Understanding Culture: Definitions and Characteristics

• Culture distinguishes humans from other animals through shared traditions via language and learning.

Definitions of Culture

• Culture encompasses knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits acquired as a member of society.
• Culture is what members of groups do, how they do it, and why.
• Culture is the webs of significance that humans create, analyzed interpretively rather than experimentally.
• Culture consists of contested codes and representations.
• Culture is the "man-made part of the environment."
• Culture can be general or specific.

Characteristics of Culture

• Culture covers all people.
• Culture is learned through enculturation, internalizing systems of meanings and symbols.
• Culture is symbolic, using verbal and non-verbal symbols where a symbol stands for something else.
• Culture is shared and transmitted.
• Culture is patterned, with connected actions, beliefs, and core values.
• Culture is adaptive and maladaptive; adaptive aspects include tools and domestication, while maladaptive aspects include environmental degradation and overpopulation.
• Culture involves adaptation, relating to the environment for survival and reproduction.
• Culture exhibits plasticity, the ability to change behavior in response to environmental changes,
• Culture includes biological adaptations, such as humans adapting both biologically and culturally.
• Culture becomes second nature

Levels of Culture

• Individual: learning from personal experience.
• Family: learning from family members through language and observation.
• Community
• City/Town
• State
• National: shared experiences, beliefs, behavior patterns, and values of citizens.
• International: cultural traits diffusing across political boundaries through various relations and information sources.
• Global

Universality, Generality, and Particularity

• Universality: traits that distinguish humans from other species, including biological (long infant dependency, year-round sexuality, complex intellectual functions) and social (group adherence, especially family) aspects.
• Particularity: characteristics that make a culture unique.
• Generality: cultural regularities that occur in different times and places but not in all cultures.
• Real culture is what people do, while ideal culture is what they say they should do, reflecting core values.
• Core values are key, basic, and central values that give a culture its integral character.

Norms and Values

• Norms are shared ideas about how things ought to be done.
• Values are shared ideas about what is true, right, and beautiful, guiding society in response to the environment.

Culture Change

• Innovation: a variation of an existing cultural pattern that is accepted by society.
• Invention: the combination of existing cultural elements into something new.
• Diffusion: the spread of cultural elements from one culture to another.

Theoretical Approaches

• Theory: systematically organized knowledge used to analyze and explain behavior.
• Cultural ecology: cultural patterns as adaptive responses to survival and reproduction.
• Ecological functionalism: focuses on the environment and society
• Cultural materialism: focuses on similarities and differences among cultures and that this can be best done by studying the material constraints to which human existence is subject.
• Symbolism: interpretive anthropology focusing on symbols attached to ideas and things.
• Functionalism: views society as highly integrated, like the organs of the body.
• Postmodernism: views culture as contested, with people fighting over meaning and interpretation.
• Neo-evolutionism: concerned with historical changes of culture on both small and extremely large-scales
• Neo-Marxism: applies Marxist thought to anthropology, particularly in non-Western societies.
• Sociobiology: explores the relationship between human cultural behavior and genetics.
• Ethnoscience: focuses on how members of a culture classify their world, emphasizing cultural systems of classification.
• Cognitive anthropology: defines culture in terms of the rules and meanings underlying human behavior.
• Ethnobotany: describes how different cultures classify plants.
• Ethnomedicine: describes the medical systems of different cultures.
• Structural anthropology: seeks to decipher deep, underlying patterns reflected in all cultures.
• Symbolic or interpretive anthropology: emphasizes culture as a system of meaning, interpreting the meanings of cultural acts.

Emic/Etic Distinction

• Emic: insider's perspective on how people perceive and categorize the world.
• Etic: outsider's perspective, the anthropologist's analysis of the culture.

Ethnocentrism & Cultural Relativism

• Ethnocentrism: the tendency to believe that one's own group's ways are the right way.
• Moderate cultural relativism: argues that different cultures are essentially equivalent, encouraging respect for cultural diversity. However, extreme cultural relativism can be problematic when maladaptive behaviors are valued the same as adaptive ones.
• Globalization leads to a tendency for similar values to be adopted, easing agreement on moral issues.