Lecture and Recitation 2

Question 1

What is Culture definition according to Clifford Geertz

Answer 1

● The way of life of a people
● The social legacy the individual acquires from his group
○ Leads the person to behave in a certain way
○ The background can explain certain behaviors
● A way of thinking, feeling and believing
○ Even if we are not aware of it, everything we do is culture wise, it is affected by our culture
● An abstraction from behavior
○ He puts all the weight in the behavior aspect
○ Our behavior needs to be examined, break the ‘ritual’ and try to see it step by step
○ He sees the individual as a source of information for meaning
● A theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave
○ The common behavior of a group
● A storehouse of pooled learning
○ We store many behaviors and things we learn in our brains, and it is accumulative
● A set of standardized orientations of recurrent problems
○ How the behaviors are being standardized
● Learned behavior
○ The behavior is the explanation of all our culture and through it we can get meaning of the symbols. Through behavior we can understand meaning
● A mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior
○ Culture tells us what behavior is ok and what isn’t, what we can do and don’t, etc.
○ Regulation of society
● A set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men
○ How to behave with our environment and others and how we adjust to it
● A precipitate of history
○ History events that led to all kinds of behavior (like the holocaust)
● A behavioral map, sieve, or matrix
○ Helps to navigate through different cultures
○ Helps to connect different behaviors to see them clearly