Some Personal Observations From The Past Week

Hall asserts that culture is the extension of the human organism and that, while humans shape their cultural environment, they are also shaped by their culture. Yet, despite the fact that different cultural complexes construct/structure behavior and perception in different ways, they are all rooted in human biology and physiology.

So, what examples can I provide from my personal experiences this week that might illustrate what Hall is discussing?

There are some weeks when my social interaction is largely confined to going to the gym, church, a trip or two to the grocery store, casual shopping and maybe dinner out. This past week, I also went to a live music venue. For the most part, these are fairly well-scripted activities. By this I mean that there is a rather clearly established and adhered-to set of behaviors that characterize these activities. In fact, it's often quite easy to spot people who are unfamiliar with the script.

In going over my activities this past week, I am reminded that I've had very little actual face-to-face conversation with anyone other than my husband, aside from a few "Peace-be-with-you"s at church and the usual customer/server interactions. Still, it's clear that there has been a lot of communication going on.

I called these activities "scripted". There are implicit or explicit guidelines in place for many such activities. One would expect that in a house of worship but it is also obvious that there is some variation in practice. I'm Episcopalian and belong to a rather large church. We all use the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) for worship and so it's easy for people from other Episcopalian congregations to walk into any other Episcopalian church and participate. The explicit guidelines for the service are in the BCP. There are two communion rites and knowing if the service will be either Rite I or Rite II tells a person in which part of the BCP the service will be found. But there are places in the Rite II service where it says that the congregation may either kneel or stand for particular parts of the service and this is where the guidelines become more implicit. Newcomers and visitors tend to unconciously glance around them to see what those around them are doing. Among other things, this behavior reinforces the sense of community in the worship service. The prayers themselves have a cadence that virtually everyone follows - consciously or unconsciously - praying simultaneously as a chorus.

As I've said, one expects to encounter this behavior in a house of worship but it is also evident at the gym! Apart from the whopping great arrow posted on the wall that signifies whether today is clockwise or counter-clockwise on the track, there are very few explicit guidelines. Instead, gym etiquette regulates behavior and that tends to be acquired through experience - and a bit of logic. Generally speaking, walkers keep to the inner lanes of the track and runners to the outside. There are quite a few people who come to the gym that are not familiar with this point of etiquette so the gym actually posted signs over the lanes. These lane signs are regarded as suggestions by most people and not as hard and fast rules. Some people walk faster than others run, for example, so the signs are heeded or ignored according to the conditions on the track. People who are new to the gym fail to even notice the signs. Actually, some newcomers and infrequent visitors fail to grasp the significance of the track and its lanes altogether and will stand and chat in a running lane or weave to and fro, disregarding the other people on the track.

During my trips to the gym this week, I saw people doing exercises that are more safely performed at some distance from the track - balance ball, free-weights and so on - taking place on the track while it was being used by over half a dozen runners. The lack of familiarity with gym etiquette found its purest expression in the duo that were engaged in a rather loud and ostensibly work-related conversation with a clearly courtship-related subtext that was evident in their body language. I could not help but note the wide berth that runners gave them during the forty-five-plus minutes of conversation. The runners steered a much wider path around them than they would normally do around people on the track which suggests that they were according them the sort of private space reserved for courting couples.