Page 61 - Cultures and Organizations

46 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

they are technically unable to perform these jobs, but because women do
not carry the symbols, do not correspond to the hero images, do not par-
ticipate in the rituals, or are not supposed to foster the values dominant
in the men’s culture, and vice versa. Feelings and fears about behaviors by
the opposite sex can be of the same order of intensity as reactions of people
exposed to foreign cultures. The subject of gender cultures will return in
Chapter 5.
Generation differences in symbols, heroes, rituals, and values are
evident to most people. They are often overestimated. Complaints about
youths’ having lost respect for the values of their elders have been found
on Egyptian papyrus scrolls dating from 2000 b.c. and in the writings of
Hesiod, a Greek author from the end of the eighth century b.c. Many dif-
ferences in practices and values between generations are normal attributes
of age that repeat themselves for each successive pair of generations. His-
torical events, however, do affect some generations in a special way. The
Chinese who were of student age during the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution
stand witness to this. Chinese young people who in this period would nor-
mally have become students were sent to the countryside as laborers and
missed their education. The Chinese speak of “the lost generation.” The
development of technology may also lead to a difference between genera-
tions. An example is the spread of television, which showed people life in
other parts of the world previously outside their perspective.
Social classes carry different class cultures. Social class is associated
with educational opportunities and with a person’s occupation or profes-
sion. Education and occupation are in themselves powerful sources of cul-
tural learning. There is no standard definition of social class that applies

across all countries, and people in different countries distinguish different
types and numbers of classes. The criteria for allocating a person to a

class are often cultural: symbols play an important role, such as manners,
accents in speaking the national language, and the use and nonuse of cer-
tain words. The confrontation between the two jurors in Twelve Angry Men
(Chapter 1) clearly contains a class component.
Gender, generation, and class cultures can only partly be classifi ed
by the dimensions found for national cultures. This is because they are
categories of people within social systems, not integrated social systems
such as countries or ethnic groups. Gender, generation, and class cultures
should be described in their own terms, based on special studies of such
cultures.