Cultural Dynamics in Encounters

Abstarct

Encounters are always embedded in cultural systems that generate ­expectations for how individuals should behave. At the level of encounters, I use the term normatization to denote the process of determining which cultural elements are made relevant in an encounter. Granted, this is an awkward term but it communicates the assembling of expectations in encounters. Culture exists at all levels of human social organization, from the technologies, texts, values, and meta-ideologies of societal and even inter-societal systems, through the generalized symbolic media, ideologies and norms of institutional domains and the meta-ideologies and subcultures of the stratification system, to the ideologies and norms of corporate units and the status beliefs about categoric units and, finally, to the process whereby these levels of culture are assembled and made relevant to encounters.

In their stocks of knowledge (Schutz 1932 [1967]), people store rather large stores of information about all these levels of culture that they then assemble, on the ground, to create expectations for how individuals should behave. The human brain is wired to bring culture to bear because, without expectations or normative understandings, encounters will not be viable. People generally do not have fully assembled cultural packages in their stocks of knowledge, but these stores of cultural elements and sub-assemblages among these elements can be assembled and readjusted depending upon the circumstances in an encounter. The more an encounter is embedded in corporate and categoric units lodged within, respectively, institutional domains and stratification systems, the more stocks of knowledge will be already assembled, at least to a degree. Yet, there is always “some assembly required” (and often re-­assembly) as individuals normatize an encounter.