Beliefs

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 766.

Components of Cultural Patterns

Above we offered a definition of culture as a learned set of shared interpretations about beliefs, values, norms, and social practices. We now explain in some detail the nature of beliefs, values, norms, and social practices, which together constitute the components of cultural patterns.

A belief is an idea that people assume to be true about the world. Beliefs, therefore, are a set of learned interpretations that form the basis for cultural members to decide what is and what is not logical and correct.

Beliefs can range from ideas that are central to a person's sense of self to those that are more peripheral.

Central beliefs include the culture's fundamental teachings about what reality is and expectations about how the world works. Less central, but also important, are beliefs based on or derived from the teachings of those regarded as authorities. Parents, teachers, and other important elders transmit the culture's assumptions about the nature of the physical and interpersonal world.

Peripheral beliefs refer to matters of personal taste. They contribute to each person's unique configuration of ideas and expectations within the larger cultural matrix [Milton Rokeach, Beliefs, Attitudes and Values: A Theory if Organization and Change]

Discussing culturally shared beliefs is difficult because people are usually not conscious of them. Culturally shared beliefs are so fundamental to assumptions about what the world is like and how the world operates that they are typically unnoticed. We hope you will come to realize through this discussion of cultural beliefs that much of what you consider to be reality may, in fact, not be reality to people from other cultures. What you consider to be the important "givens" about the world, such as the nature of people and their relationships with one another, are based on your culturally shared beliefs, which have been transmitted to and learned by you and are not a description of some invariant, unchanging characteristic of the world.

A well-known example of a widely shared belief dates back to the time when Europeans believed that the earth was flat. That is, people “knew” that the earth was flat. Most people now "know" (believe) that the earth is basically round and would scoff at any suggestion that it is flat.

Another example of a belief for many European Americans is that in “reality” there is a separation between the physical and spiritual worlds. If a teacher one day started kicking the doorsill at the front of the room, the students might begin to worry about the teacher's mental health. The students would probably not be concerned about the doorsill itself, nor would they be alarmed about the spirits who might reside there. Of course, you and they "know" that there are no spirits in doorsills. But people from Thailand and elsewhere "know" that spirits do indeed reside in inanimate objects such as doorsills, which is why doorsills should always be stepped over rather than on. In addition to their concern about the teacher, therefore, people from other cultures might conceivably worry about upsetting the spirits who dwell in the doorsill.

Members of the European American culture see humans as separate from nature. Based on this set of beliefs about the world, European Americans have set out to control nature. From the viewpoint of the typical European American, a person who believes, as the typical Indian woman does, that she "catches colds and fevers from evil spirits that lurk in trees” would be seen as strange. European Americans "know" that people do not become ill from spirits that live in trees. Yet, in the Indian culture, people "know" that human illness is caused by such spirits.