Cultural Diversity is the existence of a variety of cultural groups within a society. Cultural groups can share many different characteristics. ... Culture, religion, ethnicity, language, nationality, sexual orientation, class, gender, age, disability, health differences, geographic location and lots of other things.
Explanation:
Essay on Cultural Diversity!
Cultures change and cultural diversity is created, maintained and lost over time. Social learning and choosing, acquiring and assimilating and rejecting information and knowledge is a necessary aspect of the formation of cultural repertoire. Â
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Human culture is the inevitable result of the way our species acquires its behaviour. Expertise in exploiting our environment, values about what matters in life are, among other things, what constitute culture.
We are very adept at transmitting cultural information to others, sometimes through frank teaching but also through the constant social interaction characteristic of human life. This social interaction means not just person-to-person contacts but, in the contemporary world, involves the mass media as a whole as a super source of information and knowledge.
So information exchange and spread is the backbone of the process of formation and evolution of cultures, and this very information is disseminated and exchanged through the gigantic network of the mass media in modern times. The network is such that it has made its influence felt in every sphere of life; moreover, it is now backed by such advanced technology that the process of information exchange and communication of the information has become quicker and more sophisticated than ever before.
Cultural diversity inevitably develops in the course of cultural transmission. This happens when members of the same culture and sub-culture share a large proportion of their information.
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The sharing of cultural information allows groups of humans to interact and cooperate effectively, so it is essential that some processes act to limit diversity. If such processes did not exist, human societies could not function as they do. Languages and dialects are the common examples of shared cultural information. Genetic evidence reveals how closely related all modern humans are.
This suggests that we are descended from a relatively small population with limited individual and sub-cultural variation. How did such diversity in peoples, societies and communities come about? How did all this massive diversity of cultures we see today come about? It was, at least partly, a result of communication and information transmission.
There are many elements that make up the vast body of information comprising a population’s culture. Culture and cultural change is best viewed as a population level phenomenon. Single individuals are largely prisoners of the culture they inherit but the decisions they make—based on the information and knowledge they have, or acquire to reinforce or reject, or choose to ignore at the outset—and the outcomes of those decisions are what drive cultural revolution.
Summed over a population of individuals and over a span of time, some culturally characteristic behaviors, beliefs and values become more common in the population, some become less common and some disappear altogether. New cultural characteristics arise and either survives and spread through the population, or they fade away.
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Thus, the all-important population level phenomena of cultural evolution are a result of the aggregation of myriad events and decisions—at the individual and societal levels. This involves learning from information and accumulation of knowledge.
