Minkov indb

 1.4.4. CULTURE AS A SET OF 
MEANINGS 
American anthropologist Clifford Geertz 
is the best-known proponent of the 
view that meanings are central to the 
concept of culture (Geertz, 1973). This 
reflects one of the main preoccupations 
of Western field anthropologists in the 
past: They had to make sense of the 
incomprehensible symbols, rituals, and 
other practices in the preliterate and pre-
industrial societies that they studied. But 
the meanings-based definition has been 
accepted by cross-cultural psychologists 
as well. Pepitone and Triandis (1987) 
define culture as “shared meanings that 
are encoded into the norms that consti-
tute it” (p. 485). 
Taken to an extreme, this position may 
severely reduce the perceived content and 
scope of culture while also clashing with 
the idea of cross-cultural analysis: “Culture 
is treated as a symbolic universe of gestures 
and their micro-interpretation within spe-
cific contexts, whereas the broader brush-
strokes of cross-cultural comparisons are 
suspect” (Liu et al., 2010, p. 452). Culture, 
as treated in the vast literature on it, is cer-
tainly not just a system of meanings. Yet, 

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The Concept of Culture
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15
there are multiple reasons to be interested 
in the meanings that a particular culture 
attaches to a given concept or behavior. 
One is purely academic. Without a good 
understanding of meanings, a researcher 
may not know how to design a study. Let 
us assume that we are interested in com-
paring national suicide rates. What exactly 
constitutes suicide? Jumping off the top 
of a skyscraper in an act of despair would 
probably be viewed as suicide all over 
the world. Yet, so-called suicide attacks 
are considered combat casualties by their 
perpetrators. 
There are also practical reasons to seek 
cultural meanings. According to Cheung 
and Leung (1998), most Chinese score 
high on American depression scales. Yet, 
this does not necessarily mean that they 
need clinical assistance. Endorsement of 
items that suggest depression in a Western 
context does not always reveal the same 
condition in China. Following this logic, 
an American clinician who does not 
understand depression in a Chinese con-
text would not be very useful to Chinese 
patients, whereas cross-cultural analysts 
would have trouble comparing the depres-
siveness of Americans and Chinese. 
Maseland and van Hoorn (2011) noted 
that according to various surveys, people 
in predominantly Muslim countries value 
democracy more than other people, yet 
their societies are less democratic. They 
attempted to explain this apparent para-
dox in terms of the so-called principle of 
diminishing marginal utility: People value 
highly that of which they have little. But 
an analysis of Muslim attitudes toward 
democracy can be very misleading unless 
it starts from what people in the Muslim 
nations mean by democracy. According 
to a nationally representative study by the 
Pew Research Center (2010a), the percent-
ages of people who completely agree that 
women should be allowed to work outside 
the home are 22 in Jordan, 22 in Egypt, 
and 47 in Pakistan. Also, 82% in Pakistan, 
75% in Egypt, and 68% in Jordan said 
that when jobs are scarce, men should have 
more right to employment than women 
(in Western countries, these percentages 
ranged from 14 to 20). Another nationally 
representative study by the Pew Research 
Center (2010b) revealed that 82% of 
Egyptians and Pakistanis and 70% of 
Jordanians were in favor of stoning peo-
ple who commit adultery, while 86% of 
Jordanians, 84% of Egyptians, and 76% of 
Pakistanis supported the death penalty for 
apostates who leave the Muslim religion. 
Obviously, these populations have a very 
different concept of democracy when com-
pared to Europeans and Americans. 
On the other hand, the explicit mean-
ing that the members of a particular cul-
ture attach to a cultural phenomenon may 
be too simplistic or superficial to be of 
much use for its understanding. Jews and 
Muslims do not have a convincing story 
about the meaning of the pork taboo; 
they will either simply refer to their Holy 
Scriptures, which ban the consumption of 
pork, or say that the pig is a dirty animal, 
although chickens and cattle are not cleaner 
(Harris, 1992). Cases of this kind raise an 
interesting dilemma. How do we make 
sense of the observed phenomenon: Should 
we seek its original meaning or attempt to 
attach a new meaning to it in the modern 
context? If we adopt the first option, we 
might accept Harris’s (1992) explanation: 
Unlike grass-grazing animals, pigs were 
costly to raise in the Middle East and were 
therefore banned. But today, the meaning 
of the ban may be quite different: It can be 
viewed as a means of instilling self-control 
and discipline, similar to the practice of 
fasting, or as a group identity reinforcer. 
 1.4.5. CULTURE AS AN 
INDEPENDENTLY EXISTING 
PHENOMENON 
When cultural anthropologists say that 
culture has an independent existence, 
what they mean is that it can be studied 
independently of its carriers: the human 
beings. White (1959/2007) provides an 

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16
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Understanding “Culture”
analogy with language: Linguists study 
languages, not the people that speak them. 
This conceptualization of culture is appro-
priate for the purpose of what many 
anthropologists were interested in. They 
studied various social institutions, inheri-
tance systems, kinship terminologies, color 
terms, taboos, and religions. The individ-
ual did not matter in those studies. They 
were keyed at the supra-individual level. 
Today, the collection of individual val-
ues, beliefs, attitudes, and even aspects of 
personality, followed by aggregation to 
the societal level, is a legitimate approach 
in culturology, if not the main one. But 
the issue of the independence of culture 
is still relevant, albeit in a completely dif-
ferent sense. For many scholars, cultural 
or psychological constructs such as indi-
vidualism, uncertainty avoidance, or neu-
roticism have an independent existence of 
their own and can therefore be objectively 
delineated and described in one single 
best way. Starting from this perspective, 
the goal of the researcher is to discover 
these objectively existing phenomena, just 
like a seafarer who stumbles upon a new 
island. For example, Welzel (2010) refers 
to a debate on the “true character of indi-
vidualism” (p. 153). This implies that indi-
vidualism is an entity independent of the 
minds of the researchers who study it and 
the goal of the researchers is to find its true 
nature. One study of individualism is sup-
posed to reveal truer results than another. 
4
 1.4.6. CULTURE AS A SUBJECTIVE 
HUMAN CONSTRUCT 
Two of the authors of the main prod-
uct of Project GLOBE (a comparison of 
the societal and organizational cultures 
of 61 societies presented in 9.17. and 
9.18.) make the following point (House & 
Hanges, 2004): 
There are researchers and methodolo-
gists that hold a measurement philoso-
phy in which constructs are believed 
to be completely bounded by the 
methods by which they are measured. 
This measurement philosophy, called 
operationalism, was extremely influ-
ential during the 1940s and the 1950s. 
Operationalism was first proposed by 
Bridgman . . . , a Nobel prize-winning 
physicist, but made famous in the social 
sciences by B. F. Skinner and others. 
According to Bridgman, a construct 
is “nothing more than a set of opera-
tions.” In other words, concepts such 
as intelligence, motivation, and even 
culture are synonymous with the way 
that they are measured. For example, 
Boring’s . . . definition of intelligence 
(i.e. “intelligence is what tests test”) is 
a classic illustration of the belief that 
constructs are bounded by the way they 
are measured. (p. 100) 
The operationalist approach is 
explained in greater detail in 5.4.1. 
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