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Classifications of Cultures
Good morning, everyone! Today, we'll look at culture or rather classifications of cultures. Usually, when we deal with different people, we deal with them as if we were all members of the same culture. However, it's possible that people from different cultures have different assumptions about the world. We got in such important and basic ideas as time, personal space. And this is the view of Edward Hall. And Edward Hall is an anthropologist who spent a large part of his life studying American Indians, their culture, their language. But he was different from a lot of other anthropologists who just study one culture. He was interested in the relations between cultures, how cultures interact. What Hall believes is that cultures can be classified by placing them on a continuum, ranging from what he called high-context to low-context.
OK, what is a high-context culture? A high-context culture is a culture in which the context of the message, or the action, or an event carries a large part of its meaning and significance. What this means is that in a high-context culture, more attention is paid to what's happening in and around the message than to the message itself.
Now, let me give you examples. First, in terms of personal space. Generally speaking, in a high-context culture, because this greater dependency on group thinking, people lean towards heavier sense of involvement or closeness to people. And they have less respect for privacy, for personal space. If you go into that culture, people might stand closer when they're talking to you. They might touch more. And if they're jostled in a crowd, they won't feel violated. And also people from a high-context culture pay attention to body language. Because remember what I said, the definition of a high-context culture is that more attention is paid to the context of the message than to the message itself. And part of the context is body language.
Second, in terms of time. People in high-context cultures, are considered to have, what is called a poly-chronic attitude toward time. Here, "poly" means multiple and "chronic" means time. What this means is that they believe people, things, events have their own time. And there can't be a standard system of time for everything. What this leads them to believe is that you can't emphasize punctuality. Things happen when they are supposed to happen. So, there's a different attitude toward time; there's no set standard of time; you can't control time; everything has its own sense of time. So it's a culture that pays little attention to time, to clock time.
Now, let's move on to low-context culture. A low-context culture is just the opposite. A low-context culture is one in which the message, the event or the action is a separate entity, having meaning onto itself, regardless of the surroundings or the context. That the message, the event, the action has meaning in itself. So what this means in a low-context culture, is that people pay more attention to the event itself rather than to the context which surrounds the event or the message. For example, in terms of personal space again, there's more emphasis on individuality. So the concept of privacy is very, very important. Whereas before, as I said, in a high-context culture, they might not even be concerned with privacy or personal space. But in a low-context culture, there's a feeling that we each have our own personal space. If you get too close, if you don't knock on doors before entering, that's an invasion of privacy. People feel violated. There's a respect and a desire for privacy. And you'll also see that people might pay less attention to body language, because as I said, the message is, the message is everything. They are not going to worry about all the details around it. What you say is the important thing, or what you do is the important thing.
Another example of a low-context culture is people's attitude towards time. In terms of time, I said before, there was a poly-chronic sense of time in a high-context culture. What do you think there would be in a low-context culture? Mono-chronic? Right! A mono-chronic sense of time and by that we mean that there's one time. And that concept means that people in a low-context culture believe that there's one standard of time. And that should be for everything. And so I am not willing to hear "Oh, the traffic was heavy. That's why I'm late" or "Oh, I slept late". People in a low-context culture would be much more upset with lateness, because they feel that everyone should follow the same time. There shouldn't be all this flexibility with time and they expect punctuality. And they look at time as almost a commodity that they use expressions like "use time, to waste time, to spend time or time is money". All of these expressions reinforce the concept that time is actually something you can hold on to.
So, what this is all about is that, Hall stresses that people need to be aware of these different assumptions or concepts about reality. And he thinks that this has all kinds of relevance no matter what you're doing. If you're in business, negotiations, interpersonal relations, if you're dealing with people from different cultures in any way, it's going to affect every part of your life. In any multi-cultural situation, these assumptions need to be taken into account for successful interactions.
OK, today we've taken a brief look at Edward Hall's view of culture, mainly his classification of high- or low-context culture with some examples. Next week, we'll look at some more examples of cultures on a continuum between high-context and low-context cultures.
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