Riassunti Lingua Inglese

Lesson 1/2/3

Language

Self-construction, persuasion, popularisation, translation, verbal and extra-verbal communication, sound. Language is a way to express culture.

Culture

A complex concept that includes language, art, literature, food, traditions, customs, and much more.

Definition of "Culture"

Tylor (1871): Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

Summary: Culture is not only made of tangible products, but also of thinking, values, beliefs, and ways of doing. Culture determines patterns that may differ among different groups of individuals. We don’t need to look for similarities, but to look for and understand differences (not within a given culture, but across cultures).

Culture has many facets. Trompenaars and Hamden-Turner (1997): "In twenty years we have seldom encountered two or more groups of individuals with identical suggestions regarding the concept of culture".

Gail Robinson 1988

Culture definitions relating to:

• External behaviours: Language, gestures, customs, habits
• Products: Literature, folklore, art, music, artefacts
• Internal ideas: Beliefs, values

B. Fay

A culture is a complex set of shared beliefs, values, and concepts which enables a group to make sense of its life and which provides it with directions for how to live. Becoming a member of a particular culture is a process of conceived as learning to read the culture’s basic bets and making it one’s own. In becoming the carriers of a specific cultural tradition, individuals become the people they are, developing a cultural identity.

Culture is a set of beliefs and rules which offer mixed, contested, and ambiguous messages to its followers. The differences in the roles people play change the way culture is felt and projected. An elite member of a society will never perceive culture the same way a member of a peripheral group does. Far from being coherent unities uniformly distributed throughout a society, cultures are rather tense gatherings of difference and opposition. Moreover, cultures are open. They are permeable, susceptible to influence from other cultures. Whenever people from two different cultural backgrounds meet, it’s impossible to avoid cultural influences (it can be avoided only if it's consciously rejected). The human world is a constant interplay and exchange between cultures.

The problem of defining culture is that ethnicities and cultural identities have been reduced to a list of strange linguistic and interactional elements arranged in academic display, dislocated from the sources of their generation, from human agency, intelligence, politics, and from the possibility of change.

Culture Involves

• Enculturation
• Identity. Culture penetrates its members mentally (mind-set), physically (appearance), and socially (relations occur in certain characteristic ways).
• Conflict
• Cultures are open. We also have to consider the effect of globalization, transport technology, and social media, which led culture to be even more movable.

Key Characteristics of Culture

1. Culture is manifested at different layers of depth.
2. Culture affects behavior and interpretations of behavior.
3. Culture can be differentiated from both universal human nature and unique individual personality; culture is learned, not inherited. Human nature is what all human beings have in common; what one does with feelings, how one expresses them is modified by culture. Meanwhile, the personality is an individual’s unique personal set of mental programs which he does not share with any other human being.
4. Culture influences biological processes.
5. Culture is associated with social groups. Everyone is simultaneously a member of several different cultural groups and thus could be said to have multicultural membership.
6. Culture is both an individual construct and a social construct.
7. Culture is always both socially and psychologically distributed in a group, and so the delineation of a culture's features will always be vague. There is no absolute set of features that can distinguish definitively one cultural group from another.
8. Culture has both universal (etic) and distinctive (emic) elements. "Etics" is used for universal cultural elements, "emic" is for culture-specific, unique elements.
9. Culture is learned from the people you interact with as you are socialized. By the explanations people receive for the natural and human events around them.
10. Culture is subject to gradual change. Cultural innovation occurs as a result of both internal and external forces. Cultural diffusion is the spreading of cultural items from one culture to another. Frequently, the borrowed items are reinterpreted and reworked so that they can be fit into the receiving culture more effectively.
11. The various parts of a culture are all, to some degree, interrelated.
12. Culture is a descriptive, not an evaluative concept.

Reading Assignment: 'Small Cultures', Holliday, A.R.

What type of entities does the expression "small cultures" (as opposed to "large cultures") refer to? Why is the expression "large cultures" identified with an essentialist view of culture? Small cultures differ from large cultures by illustrating the differences between the large and small culture paradigms in research orientations.

"Small cultures" define an entity regardless of concepts like ethnic, national, or international. It relates to any cohesive social grouping with no necessary subordination to large cultures. Small cultures aren’t necessarily subordinated to or contained within large cultures; they are not composed by layers on layers of elements, but they are contained within and subordinate to large cultures.

