Page 35 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDWARD C. STEWART

Elements of the Cultural Trilogy
Individuals acquire subjective culture through interactions with other human
beings and with their environments. In this process of development, what
makes (common) sense and becomes reality for each individual is selected and
internalized from physical and social experience. Consciousness is constructed
through repeated contact with others who have already acquired patterned
cognition and behavior from those experiences. Language, traditions, customs,
ethnicity, region, religion, and race all contribute to the construction of cul-
tural identity through social bonding in a process of enculturation. A synthesis
of the social and psychological processes of enculturation continually changes
and develops to create consciousness and the psychic content of the individual’s
personal culture. Although the locus of personal culture is the individual, the
nature and quality of individual cultural meanings are socially constructed
through communicative interaction.
I shall use a paradigm with three parts, called triads, to explain the develop-
ment and functioning of nuclear culture. The first triad provides a theory of
perception (the individual level), the second triad a theory of situations (the
social level), and the third triad a theory of emotions and identi fication (the
primordial level). (See Appendix 1.1.)
The first triad deals with internal psychological processes in the body and
brain centered on perception. The origin of all that we learn and all that we
know is found in the sensory processes of perceiving. Perception has been
compared to the Roman deity Janus, with two faces looking in opposite direc-
tions: one to the past, the other to the future. Janus served as the god of gates
and doors and received the prayers of Romans at the beginning and at the end
of courses of action, especially wars. The Janus-like duality in perception quali-
fies as the central process in psychology. One face looking outward is riveted to
sensory stimuli that impinge upon and enter the organs for vision, hearing,
smell, touch, and the other sensory modalities. The other face looks inward
where all information about the external world and even about the body
arrives in the brain through the gates of perception (see Triad I).
The second principle introduces the social side. For a cognitive form such as
‘the value of equality’ to qualify as culture, it must exist simultaneously as a
psychological value of the individual and a social value of the society. The
value becomes an element in a national culture, for instance, only when it is
incorporated into the social norms and institutions of the society and
concretely influences the patterns of daily life. The social side of culture is time-
factored, meaning that culture is a dynamic process, constantly evolving accord-
ing to the collective experiences of the cultural community. The cultural flow
is neither uniform nor homogeneous. It is composed of at least three currents
of human activities: interpersonal, economic-technical, and political-social.
Each ‘movement’ of the current is contextualized in specific places and is time-
factored in real time so that specific ‘moves’ – for example, making a decision –

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