CULTURE

What is
CULTURE?

Ralph Rienz C. Mayo M.M.
Culture is

The act of developing by education and
training

Refinement of intellectual and artistic taste

A particular form or stage of civilization; also
a society characterized by such a culture
(distinct characteristic)

The New Merriam-Webster Dictionary


First and best-known definition of culture:


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

Edward Tylor


What is Culture?

Things we can all agree on:

Culture is not genetic or racial.

Culture is a product of human beings (and only
human beings have it?)

Individuals acquire characteristics from their
culture.

What are elements of Culture?
Language
Religion
Arts and styles
Customs (like etiquette)
Morality? (cultural relativism)
Cuisine (and views on what counts as food and
what doesnt)
Tastes and standards of beauty aesthetic
norms
Family structures and notions of kinship
Attitudes towards sex and gender
Attitudes towards property
Attitudes towards the boundaries of the self

Puzzles about cultures
Are cultures integrated wholes?
We talk about cultures as if they were self-
contained and integrated
There is Olmec Culture or Anassi Culture or
maybe even Black American Culture or Gay
Culture

But is there a single thing that makes up the
culture or are there just features that we group
together under a general heading, but dont
necessarily have anything in common?

Robert Lowie disputed the idea that culture
was anything more than a catch-all phrase he
called it a thing of shreds and patches

In contrast, many theorists suggest that culture
itself links together all the elements, and either
makes sense of them or exhibits laws that
explain them.
(As if culture were the dough that held the raisins
[or chocolate chips] of the elements like
language and arts together.)


Is culture itself an autonomous entity?
Kroeber suggested that culture was
superorganic and used the analogy of a coral
reef: just as a reef is constructed by creatures but
exists independently of them (and outlasts them),
so culture, although a human product, has an
independent existence.
Leslie White, although not a Boasian like Kroeber,
coined the term culturology for the study of
culture as an entity, having its own laws.
The British functionalists, too, although they
focused on society rather than culture, argued that
social structures followed their own laws and
that individuals were affected by them.

Is that right? Is culture a force in itself? Or, instead,
is it simply the collection of what people think at
the time?

Sapir, for example, argued that there were as
many cultures as there were individuals in a
group

Benedict seems to be caught in the middle
between Sapir and Kroeber: she thinks that certain
core values of a culture will be perceived by its
participants as just the way things are, but also
allows that there will be deviants persons who,
out of sheer individuality, reject the status quo.
Would this be possible if culture were a force unto
itself?

How do we draw boundaries around cultures?

If we do think that there are different
cultures, and particularly if we
are cultural relativists and
believe that morality is relative to
each culture, it becomes
imperative to distinguish one
culture from another.


Inside v. Outside

There are two possible standpoints from which to
view culture:

The subjective standpoint of the participant in
culture, the native

The objective standpoint of the outside
observer, who can compare features of one
culture with another

Explanation v. Understanding

According to thinkers like Radcliffe-
Brown and White, anthropology is very much
a science, and should offer scientific
explanations of cultural or social phenomena.
(general laws/ laws)
Vs.
Evans-Pritchard compared it with history,
and Geertz went further, comparing it with
literature. For Geertz the goal is not scientific
explanation, but interpretation or understanding.

We must view culture as a text, and just as
students of literature offer interpretations of texts,
an anthropologist must do the same.

Species v. individuals
Tylor and White saw the job of anthropology to say
something about humans in general. They saw cultures as
stages in the evolution of humans as a species.
Malinowski argued that the key to understanding a society
was to see how its features served certain needs that are
basic to humans as a whole. (However, he did allow that
each culture could meet these needs in distinctive ways, and,
furthermore, created unique culture-based needs as well.)
Vs.
Boas and his followers saw each culture as radically distinct,
not determined by humanity as a whole. You should not
generalize across cultures or say that a particular
primitive culture represents an earlier stage in evolution
from more technologically advanced cultures. The most you
can say is that they are different.
(This is one reason why Boasians disdain a science of culture
as if there were a single thing, or that you can discover
general laws that apply across cultures.)

How important is history?


Tylor had the idea that certain features of
cultures could only be explained as the
remnants of past cultures.

Kroeber argued that the only thing that
determined features of cultures were the
histories of those cultures (and illustrated this
with a study of womens fashions)

Radcliffe-Brown objected to this conjectural
history-making, and his functionalist system
explained cultural features purely in terms of how
they best served the culture now. His view
was synchronic, or atemporal.

Evans-Pritchard criticized him on just this ground:
he argued that it would be senseless to understand
a tribe like the Azande, who have been conquered
and who have conquered in successive waves
without paying detailed attention to this history.
Features of a society or culture cannot be fully
understood without paying detailed attention to
the background circumstances.


What is
CULTURE?

Culture is the
genius
of the people


Merci!!!
Danke!!!
Grazie!!!
Thank You!!!
Arigato!!!
Salamat!!!
Gracias!!!