ABSTRACT
Introduction To start this section, an understanding of the meaning of ‘culture’ is useful. Although culture is part of our daily experience and encounters, it does not have any single definition. Rightly so. Indeed, Kluckhohn and Kroeber (1952) found some 150 different definitions of culture. If anything, the multiplicity of definitions demonstrates the diverse views of culture across lenses – shaped, as it were, by the cultural encounters of the various authors that attempt to define it. Anthropologists have tended to link culture to shared understandings of symbols. Clifford Geertz in his classic work The Interpretation of Culture sees culture as a historically transmitted “pattern of meaning embodied in symbols”, and “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms” (Geertz 1973, p. 89). Contemporary scholars of culture and intercultural communications such as Kathryn Sorrells have built on Geertz’s anthropological association of culture with meaning and symbols, seeing culture as a system of shared meanings passed from generation to generation through symbols (Sorrells 2013, p. 4). Critical to this view of culture are shared meanings of symbolic forms. Symbols are the core artefacts upon which human communication is built – words, images, slogans, colour combinations, etc.
