But Cheri - if a deaf child is born into a HEARING culture, (ie: a hearing family) how are they being "robbed" of anything? I don't see how they simply acquire "deaf culture" just by BEING deaf.
Culture can be defined as:
the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group: the youth culture; the drug culture.
Anthropology. the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another
So wouldn't a deaf child born into a hearing family have a HEARING cultural background - after all that's the background of their parents/family.
The reason I'm asking this is I never could understand the "deaf culture" card being thrown around when the majority of deaf children are NOT born into deaf culture. You can't steal what you never had in the first place.
neecy,
Good definition, here are a couple others I was able to find:
Although there is no standard definition of culture, most alternatives incorporate the Boasian postulates as in the case of Bates and Plog's offering, which we shall accept as a working version:
Culture: The system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning
This is a complex definition and points to four important characteristics stressed by cultural relativists:
symbolic composition,
systematic patterning,
learned transmission,
societal grounding.
Notes Toward a Definition of Culture
Marshall Soules
In 1871 E.B. Taylor defined culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and many other capabilities and habits acquired by...[members] of society."
"Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society and transmitted from generation to generation. It thus refers to the norms, values, standards by which people act, and it includes the ways distinctive in each society of ordering the world and rendering it intelligible. Culture is...a set of mechanisms for survival, but it provides us also with a definition of reality. It is the matrix into which we are born, it is the anvil upon which our persons and destinies are forged." (Robert Murphy. Culture and Social Anthropology: An Overture. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986: 14)
And from the American Heritage Dictionary:
The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought