The following quotes about the nature of culture were taken from the Peace Corps manual, Culture Matters. They are listed here for student reference.
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Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting. The essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values. Clyde Kluckhohn
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Culture consists of concepts, values, and assumptions about life that guide behavior and are widely shared by people....[These] are transmit- ted generation to generation, rarely with explicit instructions, by parents...and other respected elders. Richard Brislin & Tomoko Yoshida
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Culture is the outward expression of a unifying and consistent vision brought by a particular community to its confrontation with such core issues as the origins of the cosmos, the harsh unpredictability of the natural environment, the nature of society, and humankind’s place in the order of things. Edward Hall
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Mystery is delightful and exciting, but it is foolish to admire it too highly. A thing is mysterious merely because it is unknown. There will always be mysteries because there will always be unknown and unknowable things. But it is best to know what is knowable. Aldous Huxley, Along the Road
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What I say is this, and this I do not say to all Englishmen. God made us different, you and I, and your fathers and my fathers. For one thing, we have not the same notions of honesty and speaking the truth. That is not our fault, because we are made so. And look now what you do? You come and judge us by your own standards of morality. You are, of course, too hard on us. And again I tell you you are great fools in this matter. Who are we to have your morals, or you to have ours? Rudyard Kipling, East and West
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Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group from another. Geert Hofstede
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Culture is the shared set of assumptions, values, and beliefs of a group of people by which they organize their common life. Gary Wederspahn
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I believe that participant observation is more than a research methodology. It is a way of being, especially suited to a world of change. Mary Catherine Bateson
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To have your eyes widened and your organ of belief stretched, whilst remaining discreetly submissive, seems to me a faculty the [traveler] ought to cultivate. When you have submitted to looking about you discreetly and to observing with as little prejudice as possible, then you are in a proper state of mind to walk about and learn from what you see. Philip Glazebrook, Journey to Kars
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I’m not English. I’m American. We see all things as possible. Norman Mailer, The Times of London
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The people who are not pleased with America must be those whose sympathies are fossilized or whose eyes have no power of observation. Such delightful and entertaining schemes for hoodwinking nature you never saw, such ingenuities for beating the terrible forces of the seasons, such daring inventions. Edmond Gosse, The Life and Letters of Sir Edmond Gosse, 1884
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All kinds of tourists are fair game for [con artists] but Americans seem their favorite targets, not just because of their careless ways with money and instinctive generosity, but also their non-European innocence about the viler dimensions of human nature... Paul Fussell, Abroad
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I was so surprised and confused when, on leaving Whittier Hall, the provost, in person, held the door for me in order to let me pass. I was so confused that I could not find the words to express my gratefulness, and I almost fell on my knees as I would certainly do back home. A man who is by far my superior is holding the door for me, a mere student and a nobody. A visitor from Indonesia in John Fieg & John Blair, There Is A Difference
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For me, there was only one place to go if I couldn’t live in my own country: America. It is a country of immigrants. There is such tolerance for the foreign and unfamiliar. America continues to amaze me. Milosc Forman
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You have to be very subservient to people: “Ma’am, can I take your bag?” “Can I do this?” Being subservient to people made me very resentful. Supermarket box boy in Working by Studs Terkel
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Bold Talent shook his head. How like children the Americans were, with their pranks and easy warmth. Men who offered their hands for strangers to shake, ladies who sat and chatted at dinner with gentlemen they had never seen before, children who threw snowballs at adults no matter what their station. He would miss them. Bette Bao Lord, Spring Moon
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Americans ignore history....The national myth is that of creativity and progress....They believe in the future as if it were a religion; they believe that there is nothing they cannot accom- plish, that solutions wait somewhere for all problems, like brides. Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake
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But the firemen; you actually see them produce. I used to work in a bank. You know, it’s just paper. It’s not real. Nine to five and it’s s___. You’re lookin’ at numbers. But now I can look back and say, “I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody.” It shows something I did on this earth. Tom Patrick, fireman, in Studs Terkel, Working
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The happy ending is our national belief. Mary McCarthy
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In England, if something goes wrong—say, if one finds a skunk in the garden, he writes to the family lawyer who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America you telephone the fire department. Each response satisfies a characteristic need: In the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America what you like is something vivid and swift. A.N Whitehead
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Every country has its own way of saying things. The important thing is that which lies behind people’s words. Freya Stark, The Journey’s Echo
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The immature rice stalk stands erect, while the mature stalk, heavy with grain, bends over. Cambodian proverb
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Khoo Ah Au liked Americans. Above all he found their personal relationships easy to read. His own people were always very careful not to give themselves away, to expose crude feelings about one another. Americans seemed not to care how much was under- stood by strangers. It was almost as if they enjoyed being transparent. Eric Ambler, Passage of Arms
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The first month or two in class I was always saying, “Look me when I talk to you,” and the kids simply wouldn’t do it. They would always look at their hands, or the blackboard, or anywhere except looking me in the face. And finally one of the other teachers told me it was a cultural thing. They should warn us about things like that. Tony Hillerman, Skinwalker
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With the best leaders, when the work is done the task is accomplished, the people will say, we have done this ourselves. Lao Tsu, China, 700 B.C.
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To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded. Ralph Waldo Emerson
