Download B. A Definition of Culture

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1. The word culture comes from the Latin root colere (to inhabit, to cultivate, or to
honor). In general, it refers to human activity; different definitions of culture reflect
different theories for understanding, or criteria for valuing, human activity.
Anthropologists use the term to refer to the universal human capacity to classify
experiences, and to encode and communicate them symbolically. They regard this
capacity as a defining feature of the genus Homo.
2. literature:The body of written works of a language, period, or culture.
3. Imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value:
“Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into
a unity” (Rebecca West).
4. The art or occupation of a literary writer.
5. The body of written work produced by scholars or researchers in a given field:
medical literature.
6. Printed material: collected all the available literature on the subject.
7. Music. All the compositions of a certain kind or for a specific instrument or
ensemble: the symphonic literature.
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a particular society at a particular time and place; "early Mayan civilization"
the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group
acculturation: all the knowledge and values shared by a society
polish: a highly developed state of perfection; having a flawless or impeccable quality;
"they performed with great polish"; "I admired the exquisite refinement of his prose";
"almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art"--Joseph
Conrad
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The reflection and prefiguration of the possibilities of organization of everyday life in a
given historical moment; a complex of aesthetics, feelings and mores through which a
collectivity reacts on the life that is objectively determined by its economy. (We are
defining this term only in the perspective of creating values, not in that of teaching them.)
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The accumulated habits, attitudes, and beliefs of a group of people that define for them
their general behavior and way of life; the total set of learned activities of a people.
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A growth of living cells or microorganisms in a controlled artificial environment.
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To grow living organisms in a prepared medium or media.
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The values, traditions, norms, customs, arts, history, folklore, and institutions that a group
of people, who are unified by race, ethnicity, language, nationality, or religion, share.
wind.uwyo.edu/sig/definition.asp
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Common beliefs and practices of a group of people. The integrated pattern of human
knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man's capacity for learning and
transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.
www.cr.nps.gov/seac/terms.htm
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In microbiology, a population of microorganisms in a growth medium or the act of growing
bacteria in media for identification. A pure culture contains only organisms that initially
arose from a single cell. Cultures are used in manufacturing cultured dairy products and
most cheeses.
www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/dairyglossary.html
The integration pattern of human behavior that includes thoughts, communications,
actions, customs, beliefs, values and institutions of a race, ethnic, religious or social
group.
www.gecdf.com/diversity/glossary.html
the way of life of a group of people. This includes what they wear, how they govern
themselves, their religious belief, other rituals, etc.
www.dakotapathways.org/5/glossary.htm
The ideas, customs, skills, arts, etc. of a given people in a given period; civilization. Can
also refer to archaeological objects of a culture.
www.imh.org/imh/china/ed/glos.html
As a noun, cultivation of living organisms in prepared medium; as a verb, to grow in
prepared medium.
www.kurlama.com/glossary/c.html
learned behavior of people, which includes their belief systems and languages, their
social relationships, their institutions and organizations, and their material goods - food,
clothing, buildings, tools, and machines.
Culture: The system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and
artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with
one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation
through learning (p7).
I. The Culture Concept
B. A Definition of Culture
Emphasis 1. Symbolic Composition.
The fundamental element or building block of culture is the culture trait. Traits assume
many forms varying from material artifacts -- tools, house structures, art works -- to
behaviourial regularities -- family interrelationships, economic exchanges, and legal
sanctions -- to abstract concepts and beliefs. All of these diverse and complex
manifestations share one feature in common; they are symbols and as such express
meaning.
A symbol is simply understood as an expression that stands for or represents something
else, usually a real world condition. The use of words in a language provides the most
obvious example. Words stand for perceived objective entities and states. Words as
symbols, however, differ from the objects they represent and have special qualities,
which is why they are so useful to us. One important characteristic is that they bear no
intrinsic relation to what they represent and are thereby arbitrary. I can denote a huge
animal with dramatic features such as a hoselike snout, enormous ears, and a pair of
spearlike oral projections with very different sound sequences, such as pachyderm or
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osono. Another important symbolic characteristic is displacement, i.e., words can be used
in the absence of the objects represented and thus can be reproduced in any time or place.
Thus I can talk about elephants without needing to import them from Africa. This quality
leads to a third major feature, creativity. Because they are freed from the material
constraints of real objects, words can be manipulated to produce novel arrangements.
Thus we can use the term elephant to postulate things beyond our direct experience, such
as elephant species, extinct elephant ancestors, flying elephants, and elephant gods.
While words provide the simplest example, all cultural elements including material
artifacts exhibit a symbolic character. Art and ceremonial objects have obvious symbolic
meanings and are intentionally created to represent them. Tools and technologies are less
obviously symbolic, but do involved representations. They are manufactured from a
standard conceptual plan to bring about a desired objective state different from them in
form. Technology also gives us a means to transform a symbolically constructed world to
a real one of domesticated elephants and ivory piano keys.
