The society in which we live constantly uses the concept of "culture." Modern life is practically inseparable from this concept. However, it is quite difficult for an average person to give him an exact definition. One immediately thinks of the expression "horticultural culture," others associate it with theater and music, while others speak of a "culture of speech." Let's look at what culture is and what functions it performs in society.
The term and its definition
The term "culture" itself comes from the Latin colere and originated about 2000 years ago. At first, this word denoted tillage and all kinds of agricultural work. The echoes of the past still sound the concepts of "agricultural culture", "horticultural culture", "agricultural crop" and others.
In the first century BC, Cicero first used this term in relation to a person, designating them the upbringing, education and values of a citizen and an individual. Since then, this culturological concept began to develop in a new direction.
Since upbringing and education are inconceivable without isolating the human world from the environment, very soon culture began to mean this circle of special values and activities that turn just a person into a rational person, and eventually become a privileged person - having access to knowledge, books, theater or science.
Over time, the term acquired new meanings. With the development of science, the word "culture" began to refer to various temporary milestones - "the culture of ancient Rome." Used it to highlight certain social groups - "hippie culture" or spheres of life - "urban culture".
In everyday life, this culturological term began to denote a hypothetically ideal moral character of a person as a synonym for "upbringing."
To date, there are about 1000 definitions of the concept of "culture", to a greater or lesser extent overlapping.
Culture functions
Based on the foregoing, we can conclude that culture plays a crucial role in the life of each individual society and of humanity as a whole. It is a unique means of collecting, storing and transmitting all human experience to future generations.
The cognitive, adaptive, educational, normative, entertaining, symbolic and communicative function of culture is studied by cultural studies. All these functions flow from each other or serve as the basis for one another.
One thing is undeniable: culture is the basis, the foundation of mankind, and accumulates in itself all the experience and knowledge ever gained into a system that regulates the life of society at all its levels.
Any individual exists in a certain cultural space. Man is inseparable from culture and throughout life they interact, changing and complementing each other.
Initially, the child’s attitudes, values, views and interests are formed under the influence of the environment in which he is placed and in which he is forced to function. A person grows, and over time, already on the basis of the formed ideas, he, in turn, already changes and forms the environment in which new future individuals grow.
The implementation of this interaction is impossible without the communicative function of culture.
Communication as the only productive type of interaction
The emergence and existence of any society is impossible without communication. A dictionary of cultural concepts defines communication as a process of interaction, the main purpose of which is the transfer of information.
Within the framework of one article it is impossible to cover the entirety, types and characteristics of all types of communications possible in society. Therefore, we dwell in more detail on some of them.
By the method of transmitting information, communication can be divided into verbal and non-verbal. The culture-man system uses both types of communication to implement one of its most important functions - the first includes all types of languages ever created by a person, the second includes gestures, facial expressions, body movements, voice timbre and other paraverbal means.
The communicative function of culture implies interpersonal interaction of people. It so happened that a person is strong precisely in society - alone he is not able to cope with any difficult problem.
In most cases, without communication, a person falls out of society, does not feel like a full-fledged individual, and prolonged isolation, as a rule, leads to moral degradation. Only through communication do people become members of society, and then, in turn, communicating and interacting, they create and develop this very society. Thus, the communicative function of culture is realized.
The Story of the Tower of Babel
As we have already found out, the communicative function of culture is that it ensures the communication of people in the process of any activity. First of all, the need for such interaction arises during joint work.
A very clear example of the communicative function of culture is the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
After the flood, the sons of Noah and their wives gave birth to many children, and then grandchildren. There were many people, and they all spoke the same language. And then they decided to erect a huge tower up to the height of God and thereby "make a name for themselves rather than scatter all over the earth."
People enthusiastically set to work - some of them made bricks, others knead clay, and others carried materials to the foot of the tower. The construction grew before our eyes. God did not like their ambition and plans, and therefore he came down from heaven and mixed the languages of all people.
The next morning they woke up and could not understand each other - brothers and sisters, parents and children spoke different languages. Construction slowed down significantly, and then completely stopped. People scattered throughout the earth and founded their cities and countries.
If we discard the religious and moral component of the biblical parable, this story is very valuable from a cultural point of view. It clearly shows that the communicative function of culture provides effective interaction between people, without which it is impossible to achieve shared goals.
Communication process
We have already found that the communicative function of culture is to ensure unhindered communication between individual individuals, as well as between society and the individual.
For communication, people use all kinds of languages. This includes not only natural, historically formed dialects, but also all kinds of artificial languages - codes, mathematical and physical formulas, signs and symbols.
All artificial languages can be divided into two large groups. The first includes those created to replace the natural language, and the most striking example is Esperanto, composed of words of Latin and Greek origin. This also includes Morse code and all kinds of gesture systems.
The second group includes languages created for solving various problems. This primarily includes the language of mathematics and physics, the computer language of coding and various algorithms.
The communication process can be divided into three parts:
- information coding;
- information transfer;
- decoding the message.
At all three stages, loss or distortion of information is possible. Why is this happening? It is quite obvious that the communicative function of culture is implemented unevenly across the globe.
Different natural conditions, historical background, cultural processes form completely different human societies. In each of them, a completely individual language develops, which is practically impossible to translate into other languages without losing any part of the information.
This is facilitated by the presence of so-called language gaps - the absence of a concept in the lexical system of one language to denote any phenomenon or subject.
This is quite easy to illustrate with the Russian word "hand", for which there is no suitable definition in English, where the hand itself is divided into two components - hand (hand from wrist to elbow) and arm (hand from elbow and above).
