Culture Is Dialectical
Culture often is thought of as a seamless web of interrelated and mutually supportive values and behaviors, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Because they are complex systems that are created by people and influenced by social, economic, and political factors, cultures are also dialectical, conflicted, and full of inherent tensions. A culture is neither “good” nor “bad” in general, but rather embodies values that have grown out of historical and social conditions and necessities. As individuals, we may find elements of our own or others’ cultures uplift- ing or repugnant. That culture is dialectical does not mean that we need to embrace all of its contradictory manifestations in order to be “authentic” members of the culture.
Young people whose cultures are disparaged by society sometimes feel that they have to accept either one culture or the other wholly and uncritically. This was found to be the case, for instance, among Romani (Gypsy) youth in research carried out in Hungary (Forray and Hegedus 1989).27 Prevalent gender expectations of Romani boys and girls tend to be fairly fixed and stereotypical. Yet because the family is often the only place where culturally dominated young people can positively strengthen their self-image, Romani girls may correctly perceive that breaking free of even limited expectations of their future life options also results in giving up their ethnic identity and abandoning their families. Through questionnaires collected from elementary school teachers of Romani children, it became clear that teachers’ negative attitudes and behaviors concerning the fixed gender roles in the Romani culture were at least partly responsible for strengthening the expected gender-based behavior among girls in school. Had teachers been able to develop a more culturally balanced and sensitive approach, it is
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conceivable that the Romani girls might have felt safe to explore other options without feeling that they were cultural traitors.
That culture is dialectical also leads to an awareness that there is no special virtue in preserving particular elements of culture as if they existed outside of social, political, and historical spaces. Mary Kalantzis and her colleagues have described this contradiction eloquently:
Preserving “communities” is not a good for its own sake, as if peoples should be preserved as museum pieces, so that they are not lost to posterity. “Communi- ties” are always mixed, contradictory, conflict-ridden and by no means socially isolated entities. Active cultural re-creation, if people so wish, might involve consciously dropping one language in preference for another or abandoning some cultural tradition or other—such as sexism.28
The work of the Puerto Rican sociologist Rafael Ramirez is particu- larly relevant here. Ramirez has suggested that we can think of every culture as a coin that has two contradictory faces or subsystems. He calls these the culture of survival and the culture of liberation, and each is important in defining the complexity of culture. The culture of survival embodies those attitudes, values, traditions, and behaviors that are developed in response to political, economic, or social forces, some of which may be interpreted as a threat to the survival of the culture in some way. They can either limit (e.g., the unequal treatment of women) or expand (i.e., mutual cooperation) people’s perspectives within a par- ticular culture. In the case of the role of women, values and behaviors of both males and females grew out of the necessity to view women, because of their unique biology, as primary caregivers. The need to survive is thus manifested in many cultures in perfectly understandable although not always ethical or equitable ways, given the history of the species. According to Ramirez:
The culture of survival is characterized mainly by the contradiction that it sustains, affirms, and provides certain power but, at the same time, does not confront or alter the oppressive elements and institutions nor affect the struc- ture of political and economic power that controls the system.29
Ramirez has defined the culture of liberation as the values, attitudes, traditions, and behaviors that embody liberatory aspects of culture. This face of culture, according to Ramirez, is part of the process of decolo- nization, and of questioning unjust structures and values, and it com- prises those elements that promote a new social order in which the “democratization of the sociopolitical institutions, economic equality,
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and cooperation and solidarity in interpersonal relations predomi- nate.”30 In this way, Ramirez says, authoritarianism is contrasted with democracy, racism with consciousness of racial and ethnic identity, and sexism with gender equality. Human rights that are generally accepted by most societies can be included in the framework of the culture of liberation. To that end, understanding the contradictory nature of culture is important if students and teachers are to develop a critical, instead of a romantic, perspective of their own and other people’s cultures.
What we do to educate our children and young people says a great deal about what we stand for and who we are as a people. The challenge is to educate all people so that everyone will benefit as articulated, not by Horace Mann or John Dewey, but by John Amos Comenius in The Great Didactic:
The education that I propose includes all that is proper for all men and it is one which all . . . who are born into this world should share. . . .
Our first wish is that all . . . be educated fully into full humanity, not any one individual, not a few, not even many, but all . . . together and singly, young and old, rich and poor, of high and lowly birth, men and women—in a world whose fate it is to be born human beings, so that at least the whole of the human race become educated men of all ages, all conditions, all sexes and all nations.