Culture: The grand web of meaning

Abstract

This chapter examines the mutually constitutive relationship between meaning and culture. We conceptualize culture as a grand web of meaning-culture is built on small and large meaning; this meaning, in turn, resides and is propagated within culture. The first part of this chapter examines this dynamic culture-meaning relationship and the meaning providing functions of culture. The second part of our chapter discusses cultural differences in meaning and investigates the case of multiculturalism to examine how individuals navigate through different meaning frameworks. We highlight cultural competence as the ability to successfully integrate different webs of meaning in an increasingly multicultural world and explore factors that help to foster multicultural competence.