Defining the Columns: What is a Culture?

Start by imagining a situation in which you might be looking for precisely the kind of information named in the introduction to this module. Perhaps you are not Muslim, you have a new client who is Muslim, and you recognize that you need information if you are to work with this person appropriately. Then imagine that you have another new client; this person is from Chile, and you are not, so you are looking for information about Chilean culture. A third new client is a gay man; you are not a gay man, so you are seeking information about how to work with gay men appropriately. These pursuits are admirable, but keep the cultures in these examples in mind: Muslim, Chilean, and gay.

Now imagine a different, admittedly improbable, situation: You are living and working on Mars, and you have been asked to write a short article for your hospital’s newsletter that describes the values, preferences, beliefs, behaviors, and speech-language characteristics of a group that you think of as your home culture, or one of your home cultures, from when you lived on Earth. Which culture would you select? Depending on your background, you might start by thinking about “American” culture. But “American” includes a lot of people! Describing all the values, preferences, behaviors, and other details for all of “American” culture would be impossible in one newsletter article. You might narrow to “African American,” or “New Englander,” or “Buddhist Americans” as your culture, if you are African American, or a New Englander, or Buddhist.

What would happen as you started to write such an article? Let’s assume you are a New Englander writing about the cultural aspects that are characteristic of New England. In this example, you are a speech-language pathologist who works at a hospital, which makes you highly educated and financially stable; additionally, you might be a Black cisgender heterosexual vegetarian woman who grew up in Montpelier, Vermont. Do most New Englanders share all of these characteristics with you? No; many of your identifying characteristics are your personal identities, or represent the other groups or subgroups that you belong to, in addition to or within “New Englander.”

To be able to write about New England culture, therefore, you would have to write either very generally or very specifically. If you write generally, you could mention some general tendencies, describe some ranges of possibilities, and clarify that many New Englanders differ from this general description. The resulting article might not describe you at all, even though the original assignment was to write about your own culture. Alternatively, if you write specifically, you might start by clarifying that your article reflects only your own experiences and identities. In this case, your article would fit you but would represent only a distinct subset of New Englanders.

The problem you will have run across, as you tried to write about one of your own cultures, is that no single label adequately captures our full sense of our complete cultural backgrounds and important individual identities. Morgan’s (1996) model used multiple dimensions, including race, religion, national origin, native language, sexual orientation, and so on, for precisely this reason; many individual dimensions must be combined to describe a complete person. Selecting any one dimension, or only a few of them, provides only a small part of any person’s sense of who they are, or only a small part of their culture and of their many identities.

In my own case, to take another example, someone else might describe me as part of “White American” culture. That label is accurate, as far as it goes. If I were assigned to write about the culture that shaped my view of the world, however, or the culture that makes me feel from some people, from a place, from a time, and also in the group, with a coherent sense of what the group is for (our 16 Questions matrix, from Module 2), my article would have to be closer to “Semi-Retired White American Women Speech-Language Pathology Professors Who Grew Up in Northern California and Have Lived and Worked in Georgia for Decades, Whose Grandparents Were Migrant Farmworkers, and Who Love and Admire Their Grown Children Who Happily Use the Word Queer to Describe Themselves.” “White American” is a group, in other words, and I do belong to it, but there is very little I could write about White American culture for my hospital newsletter on Mars that would be true about me and also true about all other people who might be described as White Americans.

Let’s return to your three new clients here on Earth: We had described them as Muslim, Chilean, and gay. Focus on one or more of those cultural labels that you would say does not describe you or is not one of your cultures. (If you happen to be Muslim, Chilean, and gay, then think about any culture that is not you.)

Do you see what happened, as we thought about the richness and complexities and details of our own cultures, as compared with how we had collapsed and oversimplified other cultures? If you are not from Chile, were you assuming that “Chilean” could be viewed as one group, even though you know that “New Englander” and “White American Women” are complex, multifaceted groups? If you are not Muslim, were you prepared to be satisfied with isolated facts like “do not eat pork” when you could talk for days about the foods that matter in your own tradition, who prepares them, when, how, and why?

Anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and other researchers have long known that people tend to use broader categories with fewer details to describe other groups and tend to use narrower categories and more details to describe themselves. This tendency is known as the “out-group homogeneity bias” (Park & Rothbart, 1982) or the tendency to assume that groups other than our own are relatively homogeneous, even as we recognize the substantial and important variation that exists within our own groups. In other words, most people qualify, limit, and add extra nuance to their descriptions and labels for their own cultures and collapse details, depend on isolated details, and depend on generalities to describe other groups.

These complexities reflect the Columns part of the Columns-and-Rows Problem. Imagine a hypothetical table or spreadsheet of cultural information, organized with a column for each culture. The problem we have been considering is how to label the columns, and it is a complicated problem that does not have a good solution. With broader or more general column labels (e.g., “Asian American” or “White” or “gay”), the table will be unable to capture the many important within-group differences that will be combined within each broadly defined column. With a column for every possible subgroup, however, the spreadsheet would be unworkably large, with an infinite number of columns. As quickly becomes obvious when we try to reduce everything we ourselves care about to one simple label, human cultures and identities cannot be fully respected and also reduced to a finite list of column labels.