CULTURE

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What is culture?
Culture is the way of life.
According to Sir Edward Burnett Taylor: a
complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society.
It is not actual observable behavior of a group
of people, but an abstraction derived from it.

 It is a set of rules or standards which, when

acted upon by the members of a society,
produces behavior that falls within a range of
variance the members consider proper and
acceptable.
Culture is manifested in music, literature,
lifestyle, painting and sculpture, theater and
film and similar things.

Fundamental features of culture:

Culture is learned behavior.
Culture is society equated behavior.
Culture is a heritage of man.
Culture is always idealized
Culture satisfies human needs.

Culture is the production of human society

Culture is the manifestation of human capacity
Culture is changeable through periods
Culture is transmitted from generation to
generation.
Culture varies from societies to societies

Culture has 2 kinds

Material culture: the tangible products of human
society.
Chair, Table, Fan, Freeze, Television, Horse, Building etc.
Non-Material culture: the intangible creations of
human society.
Non-Material culture consists of words. The people
speak. The believes, they holds, values and virtues,
they cherish, habits, they follow, retunes and the
practice they do and their ceremonies, they observed it
also includes our customs and manners, attitudes and
our look in brief our ways of acting feelings and thin
kings.

Elements of Culture
Symbols
Is anything that carries a particular meaning
recognized by people who share a culture.

Language
Is the critical element of culture that sets human
apart from other species. Members of a society
generally share a common language, which
facilitates day to day exchanges with others. This
is the foundation of every culture.

 Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf claimed

that each language has its own distinctive
symbols that serve as the building blocks of
reality.
Further, they noted that each
language has worlds or expressions not found
in any other symbolic system. Finally, all
languages fuse symbols with distinctive
emotions so that, as multilingual people know,
a single idea may feel different when spoken
in Spanish rather than in English or Chinese.

 Values
Culturally defined standards that people use to
decide what is desirable, good, and beautiful and
that serve as broad guidelines for social living.
Beliefs specific idea or thoughts that people hold
to be true.
In other words, values are abstract standards of
goodness, and beliefs are particular matters that
individuals consider true or false.

 Norms
Rules and expectation by which a society guides
the behavior of its members. In everyday life,
people respond to each other with sanctions,
rewards or punishments that encourage
conformity to cultural norms.
the established standards of behavior maintained
by a society. The ways of encouraging and
enforcing what they view as appropriate behavior
while discouraging and punishing what they
consider to be improper behavior.

2 Types of Norms
Formal norms these are the norms which
are usually written and any violation of the
norms would have a penalty.
Informal norms - these norms may or may
have not a penalty.

 Mores are norms deemed highly necessary

to the welfare of a society, often because they
embody the most cherished principles of the
people. The norms that are widely observed
and have great moral significance. Taboos,
incestuous relationships
Folkways - are norms of everyday behavior.
The important role in shaping the daily
behavior of members of a culture. Norms for
routine or casual interactions.

 Learned
Culture is learned, not biologically
inherited.
This is mans social heredity.
ENCULTURATION: the process whereby
culture is transmitted from one generation
to the next. Through this, one learns the
socially appropriate way of satisfying ones
instinctual needs.

 Cultural Universals
all societies have developed certain common
practices and beliefs.
Culture may be universal, but the manner in which
they are expressed varies from one culture to
another.

High culture to refer to cultural patterns that

distinguish a societys elite.
Popular culture to designate cultural patterns
that are widespread among a societys
population.

 Subculture refers to cultural patterns that set

apart some segment of a societys population.
Multiculturalism is a perspective recognizing
the cultural diversity of a place and promoting
equal standing for all cultural traditions.
Represents a sharp change from the past,
when our society downplayed cultural
diversity and defined itself primarily in terms
of well off Spaniards.

Attitudes toward cultures:

Ethnocentrism practice of judging another
culture based on the standards of ones culture.
Cultural Relativism the practice of judging a
culture by its own standards. Cultural Relativism
is to view that each culture must be understood
in terms of the values and ideas of the culture
and not be judged by the standards of another.

 Culture Shock- anyone who feels disoriented,

uncertain, out of place, even fearful, when
immersed with unfamiliar culture.
The
inability to read meaning in strange
surroundings. Not understanding the symbols
of a culture leaves a person feeling lost and
isolated, unsure of how to act, and sometimes
frightened.

 Historical Particularism is to view that

individual cultures must be studied and
described in their own terms and understood
within their own historical context.

CAUSES OF CULTURAL CHANGE

Discovery
Invention
Diffusion refers to the process by which a
cultural item spread from group to group or
society to society. It can be achieved in a
variety of means, exploration, military
conquest, missionary work, mass media and
tourism.

 Counterculture refers to cultural patterns

that strongly those widely accepted within a
society.
Cultural integration the close relationship
among various elements of a cultural system.
Culture Lag- the fact that some cultural
elements change more quickly than others,
disrupting cultural system.

Theoretical Analysis of Culture

Structural Functionalist analysis
Functionalism: the view that a culture is similar to
biological organism, in which parts work to
support the operation and maintenance of the
whole.
Cultural values direct our lives, give meaning to
what we do, and bind people together.

 Social Conflict Analysis

It stresses the link between culture and inequality.
Any cultural trait, from this point of view, benefits
some members of society at the expense of
others.
Marxists, argue the culture is shaped by a societys
system of economic production. it is not the
consciousness of men that determines their
consciousness.

Doctrine of Materialism
Cultural Materialism: an approach to studying
culture by emphasizing the material aspects of
life, especially the natural environment and
how people make a living.

Sociobiolgy
Sociobiology, a theoretical approach that
explores ways in which human biology
affects how we create culture.
Biological Determinism seeks to
explain why people do and think what
they do by considering biological factors
such as peoples genes and hormones.

 Charles Darwin (half of the nineteenth century):

the principles of biological evolution.
Scientific explanation for human origins and
contemporary human variation.
The process of natural selection whereby, the
most biologically fit organisms survive to
reproduce while those that are less fit die out.

Four simple Principles of Darwin

All living things live to reproduce themselves.
The blueprint for reproduction is in the genes,
the basic units life that carry traits of one
generation into the next.
Some random variation in genes allows a
species to try out new life patterns in a
particular environment.
The general patterns that promote
reproduction survive and become dominant.