Culture origins of the word

Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.^[1] Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.

A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group.
Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change.^[2]
Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.

Cultural change, or repositioning, is the reconstruction of a cultural concept of a society.^[3] Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies.

Organizations like UNESCO attempt to preserve culture and cultural heritage.

Description

Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies. These include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.^[5]

In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the proletariat and create a false consciousness. Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.

When used as a count noun, a «culture» is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes «culture» is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. «bro culture»), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.

Etymology

The modern term «culture» is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or «cultura animi,»^[6] using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man’s natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him, «refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human.»^[7]

In 1986, philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote, «The very word culture meant ‘place tilled’ in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, ‘to inhabit, care for, till, worship’ and cultus, ‘A cult, especially a religious one.’ To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly.»^[8]

Culture described by Richard Velkley:^[7]

… originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau’s criticism of «modern liberalism and Enlightenment.» Thus a contrast between «culture» and «civilization» is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such.

In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is «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.»^[9] Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, «Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.^[10]

The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is «the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.»^[11] Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as «person[s] of worth within the world of meaning»—raising themselves above the merely physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain.^[12][13]

The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago and is often thought to be unique to humans. However, some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complicated, abilities for social learning. It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form.^{[citation needed]}

Change

Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation.^[14] In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress. Rein Raud, building on the work of Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander, has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question.^[15]

Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global «accelerating culture change period,» driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society.^[16]

Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.^[17]

Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.^[18]

Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century.^[19] «Stimulus diffusion» (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. «Direct borrowing,» on the other hand, tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.^[20]

Acculturation has different meanings. Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation. The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different cultures and sharing thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.

Early modern discourses

German Romanticism

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) formulated an individualist definition of «enlightenment» similar to the concept of bildung: «Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.»^[21] He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: «Sapere Aude» («Dare to be wise!»). In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of Bildung: «For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people.»^[22]

In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant’s and Herder’s interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements—such as the nationalist struggle to create a «Germany» out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive notion of culture as «worldview» (Weltanschauung).^[23] According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between «civilized» and «primitive» or «tribal» cultures.

In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) argued for «the psychic unity of mankind.»^[24] He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of «elementary ideas» (Elementargedanken); different cultures, or different «folk ideas» (Völkergedanken), are local modifications of the elementary ideas.^[25] This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.^[26]

English Romanticism

In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the word «culture» to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of «the best that has been thought and said in the world.»^[27] This concept of culture is also comparable to the German concept of bildung: «…culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.»^[27]

In practice, culture referred to an elite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine.^[28] As these forms were associated with urban life, «culture» was identified with «civilization» (from Latin: civitas, lit. ‘city’). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a «culture» among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between high culture, namely that of the ruling social group, and low culture. In other words, the idea of «culture» that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.^[29]

Matthew Arnold contrasted «culture» with anarchy; other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted «culture» with «the state of nature.» According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between «civilized» and «uncivilized.»^[30] According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer’s theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan’s theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, other critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.

Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people’s essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by «the folk,» i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as «noble savages» living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.

In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms.^[31] In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of religion.

Anthropology

Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor’s definition of culture,^[32] in the 20th century «culture» emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially.^[33] American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and in the United States and Canada, archaeology.^{[34][35][36][37]} The term Kulturbrille, or «culture glasses,» coined by German American anthropologist Franz Boas, refers to the «lenses» through which a person sees their own culture. Martin Lindstrom asserts that Kulturbrille, which allow a person to make sense of the culture they inhabit, «can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately.»^[38]

Sociology

The sociology of culture concerns culture as manifested in society. For sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), culture referred to «the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history.»^[39] As such, culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people’s way of life. Culture can be either of two types, non-material culture or material culture.^[5] Non-material culture refers to the non-physical ideas that individuals have about their culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions, while material culture is the physical evidence of a culture in the objects and architecture they make or have made. The term tends to be relevant only in archeological and anthropological studies, but it specifically means all material evidence which can be attributed to culture, past or present.

Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918–1933), where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term Kultursoziologie (‘cultural sociology’). Cultural sociology was then reinvented in the English-speaking world as a product of the cultural turn of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may be loosely regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols.^[40] Culture has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus, there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead, look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.^[41]

Early researchers and development of cultural sociology

The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology (as shaped by early theorists like Marx,^[42] Durkheim, and Weber) with the growing discipline of anthropology, wherein researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field lingers in the methods (much of cultural, sociological research is qualitative), in the theories (a variety of critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities), and in the substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.

Cultural studies

In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism such as Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and Raymond Williams (1921–1988) developed cultural studies. Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). They saw patterns of consumption and leisure as determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production.^[43][44]

In the United Kingdom, cultural studies focuses largely on the study of popular culture; that is, on the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS.^[45] It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall,^[46] who succeeded Hoggart as Director.^[47] Cultural studies in this sense, then, can be viewed as a limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as Western civilization or globalism.

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall’s pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies, and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender.^[48] Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television or eating out) in a given culture. It also studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically, culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason. Watching television to view a public perspective on a historical event should not be thought of as culture unless referring to the medium of television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however, schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends to «fit in» certainly qualifies since there is no grounded reason for one’s participation in this practice.

In the context of cultural studies, a text includes not only written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture.^[49] Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of culture. Culture, for a cultural-studies researcher, not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups)^[50] and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies.^[51]

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies had originated in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly under the influence of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later that of Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as «capitalist» mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the «culture industry» (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.

In the United States, Lindlof and Taylor write, «cultural studies [were] grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition.»^[52] The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom.^{[citation needed]} The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.^{[citation needed]} Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, the mode and relations of production form the economic base of society, which constantly interacts and influences superstructures, such as culture.^[53] Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.),^[54] which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist, and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.^[55]

Petrakis and Kostis (2013) divide cultural background variables into two main groups:^[56]

1. The first group covers the variables that represent the «efficiency orientation» of the societies: performance orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.
2. The second covers the variables that represent the «social orientation» of societies, i.e., the attitudes and lifestyles of their members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, and human orientation.

In 2016, a new approach to culture was suggested by Rein Raud,^[15] who defines culture as the sum of resources available to human beings for making sense of their world and proposes a two-tiered approach, combining the study of texts (all reified meanings in circulation) and cultural practices (all repeatable actions that involve the production, dissemination or transmission of purposes), thus making it possible to re-link anthropological and sociological study of culture with the tradition of textual theory.

Psychology

Starting in the 1990s,^[57]: 31 psychological research on culture influence began to grow and challenge the universality assumed in general psychology.^{[58]: 158–168 [59]} Culture psychologists began to try to explore the relationship between emotions and culture, and answer whether the human mind is independent from culture. For example, people from collectivistic cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress their positive emotions more than their American counterparts.^[60] Culture may affect the way that people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers try to look for differences between people’s personalities across cultures.^[61][62] As different cultures dictate distinctive norms, culture shock is also studied to understand how people react when they are confronted with other cultures. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or they may function differently cross culture.^[57]: 19 For example, people who are raised in a culture with an abacus are trained with distinctive reasoning style.^[63] Cultural lenses may also make people view the same outcome of events differently. Westerners are more motivated by their successes than their failures, while East Asians are better motivated by the avoidance of failure.^[64] Culture is important for psychologists to consider when understanding the human mental operation.

Protection of culture

There are a number of international agreements and national laws relating to the protection of culture and cultural heritage. UNESCO and its partner organizations such as Blue Shield International coordinate international protection and local implementation.^[65][66]
Basically, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Diversity deal with the protection of culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with cultural heritage in two ways: it gives people the right to participate in cultural life on the one hand and the right to the protection of their contributions to cultural life on the other.^[67]

The protection of culture and cultural goods is increasingly taking up a large area nationally and internationally. Under international law, the UN and UNESCO try to set up and enforce rules for this. The aim is not to protect a person’s property, but rather to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. It is also intended to affect the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, region or municipality.^[68][69][70]

Another important issue today is the impact of tourism on the various forms of culture. On the one hand, this can be physical impact on individual objects or the destruction caused by increasing environmental pollution and, on the other hand, socio-cultural effects on society.^[71][72][73]

See also

• Animal culture
• Anthropology
• Cultural area
• Cultural studies
• Cultural tourism
• Culture 21 – United Nations plan of action
• Honour § Cultures of honour and cultures of law
• Outline of culture
• Recombinant culture
• Semiotics of culture

References

Further reading

Books

• Barker, C. (2004). The Sage dictionary of cultural studies. Sage.
• Terrence Deacon (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York and London: W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393038385.
• Ralph L. Holloway Jr. (1969). «Culture: A Human domain». Current Anthropology. 10 (4): 395–412. doi:10.1086/201036. S2CID 144502900.
• Dell Hymes (1969). Reinventing Anthropology.
• James, Paul; Szeman, Imre (2010). Globalization and Culture, Vol. 3: Global-Local Consumption. London: Sage Publications.
• Michael Tomasello (1999). «The Human Adaptation for Culture». Annual Review of Anthropology. 28: 509–29. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.509.
• Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1941). «The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language». Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Honor of Edward Sapir.
• Walter Taylor (1948). A Study of Archeology. Memoir 69, American Anthropological Association. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
• «Adolf Bastian», Encyclopædia Britannica Online, January 27, 2009
• Ankerl, Guy (2000) [2000]. Global communication without universal civilization, vol.1: Coexisting contemporary civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INU societal research. Geneva: INU Press. ISBN 978-2-88155-004-1.
• Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. Archived November 18, 2017, at the Wayback Machine New York: Macmillan. Third edition, 1882, available online. Retrieved: 2006-06-28.
• Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06445-6.
• Barzilai, Gad. 2003. Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-11315-1
• Benedict, Ruth (1934). Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-29164-4
• Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany, Cambridge, Harvard University press, 2007.
• Cohen, Anthony P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Routledge: New York,
• Dawkins, R. 1982. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Paperback ed., 1999. Oxford Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-19-288051-2
• Findley & Rothney. Twentieth-Century World (Houghton Mifflin, 1986)
• Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York. ISBN 978-0-465-09719-7.
• Geertz, Clifford (1957). «Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example». American Anthropologist. 59: 32–54. doi:10.1525/aa.1957.59.1.02a00040.
• Goodall, J. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-11649-8
• Hoult, T.F., ed. 1969. Dictionary of Modern Sociology. Totowa, New Jersey, United States: Littlefield, Adams & Co.
• Jary, D. and J. Jary. 1991. The HarperCollins Dictionary of Sociology. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-271543-7
• Keiser, R. Lincoln 1969. The Vice Lords: Warriors of the Streets. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. ISBN 978-0-03-080361-1.
• Kroeber, A.L. and C. Kluckhohn, 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum
• Kim, Uichol (2001). «Culture, science and indigenous psychologies: An integrated analysis.» In D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of culture and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press
• McClenon, James. «Tylor, Edward B(urnett)». Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Ed. William Swatos and Peter Kivisto. Walnut Creek: AltaMira, 1998. 528–29.
• Middleton, R. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 978-0-335-15275-9.
• O’Neil, D. 2006. Cultural Anthropology Tutorials Archived December 4, 2004, at the Wayback Machine, Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marco, California. Retrieved: 2006-07-10.
• Reagan, Ronald. «Final Radio Address to the Nation» Archived January 30, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, January 14, 1989. Retrieved June 3, 2006.
• Reese, W.L. 1980. Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought. New Jersey U.S., Sussex, U.K: Humanities Press.
• Tylor, E.B. (1974) [1871]. Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. New York: Gordon Press. ISBN 978-0-87968-091-6.
• UNESCO. 2002. Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, issued on International Mother Language Day, February 21, 2002. Retrieved: 2006-06-23.
• White, L. 1949. The Science of Culture: A study of man and civilization. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Wilson, Edward O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Vintage: New York. ISBN 978-0-679-76867-8.
• Wolfram, Stephen. 2002 A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc. ISBN 978-1-57955-008-0.

Articles

• The Meaning of «Culture» (2014-12-27), Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker

External links

• Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology
• What is Culture?

English[edit]

Wikiquote

Wikisource

Alternative forms[edit]

• culcha (pronunciation spelling)

Etymology[edit]

From Middle French culture (“cultivation; culture”), from Latin cultūra (“cultivation; culture”), from cultus, perfect passive participle of colō (“till, cultivate, worship”) (related to colōnus and colōnia), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷel- (“to move; to turn (around)”).

Pronunciation[edit]

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈkʌlt͡ʃɚ/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈkʌlt͡ʃə/

Noun[edit]

culture (countable and uncountable, plural cultures)

1. The arts, customs, lifestyles, background, and habits that characterize humankind, or a particular society or nation.

   • 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 125:

     Castration of bulls was a socialization process that turned a bull into an ox; in this transformation something wild became something very useful; nature became culture.

