Defining Culture
Previously, I have defined culture as “the ever-changing values, traditions, social and political relationships, and worldview created, shared, and transformed by a group of people bound together by a combination of factors that can include a common history, geographic location, language, social class, and religion.” As is clear from this definition, culture is complex and intricate; it includes content or product (the what of culture), process (how it is created and trans- formed), and the agents of culture (who is responsible for creating and changing it). Culture cannot be reduced to holidays, foods, or dances, although these are, of course, elements of culture. This definition also makes it clear that everyone has a culture, because all people partici- pate in the world through social and political relationships informed by history as well as by race, ethnicity, language, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and other circumstances related to identity and experience.
At least two issues need to be kept in mind if culture is to have any meaning for educators who want to understand how it is related to learning. First, culture needs to be thought of in an unsentimental way. Otherwise, it is sometimes little more than a yearning for a past that never existed, or an idealized, sanitized version of what exists in reality. The result may be an unadulterated, essentialized “culture on a pedes- tal” that bears little resemblance to the messy and contradictory culture of real life. The problem of viewing some aspects of culture as indis- pensable attributes that must be shared by all people within a particular group springs from a romanticized and uncritical understanding of culture. For instance, I have heard the argument that poetry cannot be considered Puerto Rican unless it is written in Spanish. Thus, the Spanish language becomes a constitutive characteristic of being Puerto Rican. While there is no argument that speaking Spanish is an impor- tant and even major aspect of Puerto Rican culture, it is by no means a prerequisite for Puerto Ricanness. There are hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who identify themselves first and foremost as Puerto Rican but who do not speak Spanish due to the historical conditions in which they have lived.
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The second consideration to be kept in mind is that the sociopoliti- cal context of culture needs to be acknowledged. That is, cultures do not exist in a vacuum, but rather are situated in particular historical, social, political, and economic conditions, and therefore they are influenced by issues of power. The claim of Whites that they do not have a culture is a case in point. Whites frequently do not experience their culture as a culture because as the officially sanctioned and high-status culture, it “just is.” Therefore, when Whites say that they do not “have” a culture, they in effect relegate culture to no more than quaint customs or colorful traditions. This stance is disingenuous at best because it fails to observe that Whites as a group participate disproportionately in a culture of power3 based simply on their race; access to this power is not available to those who are not White (nor, it should be stressed, is it shared equally among Whites).
In what follows, I describe a set of attributes that are key to under- standing how culture is implicated in learning, and how these notions of culture complicate a facile approach to multicultural education. These characteristics are complementary and interconnected, so much so that it is difficult to disentangle them from one another. I do so here only for purposes of clarity, not to suggest that they exist in isolation. The characteristics I review here include culture as dynamic; multifaceted; embedded in context; influenced by social, economic, and political factors; created and socially constructed; learned; and dialectical.