Cultural Values: Definition, Examples & Importance
Think about your favorite family or religious celebration. Chances are that your traditions are directly connected to the cultural values that your community has been passing down for generations.
What Are Cultural Values?
A hungry Hindu man will let himself starve rather than slaughter and eat a cow, despite the fact that there are old cows roaming all over his village, blocking the streets for cars to pass. To the average adult American man, who eats over 50 pounds of beef each year, this seems illogical. If you have been hungry for months, then you should eat the cow! There are old cows roaming all over India, no one else owns the cows, and you know how to slaughter a cow! What’s stopping the Hindu man from killing the cow?
Sacred Cows Blocking Traffic
Sacred Cow in India
The answer to that question is simple, if you understand his cultural values. The Hindus, who make up over 80% of India’s population, believe that cows are sacred and should not be slaughtered. From the outside, a group’s cultural values are often difficult to understand. For members inside the group, cultural values are the core principles and ideals upon which the entire community exists.
Values, Customs, and Culture
While the terms ‘culture,’ ‘values,’ and ‘customs’ are often used interchangeably, each is actually a distinct piece of the bigger picture. A custom is a ritual or other tradition that is an outward sign of the group’s cultural values. The group’s values aren’t always obvious right away – they run deep! Cultural values can be pieced together by observing the various customs that the people have passed down for generations. Culture is defined as all of a group’s guiding values and outward signs and symbols taken together as one big whole.
In our example, the cultural value that the Hindu man believes is to respect your ancestors and your gods. One of the customs that acts as an outward sign of this value is to allow cows to have a natural death, rather than slaughtering them. This custom, taken with all of the other customs that his community practices, represents a larger picture of Hindu culture.
Do Cultural Values Change?
Culture adapts and evolves along with the group members’ needs, wants, and opportunities. Change can be the result of the group moving to a new geographic location or simply be due to the passage of time. Technological advances have commonly been the driving forces behind changes in daily practices, shifting the framework inside which humans operate.
Historically, many cultural values changed in response to the Agricultural Revolution, when human groups became sedentary farmers, and the Industrial Revolution, when we moved from the farm to the city.
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