Individualist or Communitarian? What We Think We’re Asking — and What We’re Really Saying

What If the Problem Is the Question Itself...?

We like to sort societies into neat boxes. It’s comforting. It gives us the sense that if we understand the type of culture we’re dealing with, we’ll know how to behave, how to work, how to communicate.

So we draw a line. Here, people are individualistic. Over there, they’re communitarian.

End of story.

Except it rarely is.

This opposition, convenient as it may be, rests on a quiet assumption: that these words have a clear, stable, shared meaning. They don’t. Their meaning shifts with history, context, social norms, and power relations.

What is labelled individualism in one society may be understood elsewhere as a form of responsibility toward others. Conversely, what is called communitarian can, depending on the context, be experienced as constraint rather than solidarity. Same word. Same behaviour. Completely different reading.

This is where many intercultural misunderstandings actually begin. Not because people come from “different cultures,” but because they project their own definitions onto others. What looks like a disagreement about behaviour is often a clash between unspoken assumptions about autonomy, obligation, and what counts as acceptable.

In some contexts, prioritizing oneself is read as disloyalty to the group. In others, it is seen as a prerequisite for healthy relationships. Likewise, putting family or community first can be interpreted either as a moral responsibility or as an obstacle to personal agency.

In practice, no society operates according to a single principle. Norms are negotiated, adjusted, and sometimes contradicted. People move back and forth between autonomy and interdependence depending on situations, spaces, and moments in their lives.

Reducing these dynamics to a fixed binary flattens reality. It also conveniently shifts the source of tension onto “other cultures,” when the friction often comes from our reluctance to question our own categories.

So the real issue may not be whether a society is individualist or communitarian. It may be what those terms mean here, now, for these people. And what we quietly assume when we use them.

Because talking about individualism and communitarianism is never just about describing societies. It is also about speaking from a position. With blind spots.And with certainties that rarely get examined.

And as long as these categories are used to explain others without ever turning back on ourselves, they tell us less about cultures than about our need to simplify them.