What is culture?

What is culture?

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

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