Reading Response - Week One

Rothman's article on culture confusion brought to mind an exercise from an intercultural communications course I took in the Spring of 2015. At the start of the semester, we wrote a paper defining what culture was, and at the end of the semester, we wrote the same paper again. By the time I wrote that final paper I was still pretty confused as to what culture meant exactly. I suppose it’s entirely possible that I was alone in my predicament, but I don’t think so. 

I have to admit, I liked the Rothman article because he referred to culture as the “”Scary Movie” of words of the year”. Besides being a really astute observation, it probably appealed to me on account of the fact that I’m part of the original target audience for those movies and I love them dearly. That aside, he did make me think.

Having lived inside a generation that was raised to see culture, more specifically cultural differences, as a positive, I failed to notice that as the definition has broadened, it has become host to a slew of less than savory connotations.

Since Rothman uses rape culture as an example, I’ll use that as well.  Our technological affordances offer us a front-row seat to happenings all over the world, and this isn’t limited to texts and a few well-aimed grainy black-and-whites. We’re required to make fewer inferences visually because we’re presented with the evidence in vivid technicolor.

“Scantily clad woman is assaulted walking down the street, police confirm she had been drinking earlier in the evening” - and the public is outraged, but also, some of the public is saying, “Well, she was drunk and half-dressed. She deserved what she got”. And this happens once more and then twice more, and suddenly we have a “culture of rape”. The mere mention of ‘rape’ alongside the word ‘culture’ delivers an indelible negative association. It's actually a dangerous attitude to have, when you think about it, because it means that while we still have a negative response to rape, we're assigning a name and a belief structure to it, and this smells a little bit too much like defeat and acceptance. 

Even if we deny that this is the case, that we've created a culture around a violent act, we can't ignore the fact that one in five women in the U.S. report being victims of sexual assault.  If rape has become a culture, and that seems to be the case, then it has also created a subculture of victimized women. Looking at it from this perspective doesn't necessarily make the act of defining culture any easier, but what it does do is illustrate the myriad ways in which culture can be defined. 

If culture is the way of life, or the people surrounding a way of life, or however you care to define it personally, then morals and ethics could at the very least be considered an important chunk of the building blocks of culture. The Pew Research article on the varying differences of opinion on moral behavior from country to country gives a decent snapshot of what I mean by this, because these differences of opinion are all representative examples of our culture and several others. Ethics are the Lego build of each of these cultures. Acceptable or unacceptable behavior has been variable in them for generations, that's how they come to a consensus. 

Those particular Legos have been a source of debate amongst scientists and psychologists for quite some time. It's more popularly known as the nature versus nurture debate. Grant hits on this a bit in his article on raising a moral child. As it turns out, both sides of this debate are now coming to terms with the fact that it's not much of a debate anymore. Nature and nurture are roughly 50/50, and that means that more than likely, behavior is learned, not genetic. In other words, you teach your kid to be a good person, it's not a luck-of-the-draw kind of thing. 

Albert Bandura spent a good chunk of the 60s and 70s putting these theories of altruism and prosocial behavior to the test. With the famous Bobo doll experiments, Bandura and colleagues studied children's reaction to seeing an adult beat up a toy doll. 24 kids saw the aggression, 24 didn't, and 24 made up the control group, who saw nothing. The results of this experiment showed that the 24 kids who saw the doll abused were more likely to present aggressive behavior toward the doll themselves. The Bobo doll experiments gave Bandura enough information to formulate what he called the social learning theory, and it also gave some pretty sound evidence for learned versus genetic behavior.