Download Towards a definition of culture

Med 7 - Fall 2004
Digital Culture
Towards a
Definition of Culture
At the origen
Etymologically  "the tilling of land"
 from the Latin “cultura”  the
beginning of agriculture.
“Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and
Cain a tiller of the ground”.
Figurativelly  1510  “cultivation through education”
1805  “The intellectual side of civilization”
1867  “Collective customs and achievements of people”
Contemporary uses of the term “culture”
1.
The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs,
institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.
2.
In historical perspective  these patterns, traits, and products considered as
the expression of a particular period, class, community, or population.
3.
These patterns, traits, and products considered with respect to a particular
category, such as a field, subject, or mode of expression.
4.
The predominating attitudes and behavior that characterize the functioning
of a group or organization.
5.
Intellectual and artistic activity and the works produced by it.
6.
A high degree of taste and refinement formed by aesthetic and intellectual
training.
7.
The breeding of animals or growing of plants, especially to produce
improved stock.
Classic Culture
In antiquity  classic culture  also in medieval time.
Culture  similar to “paidéia” or “humanitas”  the
result of the closest approximation to the model (or
models) of a man that can be considered to have achieved a
state of plenitude.
Modernity: the road to mass culture
Renaissance period  culture extended to the activities of the
“mechanics”  those who had to do with technology.
The Culture / Civilization opposition.
Culture in the positivist disciplines.
Positivist ethnology and sociology  culture and civilization are
synonyms  societies mutate through successive states of cultural or
civilization progress  the opposition between the Western world and
the “primitive” cultures  in terms of knowledge, beliefs, art,
morality, law, costumes, etc.
Cultural Anthropology
Edward Tylor (1872)  British anthropologist  the Modern
technical definition of culture  as socially patterned human thought
and behavior.
Seventy-six culture topics  from cannibalism to language.
"Outline of Cultural Materials"  first published in 1938  79 major
divisions and 637 subdivisions.
Malinowski  social heritage is the key concept of cultural
anthropology.
Margaret Mead  culture  the complex set of traditional behaviours
developed by the human race and successively passed through
generations.
Alfred Kroeber
Alfred Kroeber (1917)  American anthropologists.
Culture  the highest level of organisation of the human species  it
includes all the lower levels  biological, physiological,
psychological  but it cannot be reduced to any of these.
For example  language  is potentially present at all these levels 
but it can only be activated in the social environment  through
culture.
If a child does not listen to people talking  she will not talk.
You may inherit the capacity for talking  but not the language you
will speak in.
A superorganic entity
Kroeber (1917) and Leslie White (1949)  The cross-generational aspect of
culture  culture as a superorganic entity  beyond its individual human
carriers.
Individuals are born into and are shaped by a preexisting culture that continues
to exist after they die  close to the Semiotic Theory of Culture  Juri
Lotman.
Kroeber and White  the influence that specific individuals might have over
culture  largely determined by culture  culture exists as a different order
of phenomena that can best be explained in terms of itself.
A dehumanizing denial of "free will?  the human ability to create and
change culture?  these critics would argue that culture is merely an
abstraction, not a real entity.
Culture as an objective reality  is it an observable phenomenon?  how can
include its human carriers?
160 different definitions of culture
Diverse Definitions of
Culture:
Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952)
Topical:
Culture consists of everything on a list of topics, or categories,
such as social organization, religion, or economy
Historical:
Culture is social heritage, or tradition, that is passed on to future
generations
Behavioral:
Culture is shared, learned human behavior, a way of life
Normative:
Culture is ideals, values, or rules for living
Functional:
Culture is the way humans solve problems of adapting to the
environment or living together
Mental:
Culture is a complex of ideas, or learned habits, that inhibit
impulses and distinguish people from animals
Structural:
Culture consists of patterned and interrelated ideas, symbols, or
behaviors
Symbolic:
Culture is based on arbitrarily assigned meanings that are shared
by a society
Contemporary cultural anthropology
John H. Bodley (1994)  “Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and
the Global System”.
Culture also has several properties: it is shared, learned, symbolic,
transmitted cross-generationally, adaptive, and integrated.
The shared aspect of culture means that it is a social phenomenon;
idiosyncratic behavior is not cultural.
Culture is learned, not biologically inherited, and involves arbitrarily
assigned, symbolic meanings.
Contemporary cultural anthropology
The human ability to assign arbitrary meaning to any object, behavior
or condition makes people enormously creative and readily
distinguishes culture from animal behavior.
People can teach animals to respond to cultural symbols, but animals
do not create their own symbols.
Human tools often carry heavy symbolic meanings.
The symbolic element of human language, especially speech, is again a
vast qualitative expansion over animal communication systems.
Speech is infinitely more productive and allows people to
communicate about things that are remote in time and space.
Contemporary anthropological views on culture  descriptive,
inclusive, and relativistic.
