Practical Coach: Management Skills for Everyday Life, The

Part I: What Is Culture?

We didn't all come over on the same ship, but we're all in the same boat.

—Bernard Baruch, American financier and statesman

Most of us tend to see culture through the lens of demographic categorizations such as nationality, race, gender, and so on. In addition, many of us tend to view demographic categories such as race and gender as having been created by nature, clearly bounded, stable over time, and objectively observable. However, most categories used by societies to classify people are in large part created by human beings rather than Mother Nature. Lawrence A. Hirschfield, professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Michigan, explains that our use of demographic categories helps us make sense of ...