Lesson 6: Culture: How it defines Moral Behavior

What is Culture?

Culture "is the integrated pattern of human knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors. This consists of language, ideas, customs, morals, laws, taboos, institutions, tools, techniques, and works of art, rituals and other capacities and habits acquired by a person as a member of society."(Taylor as quoted by Palispis,1997). These include the list of items you made in the Activity phase of this Lesson. Culture is the one word expected of Question # 2 of Activity # 1.

The Magisterium of the Church explains culture as "the set of means used by mankind to become more virtuous and reasonable in order to become fully human. In its fullest sense, culture means opening up to the divine, and ultimately, to a religious dimension." Based on this Church definition, it is clear that culture is meant to serve human persons.

Sociologists categorize culture into material and non-material culture. Nonmaterial culture consists of language, values, rules, knowledge, and meanings shared by members of society. Material culture is the physical object that a society produces-tools, streets, homes and toys, to name a few." (Brinkerhoff, 1989). If you review your lists again in the Activity phase, you will be able to categorize those that belong to material culture to ore y and to the non-material culture.

Culture is passed on to the next generation by learning not through the genes or heredity. "Culture" includes all human phenomena which are not purely results of human genetics. (Kroeber et al, 1952)

The Human Person and Culture

As a moral agent you are born into a culture, a factual reality you have not chosen. You are not born nothing. It may be said that the Aristotelico-Thomistic tradition is one dominant, if not the most dominant culture. This Aristotelico-Thomistic culture is a Greco-Roman culture, which has influenced and shaped the moral life of those who have been exposed to it. Those who were born into this culture, educated under this culture, are persuaded that there is God, that a divine order and law keep and govern the world, which includes you. But what happens when there are different cultures with their own different views of man's direction and destiny? For instance, the Greek culture introduced the idea of perfection. In terms of numbers, a perfect thing is 100%; in terms of figures, it is a whole circle. A perfect thing has no privation, no lack, no absence of being. What if a new culture redefines perfection as any created and present model, which may be recreated, remolded like clay? Any change in the model may be perceived as the creation of a new model of perfection, not the actualization of what was lacking. Every created model is a perfection in its own right.

Enculturation, Inculturation and Acculturation

Cultures change or evolve. There are various ways by which cultures change by enculturation, inculturation and by acculturation.

Enculturation, an anthropological term, was coined by J.M. Herskovits Margaret Mead has, however was the one who defined the term as "the process of learning a culture in all its uniqueness and particularity"

Enculturation is a process of learning from infancy till death, the components of life in ones culture. The contents of this learning include both the material and non-material culture. The latter refers to values while the former refers to tools such as a hoe or mask. In the said process of learning, a person grows into a culture, acquires competence in that culture and that culture takes root in that person and becomes the cognitive map, the term of reference for acting.

For instance, African girls (South of the Sahara) grow up learning that as a woman she has less rights and privileges as the African man. For instance, a man can marry more than one woman while she cannot. While the African wife cannot share her love with other men, the man can share his with other women in the system. It turns women into an appendage, a property of the man one of the man's laborers.Umoren, U.E. (1992)

Another marriage practice that shows that the African woman is the property of the husband and his family is levirate marriage. Levirate marriage is the marriage between the widow and the brother of her deceased husband. Therefore at the husband's death the woman is general expected to stay on (as property of the family) without any choice in the matter She raises children to immortalise the deceased husband's name Umoren, U.E. 1992.

This is enculturation in concrete terms. The African girl grows un and becomes a woman through the said process of enculturation. This enculturation process has both cognitive and emotional elements. The girl child who later becomes a woman learns and internalizes the idea that she. because she is a woman, has less privileges than the African man. This learning takes place through example, direct teaching and in patterns of behavior. What is learned becomes her cognitive map, her term of reference that directs her behavior.

Another term is inculturation. Inculturation refers to the "missiological process in which the Gospel is rooted in a particular culture and the latter is transformed by its introduction to Christianity" Umoren, U.E. (1992) In the Special Assembly of the Synod in 1985, Pope John Paul II defined inculturation in Redemptoris Mission, n. 52, as...

the intimate transformation of authentic cultural values through their integration in Christianity and the insertion of Christianity in the various human cultures. " This that inculturation is characterized by a dual movement, i.e. a dialogic movement towards cultures via the incarnation of the Gospel and the transmission of its values, and a movement towards the Church that involves the means incorporation of values that come from the cultures the latter encounters. Therefore, a fruitful cross-fertilisation can follow (Umoren, U.E., 1992)

In other words, inculturation raises two related problems, that of the evangelisation of cultures (rooting the Gospel in cultures) and that of the cultural understanding of the Gospel. It was this movement that led Pope John Paul II to say in 1982, "The synthesis between culture and faith is not only a requirement of culture, but also of faith... Faith that does not become culture is not fully accepted, nor entirely reflected upon, or faithfully experienced"

This means that inculturation is not an action but a process that unfolds over time, one that is active and based on mutual recognition and dialogue, a critical mind and insight, faithfulness and conversion, transformation and growth, renewal and innovation.

Inculturation is a two way process: it roots the Gospel in a culture and introduces that transformed culture to Christianity. For example, to root the Gospel in the African culture is to initiate two events. The first event is to transform the African culture of oppressing women into a culture where men and women are treated as human persons equal in dignity, rights and privileges. The second event is to develop the African culture's latent potential towards the human development of the woman, created like her male counterpart in the image and likeness of God. The other aspect is to introduce the woman and her transformed culture to Christianity, for example, by allowing the woman meaningfiul place among the agents of inculturation.(cf. Umoren, U.E. 1992)

Acculturation is another big term. It is the "cultural modification of an individual, group, or people by adapting to or borrowing traits from another culture". It is also explained as the merging of cultures as a result of prolonged contact. Immigrants to the United States of America become acculturated to American life. Refugees and indigenous peoples (IP) likewise adapt to the culture of the dominant majority.

There are cultural practices that should be stopped because of the painful harm they do. The practice of human sacrifice has somehow been stopped. But the circumcision of women still goes on in some parts of the world, like Africa. Some approaches have been successful, like what one NGO tried to introduce in Africa. It is called a buying in. To gradually stop the circumcision of women, the approach was to buy in, like introducing into the place good health facilities and other forms of assistance to alleviate their economic hardships in return to their stopping the practice.

How Culture Shapes the Moral Agent

Culture definitely affects the way we evaluate and judge things. Consider the African women not as privileged as the African men described in the earlier section of this Lesson. Some societies consider it alright gathering vegetables at the backyard of their neighbor considering the act as getting a share. In such societies, the act would not be called stealing. In most societies, the act is stealing. In ancient times, human sacrifice was not Wrong. Today it is a criminal act. In some culturelike Islamic culture, and African culture (South of Sahara) having several wives is allowed. In other cultures, it's concubinage or adultery. Culture has a very long lasting hold on an individual. A person may have become highly educated, may have even obtained a doctorate degree, educated with Christian values of forgiveness, but if he comes from a society with a culture of vengeance ("an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth") having the sense of obligation to make an act of revenge when a member of his tribe has been killed or harmed by another tribe, and when a case arises where a member of his tribe is harmed by another, he becomes ultimately vindictive and joins his tribe seeking revenge. No amount of graduate education can prevent him from joining his tribe to seek revenge. He forgets about his doctorate degree in Values Education.