Civilization, Progress
and Development
Civilization in Cultural Studies
Miraglia, Law and Collins  "Civilization"  a condition of relative
advancement in human society.
There is no essential threshold at which point a society becomes
"civilized"
A civilized society  usually "marked by progress in the arts and
sciences, the extensive use of writing, and the appearance of complex
political and social institutions"  American Heritage English
Dictionary.
Civilization and culture  Culture precedes civilization  a human
society will have distinct meaning systems, including language and
religious systems, before these systems become institutionalized
politically and socially  the institutions of civilization continue to
play a major role in cultural meaning systems and in the process of
cultural reproduction.
Civilization as a site
of cultural negotiation
When we choose to apply the word "civilization" to a human society of
the past, we are often playing a role, wittingly or no, in a process of
cultural negotiation.
How we perceive cultures of the past can make a big difference in how
we structure present-day cultural meaning systems.
“Civilized" vs. ”Primitive".
What are the modern cultural implications involved when applying the
word "civilization” to refer to one ancient or present society and not to
another?
René Guénon (1924)
The terms “to civilise” and “civilization”  XVIII century  the
economists prior to the French Revolution  Turgot, Littré.
The term “civilization”  enters the modern dictionaries around 1835
 it appeared under the influence of “new ideas” in the XIX century
 scientific discoveries, industrial revolution, trade, “well-being” 
the prophets of modern age  “the age of prosperity”.
The concept of “indefinite progress”  second half of XVIII  the
age of the “absolute civilization”.
Civilization  the degree of development and perfectionism reached
by the European nations in the XIX century.
Progress
Civilization  material and moral progress  “a certificate that the
European world conferred to itself” (Guénon).
Civilization and Progress  two notions closely related  popularised
in XIX century.
In some periods of civilization progress can take place  but we can
not refer to progress in everything indistinctly but to one or other
particular field  a civilization develops itself in a specific direction.
In the same manner there is progress  regress can also take place
(decadence)  sometimes both things can happen simultaneously in
different fields  e.g. in the material and ethical fields.
The modern dogma of progress
In the XIX Century  the idea of progress is extended also to natural
evolution  the “dogma” of progress.
History  a process of continuous and irreversible progress.
Material and moral progress  sometimes we speak also of
“intellectual progress”  often as synonym of “scientific progress” 
experimental sciences and its industrial applications.
Therefore  intelligence is “degraded” by identifying it exclusively
with the action of manipulating matter for practical purposes 
therefore  “intellectual progress” = “material progress” 
intellectual decadence?
Exhaustive culture
Positivistic sciences  each increment in knowledge produces a
correspondent withdrawal of ignorance  knowledge grows as an
asymptotic approximation towards an infinite point of view that
represents complete knowledge.
Complex paradigms  to each increment of knowledge there
corresponds an increase of ignorance, and to new types of knowledge
there correspond new types of ignorance.
Each gain of consciousness produces a shadow zone  “the shadow is
not anymore just what is outside light but, even less visible, it is
produced in the very heart of that which produces light”  Ceruti
(1985).
From positivism to complexity
Morin (1984)  complex ways of thinking can be
formulated only from the moment in which a rupture with
the idea of perfect knowledge is operated.
Complexity is the contrary of completeness not its
promise like many think.
Complex thinking integrates the procedures of simplifying
modes, which are dis-aggregating and analytical.
Culture in cybernetics
In cybernetics  culture  the intergenerational communication of
information.
Other than genetic information
In the form of:



material artefacts  e.g., tools, weapons, buildings, works of art.
distinctive forms of behavior  e.g., songs, rituals, institutions,
organizational forms.
and systems of distinctions  classifications, histories, knowledge coded
in symbols, ideas or beliefs.
Traditional cultures
Tradition  (1382)  Latin  traditionem  delivery, surrender, a
handing down  from stem of tradere  deliver, hand over  (trans =
over) + (dare = give)  in the modern sense  things “handed down”
from generation to generation.
Tradition in the “traditional sense” (with a capital 'T')  a source of
Revelation.
Tradition is called 'unwritten,' not because it was never written down,
but because it was not written down by the first author.
St. Augustine  with regard to the early bishops  “what they found in
the Church, they held, what they had learned, they taught; what they had
received from the Fathers, this they delivered to the children.”
More about traditions  the culture/nature relation.
Culture: mind and matter
The specific culture concept that particular disciplines work with is an
important matter because it may influence the research problems they
investigate, their methods and interpretations, and the positions they
take on public policy issues.
Recently  culture as a text  a complex set of symbols with
signification  which subjects communicate and interpret 
according to the context in which the symbols are used and interpreted
 close to hermeneutics and semiotics.
Culture as a mental process  and its physical substrate.
Med 7 - Fall 2004
Digital Culture
Towards a
Definition of Culture