Week 2: Defining Culture in Morgan's Article

After reading the article I realized the definition of culture was more complex than I thought. When we were asked to define culture in class, I came up with "culture is a variety of traditions and customs that have been passed throughout generations". I was just looking at culture as traditions passed from different ethnic groups. Even the author Morgan had trouble figuring out the definition of culture because it is pretty broad. He defines it as "the evolving way of life of a group of persons, consisting of a shared set of practices associated with a shared set of products, based upon a shared set of perspectives on the world, and set within specific social contexts" (24). The definition is pretty lengthy but it taps into everything that culture consists of. It is interesting to read about culture and how it encompasses everything around us. I didn't realize culture entailed everything around us from practices to people and specific communities to products and perspectives. I like how Morgan uses the drive-through restaurants as an example to explain the 5 dimensions of culture. Products are like the napkins or uniforms, practices are like learning how to drive a car before ordering the meal, communities are the members of the town, patrons or employees, persons encompass factors such as race, ethnicity, social class and others, and lastly is perspectives which are the different attitudes towards the meal, positive or negative, or different meanings for different members of a culture.

Morgan also defines culture as an iceberg because there are explicit and tacit cultures, where perspectives are usually placed under the tacit part because many other perspectives remain unseen by a certain culture. Usually the rest of the dimensions are seen and some perspectives as well, but most perspectives lie outside our awareness. Morgan also discusses how language cannot be separated from culture, "language-and-culture". It is a product of culture and these are both intertwined. People need language to transmit information in their everyday life. Every ethnic group has its own language that represents their own culture. It is needed to maintain relationship as well as to communicate a message to others and organize our life. Also, I like how Morgan comes up with 4 language functions useful when using language to learn culture: "language to participate in the culture, language to describe the culture, language to interpret the culture, and language to respond to the culture" (39). These are useful in language classrooms because as language teachers we will have to separate language from culture. I have had to define "culture" many times in the past for classes and now I found a definition that fits the characteristics of culture. And lets not forget about language!, these two go along with each other. Both of these are needed to carry out actions and share opinions with others in the world we live in. As a future language teacher, this topic will definitely come up, probably everyday in my classroom. I agree with Morgan and the 5 dimensions of culture. I have finally understood what culture really means and how the language functions can be very useful for future lessons. My future students will bring their own culture into the classroom as well as I will, and together we will be able to create our own little culture in our classroom.