According to Edward Tylor, "Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired as a member of society."
Enculturation is the process by which a child learns his or her culture.
What Is Culture?
Culture Is Learned
Cultural learning depends on the uniquely developed human capacity to use symbols, signs that have no necessary or natural connection to the things they stand for or signify.
Clifford Geertz defined culture as ideas based on cultural learning and symbols, and he characterizes cultures as "control mechanisms" or "programs" that govern behavior.
Through enculturation, people gradually internalize a previously established system of meanings and symbols, which helps guide their behavior and perceptions throughout their lives.
Culture is learned through direct instruction as well as observation, experience, interaction with others, and conscious and unconscious behavior modification.
Culture Is Symbolic
Symbolic thought is unique and crucial to humans and to cultural learning.
A symbol is something verbal or nonverbal, within a particular language or culture, that comes to stand for something else.
While human symbol use is overwhelmingly linguistic, there are also myriad nonverbal symbols (e.g., flags, the golden arches) that have arbitrary and conventional associations with the things they symbolize.
Every contemporary human population has the ability to use symbols and thus to create and maintain culture.
Although chimpanzees and gorillas have rudimentary cultural abilities, no other animal has elaborate cultural abilities to the extent that humans do.
Culture Is Shared
Culture is transmitted in society; it is an attribute not of individuals per se, but of individuals as members of groups.
Enculturation tends to unify people by providing them with shared beliefs, values, memories, and expectations.
Parents become agents in the enculturation of their children, just as their parents were for them.
Culture and Nature
Culture teaches humans how to express natural biological urges in particular ways.
Culture converts natural acts into cultural customs.
Culture, and cultural changes, affect how we perceive nature, human nature, and "the natural."
Culture Is All-Encompassing
The anthropological concept of culture encompasses all aspects of human group behavior.
All people are cultured, not just those who are formally educated.
Culture Is Integrated
Cultures are integrated, patterned systems; if one aspect of a cultural system changes, other parts change as well.
A set of characteristic core values (key, basic, central values) integrates each culture and helps distinguish it from others.
Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive
Although humans continue to adapt biologically, reliance on social and cultural means of adaptation has increased during human evolution and plays a crucial role.
Cultural traits, patterns, and inventions can also be maladaptive, threatening a group's continued survival and reproduction.
Culture's Evolutionary Basis
The human capacity for culture has an evolutionary basis that extends back at least 2.5 millions years—to early toolmakers whose products survive in the archaeological record.
What We Share with Other Primates
Apes and monkeys, like humans, learn throughout their lives.
Although humans employ tools much more than any other animal does, tool use turns up among several nonhuman species.
Chimps are known to make tools for specific uses in mind (for example, "termitting").
Apes have other abilities essential to culture. For example, wild chimps and orangs aim and throw things. Gorillas build nests.
Hunting was once thought to be exclusively human, but other primates, especially chimpanzees, are habitual hunters
How We Differ from Other Primates
Cooperation and sharing are much more developed in humans.
Unlike nonhuman primates, humans tend to mate year-round. An evolutionary reason for this is that human females lack a visible estrus cycle. Also, human pair bonds for mating (often in the form of marriage) are more exclusive and more durable than those of nonhuman primates.
Exogamy and kinship systems are distinctly human.
Universality, Generality, and Particularity
Anthropologists accept the doctrine known as "the psychic unity of man." According to this doctrine, although individuals differ in their emotional and intellectual tendencies and capacities, all human populations have equivalent capacities for culture.
Cultural universals are features that are found in every culture.
Cultural generalities are features that are common to several but not all human groups.
Cultural particularities are features that are unique to certain cultural traditions.
Universals and Generalities
Biologically based universals include a long period of infant dependency, year-round sexuality, and a complex brain that enables us to use symbols, languages, and tools.
Social universals include life in groups and in some kind of family.
One cultural generality (present in many but not all societies) is the nuclear family, a kinship group consisting of parents and children.
Societies can share the same beliefs and customs because of borrowing or through (cultural) inheritance from a common cultural ancestor. Another reason for generalities is domination, as in colonial rule, when customs and procedures are imposed on one culture by another.
Particularity: Patterns of Culture
At the level of the individual cultural trait or element, cultural particularities (features that are confined to a single place, culture, or society) are becoming increasingly rare because of cultural borrowing.
