By Ikram Abdelhamdi Benzouine
By Ikram Abdelhamdi Benzouine
Morocco World News
Casablanca, December 13, 2012
Human and social scientists acknowledge that culture is a highly complex phenomenon. For this reason, numerous are the ways in which it has been depicted and defined. By and large, culture is regarded as learned and communal values, beliefs, and customs. Added to this all-encompassing anthropological view, Irving (1984) said that culture is “the shared and learned information people use to generate meaning and order within a social system” (p.138). Differently put, culture can be a vital go-between for people to make meaning within their societal milieu.
By the same token, Hofstede (1991) claimed that, in a broader sense, culture is “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (p.5). From his standpoint, in the vein of Irving’s view, culture is not hereditary, but learned; it does not stem from one’s genes, but from one’s social surroundings. Norton (1995), however, maintained that “culture is not just a body of knowledge; it compromises implicit assumptions, dynamic processes, and negotiated relationships” (p.415). The focus of anthropologists on “shared meanings” may make culture sound too ‘cognitive’ or conceptual.
Indeed, most of the above-stated definitions imply that culture, apart from being perceived as related to artifacts of a given community, involves, and is mainly comprised of, socially acquired knowledge. This knowledge, though conceptual, is organized in culture-specific ways which frame and determine people’s perception of reality. Hence, in any culture, there is a great diversity of meanings about any topic, and more than one way of interpreting or representing it. In this respect, it can be deduced that representation is the production of meaning through language. In an attempt to define the term ‘representation’, Stuart Hall (1997) maintains:
[…] The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary suggests two relevant meanings for the word: 1/ to represent something is to describe or depict it, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal or imagination; to place a likeness of it before us in our mind or in the senses; as, for examples, in the sentence, ‘This picture represents the murder of Abel by Cain’; 2/ to represent also means to symbolize, stand for, to be specimen of, or to substitute for; as in the sentence, ‘In Christianity, the cross represents the suffering and crucifixion of Christ. (p.16)
Drawing upon Hall’s definition of the word ‘to represent’, people belonging to the same culture must share, to a great extent, similar symbolic and mental systems of representation. In this context, it can be argued that cultural representation is also double-grounded and difficult to define.
