ABSTRACT
Having discussed the meaning of culture as a language in which we express ourselves and through which we become aware of our ends, means and meanings, let us now examine culture as a ‘navigator’ of our actions. Culture can be viewed as practical, useful ‘software’, which helps generate blueprints for individual and collective action and which patterns our interactions. Individuals can modify blueprints they want to implement and adapt them to circumstances, but there are limits to their improvisations and innovations. We share some blueprints, we negotiate some, and we reject some. Broad and intensive contacts between individuals with different cultural software in their heads (and, consequently, different attitudes, habits, expectations, and patterns of action) can lead to co-operation, i.e. to successful planning and undertaking of actions together, but they can also impede co-operation and lead to its breakdown. Millions of successfully completed interactions inside and between complex societies demonstrate daily an overall ‘compatibility’ of our cultural softwares and an equally ubiquitous ‘flexibility’ in adjusting it to our changing needs. By enabling us to plan, predict and co-ordinate these frequent, complex and interdependent activities and interactions, our cultural software demonstrates its flexibility and our creativity in making use of it. The individuals co-operating rarely have the time and opportunity to analyse cross-cultural differences in depth. More often than not they use stereotypes to quickly label strangers, predict their expectations, prevent or limit conflicts, and bridge potentially damaging differences. Culture then functions as an inventory of simplified social labels (‘logos’), which we pin on individuals
and groups – the ones we recognize as somehow ‘different’, as ‘the Others’:
To understand what stereotypes are it is useful to consider three principles which guide work on the social psychology of stereotyping . . .: (a) stereotypes are aids to explanation, (b) stereotypes are energy-saving devices, and (c) stereotypes are shared group beliefs. The first of these implies that stereotypes should form so as to help the perceiver to make sense of a situation, the second implies that stereotypes should form to reduce effort on the part of the perceiver, and the third implies that stereotypes should be formed in line with the accepted views or norms of social groups that the perceiver belongs to.
