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Culture And Its Influence On Culture

Decent Essays

Raymond Williams (Hutchison, 2011) said “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (p. 247). When I thought of culture, I used to picture food, festivities, clothes and country. Just like the nurse, I thought that if learned about one culture, I understood everybody in that culture. But as I started expanding my knowledge the meaning of culture started becoming harder to define. Different subjects seemed to have different definitions of what culture is. The idea expanded until it was not just a check list but “a set of common understandings, manifest in act and artifact. It is in two places at once: inside somebody’s head as understandings and in the external environment as act and artifact” (Hutchison, 2011, p. 246). The definition above explains why social workers need to learn cultural humility. It clarifies that because culture is both behavior and act, it is interpreted differently by different people. In other words, two people can be from the same exact place and still have different cultures.
In the “Cultural Humility: People, Principles, and Practices” (2012) documentary, an example of an African American nurse who thought of herself as culturally competent was given. The nurse was taking care of a Latino patient who recently had surgery. The patient’s doctor commented to the nurse that the patient seems to be in considerable pain but the nurse discounted his comment. She told the doctor, in her Cross Cultural Medicine

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