Stephan Dahl
Communications and Culture Transformation
Cultural Diversity, Globalization and Cultural Convergence

Chapter 2: Culture Acquisition and Modification

The question of why any individual develops 'cultural behavior' is of course central to the debate of this project. While I have pointed out, in the previous section, what determinants exist in cultures, we can now proceed to the question of culture acquisition, culture change and acculturation.

As I have argued before, the individual is in the midst of a complex system of interaction with its immediate surroundings: the culture that s/he lives in. The infant gets like this born into a set of relationships, in its early years consisting of its family members. Through them it experiences the culture of the family; the cultural attitudes, behaviors, norms and values that dominate the process of educating the early infant. These values represent, in turn, the culture(s) of the parents and their parents in modification and adaptation to the current situation. This notion is particularly important for the emergence of similar cultural attitudes in cases of Diaspora identities.

With an increase in age, the individual increases its relationship to outside the family, including the school, later the university or work place and the peer-group. The individual also enters the wider influence area of the media and slowly the area of political and social influence and learns from those experiences. The two areas of influence can be, relatively, distinct: the family and the immediate social surroundings, and equally the social-economical-political surrounding. This explains, for example the emergence of multicultural persons in a single cultural surrounding: for example the British Born Chinese, or Turkish-Germans.

While the family surroundings, and their influence on the child while developing its identity are highly personal, the social reality (that is the general social, economic and political environment) can be subject to intensive investigation, and abstraction, as those phenomena can be more directly generalized.

The emergence of a national culture, is of course a difficult process of certain norms and values that are shared across the individuals that live in a 'national state or territory' or associate themselves to a certain 'national group', a concept that in recent years has deminished in importance, particularly because of the decline of the nation state and the break up of society in various subgroups, mobile social classes and various ethnic, religious and racial groups, that were less evident before. Each of those groups have, sometimes complimentary to or replacing of a set of cultural attributes in 'competition' to the 'national culture' per se.

A critical point in the discussion of the individual, and its acquired attributes, and the culture it adheres to, is of course the idea of 'imagined communities'. As Malcolm (1994) argues, there has not been a fixed, unified Serb or Croat identity since the Middle Ages that could be resurrected. However, the individuals behave as if there was, and develop a set of apparently national symbols and a national culture for this 'imagined community'.

Returning to the origins of this discussion, the acquisition of culture, we can identify the two main areas: the family and immediate social surroundings, and the social reality. Changes in these surroundings will be reflected in the cultural attributes of the individuals involved, depending on the amount of individuals involved the changes can mean a change in entire groups: changes in the political system, for example, represent such a fundamental change.

The world, in which we live, is in a continuos change, with the advancement of technology, and changes in the political and economical structure the changes have become a continuum with great speed. The cultural adaptation has, for many, become part of everyday life. In the following section I shall explore the changes that occur in the cultural surroundings of the individuals.

Axioms of the previous section

The child is exposed to two major influence factors: its family and the social reality of the society it lives in.

Cultural attributes are transferred through both. Cultural transfer can be personal (family, friends) or impersonal (media).

Each society consists of various groups and sub-groups: each have a set of cultural attributes, that can be understood as complimentary or replacing the set of variables of the larger unit.