Page 23 - Communication across Cultures

Chapter 1 Culture

Over time, this reward and punishment system helps shape and reinforce the adap-
tive behaviors within a cultural group, ensuring the transmission of cultural knowledge
and promoting the group’s overall cohesion and survival.

1.3.5 Cultural Communication Function

Culture serves the cultural communication function, which basically means the
coordination between culture and communication. Culture affects communication, and
communication affects culture. The noted anthropologist Hall succinctly states that cul-
ture is communication and communication is culture. It is through communication that
culture is passed down, created, and modified from one generation to the next. Commu-
nication is necessary to define cultural experiences. Cultural communication shapes the
implicit theories we have about appropriate human conduct and effective human prac-
tices in a given sociocultural context.
Cultural communication provides us with a set of ideals of how social interaction
can be accomplished smoothly among people within our community. It binds people
together via their shared linguistic codes, norms, and scripts. Scripts are interaction se-
quences or patterns of communication that are shared by a group of people in a speech
community (i.e., a group of individuals who share a set of common norms regarding
appropriate communication practices).
In sum, culture serves as the “safety net” in which individuals seek to satisfy their
needs for identity, inclusion, boundary regulation, adaptation, and communication coor-
dination. Culture facilitates and enhances individuals’ adaptation processes in their nat-
ural cultural habitats. Communication, in essence, serves as the major means of linking
these diverse needs together.

1.4 Characteristics of Culture

Culture is a complex and multifaceted concept that encompasses various character-
istics. Here are some key characteristics of culture:
1.4.1 Culture Is Learned Behavior

Culture is primarily learned, not innate. It is not something that individuals are
born with; rather, it is acquired through socialization and education within a particular
society or group. It is passed down from generation to generation through socializa-

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