* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Download B. A Definition of Culture
Survey
Document related concepts
Political economy in anthropology wikipedia , lookup
Inclusive fitness in humans wikipedia , lookup
Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship wikipedia , lookup
Human variability wikipedia , lookup
Ethnography wikipedia , lookup
Evolutionary origin of religions wikipedia , lookup
Cultural relativism wikipedia , lookup
Evolutionary archaeology wikipedia , lookup
Dual inheritance theory wikipedia , lookup
Social anthropology wikipedia , lookup
Cross-cultural differences in decision-making wikipedia , lookup
Cultural ecology wikipedia , lookup
American anthropology wikipedia , lookup
Intercultural competence wikipedia , lookup
Transcript
. 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. -------------------------------------------- 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 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.) 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. A growth of living cells or microorganisms in a controlled artificial environment. To grow living organisms in a prepared medium or media. 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 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 1 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 2 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 3 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 4 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. 5 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. 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 6 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. 7