Words like these are shared by people all over the world and allow them to communicate with one another. Communication among people of different cultures is also easier if they share a mother tongue. As you can see in the simplified map of world languages in Figure 3.2, African cultures use a variety of official and national languages. People in countries where French is the official language, such as Burkina Faso and Niger, can transact their business more easily with one another than they can with nations where Arabic or Portuguese is the primary language, such as Mauritania and Cape Verde.
Figure 3.2 Distribution of Major Languages
Source: Data from Languages of the World, One World, Nations Online Project.
Communication between cultures is never as easy or as clear as is communication within a given culture. For example, in the 2017 movie The Big Sick, Pakistan-born comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his American girlfriend experience numerous clashes over their culture differences. After she becomes seriously ill, Kumail faces cultural entanglements not only with her parents but also with his own parents, who wish to find him a spouse that conforms to their cultural expectations.
In a world dominated by consumption, communication between cultures also takes place through the viewing of common brands. However, brand names well known in some cultures may not translate well in other cultures. As a result, brands are often renamed to better reflect the cultures in which they are being sold. The following list shows the names of some well-known brands in the United States and elsewhere and the way in which they are translated into Chinese.
While such name changes are common, some Chinese brand names are simply phonetic translations of the brands’ names into Chinese. For example, Cadillac is translated “Ka di la ke.” Although this name means nothing to the Chinese, the fact that it is foreign gives it an aura of status and respectability. However, if Microsoft had used a phonetic Chinese translation of the name of its search engine Bing, it would have been in big trouble. In Chinese, the word bing translates into “disease” or “virus.” To avoid being seen as disease-ridden or a carrier of a virus, Microsoft changed the search engine’s Chinese name to Bi ying. This has the far more appealing meaning of “responding without fail” (Wines 2011).
Ask Yourself
Have you ever been in a situation, such as a trip abroad, in which understanding and communicating were difficult for you because you were unfamiliar with the language and symbols around you? How did you cope? Have you ever helped someone else who was in a similar situation? What did you do?
Cultural Differences
As you have seen so far, we can think in terms of the culture of a society as a whole (for example, American culture), and later in this chapter we will even conceive of the possibility of a global culture. But you have also seen that there is great diversity within cultures, from gang culture to internet culture and too many other variants of culture for us to enumerate. Studying and understanding culture becomes easier, however, with the aid of a few key ideas: ideal and real culture, ideology, subculture and counterculture, culture war, and multiculturalism.
Ideal and Real Culture
There is often a large gap, if not a chasm, between ideal culture, or what the norms and values of society lead us to think people should believe and do, and real culture, or what people actually think and do in their everyday lives. For example, as we have seen, a major American value is democracy. However, barely a majority of Americans bother to vote in presidential elections—only 60 percent of eligible voters voted in the 2016 election, about 1 percent above the figure four years earlier (United States Elections Project 2016; see Chapter 12). A far smaller percentage of those who are eligible vote in state and local elections. Worse, very few Americans are active in politics in other ways, such as canvassing on behalf of a political party or working to get people out to vote.
In another example, the cultural ideal that mothers should be completely devoted to their children (Hays 1998) often comes into conflict with lived reality for many women who work outside the home and must balance their time between job and family. This contradiction is apparent in the incidence of breastfeeding, which at least for some women is once again a norm of motherhood (Avishai 2007; Stearns 2009). Breastfeeding is difficult or impossible for many mothers because it is labor- and time-intensive, and given work and all the other constraints women face in their lives, it is difficult for them to find the time and energy to do it. Despite its health benefits for baby and mother, under such circumstances breastfeeding can have adverse social and economic consequences for women. One study demonstrated that women who breastfed for more than six months suffered greater economic losses than those who did so for less time or not at all (Rippeyoug and Noonan 2012). Though some women who do not breastfeed can feel that they have failed to live up to cultural standards of being a “good mom,” others have developed resistance strategies to maintain a positive maternal identity, such as recognizing that the use of formula is not always an individual choice (Holcomb 2017).
Ideology
An ideology is a set of shared beliefs that explains the social world and guides people’s actions. There are many ideologies in any society, and some of them become dominant. For example, in the United States, meritocracy is a dominant ideology involving the widely shared belief that all people have an equal chance of succeeding economically based on their hard work and skills. Many people act on the basis of that belief and, among other things, seek the education and training they think they need to succeed.
However, even with dedication and adequate education and training, not everyone succeeds. Among many other things, some people are luckier than others (Frank 2016). Even though they don’t deserve it, some people succeed because of a lucky break; others who deserve to succeed don’t because they are unlucky. This reflects the key fact that not all ideologies are true. For one thing, they may come from, and be true for, some groups of people (such as those in the upper classes) and not for others (those in the lower classes; Mannheim [1931] 1936). For another, they may be outright distortions used by one group to hide reality from another group (Marx [1857–1858] 1964). In this sense, it could be argued that meritocracy is an ideology created by the upper classes to hide the fact that those in the lower classes have little or no chance of succeeding. This fact is hidden from them to prevent them from becoming dissatisfied and rebellious. If the lower classes accept the ideology of meritocracy, they may be more likely to blame themselves for failing rather than the upper classes or the American economic system as a whole.
Subcultures
Within any culture there are subcultures, or groups of people who accept much of the dominant culture but are set apart from it by one or more culturally significant characteristics. In the United States, major subcultures include the LGBTQ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people), Hispanics, Hasidic Jews, hip-hop fans, and youth. Muslims are becoming an increasingly important subculture in the United States (especially in cities such as Detroit). They already constitute a major subculture in many European countries, most notably France and Great Britain.