   • 2013 September 7, “Farming as rocket science”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8852:

     Such differences of history and culture have lingering consequences. Almost all the corn and soyabeans grown in America are genetically modified. GM crops are barely tolerated in the European Union. Both America and Europe offer farmers indefensible subsidies, but with different motives.

2. The beliefs, values, behaviour and material objects that constitute a people’s way of life.
3. The conventional conducts and ideologies of a community; the system comprising the accepted norms and values of a society.

   • 2012 March-April, Jan Sapp, “Race Finished”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, page 164:

     Few concepts are as emotionally charged as that of race. The word conjures up a mixture of associations—culture, ethnicity, genetics, subjugation, exclusion and persecution.

4. (anthropology) Any knowledge passed from one generation to the next, not necessarily with respect to human beings.
5. (botany) Cultivation.
   • http://counties.cce.cornell.edu/suffolk/grownet/flowers/sprgbulb.htm

     The Culture of Spring-Flowering Bulbs

6. (microbiology) The process of growing a bacterial or other biological entity in an artificial medium.
7. The growth thus produced.

   I’m headed to the lab to make sure my cell culture hasn’t died.

8. A group of bacteria.
9. (cartography) The details on a map that do not represent natural features of the area delineated, such as names and the symbols for towns, roads, meridians, and parallels.
10. (archaeology) A recurring assemblage of artifacts from a specific time and place that may constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society.
11. (euphemistic) Ethnicity, race (and its associated arts, customs, etc.)

Derived terms[edit]

[edit]

• agriculture

Translations[edit]

Verb[edit]

culture (third-person singular simple present cultures, present participle culturing, simple past and past participle cultured)

1. (transitive) to maintain in an environment suitable for growth (especially of bacteria) (compare cultivate)
2. (transitive) to increase the artistic or scientific interest (in something) (compare cultivate)

[edit]

Translations[edit]

References[edit]

• culture at OneLook Dictionary Search
• culture in Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by The Keywords Project, Colin MacCabe, Holly Yanacek, 2018.
• «culture» in Raymond Williams, Keywords (revised), 1983, Fontana Press, page 87.
• “culture”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.

French[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Latin cultūra (“cultivation; culture”), from cultus, perfect passive participle of colō (“till, cultivate, worship”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷel- (“to move; to turn (around)”).

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /kyl.tyʁ/

Noun[edit]

culture f (plural cultures)

1. crop
2. culture (“arts, customs and habits”)

Derived terms[edit]

Descendants[edit]

• → Turkish: kültür

Further reading[edit]

• “culture”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Friulian[edit]

Noun[edit]

culture f (plural culturis)

1. culture

[edit]

• culturâl

Italian[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /kulˈtu.re/
• Rhymes: -ure
• Hyphenation: cul‧tù‧re

Noun[edit]

culture f

1. plural of cultura

Latin[edit]

Participle[edit]

cultūre

1. vocative masculine singular of cultūrus

Middle English[edit]

Noun[edit]

culture

1. Alternative form of culter

Spanish[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /kulˈtuɾe/ [kul̪ˈt̪u.ɾe]
• Rhymes: -uɾe
• Syllabification: cul‧tu‧re

Verb[edit]

culture

1. inflection of culturar:
   1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
   2. third-person singular imperative

Culture (Latin: cultura, lit. «cultivation»)^[1] is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of «culture» in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.^[2] However, the word «culture» is most commonly used in three basic senses:

• Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
• An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
• The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization, or group

When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term «culture» to refer to a universal human capacity. For the German nonpositivist sociologist Georg Simmel, culture referred to «the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history».^[3]

In the twentieth century, «culture» emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term «culture» in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.^{[citation needed]}

Etymology

The etymology of the modern term «culture» has a classical origin. In English, the word «culture» is based on a term used by Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations, wrote of a cultivation of the soul or «cultura animi», thereby using an agricultural metaphor to describe the development of a philosophical soul, which was understood teleologically as the one natural highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy is man’s natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him «refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human».^[4]

As described by Velkley^[4]:

The «term «culture,» which originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meanings in the writings of the eighteenth-century German thinkers, who on various levels developing Rousseau’s criticism of modern liberalism and Enlightenment. Thus a contrast between «culture» and «civilization» is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such. Two primary meanings of culture emerge from this period: culture as the folk-spirit having a unique identity, and culture as cultivation of inwardness or free individuality. The first meaning is predominant in our current use of the term «culture,» although the second still plays a large role in what we think culture should achieve, namely the full «expression» of the unique of «authentic» self.

Early modern discourses

German Romanticism

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) formulated an individualist definition of «enlightenment» similar to the concept of bildung: «Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.»^[5] He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: Sapere aude, «Dare to be wise!» In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of bildung: «For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people.»^[6]

In 1795, the great linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant’s and Herder’s interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements—such as the nationalist struggle to create a «Germany» out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive notion of culture as «worldview.» According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between «civilized» and «primitive» or «tribal» cultures.

In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) argued for «the psychic unity of mankind». He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of «elementary ideas» (Elementargedanken); different cultures, or different «folk ideas» (Völkergedanken), are local modifications of the elementary ideas.^[7] This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.

English Romanticism

In the nineteenth century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the word «culture» to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of «the best that has been thought and said in the world.»^[8] This concept of culture is comparable to the German concept of bildung: «…culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.»^[8]

In practice, culture referred to an élite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine.^[9] As these forms were associated with urban life, «culture» was identified with «civilization» (from lat. civitas, city). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a «culture» among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between «high culture», namely that of the ruling social group, and «low culture.» In other words, the idea of «culture» that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.^[10]

Matthew Arnold contrasted «culture» with «anarchy;» other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted «culture» with «the state of nature». According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between «civilized» and «uncivilized.» According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer’s theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan’s theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is really an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, some critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is really an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.

Other 19th century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people’s essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by working-class people) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as «noble savages» living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.

In 1870 Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms.^[11] In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture.

20th century discourses

American anthropology

Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor’s definition of culture, in the 20th century «culture» emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode their experiences symbolically, and communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology, linguistics, cultural anthropology and archaeology. Research in these fields have influenced anthropologists working in other countries to different degrees.

Biological anthropology: the evolution of culture

Discussion concerning culture among biological anthropologists centers around two debates. First, is culture uniquely human or shared by other species (most notably, other primates)? This is an important question, as the theory of evolution holds that humans are descended from (now extinct) non-human primates. Second, how did culture evolve among human beings?

Gerald Weiss noted that although Tylor’s classic definition of culture was restricted to humans, many anthropologists take this for granted and thus elide that important qualification from later definitions, merely equating culture with any learned behavior. This slippage is a problem because during the formative years of modern primatology, some primatologists were trained in anthropology (and understood that culture refers to learned behavior among humans), and others were not. Notable non-anthropologists, like Robert Yerkes and Jane Goodall thus argued that since chimpanzees have learned behaviors, they have culture.^[12][13] Today, anthropological primatologists are divided, several arguing that non-human primates have culture, others arguing that they do not.^{[14][15][16][17]}

This scientific debate is complicated by ethical concerns. The subjects of primatology are non-human primates, and whatever culture these primates have is threatened by human activity. After reviewing the research on primate culture, W.C. McGrew concluded, «[a] discipline requires subjects, and most species of nonhuman primates are endangered by their human cousins. Ultimately, whatever its merit, cultural primatology must be committed to cultural survival [i.e. to the survival of primate cultures].»^[18]

McGrew suggests a definition of culture that he finds scientifically useful for studying primate culture. He points out that scientists do not have access to the subjective thoughts or knowledge of non-human primates. Thus, if culture is defined in terms of knowledge, then scientists are severely limited in their attempts to study primate culture. Instead of defining culture as a kind of knowledge, McGrew suggests that we view culture as a process. He lists six steps in the process:

1. A new pattern of behavior is invented, or an existing one is modified.
2. The innovator transmits this pattern to another.
3. The form of the pattern is consistent within and across performers, perhaps even in terms of recognizable stylistic features.
4. The one who acquires the pattern retains the ability to perform it long after having acquired it.
5. The pattern spreads across social units in a population. These social units may be families, clans, troops, or bands.
6. The pattern endures across generations.^[18]

McGrew admits that all six criteria may be strict, given the difficulties in observing primate behavior in the wild. But he also insists on the need to be as inclusive as possible, on the need for a definition of culture that «casts the net widely»:

Culture is considered to be group-specific behavior that is acquired, at least in part, from social influences. Here, group is considered to be the species-typical unit, whether it be a troop, lineage, subgroup, or so on. Prima facie evidence of culture comes from within-species but across-group variation in behavior, as when a pattern is persistent in one community of chimpanzees but is absent from another, or when different communities perform different versions of the same pattern. The suggestion of culture in action is stronger when the difference across the groups cannot be explained solely by ecological factors ….^[19]

As Charles Frederick Voegelin pointed out, if «culture» is reduced to «learned behavior,» then all animals have culture.^[20] Certainly all specialists agree that all primate species evidence common cognitive skills: knowledge of object-permanence, cognitive mapping, the ability to categorize objects, and creative problem solving.^[21] Moreover, all primate species show evidence of shared social skills: they recognize members of their social group; they form direct relationships based on degrees of kinship and rank; they recognize third-party social relationships; they predict future behavior; and they cooperate in problem-solving.^[21]

Nevertheless, the term «culture» applies to non-human animals only if we define culture as any or all learned behavior. Within mainstream physical anthropology, scholars tend to think that a more restrictive definition is necessary. These researchers are concerned with how human beings evolved to be different from other species. A more precise definition of culture, which excludes non-human social behavior, would allow physical anthropologists to study how humans evolved their unique capacity for «culture».

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus) are humans’ (Homo sapiens) closest living relative; both are descended from a common ancestor which lived around five or six million years ago. This is the same amount of time it took for horses and zebras, lions and tigers to diverge from their respective common ancestors.^[22] The evolution of modern humans is rapid: Australopithicenes evolved four million years ago and modern humans in past several hundred thousand years.^[23] During this time humanity evolved three distinctive features:

(a) the creation and use of conventional symbols, including linguistic symbols and their derivatives, such as written language and mathematical symbols and notations; (b) the creation and use of complex tools and other instrumental technologies; and (c) the creation and participation in complex social organization and institutions.^[24]

According to developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, «where these complex and species-unique behavioral practices, and the cognitive skills that underlie them, came from» is a fundamental anthropological question. Given that contemporary humans and chimpanzees are far more different than horses and zebras, or rats and mice, and that the evolution of this great difference occurred in such a short period of time, «our search must be for some small difference that made a big difference – some adaptation, or small set of adaptations, that changed the process of primate cognitive evolution in fundamental ways.» According to Tomasello, the answer to this question must form the basis of a scientific definition of «human culture.»^[24]

In a recent review of the major research on human and primate tool-use, communication, and learning strategies, Tomasello argues that the key human advances over primates (language, complex technologies, complex social organization) are all the results of humans pooling cognitive resources. This is called «the ratchet effect:» innovations spread and are shared by a group, and mastered «by youngsters, which enables them to remain in their new and improved form within the group until something better comes along.» The key point is that children are born good at a particular kind of social learning; this creates a favored environment for social innovations, making them more likely to be maintained and transmitted to new generations than individual innovations.^[25] For Tomasello, human social learning—the kind of learning that distinguishes humans from other primates and that played a decisive role in human evolution—is based on two elements: first, what he calls «imitative learning,» (as opposed to «emulative learning» characteristic of other primates) and second, the fact that humans represent their experiences symbolically (rather than iconically, as is characteristic of other primates). Together, these elements enable humans to be both inventive, and to preserve useful inventions. It is this combination that produces the ratchet effect.

