Definition of Culture and Cultural Understanding

Culture is a way of life that developed and owned jointly by a group of people and passed down from generation to generation. Culture is made up of many complex elements, including religion and political systems, customs, languages, tools, clothing, buildings, and artwork. Language, as well as culture, an integral part of the human self so that many people tend to see them passed on genetically. When someone tries to communicate with people of different cultures and adjust differences, proving that culture is learned.

Culture is a holistic lifestyle. culture is complex, abstract, and broad. Many cultural aspects contribute to determine the communicative behaviors. The elements of this socio-cultural spread and cover a lot of human social activities.

Some reasons why people experience difficulties when communicating with people from other cultures is seen in the definition of culture : Culture is a complex device values in the polarizationout by an image that contains the views on its merits alone . "The image that forces" that take the forms different in different cultures such as "crude individualism" in America, "individual harmony with nature" d Japan and "collective compliance" in China. Cultural image that is forcing it to equip its members with guidelines on proper behavior and set a world of meaning and logical values that can be borrowed by its members the most humble to gain a sense of dignity and affinity with their lives.

Thus, culture was the one who provides a coherent framework for organizing one's activities and enable it to predict the behavior of others.

Culture is closely connected to the community. Melville J. Herskovits and Bronislaw Malinowski argued that everything contained in this society is determined by culture which is owned by the community itself. The term for it is the opinion of the Cultural-Determinism.

Herskovits view culture as something handed down from one generation to another, who then referred to as superorganic. According to Andreas Eppink, cultures containing whole notion of social values, social norms, knowledge and overall social structures, religious, etc., again all the extra intellectual and artistic statement that characterizes a society.

According to Edward Burnett Tylor, culture is a complex whole, which it contains knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws, customs, and other skills gained a person as a member of the community. According Selo Soemardjan and Soelaiman Soemardi, culture is the means of work, taste, and the copyright community.

From the various definitions, we can obtain an understanding of culture is something that will affect the level of knowledge and cover the system of ideas or the ideas contained in the human mind, so that in everyday life, the culture is abstract. While the embodiment of culture are the objects created by humans as being a civilized form of behavior and things that are tangible, such as behavioral patterns, language, equipment life, social organization, religion, art, etc., which all intended to help sustain the lives of human beings in society.