Page 38 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURE OF THE MIND

available in any given language is unique and re flects a culture’s unique
perspective on people’s ways of feeling. It also reflects the links
between feelings, cognition, moral norms, and social interaction.
(Wierzbicka 1994: 134–5)

The universal culture of emotion in the work of Osgood’s and Ekman’s uni-
versalisms stands for one extreme on a continuum of nuclear culture, while
Wierzbicka’s ‘culture’s unique perspective’ stands for surface culture at the
opposite end, where each perception is unique, garbed as it is in the myriad of
circumstances and accidents of occurrence. 4
In my Cultural Trilogy, universalism goes into deep culture. Concrete unique-
ness is categorized in surface culture as perception. States of emotional expression
that fall between deep and surface culture belong to procedural culture – the
‘how’ of culture. In the province of procedures, surface and deep culture
combine in the individual and in the community by merging contexts and
goals into experiences.
Procedural culture mediates operations of the human mind and is comparable
to the operation system that drives a computer. Procedural culture combines
deep thoughts, values, and logic with surface percepts in the form of recipes
shared among members of a cultural group. In the process, deep culture pro-
vides the human engineering required by the system while surface culture
designs the architecture of feedback from experience for learning and pro-
ducing adaptations rooted in biology. As with the computer program, it is
important to note that procedural culture functions as an artifact for building
adaptations to situations according to the norms of the cultural community.
Procedural culture uses the thoughts, values, and logic of deep culture as tools
adapted to the architecture of surface culture. The constraints of the neuro-
physiology of perception guide human behavior along the paths our cultural
ancestors have blazed.

Conclusion
In the late twentieth century, dissatisfaction with the objectivist paradigm in
psychology and other social sciences was met by advances in understanding
the neurophysiology of the brain, a regeneration of Darwin’s theory of
natural selection, and communication-based theoretical approaches to culture
such as the language mediations of Vygotsky. In a new view of the mind,
human nature becomes a cognitive interpretation of innate circuitry in the
brain. The brain is a system of mental modules, and its modularity can be
analyzed more concretely as an assembly of artifacts used to attain practical
consequences. From this perspective culture is composed of tool-mediated
actions collaborating with symbolic resources.
In the view of evolutionary psychologists, the present architecture of the
brain was established in the prehistory of the species about 100,000 years ago.

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