The kind of learning found among other primates is «emulation learning,» which «focuses on the environmental events involved – results or changes of state in the environment that the other produced – rather than on the actions that produced those results.»^[26][27][28] Tomasello emphasizes that emulation learning is a highly adaptive strategy for apes because it focuses on the effects of an act. In laboratory experiments, chimpanzees were shown two different ways for using a rake-like tool to obtain an out-of-reach-object. Both methods were effective, but one was more efficient than the other. Chimpanzees consistently emulated the more efficient method.^[29]

Examples of emulation learning are well documented among primates. Notable examples include Japanese macaque potato washing, Chimpanzee tool use, and Chimpanzee gestural communication. In 1953, an 18-month-old female macaque monkey was observed taking sandy pieces of sweet potato (given to the monkeys by observers) to a stream (and later, to the ocean) to wash off the sand. After three months, the same behavior was observed in her mother and two playmates, and then the playmates’ mothers. Over the next two years seven other young macaques were observed washing their potatoes, and by the end of the third year 40% of the troop had adopted the practice.^[30][31] Although this story is popularly represented as a straightforward example of human-like learning, evidence suggests that it is not. Many monkeys naturally brush sand off of food; this behavior had been observed in the macaque troop prior to the first observed washing. Moreover, potato washing was observed in four other separate macaque troops, suggesting that at least four other individual monkeys had learned to wash off sand on their own.^[31] Other monkey species in captivity quickly learn to wash off their food.^[32] Finally, the spread of learning among the Japanese macaques was fairly slow, and the rate at which new members of the troop learned did not keep pace with the growth of the troop. If the form of learning were imitation, the rate of learning should have been exponential. It is more likely that the monkeys’ washing behavior is based on the common behavior of cleaning off food, and that monkeys that spent time by the water independently learned to wash, rather than wipe their food. This explains both why those monkeys that kept company with the original washer, and who thus spent a good deal of time by the water, also figured out how to wash their potatoes. It also explains why the rate at which this behavior spread was slow.^[33]

Chimpanzees exhibit a variety of population-specific tool use: termite-fishing, ant-fishing, ant-dipping, nut-cracking, and leaf-sponging. Gombe chimpanzees fish for termites using small, thin sticks, but chimpanzees in Western Africa use large sticks to break holes in mounds and use their hands to scoop up termites. Some of this variation may be the result of «environmental shaping» (there is more rainfall in western Africa, softening termite mounds and making them easier to break apart, than in the Gombe reserve in eastern Africa. Nevertheless it is clear that chimpanzees are good at emulation learning. Chimpanzee children independently know how to roll over logs, and know how to eat insects. When children see their mothers rolling over logs to eat the insects beneath, they quickly learn to do the same. In other words, this form of learning builds on activities the children already know.^[27][34]

The kind of learning characteristic of human children is «Imitative learning,» which «means reproducing an instrumental act understood intentionally.»^[35] Human infants begin to display some evidence of this form of learning between the ages of nine and twelve months, when infants fix their attention not only on an object, but on the gaze of an adult which enables them to use adults as points of reference and thus «act on objects in the way adults are acting on them.» ^[36] This dynamic is well documented and has also been termed «joint engagement» or «joint attention.»^[37][38] Essential to this dynamic is the infant’s growing capacity to recognize others as «intentional agents:» people «with the power to control their spontaneous behavior» and who «have goals and make active choices among behavioral means for attaining those goals.»^[39]

The development of skills in joint attention by the end of a human child’s first year of life provides the basis for the development of imitative learning in the second year. In one study 14-month old children imitated an adult’s over-complex method of turning on a light, even when they could have used an easier and more natural motion to the same effect.^[40] In another study, 16-month old children interacted with adults who alternated between a complex series of motions that appeared intentional and a comparable set of motions that appeared accidental; they imitated only those motions that appeared intentional.^[41] Another study of 18-month old children revealed that children imitate actions that adults intend, yet in some way fail, to perform.^[42] Tomasello emphasizes that this kind of imitative learning «relies fundamentally on infants’ tendency to identify with adults, and on their ability to distinguish in the actions of others the underlying goal and the different means that might be used to achieve it.»^[43] He calls this kind of imitative learning «cultural learning because the child is not just learning about things from other persons, she is also learning things through them — in the sense that she must know something of the adult’s perspective on a situation to learn the active use of this same intentional act.»^[44][45] He concludes that the key feature of cultural learning is that it occurs only when an individual «understands others as intentional agents, like the self, who have a perspective on the world that can be followed into, directed and shared.»^[46]

Emulation learning and imitative learning are two different adaptations that can only be assessed in their larger environmental and evolutionary contexts. In one experiment, chimpanzees and two-year-old children were separately presented with a rake-like-tool and an out-of-reach object. Adult humans then demonstrated two different ways to use the tool, one more efficient, one less efficient. Chimpanzees used the same efficient method following both demonstrations. Most of the human children, however, imitated whichever method the adult was demonstrating. Were chimps and humans to be compared on the basis of these results, one might think that Chimpanzees are more intelligent. From an evolutionary perspective they are equally intelligent, but with different kinds of intelligence adapted to different environments.^[29] Chimpanzee learning strategies are well-suited to a stable physical environment that requires little social cooperation (compared to humans). Human learning strategies are well-suited to a complex social environment in which understanding the intentions of others may be more important than success at a specific task. Tomasello argues that this strategy has made possible the «ratchet effect» that enabled humans to evolve complex social systems that have enabled humans to adapt to virtually every physical environment on the surface of the earth.^[47]

Tomasello further argues that cultural learning is essential for language-acquisition. Most children in any society, and all children in some, do not learn all words through the direct efforts of adults. «In general, for the vast majority of words in their language, children must find a way to learn in the ongoing flow of social interaction, sometimes from speech not even addressed to them.»^[48] This finding has been confirmed by a variety of experiments in which children learned words even when the referent was not present, multiple referents were possible, and the adult was not directly trying to teach the word to the child.^[49][50][51] Tomasello concludes that «a linguistic symbol is nothing other than a marker for an intersubjectively shared understanding of a situation.»^[52]

Tomasello’s 1999 review of the research contrasting human and non-human primate learning strategies confirms biological anthropologist Ralph Holloway’s 1969 argument that a specific kind of sociality linked to symbolic cognition were the keys to human evolution, and constitute the nature of culture. According to Holloway, the key issue in the evolution of H. sapiens, and the key to understanding «culture,» «is how man organizes his experience.» Culture is «the imposition of arbitrary form upon the environment.«^[53] This fact, Holloway argued, is primary to and explains what is distinctive about human learning strategies, tool-use, and language. Human tool-making and language express «similar, if not identical, cognitive processes» and provide important evidence for how humankind evolved.^[54]

In other words, whereas McGrew argues that anthropologists must focus on behaviors like communication and tool-use because they have no access to the mind, Holloway argues that human language and tool-use, including the earliest stone tools in the fossil record, are highly suggestive of cognitive differences between humans and non-humans, and that such cognitive differences in turn explain human evolution. For Holloway, the question is not whether other primates communicate, learn or make tools, but the way they do these things. «Washing potatoes in the ocean … stripping branches of leaves to get termites,» and other examples of primate tool-use and learning «are iconic, and there is no feedback from the environment to the animal .»^[55] Human tools, however, express an independence from natural form that manifests symbolic thinking. «In the preparation of the stick for termite-eating, the relation between product and raw material is iconic. In the making of a stone tool, in contrast, there is no necessary relation between the form of the final product and the original material.»^[56]

In Holloway’s view, our non-human ancestors, like those of modern chimpanzees and other primates, shared motor and sensory skills, curiosity, memory, and intelligence, with perhaps differences in degree. «It is when these are integrated with the unique attributes of arbitrary production (symbolization) and imposition that man qua cultural man appears.»^[57]

I have suggested above that whatever culture may be, it includes «the imposition of arbitrary forms upon the environment.» This phrase has two components. One is a recognition that the relationship between the coding process and the phenomenon (be it a tool, social network, or abstract principle) is non-iconic. The other is an idea of man as a creature who can make delusional systems work—who imposes his fantasies, his non-iconic constructs (and constructions) , upon the environment. The altered environment shapes his perceptions, and these are again forced back on the environment, are incorporated into the environment, and press for further adaptation.^[58]

This is comparable to the «ratcheting» aspect suggested by Tomasello and others that enabled human evolution to accelerate. Holloway concludes that the first instance of symbolic thought among humans provided a «kick-start» for brain development, tool complexity, social structure, and language to evolve through a constant dynamic of positive feedback. «This interaction between the propensity to structure the environment arbitrarily and the feedback from the environment to the organism is an emergent process, a process different in kind from anything that preceded it .»^[59]

Linguists Charles Hockett and R. Ascher have identified thirteen design-features of language, some shared by other forms of animal communication. One feature that distinguishes human language is its tremendous productivity; in other words, competent speakers of a language are capable of producing an exponential number of original utterances. This productivity seems to be made possible by a few critical features unique to human language. One is «duality of patterning,» meaning that human language consists of the articulation of several distinct processes, each with its own set of rules: combining phonemes to produce morphemes, combining morphemes to produce words, and combining words to produce sentences. This means that a person can master a relatively limited number of signals and sets of rules, to create infinite combinations. Another crucial element is that human language is symbolic: the sound of words (or their shape, when written) typically bear no relation to what they represent.^[60] In other words, their meaning is arbitrary. That words have meaning is a matter of convention. Since the meaning of words are arbitrary, any word may have several meanings, and any object may be referred to using a variety of words; the actual word used to describe a particular object depends on the context, the intention of the speaker, and the ability of the listener to judge these appropriately. As Tomasello notes,

An individual language user looks at a tree and, before drawing the attention of her interlocutor to that tree, must decide, based on her assessment of the listener’s current knowledge and expectations, whether to say «that tree over there,» «it,» «the oak,» «that hundred-year-oak,» «the tree,» «the bagswing tree,» «that thing in the front yard,» «the ornament,» «the embarrassment,» or any of a number of other expressions. … And these decisions are not made on the basis of the speaker’s direct goal with respect to the object or activity involved, but rather that they are made on the basis of her goal with respect to the listener’s interest and attention to that object or activity.

This is why symbolic cognition and communication and imitative learning go hand-in-hand.^[61]

Holloway argues that the stone-tools associated with genus Homo have the same features of human language:

Returning to matter of syntax, rules, and concatenated activity mentioned above, almost any model which describes a language process can also be used to describe tool-making. This is hardly surprising. Both activities are concatenated, both have rigid rules about the serialization of unit activities (the grammar, syntax), both are hierarchical systems of activity (as is any motor activity), and both produce arbitrary configurations which thence become part of the environment, either temporarily or permanently.^[62]

Productivity can be seen in the facts that basic types were probably used for multiple purposes, that tool industries tend to expand with time, and that a slight variation on a basic pattern may be made to met some new functional requisite. Elements of a basic «vocabulary» of motor operations—flakes, detachment, rotation, preparation of striking platform, etc.—are used in different combinations to produce dissimilar tools, with different forms, and supposedly, different uses. . . . Taking each motor event alone, no one action is complete; each action depends on the prior one and requires a further one, and each is dependent on another ax on the original plan. In other words, at each point of the action except the last, the piece is not «satisfactory» in structure. Each unit action is meaningless by itself in the sense of the use of the tool; it is meaningful only in the context of the whole completed set of actions culminating in the final product. This exactly parallels language.^[63]

As Tomasello has demonstrated, symbolic thought can operate only in a particular social environment:

Arbitrary symbols enforce consensus of perceptions, which not only allows members to communicate about the same objects in terms of space and time (as in hunting) but it also makes it possible for social relationships to be standardized and manipulated through symbols. It means that idiosyncrasies are smoothed out and perceived within classes of behavior. By enforcing perceptual invariance, symbols also enforce social behavioral constancy, and enforcing social behavioral constancy is a prerequisite to differential task-role sectors in a differentiated social group adapting not only to the outside environment but to its own membership.^[64]

Biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon, in a synthesis of over twenty years of research on human evolution, human neurology, and primatology, describes this «ratcheting effect» as a form of «Baldwinian Evolution.» Named after psychologist James Baldwin, this describes a situation in which an animal’s behavior has evolutionary consequences when it changes the natural environment and thus the selective forces acting on the animal.^[65]

Once some useful behavior spreads within a population and becomes more important for subsistence, it will generate selection pressures on genetic traits that support its propagation … Stone and symbolic tools, which were initially acquired with the aid of flexible ape-learning abilities, ultimately turned the tables on their users and forced them to adapt to a new niche opened by these technologies. Rather than being just useful tricks, these behavioral prostheses for obtaining food and organizing social behaviors became indispensable elements in a new adaptive complex. The origin of «humanness» can be defined as that point in our evolution where these tools became the principle [sic?] source of selection on our bodies and brains. It is the diagnostic of Homo symbolicus.^[66]

According to Deacon, this occurred between 2 and 2.5 million years ago, when we have the first fossil evidence of stone tool use and the beginning of a trend in an increase in brain size. But it is the evolution of symbolic language which is the cause—and not the effect—of these trends.^[67] More specifically, Deacon is suggesting that Australopithecines, like contemporary apes, used tools; it is possible that over the millions of years of Australopithecine history, many troops developed symbolic communication systems. All that was necessary was that one of these groups so altered their environment that «it introduced selection for very different learning abilities than affected prior species.»^[68] This troop or population kick-started the Baldwinian process (the «ratchet effect») that led to their evolution to genus Homo.

