Deep culture refers to the unconscious meanings, values, norms and hidden assumptions that allow us to interpret our experiences as we interact with other people. These shared meanings form a framework that acts as a starting point for our sense of what it means to be human, what constitutes normal behavior, how to make moral/ethical choices, and what we see generally as reasonable. Deep culture generally functions out of awareness at the intuitive level, and we generally remain unaware of it until confronted with a need to interact with people who have different cultural assumptions. It is our “cultural programming”, or, as Barnlund (1989) puts it, our “collective unconscious”. Geert Hofstede (1997) describes it as the “software of the mind”. To take the computer analogy further, if our body and biological predilections are our hardware, then deep culture is the operating system – the learned framework of perception, interpretation and judgment that allows us to run the interpretive programs with which we engage in the tasks of daily living.

Living in or visiting other countries often brings us into contact with people who have different deep-culture settings. This doesn’t necessarily refer to witnessing behavior one might find unusual (e.g. washing in cow urine – reportedly practiced by the Masai in east Africa). Deep culture doesn’t refer to specific behaviors, but rather to the values and assumptions that underlie those actions. Some examples of deep culture are differing cultural assumptions about the role of men and women, differing orientations towards time, feelings of identity (e.g. collective versus individual), differing senses of morality and ethical behavior (e.g. feelings of “face” or individual morality) and many others. This book will argue that cultural difference at this deep level constitutes the most fundamental challenge of intercultural learning. It is the foundation upon which ethnocentrism rests and it constitutes the raw material for our cultural biases.

In many intercultural contexts, deep culture is not noticed or understood in any profound sense. An English visitor to Thailand may see monks with begging bowls and feel she has experienced a profound cultural difference. But she hasn’t had, strictly speaking, a Thai experience – she has had an English experience in Thailand. The deep elements of Thai culture are not those that are the most sacred or symbolically important, they are those that are most fundamental and subtle. What seems “spiritual” to our visitor may seem simply an everyday routine to many Thais. Thai communities may place an importance on ancestry or family relations that our English visitor will find hard to grasp. The levels of formality in the Thai language may seem impossibly complex and hinge on social distinctions that our visitor is unaccustomed to making. The meaning of simple concepts – family, responsibility, independence, morality, shame, fun, adulthood – may seem very different viewed from a Thai perspective.

As our visitor participates more fully in Thai communities, however, her perception of Thais may change. This change comes from her more fully sharing the world view of her hosts. Her understanding may be transformed from that of an outsider observing and interpreting explicit cultural phenomena, to that of an insider sharing the meaning and interpretation of the community that produced the phenomena. This change is primarily intuitive, not intellectual. It requires a willingness to suspend one’s outsider’s judgment and attempt to see the world from a new point of view. In doing so, the internal logic of that community becomes more clear, and one may learn to operate within these new cultural frameworks. It is this intuitively felt internal logic; the unspoken assumptions behind a community’s behavior, that constitutes deep culture. The process of acquiring the ability to step into these new frameworks of meaning is deep cultural learning.

*From Deep Culture: Hidden Challenges of Global Living, Shaules, J., (2007) Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK.