Culture

The word culture, from the Latin root colere (to inhabit, to cultivate, or to honor), generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. Different definitions of "culture" reflect different theoretical orientations for understanding, or criteria for valuing, human activity. Anthropologists most commonly use the term "culture" to refer to the universal human capacity to classify, codify and communicate their experiences symbolically. This capacity is a defining feature of the genus Homo.

Defining culture

Different definitions of culture reflect different theories for understanding - or criteria for valuing - human activity.

Sir Edward B. Tylor wrote in 1871 that "culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society", while a 2002 document from the United Nations agency UNESCO states that culture is the "set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs". [UNESCO, 2002] While these two definitions range widely, they do not exhaust the many uses of this concept - in 1952 Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of more than 200 different definitions of culture in their book, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions [Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952].

Culture as civilization

Many people today use a conception of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries. This view of culture reflected inequalities within European societies, and between European powers and their colonies around the world. It identifies "culture" with "civilization". According to this thinking, one can classify some countries as more "civilized" than others, and some people as more "cultured" than others. Thus some cultural theorists have actually tried to eliminate popular or mass culture from the definition of culture. Theorists like Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) or F. R. Leavis regard culture as simply the result of "the best that has been thought and said in the world (Arnold, 1960: 6), thus labeling anything that doesn't fit into this category as uncivilized. On this account, culture links closely with social cultivation - the progressive refinement of human behavior.

In practice, on the other side, culture referred to elite activities and goods, such as haute cuisine, high fashion or haute couture, museum-caliber art, and European classical music. The word cultured described people who knew about, and took part in, these activities. For example, someone who used 'culture' in the sense of 'cultivation' might argue that European classical music is more refined than music produced by working-class people such as punk rock, or than the indigenous music traditions of aboriginal peoples of, for example, Australia.

People who use "culture" in this way tend not to use it in the plural as "cultures". They do not believe that distinct cultures exist, each with their own internal logic or values, but rather that only a single standard of refinement suffices, against which one can measure all groups. Thus, according to this worldview, people with different customs from those who regard themselves as cultured do not usually count as "having a different culture", but class them as "uncultured". People lacking "culture" often seemed more "natural," and observers often defended (or criticized) elements of high culture for repressing human nature.

From the 18th century onwards, some social critics have accepted this contrast between cultured and uncultured, but have stressed the interpretation of refinement and of sophistication as corrupting and unnatural developments which obscure and distort people's essential nature. On this account, folk music (as produced by working-class people) honestly expresses a natural way of life, and classical music seems superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrays non-Western people as noble savages, living authentic, unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly-stratified capitalist systems of western culture.

Today most social scientists reject the monadic conception of culture, and the opposition of culture (nurture) to innate nature. They recognize non-élites as just as cultured as élites (and non-Westerners as just as civilized) - simply regarding them as just cultured in a different way. Thus social observers contrast the high culture of élites to popular culture or pop culture - goods and activities produced for, and consumed by, non-élite people or the masses.

Culture as worldview

During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements — such as the nationalist struggle to unite "Germany" out of numerous smaller entities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire — developed a more inclusive notion of culture as "worldview". In this mode of thought, a distinct and incommensurable worldview characterizes each ethnic group. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" ("tribal") cultures.

By the late 19th century, anthropologists had adopted and adapted the term culture to a broader definition that they could apply to a wider variety of societies. Attentive to the theory of evolution, they assumed that all human beings evolved equally, and that the fact that all humans have cultures must in some way result from human evolution. They also showed some reluctance to use biological evolution to explain differences between specific cultures — an approach that either exemplified a form of, or legitimized forms of, racism. They believed that biological evolution would produce a most inclusive notion of culture, a concept that anthropologists could apply equally to non-literate and to literate societies, or to nomadic and to sedentary societies. They argued that through the course of their evolution, human beings evolved a universal human capacity to classify experiences, and to encode and communicate them symbolically. Since human individuals learned and taught these symbolic systems, the systems began to develop independently of biological evolution (in other words, one human being can learn a belief, value, or way of doing something from another, even if the two humans do not share a biological relationship). That this capacity for symbolic thinking and social learning stems from human evolution confounds older arguments about nature versus nurture. Thus Clifford Geertz (1973: 33 ff.) has argued that human physiology and neurology developed in conjunction with the first cultural activities, and Middleton (1990: 17 n.27) concluded that human "'instincts' were culturally formed".

