Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
1) Meanings of Culture.
a) Etymological Meaning:
• Latin term = cultus, cultura, and colere = to cultivate and care for.
It evokes man’s activity on physical nature: working the earth, the
collective effort to plant vegetables for man and domestic animals
need.
In Latin and French implicitly in German, the word evokes
activity, sustained by needs and therefore by lack.
Therefore, culture is understood as an act of transforming
nature, to serve properly the human ends. (Blondel:43)
• In the Middle Ages the word “culture” was not used. Instead one spoke
about “humanitas, civilitas”.
• In the 17th century: Culture was introduced in relation to natura and for
the development of the spiritual and cognitive capabilities.
Everything that man added to the nature of himself or his
environment was considered as cultural good.
Thus, there was a clear distinction between nature and culture.
• Romano Guardini, nature designates the totality of things - all that exist
before man ever does anything.
Nature: include the earth, the universe, the plants and the animals
and man as an organic and spiritual reality.
Everything that existed of its own.
Culture would be that which man acquires or produces through
the exercise of his faculties: the whole of knowing and doing,
science and technique, everything that through knowledge man
carves out of nature.
It is therefore what man with his intellective-volitive
activity and competence had created.
c) Some Distinctions:
• Material culture refers to the concrete cultural objects that are made by
man.
For example, the stones probably used by the Tasaday, the bow
and arrow of the Aetas, chairs and tables used in school, the
electric computers, nuclear plants, etc.
• Immaterial culture refers to cultural ideas, myths, stories, cultural
attitudes and behaviors. “A difference in the speed of development of
material and immaterial culture might lead to a cultural lag where two
parts of culture no longer correspond.”1
1
Source: Franz-Josef Eilers, svd, Communicating Between Cultures (Manila: divine Wor Publications,
1992), p.22.
2
ibid. pp. 23-24
• Sensible because all the manifestations even the most spiritual is
perceptible to the senses, as poetry, and music.
• Dynamic since it is in continuos development and transformation,
following the nature of the social groups that may be in the process of
expansion or contradiction.
Chenu attributes the dynamism of culture to the fact that the
human being reconstructs truth only through gathered pieces of
knowledge.
• Creative since as an authentic product of the person's genius it expresses
his/her transcending mechanical repetition.
Mircea Eliade, however, has revived the idea begun in Plato that
culture is an imitation of the eternal ideal with his theory of "the
myth of the eternal return."
- The acquisition of culture involves the whole history of humanity and also the
nature of man in the philosophical sense of the term.
Based on the metaphysical perspective between being and becoming.
- Two general considerations on the mode of acquisition:
one re: the emergence of cultures
two re: the acquisition of culture on the part of the invidual.
a. Re: the emergence of cultures: If culture is not determined biologically of
individuals, then it searches its origin in the natural environment. (Nature-
nurture)
Natural environment is conceived as geographical environment in
relation to the needs and the biological possibility of man.
Cultural diversity would be due to the diversity of environment
reflective of their opportunity and of their exigencies.
It is clear that all the cultures take account of the environment.
• Toynbee has seen the birth of the great civilization: for
example Egypt, Sumerian, Indian and China – where its
territories (natural environment) have shaped these
civilizations.
However, many variety of cultures more or less ‘primitive’ or
indigenous in the same or similar geographical environments did
emerge in the same geographical environments.
The emergence of a single culture is factored by many elements.
Heredity and environment are not enough to account its diversity.
b. Re: The acquisition of a determined culture on the part of the single
individuals.
Race or biological heredity alone does not predestine a given group
to have such and such a culture.
The great differences of hereditary based of individuals are by
genetics. However, they only account partly.
The acquisition of culture is partly therefore of the environment
and not totally by way of nature.
Cultural environment consists in the modifications of the natural
environment introduced by the group, and also any new
development in the cultural behaviours of the group and its
members.
From infancy, the individual is shaped by the behaviour and
cultural environment of the group which later become carriers of
its culture.
In this sense, culture is acquired through traditions, that is
transmitted intentionally, or that which we learned since the time
of our childhood.
Tradition in this sense opposes itself clearly to the biological
evolution.
• Theodosius Dobzhansky: "Culture (…) is wholly acquired
by human beings from other human beings, and not only
children from their parents as in biological heredity.
Culture is acquired by imitation, training and learning
(…). Biological heredity does not transmit characters
which a human individual has acquired during his or her
lifetime, but culture transmits only characters."3
Conclusion.
3
Source: Theoduius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving. The Evolution of the Specie (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982), p. 8.
Man as biological organism, man participating to a determined culture,
man as single person, as purely its natural environment, its cultural world
and its personal world
• these are all abstract aspects of a unique being correlative
globally to the whole which is his world.
Murray and Kluckhon, anthropologists: " every
man is similar in the first place to men, secondly to
some, thirdly to no one."
- To say more, that culture is acquired by groups not simply as replica of the
exigencies of natural environment, and by individuals through traditions.
This leads us to the question of the relationship between culture and
human nature.
- Finally, this relation is not only of acquisition of the existing culture on the part of
the individuals who participate,
but also - if it is true that cultures begin and change – to the question of the
contribution of the individuals participating to the culture itself.