The question for Deacon is, what behavioral-environmental changes could have made the development of symbolic thinking adaptive? Here he emphasizes the importance of distinguishing humans from all other species, not to privilege human intelligence but to problematize it. Given that the evolution of H. sapiens began with ancestors who did not yet have «culture,» what led them to move away from cognitive, learning, communication, and tool-making strategies that were and continued to be adaptive for most other primates (and, some have suggested, most other species of animals)? Learning symbol systems is more time consuming than other forms of communication, so symbolic thought made possible a different communication strategy, but not a more efficient one than other primates. Nevertheless, it must have offered some selective advantage to H. sapiens to have evolved. Deacon starts by looking at two key determinants in evolutionary history: foraging behavior, and patterns of sexual relations. As he observes competition for sexual access limits the possibilities for social cooperation in many species; yet, Deacon observes, there are three consistent patterns in human reproduction that distinguish them from other species:

1. Both males and females usually contribute effort towards the rearing of their offspring, though often to differing extents and in very different ways.
2. In all societies, the great majority of adult males and females are bound by long-term, exclusive sexual access rights and prohibitions to particular individuals of the opposite sex.
3. They maintain these exclusive sexual relations while living in modest to large-sized, multi-male, multi-female, cooperative social groups.^[69]

Moreover, there is one feature common to all known human foraging societies (all humans prior to ten or fifteen thousand years ago), and markedly different from other primates: «the use of meat. . . . The appearance of the first stone tools nearly 2.5 million years ago almost certainly correlates with a radical shift in foraging behavior to gain access to meat.»^[70] Deacon does not believe that symbolic thought was necessary for hunting or tool-making (although tool-making may be a reliable index of symbolic thought); rather, it was necessary for the success of distinctive social relations.

The key is that while men and women are equally effective foragers, mothers carrying dependent children are not effective hunters. They must thus depend on male hunters. This favors a system in which males have exclusive sexual access to females, and females can predict that their sexual partner will provide food for them and their children. In most mammalian species the result is a system of rank or sexual competition that results in either polygyny, or life-long pair-bonding between two individuals who live relatively independent of other adults of their species; in both cases male aggression plays an important role in maintaining sexual access to mate(s). What is unique about humans?

Human reliance on resources that are relatively unavailable to females with infants selects not only for cooperation between a child’s father and mother but also for the cooperation of other relatives and friends, including elderly individuals and juveniles, who can be relied upon for assistance. The special demands of acquiring meat and caring for infants in our own evolution together contribute to the underlying impetus for the third characteristic feature of human reproductive patterns: cooperative group living.^[71]

What is uniquely characteristic about human societies is what required symbolic cognition, which consequently leads to the evolution of culture: «cooperative, mixed-sex social groups, with significant male care and provisioning of offspring, and relatively stable patterns of reproductive exclusion.» This combination is relatively rare in other species because it is «highly susceptible to disintegration.» Language and culture provide the glue that holds it together.^[72]

Chimpanzees also, on occasion, hunt meat; in most cases, however, males consume the meat immediately, and only on occasion share with females who happen to be nearby. Among chimpanzees, hunting for meat increases when other sources of food become scarce, but under these conditions, sharing decreases. The first forms of symbolic thinking made stone-tools possible, which in turn made hunting for meat a more dependable source of food for our nonhuman ancestors while making possible forms of social communication that make sharing—between males and females, but also among males, decreasing sexual competition:

So the socio-ecological problem posed by the transition to a meat-supplemented subsistence strategy is that it cannot be utilized without a social structure which guarantees unambiguous and exclusive mating and is sufficiently egalitarian to sustain cooperation via shared or parallel reproductive interests. This problem can be solved symbolically.^[73]

Symbols and symbolic thinking thus make possible a central feature of social relations in every human population: reciprocity. Evolutionary scientists have developed a model to explain reciprocal altruism among closely related individuals. Symbolic thought makes possible reciprocity between distantly related individuals.^[74]

Archeological approaches to culture: matter and meaning

In the 19th century archeology was often a supplement to history, and the goal of archeologists was to identify artifacts according to their typology and stratigraphy, thus marking their location in time and space. Franz Boas established that archeology be one of American anthropology’s four fields, and debates among archeologists have often paralleled debates among cultural anthropologists. In the 1920s and 1930s, Australian-British archeologist V. Gordon Childe and American archeologist W. C. McKern independently began moving from asking about the date of an artifact, to asking about the people who produced it — when archeologists work alongside historians, historical materials generally help answer these questions, but when historical materials are unavailable, archeologists had to develop new methods. Childe and McKern focused on analyzing the relationships among objects found together; their work established the foundation for a three-tiered model:

1. An individual artifact, which has surface, shape, and technological attributes (e.g. an arrowhead)
2. A sub-assemblage, consisting of artifacts that are found, and were likely used, together (e.g. an arrowhead, bow and knife)
3. An assemblage of sub-assemblages that together constitute the archeological site (e.g. the arrowhead, bow and knife; a pot and the remains of a hearth; a shelter)

Childe argued that a «constantly recurring assemblage of artifacts» to be an «archaeological culture.»^[75][76] Childe and others viewed «each archeological culture … the manifestation in material terms of a specific people.»^[77]

In 1948 Walter Taylor systematized the methods and concepts that archeologists had developed and proposed a general model for the archeological contribution to knowledge of cultures. He began with the mainstream understanding of culture as the product of human cognitive activity, and the Boasian emphasis on the subjective meanings of objects as dependent on their cultural context. He defined culture as «a mental phenomenon, consisting of the contents of minds, not of material objects or observable behavior.»^[78] He then devised a three-tiered model linking cultural anthropology to archeology, which he called conjunctive archeology:

1. Culture, which is unobservable and nonmaterial
2. Behaviors resulting from culture, which are observable and nonmaterial
3. Objectifications, such as artifacts and architecture, which are the result of behavior and material

That is, material artifacts were the material residue of culture, but not culture itself.^[79] Taylor’s point was that the archeological record could contribute to anthropological knowledge, but only if archeologists reconceived their work not just as digging up artifacts and recording their location in time and space, but as inferring from material remains the behaviors through which they were produced and used, and inferring from these behaviors the mental activities of people. Although many archeologists agreed that their research was integral to anthropology, Taylor’s program was never fully implemented. One reason was that his three-tier model of inferences required too much fieldwork and laboratory analysis to be practical.^[80] Moreover, his view that material remains were not themselves cultural, and in fact twice-removed from culture, in fact left archeology marginal to cultural anthropology.^[81]

In 1962 Leslie White’s former student Lewis Binford proposed a new model for anthropological archeology, called «the New Archeology» or «Processual Archeology,» based on White’s definition of culture as «the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism.»^[82] This definition allowed Binford to establish archeology as a crucial field for the pursuit of the methodology of Julian Steward’s cultural ecology:

The comparative study of cultural systems with variable technologies in a similar environmental range or similar technologies in differing environments is a major methodology of what Steward (1955: 36–42) has called «cultural ecology,» and certainly is a valuable means of increasing our understanding of cultural processes. Such a methodology is also useful in elucidating the structural relationships between major cultural sub-systems such as the social and ideological sub-systems.^[83]

In other words, Binford proposed an archeology that would be central to the dominant project of cultural anthropologists at the time (culture as non-genetic adaptations to the environment); the «new archeology» was the cultural anthropology (in the form of cultural ecology or ecological anthropology) of the past.

In the 1980s, there was a movement in the United Kingdom and Europe against the view of archeology as a field of anthropology, echoing Radcliffe-Brown’s earlier rejection of cultural anthropology.^[84] During this same period, then-Cambridge archeologist Ian Hodder developed «post-processual archeology» as an alternative. Like Binford (and unlike Taylor) Hodder views artifacts not as objectifications of culture but as culture itself. Unlike Binford, however, Hodder does not view culture as an environmental adaptation. Instead, he «is committed to a fluid semiotic version of the traditional culture concept in which material items, artifacts, are full participants in the creation, deployment, alteration, and fading away of symbolic complexes.»^[85] His 1982 book, Symbols in Action, evokes the symbolic anthropology of Geertz, Schneider, with their focus on the context dependent meanings of cultural things, as an alternative to White and Steward’s materialist view of culture.^[86] In his 1991 textbook, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology Hodder argued that archeology is more closely aligned to history than to anthropology.^[87]

Language and culture

The connection between culture and language has been noted as far back as the classical period and probably long before. The ancient Greeks, for example, distinguished between civilized peoples and bárbaros «those who babble», i.e. those who speak unintelligible languages.^[88] The fact that different groups speak different, unintelligible languages is often considered more tangible evidence for cultural differences than other less obvious cultural traits.

The German romanticists of the 19th century such as Herder, Wundt and Humbolt, often saw language not just as one cultural trait among many but rather as the direct expression of a people’s national character, and as such as culture in a kind of condensed form. Herder for example suggests, «Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache» (Since every people is a People, it has its own national culture expressed through its own language).^[89]

Franz Boas, founder of American anthropology, like his German forerunners, maintained that the shared language of a community is the most essential carrier of their common culture. Boas was the first anthropologist who considered it unimaginable to study the culture of a foreign people without also becoming acquainted with their language. For Boas, the fact that the intellectual culture of a people was largely constructed, shared and maintained through the use of language, meant that understanding the language of a cultural group was the key to understanding its culture. At the same time, though, Boas and his students were aware that culture and language are not directly dependent on one another. That is, groups with widely different cultures may share a common language, and speakers of completely unrelated languages may share the same fundamental cultural traits.^[90][91] Numerous other scholars have suggested that the form of language determines specific cultural traits.^[92] This is similar to the notion of Linguistic determinism, which states that the form of language determines individual thought. While Boas himself rejected a causal link between language and culture, some of his intellectual heirs entertained the idea that habitual patterns of speaking and thinking in a particular language may influence the culture of the linguistic group.^[93] Such belief is related to the theory of Linguistic relativity. Boas, like most modern anthropologists, however, was more inclined to relate the interconnectedness between language and culture to the fact that, as B.L. Whorf put it, «they have grown up together».^[94]

Indeed, the origin of language, understood as the human capacity of complex symbolic communication, and the origin of complex culture is often thought to stem from the same evolutionary process in early man. Evolutionary anthropologists^{[citation needed]} suppose that language evolved as early humans began to live in large communities which required the use of complex communication to maintain social coherence. Language and culture then both emerged as a means of using symbols to construct social identity and maintain coherence within a social group too large to rely exclusively on pre-human ways of building community such as for example grooming. Since language and culture are both in essence symbolic systems, twentieth century cultural theorists have applied the methods of analyzing language developed in the science of linguistics to also analyze culture. Particularly the structural theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, which describes symbolic systems as consisting of signs (a pairing of a particular form with a particular meaning), has come to be applied widely in the study of culture. But also post-structuralist theories, that nonetheless still rely on the parallel between language and culture as systems of symbolic communication, have been applied in the field of semiotics. The parallel between language and culture can then be understood as analog to the parallel between a linguistic sign, consisting for example of the sound [kau] and the meaning «cow», and a cultural sign, consisting for example of the cultural form of «wearing a crown» and the cultural meaning of «being king». In this way it can be argued that culture is itself a kind of language. Another parallel between cultural and linguistic systems is that they are both systems of practice, that is they are a set of special ways of doing things that is constructed and perpetuated through social interactions.^[95] Children, for example, acquire language in the same way as they acquire the basic cultural norms of the society they grow up in – through interaction with older members of their cultural group.

However, languages, now understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speak them. Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group and difference from others. Even among speakers of one language several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. In linguistics such different ways of using the same language are called «varieties». For example, the English language is spoken differently in the USA, the UK and Australia, and even within English-speaking countries there are hundreds of dialects of English that each signal a belonging to a particular region and/or subculture. For example, in the UK the cockney dialect signals its speakers’ belonging to the group of lower class workers of east London. Differences between varieties of the same language often consist in different pronunciations and vocabulary, but also sometimes of different grammatical systems and very often in using different styles (e.g. cockney Rhyming slang or Lawyers’ jargon). Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.

