1973. 145). This implies that culture is not in “people’s heads but in the ‘meanings’ and
‘thinkings’ shared by social actors” (Allaire & Firsirotu, 1984. 198). “Man” says Geertz,
“is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun; I take culture to
be those webs’ (Geertz, 1973.5). For the semiotic school, to understand human thought
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