Small cultures are referred to as non-essentialist because they relate to cohesive behavior in activities within any social grouping, while large cultures are referred to as essentialist because they relate to the essential differences between ethnic, national, and international entities. In cultural research, small cultures are related to the research of interpreting group behavior. "Small" is therefore not just a matter of size, but of the degree of imposition on reality. Small cultures can be any social grouping from a neighborhood to a work group. Small culture is thus a dynamic, ongoing group process which operates in changing circumstances to enable group members to make sense of and operate meaningfully within those circumstances.

Exam Practice 1 – The Concept of Culture

Answer this question. Please write in plain, correct English.
Tip: be precise and make sure you answer both parts of the question! Your answer should be around 100 words.

Culture is a complex concept and has been defined in different ways by different scholars.

1. Provide two definitions of your choice and
2. Discuss them.

Nowadays, we cannot give a unique definition of the term “culture”. There are two main currents of thought; the first one is reducible to a notion of "large cultures" intended as big entities such as British, Italian, Korean and so on, a concept which is strictly connected to ethnic or national qualities. The second one can be summed up with the term "small cultures" and it relates to any cohesive social grouping, without taking account of large cultures. To me, both interpretations can be unequivocally acceptable and valid. It is impossible to give a sole definition. I see the notion of "culture" as a matryoshka doll. The outer layer is the general idea of culture - large cultures. Inside this bigger doll, we can find different dolls identical to the first one, but in different sizes - small cultures. Ultimately, all the small dolls can easily fit into the bigger one.

Lesson 4

The Iceberg Theory

Where does the word “culture” come from? 'Cultus, Colere', 'cultivation' or 'to till' (arare).

Cultural Iceberg Theory

According to the Cultural Iceberg Theory, the most important part of culture is completely hidden and what can be seen is just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. The culture under discussion is not visible, but internal and collective and it is acquired rather than learned. It’s a theory popularized through the works of anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who was a highly successful business consultant, cross-cultural skills trainer, and writer, today the most widely respected popularizer of 20th-century anthropology.

In the Cultural Iceberg Theory, the tip of the iceberg, which stands above the waterline, is a symbol of the conscious surface of a culture (e.g. language, music, art, food, visible behavior). What stands below the waterline, which can be semi-visible or invisible, consists of the subconscious aspects of culture, which are the most powerful elements (e.g. customs, traditions, communication, environment, thinking, structure). We call these elements value orientations because they are preferences for certain outcomes over others.

Value Orientations

Patterned principles that determine preferences for certain outcomes over others. (E.g. How do you address your lecturers in university? You and your best friend are meeting at 3 PM, at what time do you get there?)

When comparing culture to an iceberg, it’s obvious that you split it into visible culture and hidden culture. Visible culture is explicitly learned, conscious, easily changed, and consists of objective knowledge. Hidden culture is implicitly learned, unconscious, difficult to change, and subjective to knowledge.

Triad of Culture

Creating the Iceberg Theory, Hall divided culture into a triad, which, from the tip to the bottom of the iceberg, consists of:

• Technical culture: Humanist concept of culture, shared encyclopedic knowledge, communication at the level of science, scientific, analyzable, teachable. It can be measured accurately and has no meaning outside itself. In technical culture, there’s only one right answer, which will be based on an objective technical principle.
• Formal culture: Traditions, rules, customs, procedures. No longer objective, but part of an accepted way of doing things. What is normal or appropriate according to conventions, and awareness is immediate when the convention is ignored.
• Informal culture: In Hall’s view, informal culture = no rules, neither taught nor learned, but acquired informally and out-of-awareness. At this informal level, according to Hall, we react out-of-awareness and not at the technical level. It is this out-of-awareness level that we respond to emotionally and identify with.

Examples

E.g. "Time": technical time can be broken down into its 'isolates' (minutes, seconds) and analyzed and only refers to the technical understanding of the concept. A technical 'second' has no feeling but a clear unambiguous scientific definition.

E.g.1 "Time": quarto d’ora accademico
E.g.2 If a child forgets to say “thank you” at the appropriate moment, an adult will prompt him/her with the question “what is the magic word?”

E.g. "See you at 10 AM" what time do you go to the meeting? 10 o’clock? 10.10? 10.30? Your out-of-awareness response will be determined by your knowledge of the context (meeting with friend/supervisor/to work/do shopping/watch a movie) to understand the full meaning.

It’s possible to change level almost instantly, as this dialogue below shows. As the parent becomes more aware of the need to focus consciously on the situation, his language moves from the informal to the formal and finally to the technical.

