November 23, 1973. Hartford, Connecticut – Three policemen giving a heart massage and oxygen to a heart attack victim Friday were attacked by a crowd of 75 to 100 persons who apparently did not realize what the policemen were doing.

Other policemen fended off the crowd of mostly Spanish speaking residents until an ambulance arrived. Police said they tried to explain to the crowd what they were doing, but the crown apparently thought they were beating the woman.

Despite the policemen’s efforts the victim, Evangelica Echevaria, 59, died.

Here we see people using their culture. Members of two different groups observed the same event but their interpretations were drastically different. The crowd used their culture to (a) interpret the behavior of the policemen as cruel, and (b) to act on the woman’s behalf to put a stop to what they saw as brutality. They had acquired the cultural principles for acting and interpreting things in this way through a particular shared experience.

The policemen, on the other hand, used their culture (a) to interpret the woman’s condition as heart failure and their own behavior as a life saving effort, and (b) to give cardiac massage and oxygen to the woman. Furthermore, they interpreted the actions of the crowd in a manner entirely different from how the crowd saw their own behavior. These two groups of people each had an elaborate cultural rules for interpreting their experience and for acting in emergency situations. The conflict arose, at least in part, because these cultural rules were so different.

By restricting the definition of culture to shared knowledge, we do not eliminate an interest in behavior, customs, objects, or emotions. We have merely shifted the emphasis from these phonomena to their meaning. The ethnographer observes behavior, but goes beyond it to inquire into the meaning of that behavior. The ethnographer sees artifacts and natural objects but goes beyond them to discover what meanings people assign to these objects. The ethnographer observes and records emotional states, but goes beyond them to discover the meaning of fear, anxiety, anger and other feelings.

This concept of culture (as a system of meaningful symbols) has much in common with symbolic interactionism, a theory which seeks to explain human behavior in terms of meanings. Symbolic interactionism has its roots in the work of sociologists like Coolry, Mead and Thomas. Blumer has identified three premises on which this theory rests (1969).

The first premise is that “human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them” (1969:2). policemen and the crowd interacted on the basis of the meanings things had for them. The geographic location, the types of people, the police car, the movements of the policemen, the behavior of the sick woman, and the activities of the onlookers were all symbols with special meanings. People did not act toward these but toward their meanings.

The second premise underlying symbolic interactionism is that the “meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows (Blumer 1969:2). Culture is a shared system of meanings, is learned, revised, maintained and defined in the context of people interacting. The crowd came to share their definitions of police behavior through interacting with one another and through past associations with the police. The police officers acquired the cultural meanings they used through interacting with other officers and members of the community. The culture of each group was inextricably bound up with the social life of their particular communities.

The third premise of symbolic interactionism is that “meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interactive process used by the person dealing with the things he encounters” (Blumer 1969:2). Neither the crowd nor the policemen were automatons, driven by their culture to act in the way they did. Rather, they used their culture to interpret the situation. At any moment, a member of the crown might have interpreted the behavior of the policemen in a slightly different way, leading to a different reaction.
We may see this interpretive aspect more aspect more clearly if we think of culture as a cognitive map. It serves as a guide for acting and for interpreting our experience; it does not compel us to follow a particular course. Like this brief drama between the policemen, a dying woman and the crowd, much of life is a series of unanticipated social occasions. Although our culture may not include a detailed map for such occasions, it does provide principles for interpreting and responding to them. Rather than a rigid map that people must follow, culture is best thought as

A set of principles for creating dramas, for writing scripts, and of course, for recruiting players and audiences…. Culture is not simply a cognitive map that people acquire, in whole or in part, more or less accurately, and then learn to read. People are not just map-readers; they are map-makers. People are cast out into imperfectly charted, continually shifting seas of everyday life. Mapping them out is a constant process resulting not in an individuals cognitive map, but in a whole chart case of rough, improvised, continually revised sketch maps. Culture does not provide a cognitive map, but rather a set of principles for map-making and navigation. Different cultures are like different schools of navigation designed to cope with different terrains and seas (Frake 1977:6-7)