Transcultural Conflicts in Pearl S. Buck’s East Wind: West Wind

Abstract

Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define. Culture can be defined as the ways in which people relate themselves to their physical and social environment, and how they express these relationships. Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, belief, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religions, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

A culture is learned, not inherited. It derives from one’s social environment, not from one’s genes. Culture should be distinguished from human nature on one side, and from an individual’s personality on the other, although exactly where the borders lie among human nature, culture and personality, is a matter of discussion among social scientists.