Emphasis 2. Systematic Patterning.
Cultural elements as symbols assume their meanings in relationship to other symbols
within a broader context of a meaning system. To interpret a symbol, therefore,
anthropologists must investigate the interrelatedness of elements and the presence of
unifying principles that connect symbols to form larger patterns and cultural wholes.
Let us take as an example a prevalent Dani institution that Heider identifies as "warfare".
We shall be returning to Dani warfare on several occasions and will try to come to an
understanding of its causes and consequences. The first assignment that an anthropologist
must undertake, however, is to understand what warfare means in relation to other
aspects of Dani culture in the Dani's own terms. In doing so we must suspend our own
concepts and theories of warfare as a way that nation states compete over scarce
resources, or as a consequence of innate human aggression, or as a delayed reaction to the
repression of childhood sexuality.
Our first clues to Dani warfare may come from their language and a discovery that the
Dani have two words for large-scale armed conflict: wim and um'aim. Heider
distinguishes the two as different phases of warfare, but this understanding masks the fact
that each form is linked into a separate matrix of meaning and behaviour. Wim is
conducted between territorial and social units termed alliances. All the combatants share
the same culture and language and hold comm on beliefs and understandings about how
and why warfare is conducted. Hostilities between alliances take the form of formal
battles or sporadic ambushes or raids. They are always suspended when one of the
combatants, or sometimes a bystander, is killed. If a fatality occurs, the alliance of the
dead person holds a funeral, and the victorious group holds a celebration. (The bereaved
group accommodatingly confirms the death and conveys the name of the deceased to the
victors). The limits to violence that are inherent in this system, in which only one person
is killed during a battle, result in a low fatality rate and a balance between opponents in
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which no territory or other resource is ceded. They also maintain warfare as a constant
state that commits men to guard duty, fighting, and c
The key to understanding what might appear to you as something outside of your own
cultural experience of war is that the Dani pattern combines elements that occur in
Western culture into a very different complex and is related to other Dani institutions
within a singular cultural matrix. The Dani provide a coherent understanding of their
system by explaining warfare in relation to their belief in ghosts. When someone is killed,
the ghosts of the aggrieved allia nce will demand that the living avenge the death and will
harass them until an enemy is killed. Ceremonies are then held to appease the ghosts of
the two groups involved. The cycle is perpetuated indefinitely, because each new death
calls for an additional act of vengeance. The religious rationale and the formalization and
ceremonialization of hostility lead Heider to designate this form as the "ritual phase" of
warfare.
We shall return to a consideration of ritual warfare and the alternate "phase" of secular
warfare, or um'aim later in this course. For the present we can conclude that cultural traits
and patterns must be initially understood in terms of the logic of the culture and the
integration of cultural elements according to internally consistent themes and principles.
This perspective is termed holism, a position that maintains that individual culture trai ts
cannot be understood in isolation
Emphasis 3 .Learned Transmission.
Culture traits and broader cultural patterns inclusive of language, technology, institutions,
beliefs, and values are transmitted across generations and maintain continuity through
learning, technically termed enculturation. Accordingly, learning abilities and
intelligence are essential assets for all human groups and have replaced the role of
biologically based genetic transmission of instincts dominant in most other animal
species. However, an important relation between biology and culture must first be
acknowledged.
Human biology has affected the development of culture, since symbolic and learning
abilities depend upon the physical composition of the brain and other anatomical
adaptations, such as vocal structures that can produce speech or manual abilities that can
manufacture tools. This biological substratum supports a generalized capacity for culture
among all humans and explains universal features, such as language learning abilities.
However, biological factors do not determine specific cultural traits, such as the ability to
speak French, English, or Dani. All children are preprogrammed by genetics to learn
languages through a fixed series of stages, but will acquire a specific language only
through patient instruction. Thus biology determines our general capacity for culture and
is responsible for appears of some cultural universals, i.e., traits that appear in some form
in every culture in the world. However, cultural variations among peoples are attributable
to learned traditions and not to innate or genetic propensities.
The replacement of genetic transmission of behaviour by learning in the course of human
evolution has had a clear effect on our biological heritage. We adapt to our environment
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through cultural strategies rather than genetic predispositions. Accordingl y, human
groups have spread to every part of the world and survived drastic differences in climate
and diet without dramatic anatomical changes. The result has been that physical
differences among peoples, which have developed over millions of years in thousands of
diverse ecosystems, are remarkably superficial. Cultural differences, however, are
profound and limitless and form a fascinating subject matter for anthropological enquiry.
