Cultural Integration: Diversity & Society

The Integration of Culture

• Cultural diversity is vast, with behaviors being ignored, unimagined, or monopolized across societies.
• Traits, though unrelated and independent historically, can merge, leading to unique behaviors.
• Cultural standards vary across a spectrum from positive to negative, even in areas like taking a life, where views range from condemnation to justification based on context (e.g., homicide, infanticide, patricide/matricide).
• Reactions to events such as accidental death and suicide depend on cultural context: from inconsequential to punishable by death and a sin against the gods.
• Customs like self-torture, head-hunting, and varying sexual norms aren't random; taboos on killing are not arbitrary even though standards vary.
• Cultural behavior goes beyond being local and variable, it integrates into thought and action.
• Cultures develop characteristic purposes that shape how people consolidate experiences.
• Well-integrated cultures transform assorted actions into characteristic goals, understood through the society's emotional and intellectual mainsprings.
• Culture is not just the sum of its parts; it's a unique arrangement creating a new entity
• Cultures selectively adopt and adapt traits from surrounding regions to serve their purposes, whether consciously or unconsciously.
• The study of cultural behavior should focus on living cultures, their thought patterns, and institutional functions.
• Malinowski's work on the Trobriand Islanders highlights the importance of traits having a living context, however, it generalizes Trobriand traits as universally primitive, failing to recognize diverse configurations.
• Anthropologists are shifting from studying a singular "primitive culture" to examining various "primitive cultures".

Patterns in Culture

• This shift from singular to plural views of culture is starting to take hold.
• A complete study of cultural configuration is important in modern science.
• Wilhelm Stern emphasizes the individual's totality as the departure point, criticizing atomistic studies and advocating for personality configuration investigations.
• The Struktur school emphasizes on the field
• Worringer highlights the differences in aesthetics between Greek and Byzantine art.
• The goal of Greek art was for figures to embody their identification of their vitality with the objective world, aiming to express pleasure in activity
• Byzantine art objectified abstraction, expressing a separation when faced with nature's otherness.
• The Gestalt, or configuration, psychology emphasizes on studying the whole, rather than its parts
• The "wholeness-properties" as well as the "wholeness-tendencies" must be studied to determine relationship
• There is a discontinuity in kind, as well as taking multiple different and similar recognizing elements that have entered into the two

Cultural Patterns and Historical Interpretations

• WilhelmDilthey emphasized the importance of integration and configuration in social sciences
• Die Typen der Weltanschauung analyzes the history of thought and how philosophical systems are relative
• These philosophies are great expressions of the variety of life, that cannot be resolved into one another
• There is no finality in any of them
• Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West argues civilizations have a life span tied to cultural shifts and cultural achievements
• Each civilization has its youth, strong manhood and disintegrating senescence
• The Apollonian man conceived of his soul's cosmos as orderly
• Faustian man longs for the infinite
• Apollonian and Faustian are interpretations of existence that are alien from one another

Conclusion

• Western civilizations are complex and aren't well understood, also making it difficult to summarize
• The study of simpler culture is clearer, and can make for philosophical justifications
• Darwin used the structure of beetles to analyze biological evolution
• Understanding cultures can be achieved from behavior and thoughts from less complex groups
• Focusing on the coherent organization of behavior in a few cultures can be more enlightening than skimming a large one.