People living apart from one another develop unique cultures, but elements of different cultures can easily spread from one group of people to another. Culture changes dynamically and people can (must?) teach and learn culture, making it a potentially rapid form of adaptation to change in physical conditions. Anthropologists view culture as not only as a product of biological evolution but as a supplement to it, as the main means of human adaptation to the world.

This view of culture as a symbolic system with adaptive functions, and one which varies from place to place, led anthropologists to conceive of different cultures as defined by distinct patterns (or structures) of enduring, arbitrary, conventional sets of meaning, which took concrete form in a variety of artifacts such as myths and rituals, tools, the design of housing, and the planning of villages. Anthropologists thus distinguish between material culture and symbolic culture, not only because each reflects different kinds of human activity, but also because they constitute different kinds of data that require different methodologies.

This view of culture, which came to dominate between World War I and World War II, implied that each culture had bounds and demanded interpretation as a whole, on its own terms. There resulted a belief in cultural relativism; the belief that one had to understand an individual's actions in terms of his or her culture; that one had to understand a specific cultural artifact (a ritual, for example) in terms of the larger symbolic system of which it forms a part.

Nevertheless, the belief that culture comprises symbolical codes and can thus pass via teaching from one person to another meant that cultures, although bounded, would change. Cultural change could result from invention and innovation, but it could also result from contact between two cultures. Under peaceful conditions, contact between two cultures can lead to people "borrowing" (really, learning) from one another (diffusion or transculturation). Under conditions of violence or political inequality, however, people of one society can "steal" cultural artifacts from another, or impose cultural artifacts on another (acculturation). Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model for how, when and why people adopt new ideas.

All human societies have participated in these processes of diffusion, transculturation, and acculturation, and few anthropologists today see cultures as bounded. Modern anthropologists argue that instead of understanding a cultural artifact in terms of its own culture, one needs to understand it in terms of a broader history involving contact and relations with other cultures.

In addition to the aforementioned processes, migration on a major scale has characterized the world, particularly since the days of Columbus. Phenomena such as colonial expansion and forced migration through slavery became prominent. As a result, many societies have become culturally heterogeneous. Some anthropologists have argued nevertheless that some unifying cultural system bound heterogeneous societies, and that it offers advantages to understand heterogenous elements as subcultures. Others have argued that no unifying or coordinating cultural system exists, and that one must understand heterogeneous elements together as forming a multicultural society. The spread of the doctrine of multiculturalism has coincided with a resurgence of identity politics, which involve demands for the recognition of social subgroups' cultural uniqueness.

Sociobiologists argue that observers can best understand many aspects of culture in the light of the concept of the meme, first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins suggests the existence of units of culture - memes - roughly analogous to genes in evolutionary biology. Although this view has gained some popular currency, anthropologists generally reject it.

Culture as values, norms, and artifacts

Another common way of understanding culture sees it as consisting of three elements: values, norms, and artifacts. (See Dictionary of Modern Sociology, 1969, 93, cited at [1]) Values comprise ideas about what in life seems important. They guide the rest of the culture. Norms consist of expectations of how people will behave in different situations. Each culture has different methods, called sanctions, of enforcing its norms. Sanctions vary with the importance of the norm; norms that a society enforces formally have the status of laws. Artifacts — things, or material culture — derive from the culture's values and norms.

