Hey, there! ¡Hola! Bonjour! Guten tag! Buon giorno! Bom dia!
Dzien Dobry! Nĭ hăo! Vanakam! Shalom! Salām!
This is me, Ekaterina Matveeva internationally, or Kate in English, Katerina en español.
Pero en cada idioma tengo mi nombre. And I'm linguist, entrepreneur, founder of Amolingua.
At Amolingua we develop educational and cultural programmes whereas language training, soft skills training
for people, business people, entrepreneurs who would like to make their project global.
And we’ve teamed up with Platzi to create a course to introduce you to cultural intelligence.
But actually what is culture? Oh, well! Culture has so many definitions and we still
don't know which one is the best for us. Well, when you think about culture you may think
of costumes, beliefs. Well, so decisions that shared by a group of people.
Also, I think about a system of knowledge, a system of beliefs. Also, shared the land
by a specific group of people. Also, culture is communication and communication is culture.
And indeed, every person's self identity depends on culture.
The people looking at the diversity of culture thing.
Okay, this is mine. I belong to it. This is how our system of worldviews is formed.
So what is culture for you? And maybe you have a few cultures?
Maybe you have a few languages especially if you work and intercultural teams or the cultural project.
How do you find the sense of belonging? And how do you defined culture for yourself?
How do you communicate? Do you believe that culture defines a group of people, their behavior?
Or do you believe that it's something different? Well, in fact, we can say that culture is about
change and diversity. Why so? Because culture, indeed, can help you to change, to adapt,
because it's connected to your needs. Let's say you are like you are looking for food and you know that
the source of food, fish, is in one place in the river. And what happens if this river dries up?
You need to look for a different source of food.
So you change your customs instead of going weekly or monthly to that particular river, you start going to a lake.
So, there is exchange. And there's also diversity because there are so many groups of people,
the social groups that form their beliefs, their customs. But also culture can be learned.
So it means it can be taught. All those systems of beliefs
superstitions, customs can be taught from generation to generation. That what we can see in tribes,
for example. Then, it also can be shared as we discussed.
We've got on social groups that share the same knowledge.
Also, it can be patterned in a way that there is pattern of, well, costumes, rituals,
a ritual it's something that appears over and over again, and actions and behavior.
There are certain patterns then it can be adaptive as an example with the river and the lake.
And it can be symbolic. It means that culture is full of symbols, kind of socio cultural connotation it's called.
Where one thing can mean something really deep, we need to remember about it.
Also from various theories about culture, there is so-called cultural determinism,
meaning, well, but... whatever people learn, they are. There is like you are what you eat and he's like
you are what you learn, meaning that all this knowledge, all these beliefs, that are learned by people determine
their behavior. But there is also another theory, cultural relativism, that suggest
that actually all the people are different and all social groups are different,
meaning that there are so many cultures and there are so many systems of beliefs that all these people
will behave in different way, will think differently and will feel differently.
And it's quite difficult to reach this gap between cultures. Who is right, who is wrong?
I believe both are right. Maybe not like 100%, but definitely we have bows, yeah,
from both sides. So when we learn what culture is and we understand that there are so many different
ways how to define it, we need to get an idea of what is cultural intelligence.
And that's our second lesson.