It would seem that such a simple word can hardly create significant problems in communication, but learners of a foreign language can easily prove the opposite to you. How do you hold a baby? On hands. Use hand or arm for this?
And if difficulties arise in such simple cases, then what about more complex gaps when not only the word, but the whole phenomenon or concept is absent in the recipient language or the source language?
Such language dilemmas cause great damage to the communicative function of culture, but at the same time give rise to interesting phenomena such as code switching. We will talk about this later.
Code Switching in Language Culture
What is code switching? This is a concept that appeared at the intersection of linguistics and cultural studies. It has become widespread among immigrants. This is a spontaneous switch from one language to another and vice versa.
There is internal (insertion in one word) and external (insertion of a phrase or sentence) switching. Almost always, a similar phenomenon occurs at the place of the language gap.
Consider the effect of switching codes on the example of Russian Germans. In German, there is a sufficiently capacious word Termin, meaning a certain appointed time, meeting. This is an appointment with a doctor or hairdresser, and a scheduled meeting with friends. Most definitely, the Russian language does not have the exact equivalent of this word, so most immigrants after a few months of life in Germany stop looking for a Russian word suitable for each particular case, replacing it with German.
Communicative culture: concept, features, structure, functions
The effect of switching codes is inextricably linked to the communicative culture of the speaker. What does this phenomenon mean? Consider the concept, features, structure and functions of a communicative culture in more detail.
Communicative culture is a combination of personal knowledge and skills that provide friendly communication with other individuals. Its structure is made up of basic communication skills - general literacy, the availability of speech for the interlocutor, the adequacy of the use of words and expressions, the appropriateness of the chosen tone of the conversation, control over the psycho-emotional state.
Communicative culture is a connecting link, a component of all types of cultures. Without it, effective interaction is simply impossible. A child begins to comprehend a communicative culture literally from birth - with songs and nurseries, with the first poems and songs, copying and tracing the tone, phrases and reactions of people close to him.
A person in the "communicative culture - individual" system is both a recipient and a donor. The formation of a communicative personality culture involves:
- the development of a number of psychological and mental properties;
- mastery of the means of communication;
- the formation of social attitudes;
- development of communication skills.
Thus, we can conclude that the formation of human thinking and the search for the most effective ways of interacting with other people belong to the main function of a communicative culture. The development of effective communication skills will allow you to feel confident in any company and in any conditions, as well as learn how to influence the development of the situation in your own interests.
The role of communicative function in artistic culture
The main task of art, like language, is the preservation and transmission to subsequent generations of certain knowledge, skills and all kinds of information. Regardless of whether the artist, actor, musician or other cultural figure plans to transfer certain information to other people or considers it only as a way of self-expression, art bears the imprint of the personality of the creator and the spirit of the times, and therefore is essentially a means communications.
What is the communicative function of culture and art? The whole point of the existence of the latter is to accumulate and pass on to other people spiritual experience. So, art in itself is a peculiar means of communication not only between individuals, but also between different generations.
Being, however, a rather peculiar means of communication, art has its own specific features:
- Erasing borders. The communicative possibilities of any language are limited by the society of people who understand it. Art blurs the boundaries between people, being a universal and accessible to all means of communication.
- The specificity of the task. If the goal of any verbal communication is to transmit the most reliable information possible, then the task of art is to fill people with their ideological content and educate them spiritually.
- Uniqueness. If information encoded in one language can still be encoded into another, then a work of art is unique in nature - its value lies not only in content, but also in form. So, the magic of dance cannot be conveyed through painting, and the depth of painting cannot be expressed in any way through theatrical productions.
Sport and communication: points of interaction
Sport plays a major role in society. Without it, the formation of a healthy society is impossible. And here we are talking not only about the physical, but also about the spiritual health of the nation.
How does sport affect spirituality, and what does it have to do with the communication process?
Physical culture is a social phenomenon that is closely related to all aspects of the life of a modern person - politics, economics, education and others.
Sport can change and shape a person’s body, at the same time changing his self-esteem, mood, idea of his own abilities. These changes cannot but affect other spheres of objective human activity.
The communicative function of physical culture consists in the formation of business and personal contacts of people, their communication and rapprochement through joint sports activities. In addition, physical education is one of the most important areas of international communication, a striking example of which can serve as the Olympic Games.
The intersection points of cultural functions
Culture performs many different functions in the life of society that are studied by cultural studies. Like most sciences, cultural science does not stand aside, but is in close interaction with other areas of humanitarian knowledge. In addition to cultural studies, for example, linguistics studies the symbolic and communicative function of culture.
To comprehend any cultural heritage, a person needs to master a certain sign system. Language as a means of interpersonal interaction is an object of study of linguistics.
Linguistic scholars study the language from the point of view of its nature, functions, historical development, internal structure. In turn, cultural scientists, based on the studies of linguists, build their theories about the influence of language on the development of culture and society.
Accumulation and augmentation of information as a starting point of the function of culture
As we have already explained above, one of the most important functions of culture is the accumulation and transfer of experience, knowledge and information to future generations. Without knowing one’s past, without recognizing mistakes and adequately assessing them, it is impossible to form a fully-fledged personality that is able to adequately predict the future.
To convey this experience, iconic systems were invented - languages, codes, art. People used all the means available to them to preserve knowledge of the past for children. Thus, the information-communicative function of culture is realized.
Until the last moment, the natural individual and collective memory of the people, speech, and material means — books, photographs, albums, were used as a means of storing this data. Currently, an increasing part of the collective culture is stored on electronic media.