Julian Huxley gives a slightly different categorization of culture, dividing it into three inter-related subgroups - "mentifacts", "socifacts" and "artifacts" - standing for ideological, sociological, and technological subsystems respectively. Mentifacts are mental manifestations of culture - different ideas, beliefs, and knowledge and the ways in which these things are expressed in speech or other forms of communication. Socialization depends on the belief subsystem, that is, on mentifacts. The way we interact with each other, and the types of relationship we form, depends greatly on the dominant cultural belief systems. But in the same time sociological subsystem governs interaction between people and influencing the formation of mentifacts. That is to say, the quality of human interactions influence formation of new ideas and beliefs that form cultural mentifacts. Material objects and their use make up the technological subsystem of culture. It is also strongly interconnected with other two subsystems. [2]

As a rule, archeologists focus on material culture whereas cultural anthropologists focus on symbolic culture, although ultimately both groups maintain interests in the relationships between these two dimensions. Moreover, anthropologists understand "culture" to refer not only to material, consumption goods, but to the general processes which produce such goods and give them meaning, and to the social relationships and practices in which such objects and processes become embedded.

Culture as patterns of products and activities

In the early 20th century, anthropologists understood culture to refer not to a set of discrete products or activities (whether material or symbolic), but rather to underlying patterns that are reflected in those products and activities. Such, patterns of relationship among people (e.g. husband and wife, co-workers in a company, etc.) reflects social structure in a particular society (social roles). On the other side art and myth reflect patterns of worldview of a particular sociaty as well. Both patterns of social structure and patterns of worldview is what characterizes a culture.

Historically, in the case of smaller societies, in which people merely fell into categories of age, gender, household and descent group, anthropologists believed that people more-or-less shared the same set of values and conventions. People in such societies remained strongly connected to their common culture. In the case of larger societies, in which people undergo further categorization by region, race, ethnicity, and social class, anthropologists came to believe that members of the same society often had highly contrasting values and conventions. They thus used the term subculture to identify the cultures of parts of larger societies. Since subcultures reflect the position of a segment of society vis a vis other segments and the society as a whole, they often reveal processes of domination and resistance (domination of the main culture over its subcultures, and the resistance of those subcultures to such domination).

Culture as Symbols

The symbolic view of culture, the legacy of Clifford Geertz (1973) and Victor Turner (1967), holds symbols to be both the practices of social actors and the context that gives such practices meaning. Anthony P. Cohen (1985) writes of the "symbolic gloss" which allows social actors to use common symbols to communicate and understand each other while still imbuing these symbols with personal significance and meanings. Symbols provide the limits of cultured thought. Members of a culture rely on these symbols to frame their thoughts and expressions in intelligible terms. In short, symbols make culture possible, reproducible and readable. They are the "webs of significance" in Weber's sense that, to quote Pierre Bourdieu (1977), "give regularity, unity and systematicity to the practices of a group...".

Cultural change

When come to change, cultures both embrace and resist change, depending on which cultural trait is to change. For example, the role of women in the Western cultures have faced serious changes in the last century, what was at first met with great resistance. However, once the change has been implemented, many non-Western cultures want to embrace the positive aspects of this change into their own cultures.

Cultural change can come about due to the environment, to inventions (and other internal influences), and to contact with other cultures. For example, the end of the last ice age witnessed the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations (e.g. new rituals and customs that were agriculture-centered), that further changed how people related to nature and ultimatelly to each other.

The spread of culture and language in human population can be explained by two models - the culture diffusion model and the demic diffusion model. Culture diffusion connotes spreading of one or more cultural traits (e.g. customs, ideas, attitudes) from a central point outward, usually from one culture to its neighbouring cultures. The pace of the change, in this case is slow, gradual, and limited. In it, "stimulus diffusion" refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention in another. For example, after seeing English writing system in 1821, Sequoyah native American indians developed their own, rather unique, Cherokee writing system. Diffusions of innovations theory presents a research-based model for why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.

