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Social contexts exert influence on all people, but may be
influential in subtly different ways among people from these two types of culture. What is
apparent is how much these processes are symbolically driven. That is, the symbolic
universe is superimposed on the social and physical universe, but it is the symbolic
universe to which people primarily respond. That is, we respond not to a thing itself, but
to what that thing means. That meaning may change from time to time and place to place,
and is therefore inseparably tied to the context within which it occurs. We might go
further and say that, because meaning cannot be separated from context, to talk of a
person without specifying the context that person inhabits is meaningless. How people en-act their existence, in turn, comes from the meaning
they have acquired in their interactions with others. This is the only way that people can
acquire social meaning, and so they themselves must be social products. They embody
patterns of behaviour which in turn provide further opportunities for meaning to be
transmitted to the next generation of beings. |
