Subjective Culture Article Review

Subjective Culture

Culture is the human-made part of the environment, which can be split into two categories: material and subjective. I view culture as a tree; the trunk is the idea of culture itself, the branches being the different elements of culture, and the leaves being the things that affect culture. There are many different ways to study culture one of the most being to study culture is through whatever language the people of that particular culture use. In my opinion, another good way to study culture is by the way people of certain cultures dress. Some cultures are more conservative, and one will see people of that culture (mainly women) wearing more clothing. The first thing to pay attention to when looking at culture is if the ideas are shared or not, then whether shared responses correspond a language, a time period, and a geographic location. People sharing other elements is how subcultures are emerged.

There are many elements of culture. The author explains how categories have associations, and categories are also linked to each other through beliefs. Some other ways categories are linked are through attitudes which are ideas charged with emotion, norms which are ideas about behavior expected of members of groups, roles which are a special category of norms, and tasks which are a sequence of behaviors. The other two elements are values, and and value orientation. To me, the three most important elements of culture are beliefs, norms, and values.

Beliefs are based off of opinions people have over something, and for a whole community to share similar opinions and have that turn into a form a culture is amazing to me. I think that norms are an important part of culture because norms show us an overview of the social hierarchy. Values are unbelievably important to culture; so many things change throughout culture as the world evolves, but values tend to stay close to the same, which I think helps culture grow roots. There are 10 set of recurring values in different cultures which are: self direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence, and universalism. A broader version of this would be innate human nature, man-nature, relationships between humans, and time focus. Through these two sets of values, we can see how some cultures overlap, which is unbelievably important when trying to find a solution that affects multiple cultures.

Works Cited

Triandis, H.C. (2002). Subjective culture. In W.J. Lonner, D.L. Dinnel, S.A. Hayes, & D.N. Sattler (Eds.), Online Readings in Psychology and Culture (Unit 15, Chapter 1), Center for Cross- Cultural Research, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington USA.