Emphasis 4. Societal Grounding
Culture is observable only in the form of personal behaviour but can be abstracted from
individuals' actions and attributed to the social groups to which they belong. Accordingly,
anthropologists underemphasize the importance of individual responsibility and creativity
and focus on the common denominator of collective identity and symbols. This position
counters some modern understandings of the importance of individual rights and actions.
However, a few reflections show that society defines and constrains our behaviour in
many unperceived ways. We can best understand the social aspect of culture by realizing
that the central function of human symbolization is communication and requires
adherence to understood conventions.
We most consciously experience social forces in the form of legal sanctions, which are
themselves culturally based, but group norms constrain our behaviour in a wider array of
circumstances. There is no law that says that I must communicate with you in English,
but I am impelled to do so by the fact that we are engaged in a social relationship that
requires mutual understanding. Under special circumstances, you or I might use another
language and expect that the other learns it or engages a translator. However, I would
never be allowed to use my individual creative powers to invent my own personal
language.
A second example involves the selection of clothing. Here in the virtual classroom I am
not subject to a dress code, but I do teach this class to a live audience as well and must
face each day with the problem of what to wear for my lectures. Of course there are some
legal constraints to my selection, since I cannot appear naked, but there are less obvious
social restrictions as well. Past generations imposed fairly well defined limits to
professorial dress. We had to wear academic gowns symbolic of our status. At a later
period professionally identifying clothing was no longer in fashion, and we donned the
more mundane adornments of generic business attire, although gowns were and still are
required for academic processions.
In the 1960s, anti-authoritarian values dictated a new standard: jeans and work-shirts.
Now we have apparently achieved a wide freedom to select whatever dress styles we
want, but there are still strict cultural limits. I could not come to class in a bathing suit,
even on a hot humid day when doing so would contribute to my comfort. As a male, I
could not wear high heels and a miniskirt, at least not without creating undesired
attention that would detract from my teaching effectiveness.
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Such conventional meanings and limitations attached to dress are arbitrary and assume
quite different forms in other cultures. Highland Mayan men and women in the
Guatemalan community of San Antonio must invariably both follow a strict dress code in
which everyone in the village wears the same dress. Judging from Western fashion, we
might describe both male and female outfit as consisting of a blouse and wrap-around
skirt, which might cause us to question the masculinity of Mayan men.
While the emphasis on the social determinants of personal behaviour are basic to the
culture concept, anthropologists have tended to exaggerate their influence to the point of
overlooking individual behaviour completely. As such, people are often viewed as actors
in a play written and directed by an extra-natural author labelled "culture" or "society".
(This tendency is called reification, the process of assigning a material reality to an
abstract concept.) Cultural and social forces are manifest only in the behaviour of
individuals, who are subject to influences of a different nature, such as psychological
drives, personal ambitions, and creative imaginings. The anthropological focus on the
culture concept gives us only a partial view of the human reality and we must borrow
from or cooperate with other disciplines to achieve a total understanding of the human
experience.
II. Method and Theory in Cultural Anthropology.
Having covered the main subject matter and unifying concepts of cultural anthropology,
we must now turn to the more specific issues of how anthropologists record and represent
cultural data and use them to address theoretical issues. Anthropology is a science and, as
such, must deal with both the objective collection and recording of empirical data and the
treatment of their findings in terms of an explanatory system.
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Ethnography is the process of recording and describing a culture of a specific
people, such as the Dani, and its traits, patterns, and principles of coherent
integration. Anthropologists produce ethnography on the basis of firsthand field
observation of the people who are being studied.
Ethnology covers the theoretical aspect of anthropology. Ethnologists ascertain
how cultures differ or exhibit similarities through comparison and generalization,
suggest reasons for cross cultural regularities observed, and use these explana tory
inferences to formulate new research hypotheses.
Ethnography and ethnology are interrelated in a complex fashion. Deductive scientific
method dictates that research must be organized to address a theoretical hypothesis that is
derived from prior reasoning. This requirement creates an anthropological d ilemma,
however, since an ethnographer must understand his/her observations in terms of their
meanings within a particular cultural context, which may substantially depart from
theoretical system chosen for interpretation. There are accordingly two ethno graphic
styles:
1. the deductive, or problem oriented, approach, which narrows investigation in
terms of issues and principles identified as significant within anthropological
theory
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2. the inductive approach, which identifies research problems and builds explanation
from the field experience per se, and
Inductive approaches have been more characteristic of the older schools of
anthropology that developed between the start of the century and World War II.
They have resulted in fairly general ethnographic descriptions. Problem oriented
approaches are ty pical of current anthropological research and tend to focus on
specialized subject matter, such as subsistence techniques, economic transactions,
or religious rituals. Anthropologists must still take general ethnography and local
meaning systems into acc ount, however, and must be open to modifying their
research directions and theoretical assumptions if they prove inapplicable or
problematic.
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