A community’s ways of speaking or signing are a part of the community’s culture, just as other shared practices are. Language use is a way of establishing and displaying group identity. Ways of speaking function not only to facilitate communication, but also to identify the social position of the speaker. Linguists call different ways of speaking language varieties, a term that encompasses geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture.^[96]

The differences between languages does not consist only in differences in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar, but also in different «cultures of speaking». Some cultures for example have elaborate systems of «social deixis», systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means.^[97] In English, social deixis is shown mostly though distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, but also in titles such as «Mrs.», «boy», «Doctor» or «Your Honor», but in other languages such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. In several languages of east Asia, for example Thai, Burmese and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest.^[97] Other languages may use different forms of address when speaking to speakers of the opposite gender or in-law relatives and many languages have special ways of speaking to infants and children. Among other groups, the culture of speaking may entail not speaking to particular people, for example many indigenous cultures of Australia have a taboo against talking to one’s in-law relatives, and in some cultures speech is not addressed directly to children. Some languages also require different ways of speaking for different social classes of speakers, and often such a system is based on gender differences, as in Japanese and Koasati.^[98]

Cultural anthropology

1899–1946: Universal versus particular

The modern anthropological understanding of culture has its origins in the 19th century with German anthropologist Adolf Bastian’s theory of the «psychic unity of mankind,» which, influenced by Herder and von Humboldt, challenged the identification of «culture» with the way of life of European elites, and British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor’s attempt to define culture as inclusively as possible. Tylor in 1874 described culture in the following way: «Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is 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.»^[99] Although Tylor was not aiming to propose a general theory of culture (he explained his understanding of culture in the course of a larger argument about the nature of religion), American anthropologists have generally presented their various definitions of culture as refinements of Tylor’s. Franz Boas’s student Alfred Kroeber (1876–1970) identified culture with the «superorganic,» that is, a domain with ordering principles and laws that could not be explained by or reduced to biology.^[100] In 1973, Gerald Weiss reviewed various definitions of culture and debates as to their parsimony and power, and proposed as the most scientifically useful definition that «culture» be defined «as our generic term for all human nongenetic, or metabiological, phenomena» (italics in the original).^[101]

Franz Boas, founded modern American anthropology with the establishment of the first graduate program in anthropology at Columbia University in 1896. At the time the dominant model of culture was that of cultural evolution, which posited that human societies progressed through stages of savagery to barbarism to civilization; thus, societies that for example are based on horticulture and Iroquois kinship terminology are less evolved than societies based on agriculture and Eskimo kinship terminology. One of Boas’s greatest accomplishments was to demonstrate convincingly that this model is fundamentally flawed, empirically, methodologically, and theoretically. Moreover, he felt that our knowledge of different cultures was so incomplete, and often based on unsystematic or unscientific research, that it was impossible to develop any scientifically valid general model of human cultures. Instead, he established the principle of cultural relativism and trained students to conduct rigorous participant observation field research in different societies. Boas understood the capacity for culture to involve symbolic thought and social learning, and considered the evolution of a capacity for culture to coincide with the evolution of other, biological, features defining genus Homo. Nevertheless, he argued that culture could not be reduced to biology or other expressions of symbolic thought, such as language. Boas and his students understood culture inclusively and resisted developing a general definition of culture. Indeed, they resisted identifying «culture» as a thing, instead using culture as an adjective rather than a noun. Boas argued that cultural «types» or «forms» are always in a state of flux.^[102][103] His student Alfred Kroeber argued that the «unlimited receptivity and assimilativeness of culture» made it practically impossible to think of cultures as discrete things.^[104]

Boas’s students dominated cultural anthropology through World War II, and continued to have great influence through the 1960s. They were especially interested in two phenomena: the great variety of forms culture took around the world,^[105] and the many ways individuals were shaped by and acted creatively through their own cultures.^[106][107] This led his students to focus on the history of cultural traits: how they spread from one society to another, and how their meanings changed over time^[108][109]—and the life histories of members of other societies.^{[110][111][112][113][114][115][116][117]} Others, such as Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and Margaret Mead (1901–1978), produced monographs or comparative studies analyzing the forms of creativity possible to individuals within specific cultural configurations.^{[118][119][120]} Essential to their research was the concept of «context»: culture provided a context that made the behavior of individuals understandable; geography and history provided a context for understanding the differences between cultures. Thus, although Boasians were committed to the belief in the psychic unity of humankind and the universality of culture, their emphasis on local context and cultural diversity led them away from proposing cultural universals or universal theories of culture.

There is a tension in cultural anthropology between the claim that culture is a universal (the fact that all human societies have culture), and that it is also particular (culture takes a tremendous variety of forms around the world). Since Boas, two debates have dominated cultural anthropology. The first has to do with ways of modeling particular cultures. Specifically, anthropologists have argued as to whether «culture» can be thought of as a bounded and integrated thing, or as a quality of a diverse collection of things, the numbers and meanings of which are in constant flux. Boas’s student Ruth Benedict suggested that in any given society cultural traits may be more or less «integrated,» that is, constituting a pattern of action and thought that gives purpose to people’s lives, and provides them with a basis from which to evaluate new actions and thoughts, although she implies that there are various degrees of integration; indeed, she observes that some cultures fail to integrate.^[121] Boas, however, argued that complete integration is rare and that a given culture only appears to be integrated because of observer bias.^[122] For Boas, the appearance of such patterns—a national culture, for example—was the effect of a particular point of view.^[123]

The first debate was effectively suspended in 1934 when Ruth Benedict published Patterns of Culture, which has continuously been in print. Although this book is well known for popularizing the Boasian principle of cultural relativism, among anthropologists it constituted both an important summary of the discoveries of Boasians, and a decisive break from Boas’s emphasis on the mobility of diverse cultural traits. «Anthropological work has been overwhelmingly devoted to the analysis of cultural traits,» she wrote «rather than to the study of cultures as articulated wholes.»^[124] Influenced by Polish-British social anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, however, she argued that «The first essential, so it seems today, is to study the living culture, to know its habits of thought and the functions of its institutions» and that «the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behavior is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture.»^[125] Influenced by German historians Wilhelm Dilthey and Oswald Spengler, as well as by gestalt psychology, she argued that «the whole determines its parts, not only their relation but their very nature,»^[126] and that «cultures, likewise, are more than the sum of their traits.»^[127] Just as each spoken language draws very selectively from an extensive, but finite, set of sounds any human mouth (free from defect) can make, she concluded that in each society people, over time and through both conscious and unconscious processes, selected from an extensive but finite set of cultural traits which then combine to form a unique and distinctive pattern.»^[128]

The significance of cultural behavior is not exhausted when we have clearly understood that it is local and man-made and hugely variable. It tends to be integrated. A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. Within each culture there come into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society. In obedience to their purposes, each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogeneous items of behavior take more and more congruous shape. Taken up by a well-integrated culture, the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its particular goals, often by the most unlikely metamorphoses.^[129]

Although Benedict felt that virtually all cultures are patterned, she argued that these patterns change over time as a consequence of human creativity, and therefore different societies around the world had distinct characters. Patterns of Culture contrasts Zuňi, Dobu and Kwakiutl cultures as a way of highlighting different ways of being human. Benedict observed that many Westerners felt that this view forced them to abandon their «dreams of permanence and ideality and with the individual’s illusions of autonomy» and that for many, this made existence «empty.»^[130] She argued however that once people accepted the results of scientific research, people would «arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.»^[130]

This view of culture has had a tremendous impact outside of anthropology, and dominated American anthropology until the Cold War, when anthropologists like Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf rejected the validity and value of approaching «each culture» as «a world in itself» and «relatively stable.»^[131] They felt that, too often, this approach ignored the impact of imperialism, colonialism, and the world capitalist economy on the peoples Benedict and her followers studied (and thus re-opened the debate on the relationship between the universal and the particular, in the form of the relationship between the global and the local). In the meantime, its emphasis on metamorphosing patterns influenced French structuralism and made American anthropologists receptive to British structural-functionalism.

The second debate has been over the ability to make universal claims about all cultures. Although Boas argued that anthropologists had yet to collect enough solid evidence from a diverse sample of societies to make any valid general or universal claims about culture, by the 1940s some felt ready. Whereas Kroeber and Benedict had argued that «culture»—which could refer to local, regional, or trans-regional scales—was in some way «patterned» or «configured,» some anthropologists now felt that enough data had been collected to demonstrate that it often took highly structured forms. The question these anthropologists debated was, were these structures statistical artifacts, or where they expressions of mental models? This debate emerged full-fledged in 1949, with the publication of George Murdock’s Social Structure, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté.

Opposing Boas and his students was Yale anthropologist George Murdock, who compiled the Human Relations Area Files. These files code cultural variables found in different societies, so that anthropologists can use statistical methods to study correlations among different variables.^{[132][133][134]} The ultimate aim of this project is to develop generalizations that apply to increasingly larger numbers of individual cultures. Later, Murdock and Douglas R. White developed the standard cross-cultural sample as a way to refine this method.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology brought together ideas of Boas (especially Boas’s belief in the mutability of cultural forms, and Bastian’s belief in the psychic unity of humankind) and French sociologist’s Émile Durkheim’s focus on social structures (institutionalized relationships among persons and groups of persons). Instead of making generalizations that applied to large numbers of societies, Lévi-Strauss sought to derive from concrete cases increasingly abstract models of human nature. His method begins with the supposition that culture exists in two different forms: the many distinct structures that could be inferred from observing members of the same society interact (and of which members of a society are themselves aware), and abstract structures developed by analyzing shared ways (such as myths and rituals) members of a society represent their social life (and of which members of a society are not only not consciously aware, but which moreover typically stand in opposition to, or negate, the social structures of which people are aware). He then sought to develop one universal mental structure that could only be inferred through the systematic comparison of particular social and cultural structures. He argued that just as there are laws through which a finite and relatively small number of chemical elements could be combined to create a seemingly infinite variety of things, there were a finite and relatively small number of cultural elements which people combine to create the great variety of cultures anthropologists observe. The systematic comparison of societies would enable an anthropologist to develop this cultural «table of elements,» and once completed, this table of cultural elements would enable an anthropologist to analyze specific cultures and achieve insights hidden to the very people who produced and lived through these cultures.^[135][136] Structuralism came to dominate French anthropology and, in the late 1960s and 1970s, came to have great influence on American and British anthropology.

Murdock’s HRAF and Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism provide two ambitious ways to seek the universal in the particular, and both approaches continue to appeal to different anthropologists. However, the differences between them reveal a tension implicit in the heritage of Tylor and Bastian. Is culture to be found in empirically observed behaviors that may form the basis of generalizations? Or does it consist of universal mental processes, which must be inferred and abstracted from observed behavior? This question has driven debates among biological anthropologists and archeologists as well.

Structural-Functionalist challenge: Society versus culture

In the 1940s the Boasian understanding of culture was challenged by a new paradigm for anthropological and social science research called Structural functionalism. This paradigm developed independently but in parallel in both the United Kingdom and in the United States (In both cases it is sui generis: it has no direct relationship to «structuralism» except that both French structuralism and Anglo-American Structural-Functionalism were all influenced by Durkheim. It is also analogous, but unrelated to, other forms of «functionalism»). Whereas the Boasians viewed anthropology as that natural science dedicated to the study of humankind, structural functionalists viewed anthropology as one social science among many, dedicated to the study of one specific facet of humanity. This led structural-functionalists to redefine and minimize the scope of «culture.»

In the United Kingdom, the creation of structural functionalism was anticipated by Raymond Firth’s (1901–2002) We the Tikopia, published in 1936, and marked by the publication of African Political Systems, edited by Meyer Fortes (1906–1983) and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) in 1940.^[137][138] In these works these anthropologists forwarded a synthesis of the ideas of their mentor, Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942), and his rival, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955). Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown viewed anthropology—what they call «social anthropology»—as that branch of sociology that studied so-called primitive societies. According to Malinowski’s theory of functionalism, all human beings have certain biological needs, such as the need for food and shelter, and humankind has the biological need to reproduce. Every society develops its own institutions, which function to fulfill these needs. In order for these institutions to function, individuals take on particular social roles that regulate how they act and interact. Although members of any given society may not understand the ultimate functions of their roles and institutions, an ethnographer can develop a model of these functions through the careful observation of social life.^[139] Radcliffe-Brown rejected Malinowski’s notion of function, and believed that a general theory of primitive social life could only be built up through the careful comparison of different societies. Influenced by the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who argued that primitive and modern societies are distinguished by distinct social structures, Radcliffe-Brown argued that anthropologists first had to map out the social structure of any given society before comparing the structures of different societies.^[140] Firth, Fortes, and Evans-Pritchard found it easy to combine Malinowski’s attention to social roles and institutions with Radcliffe-Brown’s concern with social structures. They distinguished between «social organization» (observable social interactions) and «social structure» (rule-governed patterns of social interaction), and shifted their attention from biological functions to social functions. For example, how different institutions are functionally integrated, and the extent to, and ways in, which institutions function to promote social solidarity and stability. In short, instead of culture (understood as all human non-genetic or extra-somatic phenomena) they made «sociality» (interactions and relationships among persons and groups of people) their object of study. (Indeed, Radcliffe-Brown once wrote «I should like to invoke a taboo on the word culture.»)^[141]

Coincidentally, in 1946 sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) founded the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. Influenced by such European sociologists as Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, Parsons developed a theory of social action that was closer to British social anthropology than to Boas’s American anthropology, and which he also called «structural functionalism.» Parson’s intention was to develop a total theory of social action (why people act as they do), and to develop at Harvard and inter-disciplinary program that would direct research according to this theory. His model explained human action as the result of four systems:

1. the «behavioral system» of biological needs
2. the «personality system» of an individual’s characteristics affecting their functioning in the social world
3. the «social system» of patterns of units of social interaction, especially social status and role
4. the «cultural system» of norms and values that regulate social action symbolically

According to this theory, the second system was the proper object of study for psychologists; the third system for sociologists, and the fourth system for cultural anthropologists.^[142][143] Whereas the Boasians considered all of these systems to be objects of study by anthropologists, and «personality» and «status and role» to be as much a part of «culture» as «norms and values,» Parsons envisioned a much narrower role for anthropology and a much narrower definition of culture.