Beside the culture diffusion model, which explains some limited change inside culture, the demic diffusion model refers to a mass movement of people from one geographical area to another (and usually from one cultural sphere to another), which brings rather rapid and sudden change to the area where people migrated.

Acculturation has different meanings, but in this context refers to replacement of the traits of one's culture of origin, with those of another, usually dominant culture in the place where one lives. Such happened to certain Native American tribes and to many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. The proces of acculturation is common among immigrants from one country to another, where an immigrant adopts to the new culture by replacing one or more cultural traits from his own culture with traits from the new culture. The final stage of acculturation is assimilation - the total absorption of an individual or minority group into another culture, what is often accelerated by intermarriage and by de-emphasizing cultural differences. Related term to acculturation is transculturation what refers to when an individual moves to a new culture and adopts to it.

Propagating culture

Insofar as culture grows and changes naturally within human society, it requires little or no formal propagation. Family or age-based peer groups will instinctively foster (and develop) their own cultural norms (that are often very similar to the major culture), on that way preserving and propagating culture.

But few cultures act in such a laissez faire manner. Most societies develop some sort of "ideology" or similar basis for inculcating and preserving established or "correct" cultural behavior. And many societies take the task of education out of the hands of priests and shamans and place it on a wider footing, so that the young (at least) gain a practical and emotional identification with a standardised version of their nurturing culture.

Groups of immigrants, exiles, or minorities often form cultural associations or clubs to preserve their own cultural roots in the face of a surrounding (generally more locally-dominant) culture. Thus the world has acquired many Garibaldi Clubs, Pushkin Societies, and underground schools.

On a broader scale, many countries market their cultural heritage internationally. This occurs not only in the promotion of tourism (importing money), but also in cultural development abroad (exporting ideas). Note the roles of cultural attachés in embassies and the function of specific organizations devoted to propagating the mother-culture, its language and its ideologies abroad, for example the work of:

• the Alliance française
• the British Council
• the Fulbright Program
• the Goethe-Institut
• the Instituto Cervantes

Cultural studies

Cultural studies developed in the late 20th century, in part through the re-introduction of Marxist thought into sociology, and in part through the process of articulation of sociology and other academic disciplines, such as literary criticism. Cultural studies movement aimed to focus on the analysis of subcultures in industrial or capitalist societies. Following the non-anthropological tradition, this movement generally focuses on the study of consumption goods (such as fashion, art, and literature). However, because the 18th- and 19th-century distinction between "high" and "low" culture seems inappropriate to apply to the mass-produced and mass-marketed consumption goods which cultural studies analyse, these scholars used instead the term "popular culture".

Today, some anthropologists have joined the project of cultural studies. Most, however, reject the identification of culture with consumption goods. Furthermore, many now reject the notion of culture as bounded, and consequently reject the notion of subculture. Instead, they see culture as a complex web of shifting patterns that link people in different locales and that link social formations of different scales. According to this view, any group can construct its own cultural identity.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Arnold, M., (1882). Culture and Anarchy. Macmillan and Co., New York. Online at [3].
• Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice.
• Cohen, A. P. (1985/1995). The Symbolic Construction of Community. New York: Routledge.
• Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York.
• Hoult, T. F., ed. (1969). Dictionary of Modern Sociology. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co.
• Kroeber, A. L. Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum
• Middleton, R. (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
• Cultural Anthropology Tutorials, Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marco, California, United States, as of December 12, 2004.
• UNESCO, "UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity", issued on International Mother Language Day, February 21, 2002.

External links

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: "Cultural Development" in Antiquity
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: "Culture" and "Civilization" in Modern Times
• Classificatory system for cultures and civilizations, by Dr. Sam Vaknin
• Development Gateway Culture and Development Topic Page

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Comment

This is an unfinished work in progress.—Jennifer Tanabe 14:33, 7 Oct 2005 (UTC)