Zusammenfassung der Ressource
What is culture?
- For Edward Tylor cultures are
systems of human behavior and
thought, obey natural laws, so
they can be studied scientifically
- Enculturation
- Culture Is Learned
- Human cultural learning
depends on the uniquely
developed human capacity to
use symbols.
- Symbols: Signs that have no
necessary or natural connection
with the things for which they
stand.
- Culture Is Symbolic
- Symbolic thought is unique and
crucial to cultural learning.
- Association between
symbols and
symbolized is arbitrary
and conventional.
- Culture Is Shared
- Culture is located in and
transmitted through
groups.
- Shared beliefs, values,
memories, and expectations
link people who grow up in
the same culture.
- Culture and Nature
- Culture takes natural biological urges
and teaches us to express them in
particular ways.
- Culture Is All-Encompassing
- Anthropology: culture includes features
sometimes regarded as trivial or
unworthy of serious study.
- Culture Is Intigrated
- Cultures are integrated, patterned
system, if one part changes, other
parts change.
- Core Values
- Culture Can Be Adaptive
and Maladaptive
- Humans have biological and cultural
ways of coping with environmental
stress, what’s good for an individual
isn’t necessarily good for the group.
- Universality, Generality
and Particularity
- 1. Individuals vary in emotional and intellectual
tendencies and capacities. 2. All human populations
have equivalent capacities for culture. 3. People can
learn any cultural tradition.
- Universal: exists in every culture.
- Biological
- Pysichological
- Generality: exists in some but not all societies.
- Diffusion
- Colonization
- Invention
- Particularity: distinctive or unique culture
trait, pattern, or integration
- Culture and the
Individual: Agency
and Practise
- Generations of anthropologists
theorized about the relationship
between “system” and “individual”
- Levels of Culture
- National Culture
- Cultural features shared by citizens of the same nation.
- International Culture
- Cultural traditions that extend beyond national boundaries.
- Subcultures
- Identifiable cultural patterns existing within a larger culture.
- Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism
and Human Rights
- Ethnocentrism
- Tendency to view one’s own culture as
superior and to use one’s own standards
and values in judging outsiders.
- Cultural relativism
- To know another culture requires full
understanding of its members’ beliefs
and motivations
- Human rights
- Rights based on justice and morality
beyond and superior to particular
countries, cultures, and religions.
- Mechanisms of Cultural Change
- Diffusion
- Acculturation
- Independent invention
- Globalization
- Series of processes that
work to make modern
nations and people
increasingly interlinked and
mutually dependent
- Economic and political forces
- Long-distance communication
- Local people must increasingly cope with forces generated by progressively larger systems