Although Boasian cultural anthropologists were interested in norms and values, among many other things, it was only with the rise of structural functionalism that people came to identify «culture» with «norms and values.» Many American anthropologists rejected this view of culture (and by implication, anthropology). In 1980, anthropologist Eric Wolf wrote,

As the social sciences transformed themselves into «behavioral» science, explanations for behavior were no longer traced to culture: behavior was to be understood in terms of psychological encounters, strategies of economic choice, strivings for payoffs in games of power. Culture, once extended to all acts and ideas employed in social life, was now relegated to the margins as «world view» or «values.»^[144]

Nevertheless, several of Talcott Parsons’ students emerged as leading American anthropologists. At the same time, many American anthropologists had a high regard for the research produced by social anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s, and found structural-functionalism to provide a very useful model for conducting ethnographic research.

The combination of American cultural anthropology theory with British social anthropology methods has led to some confusion between the concepts of «society» and «culture.» For most anthropologists, these are distinct concepts. Society refers to a group of people; culture refers to a pan-human capacity and the totality of non-genetic human phenomena. Societies are often clearly bounded; cultural traits are often mobile, and cultural boundaries, such as they are, can be typically porous, permeable, and plural.^[145] During the 1950s and 1960s anthropologists often worked in places where social and cultural boundaries coincided, thus obscuring the distinction. When disjunctures between these boundaries become highly salient, for example during the period of European de-colonization of Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, or during the post-Bretton Woods realignment of globalization, however, the difference often becomes central to anthropological debates.^{[146][147][148][149][150]}

1946–1968: Symbolic versus adaptive

Parsons’ students Clifford Geertz and David M. Schneider, and Schneider’s student Roy Wagner, went on to important careers as cultural anthropologists and developed a school within American cultural anthropology called «symbolic anthropology,» the study of the social construction and social effects of symbols.^{[151][152][153][154]} Since symbolic anthropology easily complemented social anthropologists’ studies of social life and social structure, many British structural-functionalists (who rejected or were uninterested in Boasian cultural anthropology) accepted the Parsonian definition of «culture» and «cultural anthropology.» British anthropologist Victor Turner (who eventually left the United Kingdom to teach in the United States) was an important bridge between American and British symbolic anthropology.^[155]

Attention to symbols, the meaning of which depended almost entirely on their historical and social context, appealed to many Boasians. Leslie White asked of cultural things, «What sort of objects are they? Are they physical objects? Mental objects? Both? Metaphors? Symbols? Reifications?» In Science of Culture (1949), he concluded that they are objects «sui generis«; that is, of their own kind. In trying to define that kind, he hit upon a previously unrealized aspect of symbolization, which he called «the symbolate»—an object created by the act of symbolization. He thus defined culture as «symbolates understood in an extra-somatic context.»^[156]

Nevertheless, by the 1930s White began turning away from the Boasian approach.^[157] He wrote,

In order to live man, like all other species, must come to terms with the external world…. Man employs his sense organs, nerves, glands, and muscles in adjusting himself to the external world. But in addition to this he has another means of adjustment and control…. This mechanism is culture.^[158]

Although this view echoes that of Malinowski, the key concept for White was not «function» but «adaptation.» Whereas the Boasians were interested in the history of specific traits, White was interested in the cultural history of the human species, which he felt should be studied from an evolutionary perspective. Thus, the task of anthropology is to study «not only how culture evolves, but why as well…. In the case of man … the power to invent and to discover, the ability to select and use the better of two tools or ways of doing something— these are the factors of cultural evolution.»^[159] Unlike 19th century evolutionists, who were concerned with how civilized societies rose above primitive societies, White was interested in documenting how, over time, humankind as a whole has through cultural means discovered more and more ways for capturing and harnessing energy from the environment, in the process transforming culture.

At the same time that White was developing his theory of cultural evolution, Kroeber’s student Julian Steward was developing his theory of cultural ecology. In 1938 he published Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Socio-Political Groups in which he argued that diverse societies—for example the indigenous Shoshone or White farmers on the Great Plains—were not less or more evolved; rather, they had adapted differently to different environments.^[160] Whereas Leslie White was interested in culture understood holistically as a property of the human species, Julian Steward was interested in culture as the property of distinct societies. Like White he viewed culture as a means of adapting to the environment, but he criticized Whites «unilineal» (one direction) theory of cultural evolution and instead proposed a model of «multilineal» evolution in which (in the Boasian tradition) each society has its own cultural history.^[161]

When Julian Steward left a teaching position at the University of Michigan to work in Utah in 1930, Leslie White took his place; in 1946 Julian Steward was made Chair of the Columbia University Anthropology Department. In the 1940s and 1950s their students, most notably Marvin Harris, Sidney Mintz, Robert Murphy, Roy Rappaport, Marshall Sahlins, Elman Service, Andrew P. Vayda and Eric Wolf dominated American anthropology.^{[162][163][164][165][166][167][168][169][170]} Most promoted materialist understandings of culture in opposition to the symbolic approaches of Geertz and Schneider. Harris, Rappaport, and Vayda were especially important for their contributions to cultural materialism and ecological anthropology, both of which argued that «culture» constituted an extra-somatic (or non-biological) means through which human beings could adapt to life in drastically differing physical environments.

The debate between symbolic and materialist approaches to culture dominated American Anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam War and the publication of Dell Hymes’ Reinventing Anthropology, however, marked a growing dissatisfaction with the then dominant approaches to culture. Hymes argued that fundamental elements of the Boasian project such as holism and an interest in diversity were still worth pursuing: «interest in other peoples and their ways of life, and concern to explain them within a frame of reference that includes ourselves.»^[171] Moreover, he argued that cultural anthropologists are singularly well-equipped to lead this study (with an indirect rebuke to sociologists like Parsons who sought to subsume anthropology to their own project):

In the practice there is a traditional place for openness to phenomena in ways not predefined by theory or design – attentiveness to complex phenomena, to phenomena of interest, perhaps aesthetic, for their own sake, to the sensory as well as intellectual, aspects of the subject. These comparative and practical perspectives, though not unique to formal anthropology, are specially husbanded there, and might well be impaired, if the study of man were to be united under the guidance of others who lose touch with experience in concern for methodology, who forget the ends of social knowledge in elaborating its means, or who are unwittingly or unconcernedly culture-bound.^[172]

It is these elements, Hymes argued, that justify a «general study of man,» that is, «anthropology».^[173]

During this time notable anthropologists such as Mintz, Murphy, Sahlins, and Wolf eventually broke away, experimenting with structuralist and Marxist approaches to culture, they continued to promote cultural anthropology against structural functionalism.^{[174][175][176][177][178]}

1940–present: Local versus global

Boas and Malinowski established ethnographic research as a highly localized method for studying culture. Yet Boas emphasized that culture is dynamic, moving from one group of people to another, and that specific cultural forms have to be analyzed in a larger context. This has led anthropologists to explore different ways of understanding the global dimensions of culture.

In the 1940s and 1950s, several key studies focused on how trade between indigenous peoples and the Europeans who had conquered and colonized the Americas influenced indigenous culture, either through change in the organization of labor, or change in critical technologies. Bernard Mishkin studied the effect of the introduction of horses on Kiowa political organization and warfare.^[179] Oscar Lewis explored the influence of the fur trade on Blackfoot culture (relying heavily on historical sources).^[180] Joseph Jablow documented how Cheyenne social organization and subsistence strategy between 1795 and 1840 were determined by their position in trade networks linking Whites and other Indians.^[181] Frank Secoy argued that Great Plains Indians’ social organization and military tactics changed as horses, introduced by the Spanish in the south, diffused north, and guns, introduced by the British and French in the east, diffused west.^[182]

In the 1950s Robert Redfield and students of Julian Steward pioneered «community studies,» namely, the study of distinct communities (whether identified by race, ethnicity, or economic class) in Western or «Westernized» societies, especially cities. They thus encountered the antagonisms 19th century critics described using the terms «high culture» and «low culture.» These 20th century anthropologists struggled to describe people who were politically and economically inferior but not, they believed, culturally inferior. Oscar Lewis proposed the concept of a «culture of poverty» to describe the cultural mechanisms through which people adapted to a life of economic poverty. Other anthropologists and sociologists began using the term «sub-culture» to describe culturally distinct communities that were part of larger societies.

One important kind of subculture is that formed by an immigrant community. In dealing with immigrant groups and their cultures, there are various approaches:

• Leitkultur (core culture): A model developed in Germany by Bassam Tibi. The idea is that minorities can have an identity of their own, but they should at least support the core concepts of the culture on which the society is based.
• Melting Pot: In the United States, the traditional view has been one of a melting pot where all the immigrant cultures are mixed and amalgamated without state intervention.
• Monoculturalism: In some European states, culture is very closely linked to nationalism, thus government policy is to assimilate immigrants, although recent increases in migration have led many European states to experiment with forms of multiculturalism.
• Multiculturalism: A policy that immigrants and others should preserve their cultures with the different cultures interacting peacefully within one nation.

The way nation states treat immigrant cultures rarely falls neatly into one or another of the above approaches. The degree of difference with the host culture (i.e., «foreignness»), the number of immigrants, attitudes of the resident population, the type of government policies that are enacted, and the effectiveness of those policies all make it difficult to generalize about the effects. Similarly with other subcultures within a society, attitudes of the mainstream population and communications between various cultural groups play a major role in determining outcomes. The study of cultures within a society is complex and research must take into account a myriad of variables.

Cultural studies

In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism, such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, developed Cultural Studies. Following nineteenth century Romantics, they identified «culture» with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). Nevertheless, they understood patterns of consumption and leisure to be determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production.^[183][184] In the United States, «Cultural Studies» focuses largely on the study of popular culture, that is, the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. The term was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall’s pioneering work, along with his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender.^{[citation needed]} Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. This field studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Recently, as capitalism has spread throughout the world (a process called globalization), cultural studies has begun to analyse local and global forms of resistance to Western hegemony.^{[citation needed]}

In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not only includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture.^{[citation needed]} Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of «culture». «Culture» for a cultural studies researcher not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups)^[185] and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the discipline of comparative literature and cultural studies.^{[citation needed]}

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field’s inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies was developed in the 1950s and 1960s mainly under the influence first of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as ‘capitalist’ mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the «culture industry» (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.

Whereas in the United States Lindlof & Taylor say that «cultural studies was grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition».^[186] The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom.^{[citation needed]} The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.^{[citation needed]} Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production (the economic base) essentially control a culture.^{[citation needed]} Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view is best exemplified by the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is influential voices in the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.^{[citation needed]}

Cultural change

Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global «accelerating culture change period», driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors.

Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.^[187] (See structuration.)

Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.^[188]

Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, hamburgers, mundane in the United States, seemed exotic when introduced into China. «Stimulus diffusion» (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. «Direct Borrowing» on the other hand tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.

Acculturation has different meanings, but in this context refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with those of another, such has happened to certain Native American tribes and to many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation.

See also

• Counterculture
• Creative Culture
• Cross-cultural communication – Intercultural competence
• Cultural bias – Cultural imperialism – Ethnocentrism
• Cultural dissonance
• Cultural Institutions Studies
• Culture theory
• Culture war
• Interculturality
• Outline of culture
• Sociocultural evolution
• Urban culture

Notes

References

External links

• Centre for Intercultural Learning
• Detailed article on defining culture
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas «culture» and «civilization» in modern times
• Global Culture Essays on global issues and their impact on culture
• Centre for cultural technologies
• Reflections on the Politics of Culture by Michael Parenti
• What is Culture? – Washington State University
• Define Culture Compilation of 100+ user submitted definitions of culture from around the globe
• Concepts of Culture in Cross-National and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

In the broadest sense, culture denotes everything that humans produce themselves in a creative way — in contrast to nature that they have not created or changed . According to the broader definition, cultural achievements are all formative transformations of a given material, for example in technology , agriculture , food preparation or fine arts , but also spiritual structures (such as the cultura animi «spiritual culture» in Cicero) or » subcultures » such as music , languages , morals , Religion , law , economics and science . The South African medical anthropologist Cecil Helman defined culture in 1984 in terms of human behavior: it is a system of “guidelines” for the individual as a member of a particular society.

