Cross-Cultural Communication Vol. 9, No. 2, 2013, pp. 31-35 doi

1.  CULTURE AND CULTURE DIVERSITY

1.1  Understanding Culture

The word culture has numerous meanings. An early 

definition was provided by E. B. Tylor (1967), who 

treated culture as a complex whole of social traditions 

and as prerequisite for one to be a member of the society. 

Culture can be a set of fundamental ideas, practices, and 

experiences of a group of people that are symbolically 

transmitted generation to generation through a learning 

process. Culture may as well refer to beliefs, norms, and 

attitudes that are used to guide one’s behaviors and to 

solve human problems. Moreover, one can look at culture 

from an interpretative and performance perspective by 

viewing it as a system of expressive practices and mutual 

meanings associated with one’s behaviors.

Maybe Geert Hofstede, researcher in intercultural 

communication, provides a clearer concept; he refers to 

culture as “the software of the mind.” Culture is like Dos 

or UNIX or Windows. The metaphor of windows very 

appealing to describe culture: culture can be thought of 

as a mental set of windows through which all of life is 

viewed. These windows vary a bit from individual to 

individual within a society, but they share important, 

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Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture

Proverbs Reveal Culture Diversity

useful characteristics with all members of a society. Thus, 

the omnipresent quality of culture leads Hall, another 

researcher in intercultural communication, concludes that 

“there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched 

and altered by culture.”

Although the concept of culture seems complex, 

culture is learned. And because human behavior is 

culturally based, culture deals with the way people 

live; all need to do is learning culture through different 

elements or aspects of culture.