This paper examines the relationship between culture and curriculum, combining academic discourse relating to the construction of identity, policy, and curriculum and conversations with 42 members of a New Zealand intermediate school community about the nature of culture. Interviewers' comments and stories illuminate their views of Maori and White culture, cultural differences and interrelationships, intergroup relations in school and community, and cross-cultural communication and learning. The study suggests that while an initial premise of fluidity and complexity in understandings of culture is present in academic and community sources, so too are principles of constancy that emphasize relatedness. In order that these principles may promote understandings of culture in the teaching of culture, a revisionary perspective is needed towards the canon (particularly the sources of knowledge to be regarded as authoritative) and towards the research, interpretation, and representation of understandings of culture. The development of a "language for being related" is suggested as one way in which teacher and researcher understandings of culture might embrace diversity and equity issues in curriculum. This language would include the following principles: adopting a global perspective of culture that honors the particularities of local context; incorporating many ways of knowing culture and expressing that knowing; seeking non-oppositional ways of interpreting cultural difference; upholding the view that the teaching of culture is a collaborative holistic project where learning takes place in many ways with many teachers; affirming the coexistence of change and constancy in understandings of culture; and making explicit the teacher's curricular contribution to understandings of culture. Contains 47 references and a glossary. (TD)