Socio-Cultural Elements
Many aspects of culture also determine the communicative behavior. These socio-cultural elements are scattered and include many human social activities. Some of the reasons why people experience difficulties when communicating with people from other cultures are seen in the definition of culture: Culture is a complicated set of values that are polarized by an image that contains views on its own privileges. "The forceful image" takes on different forms in various cultures such as "crude individualism" in America, "harmony of the individual with nature" in Japan and "collective obedience" in China. These coercive cultural images equip their members with guidelines on appropriate behavior and establish a world of logical meanings and values that the most modest members can borrow to gain dignity and connection with their lives. Thus, culture provides a framework which is coherent to organize one's activities and enable them to predict the behavior of others.
Culture is very closely related to the community. Melville J. Herskovits and Bronislaw Malinowski argued that everything that exists in society is determined by the culture owned by the community itself. The term for that opinion is Cultural-Determinism.
According to experts
Herskovits views culture as something that is passed down from one generation to another, which is then referred to as superorganic. According to Andreas Eppink, culture contains the whole notion of social values, social norms, science and the whole of social, religious structures, etc., in addition to all the intellectual and artistic statements that characterize a society.
According to Edward Burnett Tylor, culture is a complex whole, which contains knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, customs, and other abilities that a person can obtain as a member of society.
A.l. Kroeber and C.Kluekhohn Regarding the notion of culture, many definitions or limitations to the understanding of culture conveyed by experts / scholars. Like two American anthropology scholars have succeeded in gathering and analyzing 160 definitions of culture originating from various scholars and writers.
E. B. Taylor in his book primitive culture argues that, culture is a complex whole, which contains knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, customs, and other abilities that can be obtained from a person as a member of society.
Ralph Linton in his book the cultural background of petsonality, argues the definition of culture that, a culture is a configuration of the behaviors that are studied and the results of the behavior in which the determining elements are shared and continued by certain members of the community.
M. Jacobs and B.J.Stern in his book General Anthropology writes that culture encompasses the whole which includes forms of social technology, ideology, religion, and art as well as objects (culture) which all constitute social heritage.
Prof., Takdir Alisyahbana, said that culture is a manifestation of the way of thinking. For destiny understanding of culture is very broad, because all behavior and deeds can be returned to the results of the way of thinking. Feelings for destiny come to mind too.
Selo Soemardjan and Soelaiman Soemardi provided a cultural definition as a means of the people's work, taste and creative works.
According to Koentjaraningrat, culture is the whole system of ideas, actions and results of human work in the context of people's lives which are made to belong to human beings by learning.