At a higher level, cultures are integrated and patterned differently and display tremendous variation and diversity.
When cultural traits are borrowed, they are modified to fit the culture that adopts them.
Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice
People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly following its dictates. Cultures are dynamic and constantly changing.
Culture is contested—that is, different groups in society struggle with one another over whose ideas, values, goals, and beliefs will prevail.
Common symbols may have radically different meanings to different individuals and groups in the same culture.
Ideal culture consists of what people say they should do and what they say they do, whereas real culture refers to their actual behavior.
Agency refers to the actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities.
Practice theory recognizes that individuals within a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and influence.
Practice theory focuses on how individuals influence, create, and transform the world they live in.
Culture shapes how individuals experience and respond to external events, but individuals also play an active role in how society functions and changes.
Levels of Culture
National culture refers to the beliefs, learned behavior patterns, values, and institutions shared by citizens of the same nation.
International culture extends beyond and across national boundaries because of diffusion (borrowing), migration, colonialism, and globalization
Subcultures are different symbol-based patterns and traditions associated with particular groups in the same complex society.
Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view one's own culture as superior and to apply one's own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures.
Ethnocentrism contributes to social solidarity, a sense of value and community, among people who share a cultural tradition.
Ethnocentrism is universal—that is, people everywhere believe that their cultural values and customs are true, right, proper, and moral.
Cultural relativism is the viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture.
Cultural relativism can present problems.
At its most extreme, cultural relativism argues that there is no superior, international, or universal morality, that the moral and ethical rules of all cultures deserve equal respect.
Some argue that the problems with relativism can be solved by distinguishing between methodological and moral relativism. In anthropology, cultural relativism is not a moral position, but a methodological one. It states: to understand another culture fully, you must try to see how people in that culture see things. This approach does not preclude making moral judgments or taking action.
The idea of inalienable, international human rights invokes a realm of justice and morality beyond and superior to the laws and customs of particular countries, cultures, and religions.
Cultural rights are vested in groups rather than individuals, and include a group's ability to preserve its culture, language, and economic base.
The notion of indigenous intellectual property rights (IPR) attempts to conserve each society's core beliefs, knowledge, and practices.
According to the IPR concept, a particular group may determine how indigenous knowledge and its products may be used and distributed and the level of compensation required.
Mechanisms of Cultural Change
Diffusion
Diffusion is the borrowing of traits between cultures.
Diffusion has gone on throughout human history, as contact between neighboring groups has always existed and has extended over vast areas.
Diffusion can be direct—between two adjacent cultures—or indirect—across one or more intervening cultures or through some long-distance medium (e.g., mass media, information technology).
Diffusion is forced when one culture subjugates another and imposes its customs on the dominated group.
Acculturation
Acculturation is the exchange of cultural features that results when groups come into continuous firsthand contact.
Acculturation may occur in either or both groups engaged in such contact.
With acculturation, parts of the cultures change, but each group remains distinct.
A pidgin—an example of acculturation—is a mixed language that develops to ease communication between members of different cultures in contact (e.g., in the context of trade or colonialism).
Independent Invention
Independent invention is the process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems.
One reason that cultural generalities exist is that people in different societies have innovated and changed in similar ways when faced with comparable problems and challenges (e.g., the independent invention of agriculture in both the Middle East and Mexico).
Globalization
Globalization encompasses a series of processes, including diffusion, migration, and acculturation, working to promote change in a world in which nations and people are increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent.
Forces of globalization include international commerce and finance, travel and tourism, transnational migration, the mass media, and various high-tech information flows.
As a result of globalization, local people must increasingly cope with forces generated by progressively larger regional, national, and international systems.
Indigenous peoples and traditional societies have devised various strategies to deal with threats to their autonomy, identity, and livelihood.
Anthropology Today: The Advent of Behavioral Modernity
Scientists disagree with when, where, and how early anatomically modern humans (AMHs) achieved behavioral modernity—relying on symbolic thought, elaborating cultural creativity, and as a result becoming fully human in behavior as well as anatomy.
The traditional view has been that modern behavior originated fairly recently, perhaps 45,000-40,000 years ago, and only after Homo sapiens pushed into Europe.
Recent discoveries outside Europe suggest a much older, more gradual evolution of modern behavior.
