Paradigm

Between definitions and concepts culture may be considered as a paradigm jungle (Barker). In order to understand this idea we need to start with explaining paradigms as such. Below you find a definition of a paradigm. Barker gives an example from tennis. If you do not know anything from tennis, you just see people in funny clothes with an instruments in their hands, a net, lines on the ground and a ball. These people try to hit the ball (or not?) and get sometimes excited or angry. To understand why you have to know the rules and to know when someone scores: the paradigm of tennis!

If you click on the icon in the middel of the stack below, you will first see this definition again. Clicking on the right you will see an exercise: a square of nine dots. You have to connect these dots in accordance with the instructions next to them. The final picture in the stack gives you a solution.

A person is a member of dozens, even hundreds of groups. They range from the small and specific (e.g. family) to the large and abstract (e.g. all women in a given country). Each group has its own culture, its own way of thinking, acting and feeling. Each of us shifts all the time through those cultures or paradigms to find the proper response in the given situation. In that sense culture is a paradigm jungle. Even worse: if you cannot find a suitable paradigm, you have to develop one!