Culture is a powerful force. It can keep an individual from eating a certain food even though that food is edible, prevent him or her from getting married for fear of intermarriage, or cause him or her to disembowel or shoot himself to wipe out a stain of dishonor. Culture influences the beliefs, values, and goals of individuals, and it is the way in which people define themselves and connect to one another in society.
The word “culture” means “the way of life of a people,” as the English poet Matthew Arnold suggested in the early 19th century, and it has been used to describe a variety of human phenomena including behavior, values, beliefs, attitudes, manners, and traditions. Some scholars have characterized cultures as organized systems of shared and contested ideas, beliefs, and values, while others have viewed them as ways in which power is exercised and maintained.
Many studies have shown that culture matters and has been a major factor in human behavior and development, particularly in the areas of health and well-being, social interaction, education, and communication. But the concept of culture is a challenging one to define. It is a complex whole that encompasses an inexhaustible number of human aspects—behaviors, customs, values, norms, mores, beliefs, rules, language, institutions, art, tools, technologies, products, and architecture. It also is constantly changing, with new behaviors, beliefs, and practices replacing older ones.
As a result, it is important to have various ways to conceptualize culture and the different processes by which it shows up in human behavior and development. The papers in this spotlight series take the challenge and complexity of defining culture a step further by exploring different aspects of how it shows up in behavior and development.
All six articles in this spotlight series address the challenge of defining culture by taking different approaches to understanding how and why it matters to human behavior and development. They provide a valuable contribution to our collective knowledge by moving our research and investigations of culture in new and substantive directions.
In her article on cultural pathways of action and development, Marie Suizzo takes advantage of the agricultural etymology of the word culture to propose that we think of it as a process of “culturing.” She uses research on Parisian mothers’ childrearing goals and low-income Mexican American and African American parents’ conversations about their children’s school achievement to illustrate how this sense of cultivation (by carving, categorizing, communicating about) cultural pathways informs human behavior and development.