The term cultural baggage refers to the tendency for one's culture to pervade thinking, speech, and behavior without one being aware of this pervasion. Cultural baggage becomes a factor when a person from one culture encounters a person from another, and unconscious assumptions or behaviors can interfere with interaction.
The "baggage" imagery implies that cultural baggage is something that one carries at all times and that it can be burdensome, hindering freedom of movement (i.e. hinders intercultural dialog). Darret B. Rutman has used the term to describe early European settlers of North America (A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia 1650-1750 by Darret B. Rutman, Anita H. Rutman, ISBN 0-393-30318-7).
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or baggage:
“At times it seems that the media have become the mainstream culture in children’s lives. Parents have become the alternative. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)
“It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; when it, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)