Culture: Concepts and definitions. Week 2.

  What a culture Does rather that what a culture Is seems to be correct because culture is truly "a dynamic process of meaning-making" as Brian Street asserts (Kumaravadivelu, p.10). Each of us represents a certain culture as each of us has values, religious beliefs, customs, and norms which constitute the practice of our everyday life. For example, I follow my Buryat traditions I was brought up on: drink tea with milk, read Buddhist mantras which are believed to improve one's karma, cook homemade soups as this is what they cook a lot in Russia, do not whistle in the house as it means that one is whistling his or her money away, and so on. The point is that all these values constitute my personality and shape my view on the world. Pierre Bourdieu (Kumaravadivelu, p.14) calls it as "acquired habitus".
Nevertheless, I am not monocultural, but instead, I am a representative of several cultures (in my case, Russian, Buryat, and Western) as any of us is a representative of the contact of various cultural communities.
Sociologists' division of the world into two camps on the individualism and collectivism dimentions as important aspects of cultural behavior couldn't leave me indiffirent. I agree that such a phenomenon exists as a coninuum not a dichotomy. Without denying that collectivism still plays a role in Russian cultural behavior, it would be incorrect to ascribe this feature to any Russian individual. Rather, cultural change which is an ongoing process in the life of individuals, communities, and nations, causes these two dimentions overlap.
Moreover, today each culture is a hybrid culture as the result of the cultural globalization. What used to be considered as a local or national matter is now percieved as international or global. Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian educator, suggested that the world is a global village where "cultures reposition themselves between visual and acoustic space." Ethnic reductionism which takes place not only in political rhetoric, media, and academic literature, but also happens in every day life, and confines ethnic minorities to dismissive referential images, is only a sign of narrow-mindedness and simply a pursuit for domination.

In TESOL, the concept of culture still has not recieved the proper attention. I agree that individual-cultural is inseparable because we as individuals start with our genetic phenotypes and sociocognitive materials we possess. Further on, it is important to see the individual in the cultural as we constantly bring in new ways of looking at the world and thus, we ,by our individuality, change the world in a constant manner. Thus, the concept of culture, needs reconceptualization and redifinition as this trunscultuarl world forces us to face this challenge.