In the course of history, the concept of culture has repeatedly been determined from different sides. Depending on the circumstances, the term culture expresses the lively self- image and the zeitgeist of an era , the status or claim to power of certain social classes or also scientific and philosophical-anthropological views. The range of meanings is correspondingly large and ranges from a purely descriptive ( descriptive ) use (“the culture of that time”) to a prescriptive ( normative ) use, if the latter is associated with claims to be met with the concept of culture.

The concept of culture can refer to a social group of people who are assigned a certain culture, or to what all people should have (see the concept of culture in comparative social research ). Similarities of a group of people or of the whole of humanity then serve to distinguish this group from others or between humans and animals .

There are a number of agreements and laws with regard to the protection of cultural property . The UNESCO and its partner organizations to coordinate international protection and local reactions.

Concept history

Word origin

The word «culture» is the Germanization of the Latin word cultura («development, processing, order, care»), which is derived from the Latin colere («cultivate, maintain, cultivate, train»). The terms colony and cult have the same origin . “Culture” has been documented in the German language since the end of the 17th century and has been used from the beginning to refer to both soil cultivation (agricultural cultivation) and the “care of spiritual goods” (spiritual culture, i.e. care of the language or a science). In the 19th century, the Nuremberg industrial and cultural association also used the word culture in the sense of «soil culture». Today, the term’s agricultural reference is only widespread in terms such as cultivated land for arable land or cultivation for reclamation ; related meanings such as cell and bacterial cultures are also used in biology . In the 20th century, cultural is used as an adjective, but with a clear spiritual focus.

The origin of the Latin word colere is derived from the Indo-European root kuel- for “[to] turn, turn”, so that the original meaning is probably to be sought in the sense of “busy being”.

Antiquity

Pliny the Elder did not yet coined the word “culture” for a term, but did differentiate between terrenus (belonging to the earth) and facticius (artificially produced). In Latin, the term cultura is applied both to the personal culture of individuals and to the culture of certain historical periods. So characterized z. B. Cicero ‘s philosophy as cultura animi , that is, as care of the spirit. In addition to culture as a material culture with Pliny, there is also culture as a processing of one’s own personality.

Modern times

Immanuel Kant’s determination of the human being as a creator of culture takes place in relation to nature. For Kant, human beings and culture are the ultimate ends of nature. With this end of nature, the moral ability of the human being to the categorical imperative is connected: “Act only according to the maxim through which you can at the same time want it to become a general law.” To recognize such a general law as “ belongs to the idea of morality nor about culture. ”It is this guiding principle of moral action that separates man from nature on the one hand, and on the other hand stands as the ultimate goal of nature in its service to respect and pursue this goal. Without this moral principle, humans can only develop technologically, which leads to civilization .

The anthropologist Edward Tylor determined culture in 1871 (“Primitive Culture”) taking up Darwin’s theory of evolution and thus gave a first definition based on the findings of natural science: “Culture or civilization in the broadest ethnographic sense is the epitome of knowledge, belief, art, morality , Law, custom and all other abilities and habits that man has acquired as a member of society . »

According to Albert Schweitzer, culture ultimately strives for “the spiritual and moral perfection of the individual”: “The struggle for existence is twofold. Man has to assert himself in nature and against nature and also among people and against people. The struggle for existence is diminished by the fact that the rule of reason extends both over nature and over human, stinking nature in the greatest possible and most expedient manner. So culture is essentially twofold. It is realized in the rule of reason over the forces of nature and in the rule of reason over human attitudes. «

The French cultural philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss compared the concept of language with culture: culture behaves like language: only an outsider can recognize and interpret the rules and structures on which it is based.

Culture and civilization

In the German-speaking area in particular, the general understanding of the term has developed a distinction between culture and civilization , while in the English-speaking area, for example, only one word was used for «culture» (civilization) for a long time (compare the title of the book by Samuel P. Huntington Clash of Civilizations , German clash of civilizations ). It is only in the last few decades that culture has also become more common, without, however, referring to any contrast to civilization .

The earliest formulation of this contrast in the German language comes from Immanuel Kant:

For Kant, “civilization” means that people educate themselves to be with one another, adopt manners and know how to organize their everyday life comfortably and practically, and that perhaps through science and technology they produce vehicles, hospitals and refrigerators. However, all of this is not enough for them to “have culture”, although it could serve culture. Because for Kant the condition for culture is the “idea of ​​morality” (the categorical imperative ), i. This means that people consciously direct their actions towards ends that are in themselves good .

Wilhelm von Humboldt connects with this by referring the contrast to the external and internal of the human being: the formation and development of the personality are moments of culture, while purely practical and technical things belong to the realm of civilization.

For Oswald Spengler , civilization has negative connotations when it denotes the inevitable dissolution of culture. Spengler saw cultures as living organisms which, in analogy to the development of the human individual, go through a youth, a manhood and an old age and then perish. Civilization corresponds to the last of these stages, so civilized man no longer has a future culture. Civilizations “are a degree; they follow becoming as what has become, life as death, development as rigidity […] They are an end [sc. of culture], irrevocable, but with the utmost necessity they have been achieved again and again. »

Helmuth Plessner even considers the German word “culture” to be almost impossible to translate. He sees a religious function in its «empathic» meaning:

Cultural nation and state nation

The concept of the cultural nation emerged in the 19th century as an expression of an understanding of the nation represented less by politics and military power than by cultural characteristics. The historian Friedrich Meinecke saw in the cultural similarities that hold a nation together, in addition to common “cultural property” (e.g. the Weimar Classic ), above all religious similarities. There is still no talk of nationality in this context.

While at the beginning there was talk of a cultural nation in a critical sense compared to the state nation, since the German national feeling (from language, traditions, culture and religion) was not reflected by political particularism , the term changed under the influence of folk ideas: As a basis a cultural nation was now understood to be a “people” in the sense of a “community of descent”. This concept of a people, in turn, had a critical effect on the political and legal concept of the state people, which represents the entirety of all citizens of a state.

Modern developments

Systems theory approach

For the systems theorist Niklas Luhmann , from a historical perspective, culture only begins when a society succeeds not only in making observations of people and their environment, but also in developing the forms and perspectives of observing the observations . Such a society is not only highly differentiated into experts culturally and in terms of division of labor, but has also trained second-level experts. The latter examine the modes of observation of the former and help to understand them in their contingency; That is, only now are the contents of culture understood as something made and not as an ability given to humans. Culture can thus be deconstructed and reconstructed.

«Historical Anthropology»

A current field of work, which could be described as «historically oriented anthropology «, examines the determinations of «human nature» made in the course of history. The order of the senses , for example, shows that their number cannot be clearly defined at five, that they appear partly hierarchically and partly equally. This means that the senses also have a story if they are culturally coded. For example, a preference for the sense of sight over other senses is evident for Western culture. Further fields of historical anthropology are:

• A history of the soul and feelings emerges from the relationship between the spatial-material external world and the interiority of the human subject without expansion . It is precisely in this context that views can develop which feelings should not be understood as inner states of the individual, but rather spatially extended atmospheres.
• The historical relationship between “the” health and “the” diseases can be used to investigate how what is considered healthy and what is viewed as pathological is shifting again and again without a fixed boundary being recognizable here. Rather, every definition is culture-dependent, which is particularly evident in the case of mental illnesses, as evidenced by the variable and indefinite use of the terms «nervousness», «hysteria» and «hypochondria» in the period from the 18th to the 20th century.
• The gender relationship is now being investigated in a large number of scientific disciplines, with gender studies in particular devoting itself to it . The coming of the Anglo-Saxon distinction between biological sex (Engl. Sex ) and gender role (Engl. Gender ) has prevailed in the German-speaking area. Above all, Judith Butler pointed out that the biological gender is subject to cultural interpretation and thus “typically male” or “typically female” characteristics cannot be defined: gender roles and “gender” are constructed .

Variants and limits of the concept of culture

The Germanist and professor for intercultural business communication Jürgen Bolten differentiates compositions with the root word cult in terms of their meaning in four clearly distinguishable groups. He encompasses two of them under a broad concept of culture: (1.) Culture as living environment or ethnicity, in the sense of: to live or to be resident; (2.) Culture as biological cultures, in the sense of: cultivating, practicing agriculture. He includes two more under a narrow cultural term: (3.) Culture as «high» culture, in the sense of: to maintain, adorn, revere, and (4.) Culture as a cult or cult, in the sense of: to worship, adore, to celebrate. Bolten attributes the narrow concept of culture to the separation of culture and civilization, which was mainly represented by Immanuel Kant and later by Oswald Spengler (see also the section on “Culture and Civilization” ).

Other authors refer to Cicero , Herder , von Humboldt with regard to the development of the concept of culture in German-speaking countries .

Given the large number of different uses of the word «culture» and the variety of competing scientific definitions, it seems sensible, instead of a better understanding of culture of many cultural concept en speaking. As early as 1952, 170 different definitions were counted. To a certain extent, culture is a variable that depends on the various framework conditions of various subject areas and their perspectives. The cultural philosopher Egon Friedell advocated the following provocative thesis:

Contrasting culture and nature

The concept that makes the emergence of culture understandable and clearly delimits the term contrasts culture with nature. This defines everything as a culture that humans change and produce on their own initiative, while the term nature encompasses that which is by itself as it is.

However, with «natural» something can mean always that by culture techniques such as art and science described was. The limits of what “nature” designates are being expanded more and more through human research: the electron microscope , for example, makes the smallest particles visible, while the Hubble telescope shows the large cosmic scales. However, if nature can only be perceived through cultural technology, it ultimately seems that “everything is culture”. This makes the idea that culture is always dealing with the other , the new and the alien, increasingly implausible , because if everything is culture, then it is unclear what is actually meant by the term.

If culture is still to be understood as coping with the other, nature, then nature must not be thought of as spatially opposing humans, but the other is inscribed in culture itself . The other does not simply exist alongside or outside of the culture, but clings to it like a downside. “Nature” would then be a borderline term that encompasses “something” that is described and worked on by humans, but which at the same time means that this “something” is never directly accessible. There is no such thing as “nature in itself”, only descriptions of nature. The exact mathematical physics is only one possible form of the representation of nature, although the mathematical description of nature can gradually approach the essence of “nature” within its given logic. Ernst Cassirer described this changed conception of nature as the transition from substance to function in his 1910 treatise Substance Concept and Function Concept.

The concept of culture outside of Western thought

In principle, the juxtaposition of nature and culture is a typical European order pattern. Ethnology has shown that there is no world view that is understood by all people as it were. The dichotomy nature ↔ culture, which is taken for granted in the “modern world” , does not exist in all peoples. For example, Amazon indigenous people also regard animals, plants, natural phenomena and nature spirits as human beings . According to their imagination, they exist temporarily in a different form, but are also full-fledged «cultural beings».

Normative use of the term

Various questions are raised when the term “culture” is used not only descriptively (descriptively) but also normatively (prescriptively). In this sense, “culture” means not only what is actually found, but also what should be , for example non- violence .

A normative use of the term culture is not uncommon in everyday language, as one hears, for example, that a “culture of violence” is only talked about in a pejorative way — such a culture would be an “unculture”. So often moral standards are connected with the concept of culture. However, this creates the difficulty of determining what can be understood by “violence” and when it can be avoided. Not only do different cultures have different understandings of when an act is violent, but also of what is injured by the violence in the first place.

The concept of culture in biology

However much an organism adapts to its environment: an inheritance by learning or physical adaptation of acquired characteristics is considered impossible because the in genome -scale innate characteristics — apart from a few epigenetic factors whose influence width but was already enshrined in the genome — are not changed by environmental influences. Nevertheless, it is possible that an animal passes on characteristics acquired by its parents through imprinting or learning to its own offspring. “The non-genetic transmission of information from one generation to the next is commonly referred to as a cultural tradition .” In behavioral biology , such cultural traditions are often referred to as culture .

There are cultural traditions for birds, for example, in which the young animals take over the typical song from their parents by way of imprinting. The use of tools in animals also often corresponds to the definition of cultural tradition . The most far-reaching examples are found in apes and the crows and ravens .

Emergence of culture

Biological prerequisites in humans and environmental conditions

The self-confidence of the psychic acts opens up the changeability of oneself and the world to man: Things are not given immutable, but an understanding of the possible develops . The symbolic representation allows possibilities to be played out and things to be combined. Man has an open relationship to his environment, which does not linearly determine him and his actions (pre-determined), but can react freely to them. The favorable climatic conditions of the last 10,000 years (geological section of the Holocene ) have made it possible for civilizations to develop since the last ice age. Through agriculture, division of labor and population growth (see Neolithic Revolution ), the societies that produced science and the arts were able to differentiate themselves.

