The Concept of Culture Flashcards
1
Q
Understanding and Studying Culture
A
- Defining Culture
- Humans are biological and cultural
- both influence each other, intertwined
- How we study culture
2
Q
Popular vs Academic Perspectives
A
- Cultured or uncultured
- Insider/outsider matter?
- The academic anthropologist doesn’t quantify culture - humans are cultural beings
3
Q
Anthropology’s Unifying Concept
A
- Culture is to anthropology as the gene is to biology
- Links all of the subfields of anthropology together
- But we don’t all think about culture the same way
- There are 100s of definitions of culture.
4
Q
Roots of the term Culture
A
Derived from the latin term cultura (cultivation)
5
Q
Culture as a Toolkit
A
- Theres lots of ways to define what counts as culture
- But why do we have culture at all?
- We are gregarious apes — we’re social beings
- We need to live in social groups
- In a way, culture is adaptive because it provides a toolkit for getting though life together
6
Q
First modern definition
A
- ‘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’ E.B. Tylor.
Component of Tyler’s Definition - Building on Tylor’s definition
- Culture is learned, shared, symbolic, integrative, and adaptive
- It is all these thing — and definitions that only focus on behaviour or ideation or symbols are incomplete
- Culture is not fixed to particular biological population or geographic locations
- People create and reproduce culture (it is dynamic, not static), and culture can — and does — circulate across social and national borders.
7
Q
Other Definitions
A
- “The sum total of knowledge, attitudes and habitual behaviour patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society” Ralph Linton (1940).
- “The pattern of life within a community, the regularly recurring activities and material and social arrangements characteristic of a particular group” Ward Goodenough (1957).
- “Culture is the framework of beliefs, expressive symbols, and values in terms of which individuals define their feelings and make their judgements” (Geertz 1957 American Anthropologist 59:32-54).
- “an historically transmitted pattern of meaning embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means which men communicate” (Geertz 1973: 89).
- “Sets of learned behaviours and ideas that humans acquire as members of society. Humans use culture to adapt to and transform the world in which we live” (Schultz et al. 2012).
8
Q
Summary of Culture
A
- Collective
- Socially acquired (we’re not born with it, but we are born into it)
- Knowledge (language, symbols, concepts, cosmologies)
- Values, beliefs and attitudes
- Behaviours (ways of doing things – from walking to farming to watching movies)
- Materials that we use/alter
- Adaptive and transformative
9
Q
Textbook’s Definition
A
- The text offers a decent, but maybe vague, definition
- Culture is everything a people have, think and do
- Culture is learned, shared and public
- We enact culture with others
- I prefer that culture is everything a people have, say and do
- Culture is observable as collective patterns (actions/behaviours, interactions with things, and understandings/meanings)
Everything we have, say, think, and do
- Material Objects
- Ideas, attitudes, Behaviour patterns
10
Q
Values, Attitudes, Beliefs, and Ideas
A
- Values are abstract concepts of what is important to people in their everyday lives which they act to acquire or maintain
- Values vary, of course, between individuals, but each society also tends to have a set of common core values that most members share.
- Values are important in understanding culture in that they influence attitudes and behaviour.
- Attitudes are evaluations or feelings, either negative or positive, about such things as behaviours, people, objects, ideas, and even ourselves.
- We learn our attitudes as we grow up, and changing them is often difficult and requires a substantial amount of persuasion. This is because attitudes are important to us. They help us make decisions.
- Beliefs have to do with the knowledge of the state of affairs; that is, what one thinks is true.
- Ideas are what we think things are or how things work.
11
Q
Norms
A
- We are guided in our attitudes and actions by rules, mostly unwritten, about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in specific situations, and which we also follow unconsciously. These ideas are known as norms.
- Most norms are established by implicit consensus without being openly expressed, and they govern such things as the appropriate ways to dress, speak, greet one another, conduct business, and so on.
- To accept and follow the norms is to be accepted by the group.
- Norms also function to co-ordinate interactions with others and to get things done.
- Because people from the same culture learn essentially the same set of values, rules, and expected behaviours, their lives are made somewhat less complicated because they know, within broad limits, what to expect from one another.
- In a sense, norms are a form of communication.
- Schema: An organized pattern of behaviour that helps organize our daily lives, that we follow unconsciously.
12
Q
Society
A
- “A distinct and relatively autonomous community whose members’ mutual social relations are embedded in and expressed through the medium of culture”.
- “Any portion of a community regarded as a unit distinguishable by particular aims or standards of living or conduct”. i.e. culture
- “A group of people who occupy a specific locality and who share the same cultural traditions or culture.” But what about multicultural societies???
13
Q
Culture cf. Society
A
- Traditionally, anthropologists studied groups that were both societies (communities living together) and cultures
- But even this didn’t mean perfect cultural homogeneity
- In pluralistic societies, there are dominant cultures and subcultures
14
Q
Culture is an Adaptation
A
- Humans are apes
- Culture is a type of inheritance that enables change at a much faster speed than genetic inheritance
- We are biocultural
- the product of both biological and cultural factors.
- our bodies and their accompanying biological processes are heavily influenced by our cultures.
- Culture provides humans with an enormous adaptive advantage over all other forms of life. Because culture is learned, humans can produce technological solutions to better adapt to the environment much faster and more efficiently.
- Because of the adaptive nature of culture, people are now able to live in many previously uninhabitable places, such as deserts, the polar regions, under the sea, and even in outer space.
- Cultural change is volitional, or intentional
- Agency
- Culture can be maladaptive
- Mo’ai
15
Q
Culture is Learned
A
- Social inheritance (Ralph Linton)
- Members are enculturated to the group (socialization)
- Guided reproduction of culture – humans reconstruct culture for themselves (others correct and guide us)
- Social learning is different from trial-and-error learning
- Although we are enculturated, we can change culture too
- Culture is learned by observing others, participating in the culture, and by being taught what things mean and how to behave.
- From day one we are immersed in a culture where people have certain things, hold certain values, attitudes, and ideas, and behave in certain ways.