The Relationship Between Culture and Language

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The world is unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. We see, hear, and experience as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. Language has become the medium of expression for their society. Our mind’s linguistic system organizes the flux of impressions through which the world is presented.

In Linguistic Relativity

• The language you speak helps to form your world-view.
• Language defines your experiences for you.
• Language imposes habits of both looking and thinking.

E.g.1 Hopi language describes water with two different words for ‘drinking water in a container’ versus a ‘natural body of water’

E.g.2 English: snow (= same word for ‘falling snow’, ‘snow on the ground’, ‘slushy snow’).

Inuit language uses the apparently distinct roots: aput ‘snow on the ground’, qana ‘falling snow’, piqsirpoq ‘drifting snow’, and qimuqsuq ‘a snow drift’

Stephen Pinker moved a critique towards the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He said it’s “no more than a myth”, he said the whole Hopi examples are badly analyzed because “the Eskimos don’t have more words for snow than do speakers of English” and lastly, if language determines thought, then those without language do not think. How do babies learn and develop language without thought process?

Cultural/Cognitive processes are the main drivers and language adapts to this. To Gumperz, the one-to-one relationship between language and cultural variability should be seen as an oversimplification because cultures are no longer homogeneous and language divisions have become more and more permeable. Language is the expression of culture, while communication is determined by context.

Exam Practice 2 – The Levels of Culture

Answer this question. Please write in plain, correct English.
Tip: be precise and make sure you answer both parts of the question! Your answer should be around 100 words.

Discuss the concept of culture in relation to Hall’s theory of the Cultural Iceberg.

According to the Cultural Iceberg Theory by Edward T. Hall, the most important part of culture is completely hidden and what can be seen is just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. The tip of the iceberg, which stands above the waterline, is a symbol of the conscious surface of a culture (e.g. language, food, visible behavior). What stands below the waterline, which can be semi-visible or invisible, consists of the subconscious aspects of culture, which are the most powerful elements (e.g. customs, traditions, thinking). These elements are called value orientations. When comparing culture to an iceberg, it gets split into visible culture and hidden culture. Visible culture is explicitly learned, conscious, easily changed, and consists of objective knowledge. Hidden culture is implicitly learned, unconscious, difficult to change, and subjective to knowledge. Hall also divided culture into a Triad of Culture, which from the tip to the bottom of the iceberg consists of: technical culture (analyzable, scientific, e.g. ‘time’ and its sub-units), formal culture (what is normal or appropriate, responds to conventions, e.g. “quarto d’ora accademico”) and informal culture (acquired out-of-awareness, e.g. given a specific time, I’m going to show up on time, before or late depending on whom I’m meeting).

Lesson 5 & 6

The Notion of 'Context'

Theory of Context by Malinowski 1923

Malinowski was a Polish-born British anthropologist. He analyzed the ethnographic fieldwork in the Tobriand Islands (Papua New Guinea), whose inhabitants lived by fishing and gardening and spoke the Kiriwininan language. He asked how to translate the texts in Kiriwininan from discussions with the Tobrianders to make them accessible for the British culture.

Tobriand culture is far from the Western culture so, instead of translating word by word, an explanation of customs, words, tribal organization, and special psychology was needed. To the translated text was attached an extended commentary, which created a total environment (verbal environment + situation in which the text was produced) -> context of situation.

Language is rooted in the reality of the culture, it is needed to explain things like tribal life and customs of the people. In case of the “language in action”, the message was clear only to those who knew what was going on, so it was necessary to provide not only a description of what was happening (context of situation), but also of the total cultural background -> context of culture.

Recap

• Immediate sight and sounds surrounding the event: context of situation
• Cultural history behind the participants and the practices: context of culture
• Meaning of the linguistic interaction: context of situation + context of culture

Context of Situation (Halliday 1852)

1. Field of discourse: what is going on, the nature of the social action
2. Tenor of discourse: the participants, their statuses and roles, their permanent and temporary relationships
3. Mode of discourse: the role language is playing, the symbolic organization of the text, its status, its function in the context, the channel, and the rhetorical mode.

The variable of the field of discourse refers to the topic of the language event and operates a constraint on the lexis and expressions available for use. The variable of the tenor of discourse, referring to the participants, constrains the degree of formality of a language event. The variable of the mode of discourse refers to the medium (written, spoken) and the channel (e-mail, article, essay) chosen for the language used.