Culture as coping

The question of the basic needs

In relation to the natural environment, humans are faced with many challenges and dangers and, like every living being, are dependent on satisfying their biological-physiological needs from their natural environment. For example, Bronisław Malinowski tried , in historical retrospect, to reveal the challenges posed to people as “ basic human needs ”. On the basis of historical comparisons, he tried to uncover a finite number of such basic needs, from which all human activities could then be explained. Also functionalist — evolutionary theories of culture as seen in the various culture techniques alone means that serve the purpose of survival. Culture would then be the satisfaction of the same human needs.

However, it cannot simply be assumed that cultural products merely satisfy basic human needs. This becomes clear, for example, in the modern transport system: New technical means of transport not only make it possible to cover greater distances, but they also make it socially necessary to cover ever greater distances. Therefore, it cannot simply be said that the airplane, for example, satisfies a basic need for intercontinental flights. Cultural institutions are therefore not only a response to demands from nature or natural needs, but also a response to structures that they themselves have created; they require new institutions (Malinowski), which is why they are essentially self-referential. The modern cultural industry , for example, does not serve any vital needs with music , cinema and television , but rather represents a world of its own that creates certain needs in the first place.

The fact that cultural achievements are accompanied by a joy in discovering, in inventing and creating something new, which is not aimed at direct benefit, can be clearly seen in the work of the cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirers and his examination of the Renaissance . It should be borne in mind that technical innovations in the Renaissance did not only serve to better process nature and thus satisfy basic needs, but were also used to a large extent in art.

Shaping and ordering of what is random and unstructured

Functionalist theories, which interpret everything that humans do for their survival, ignore the meaningful character of human cultural activity. Culture also creates structures of meaning and systems of order that create a place in the human world for what is given by chance ( contingents ) and in disorder. This means that in the process of culture, people try to give the random and disordered a structure, to make them recognizable, symbolically communicable or usable. At the same time, culture is always behind in the demands and challenges that people face; it is a retrospective overcoming of contingency.

Integration into already existing structures of meaning and form relationships

If extraordinary events are culturally processed by the individual or a group, this does not take place in a vacuum. Traditional relationships of meaning and form, ways of thinking and practices are used to cope with this, but these in turn are contingent, i. That is , they did not necessarily have to come into being in exactly this form for all human cultures. This means that no general cultural development that is the same for all human communities can be traced or predicted. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that even symbol systems with universal claims such as mathematics have experienced different forms in different cultures (see also the history of mathematics ).

Culture as a symbolic generation of meaning

Culture as a symbolic reference to the world

When people refer to themselves or to their environment, they do so not only through their bodily senses, but above all through symbols . In contrast to animals, whose behavior patterns and reactions are instinctively prescribed or conditioned , humans can relate to things in the world with the help of symbols, for example words. Symbols make things manageable while keeping them in certain respects represent . Man can describe nature through mathematical symbols or sing about it through poetic words, he can paint or dance, carve it in stone or describe it in text. Individual things appear to him from a religious, scientific, ideological, aesthetic, rational or political point of view, so they are always integrated into a larger whole in which they have a meaning . This is what defines the human cultural world .

Symbolization as shaping

The earliest and most important works that highlight the importance of signs and symbols for human language and thought are the works of Charles S. Peirce , who developed a theory of signs as an expanded logic , and Ferdinand de Saussure , who established semiotics as a general linguistics . It was then Ernst Cassirer who developed a cultural philosophy in the 1920s that understands people as symbolic beings . In contrast to Peirce and Saussure, Cassirer did not start with the thoughts and consciousness of people, but with their practical relation to the world. So the human being does not relate to the world merely theoretically, but has a physical relationship to it. Human cultural activity is therefore always a shaping, shaping and forming of things.

The elementary form of the design is the delimitation or perspective. Since every perception only captures part of reality, every perception is formative: when seeing, for example, the background is dimmed and the focus is directed to the object in front of it. Only through this delimitation (formation of conciseness) can the object be symbolically recognized as this or that. The person does not behave passively. Rather, it is his actions and actions that produce that world of symbolic figures that defines his culture. Nothing in the world is therefore given in itself, the world is not a hodgepodge of simply existing things, but all things familiar to us arise only from the cultural activity of man, his actions:

For Cassirer, design always takes place in connection with a sensual content. Every form takes place in a medium: language needs the sound, music the sound, the painter the canvas, the sculptor the stone, the carpenter the wood. Cassirer’s formulation of symbolic conciseness sums up this central idea : In one medium, a concise form is worked out, which can then symbolically relate to another.

If the formation of conciseness always takes place immanently in a medium, then one can speak of an immanent structure : The properties of the medium determine at the same time the possibilities for form and meaning. The symbol is therefore not entirely arbitrary, but develops in constant relation to the resistance of the world on which man works: Wood cannot be poured into shape, but requires a certain approach to it, words do not last for minutes, but are of a brevity that makes it usable in everyday life. Warning signals are loud and glaring, whispers of love are soft and gentle, so that they flatter the ear. Regarding the sense of sight, Cassirer speaks of the fact that shape develops “ in seeing and for seeing”, because every visual process is always preceded by a design that also determines what is newly grasped. (See Sect. Spatial perception .) The inherent structure of the sensory content is a prerequisite for this is that the world does not come across as formless-indeterminate mass: form by compression and extraction solution, forms, shapes, contrasts that by fixing an identity pass over other perceptual content . Only then does the world not “dissolve”. In order for the forms and shapes to become permanent and to stand out “from the stream of consciousness certain constant basic shapes, partly of a conceptual, partly purely visual nature” , a subsequent representation is required. This means that «instead of the flowing content […] a self-contained and self-contained form.»

Not everything that a person encounters is immediately presented by him. So that a symbol that can be used by people can be created through conciseness:

• Recognition (recognition): Only that which can be recorded repeatedly can become a symbol.
• Presentation: Presence of the physical and sensual; Symbolization needs a material medium.
• Retention: The experience remains in consciousness for a certain period of time and does not immediately disappear again.
• Representation: The relationship that connects what is represented and what is represented: For Cassirer it is a fundamental achievement of consciousness and takes place as a constant movement between the two.

Universality of symbols

Symbols are universal carriers of meaning. This means that on the one hand anything shaped in any way can become a symbol, and on the other hand symbols can be shifted from one meaning to another at will. While animals also have warning cries through which they draw the attention of their fellow species to danger, these are always tied to the specific situation . Animal signals always lead to the same reaction of the conspecifics or, if they are uttered outside the usual context, remain incomprehensible to others. Human symbols, on the other hand, such as the word, are universally applicable and can be transferred to different things or situations.

Embedding the symbols in a whole

If something develops in the form that is then of importance for the human being, any meaning is not simply added to the perceptual content, but what is perceived is embedded in a whole:

Although every form depends on this human ability, there is historically no “absolute zero” of symbolic conciseness, no state of complete formlessness, because the starting point is the “physiognomic” world perception of mythical consciousness. For the mythical consciousness, the world shows itself in mimetic moments of expression. These are affectively effective and, according to their origin, still protrude into the animal world. They offer starting points for any further shaping.

By means of symbols, individual sensual contents are formed into carriers of a general spiritual meaning. The shaping thus takes place at the same time as the sensory perception.

At the same time, the shaping is accompanied by a sense of meaning; only shapes reveal references and structures in the world. Symbolic forms are thus basic forms of understanding, which are universally and intersubjectively valid, and with which people shape their reality. Culture is the way in which humans create meaning through symbols . So symbols always arise in connection with sensuality, but have a meaning that refers beyond this :

Culture as a network of symbolic relationships: «Culture as text»

The embedding of individual symbols in a superordinate whole can be particularly vividly described if culture is described metaphorically as “text”. Just as a single word in a sentence only gets its exact meaning, gestures, images, clothing and other things only get their meaning in the overall context of a culture. As early as 1904, Max Weber defined culture as a fabric of signs:

“Culture” is everything for Weber : “Prostitution is a cultural phenomenon as good as religion or money.” In recent times, Clifford Geertz has linked his concept of culture to Weber:

Humans can therefore be described as that being who, through shaping, gives things a meaning by classifying them in an overall context. The view that culture is a system of signs therefore determines most modern anthropological, sociological, literary and philosophical cultural theories. In this context, the standing term of “culture as text” has established itself. However, while Cassirer ties his concept of culture to the practical activity of people and their dealings with the world, the pointed metaphor of “culture as text” , on the other hand, harbors the risk of narrowing the concept of culture and leads to cultural phenomena only from their linguistic side be looked at.

Tradition and cultural memory

Human societies depend on their cultural abilities for their survival and the satisfaction of their needs. For these generations also are available, a generation its practices, standards, works, language, institutions need to the next generation deliver . This formation of traditions can be found as an anthropological basic law in all human societies.

This cultural memory is one of the primary goals in many wars and armed conflicts and is therefore threatened with destruction. Often it is precisely the cultural heritage of the enemy that is deliberately intended to be permanently damaged or even destroyed. National and international coordination with regard to military and civil structures for the protection of the cultural identities of a society or the global community is carried out by the International Blue Shield Committee as a partner organization of UNESCO .

Anthropological prerequisites for tradition formation

From an anthropological point of view, Michael Tomasello has recently described the process of enriching knowledge through the formation of tradition as the “ jacking effect ”: With each generation, some knowledge and cultural skills are added. For Tomasello, the formation of tradition shows one of the main distinguishing features between humans and animals, which do not know how to pass on knowledge through imitation. For example, monkeys can imitate their conspecifics, but they are not able to recognize them as intentional beings. H. as beings who have a specific purpose in mind in their actions. They therefore fail to understand the meaning behind an action and to carry it out themselves in the manner necessary for success. Instead, they only mirror the movements of their conspecifics and thus only achieve accidental successes.

Language as a medium of cultural memory

In order for the transmission of the cultural contents to succeed, what is to be transmitted must be regularly repeated , for example a certain ritual at a certain time of the year . An essential form of repetition is not only the actual exercise of what is passed on, but also the fixation in the language , i.e. the embedding in a system of symbols . Language is therefore a primary medium of transmission, which also accompanies any non-linguistic transmission of knowledge.

Consequences of the written culture

Oral language is the only medium in which cultural memory is inscribed, then tradition is always threatened with falsification. Because if legends, myths and lineages are only passed on orally ( oral tradition ), the stories told can change imperceptibly over time or be consciously changed. In most early cultures, for example, the stories about lineages and rulers justify the current social conditions. Now it can happen that, for example, due to the sudden death of the ruler, another family occupies this place. With the intention of justifying these new conditions, cultures that rely solely on oral tradition can adapt the narratives that justify domination to the new conditions. This then leads to a stabilization of the new order. This process can be described as the “homeostatic organization of cultural tradition”. Only with the font is a culture, a medium is available, which the verifiability allows the traditional content. In disputes, for example, it is possible to read which family is attributed to the descent from the gods. With this, writing brings the greatest break in human cultural development, it represents a revolution that — apart from the invention of printing with movable type — is no longer achieved by the following writing systems such as gramophone , film and computer .

Overarching moments of cultural life

The comparison of the following cultural elements has led to various attempts to define geographical areas in which similar, delimitable cultures can be established. The resulting cultural areas are controversial for various reasons, but they provide an opportunity to structure the cultural diversity of the world in order to obtain a rough overview.

tradition

Identity and tradition

The formation of a group’s identity is strongly linked to the tradition that lives within it . The social group thereby also shapes the culture. Many lines of tradition in the religions also determine the identity of the members belonging to them through joint ceremonies and rituals. Therefore «tradition […] can be defined as a permanent cultural construction of identity.»

Relationship to other traditions

Often a claim to truth goes hand in hand with one’s own tradition, which is why other traditions are perceived as incomprehensible and strange. While one’s own tradition does not need to be justified, the other is not considered to be justifiable. Such a meeting can either lead to isolation from the foreign, to the adoption of individual foreign elements ( syncretism ) or to the first approaches of a traditional criticism which calls into question one’s own rites, customs, customs and norms. A more drastic situation arises when a common basis of validity is sought in dialogue with the other tradition. Since every tradition claims the age of its origin, this cannot serve as a benchmark. For the first time, however, tradition itself becomes a topic and subject of conscious discussion. With that tradition can be called into doubt because it is only tradition.

Criticism of tradition

The historically earliest critique of tradition in the West takes place in the beginnings of Greek philosophy , namely when, in the Platonic dialogues , the advocates of tradition fail to establish their own position philosophically. In the period from the 16th to the 18th century, too, philosophy assumed the leading role in traditional criticism, especially in the Age of Enlightenment . The Enlightenmentists criticize the flawed transmission of the holy scriptures and oppose it with the eternally valid laws of reason. In natural law looks for natural laws, traditional law can be criticized on the basis thereof. With the French Revolution it was recognized for the first time that societies are fundamentally changeable, revolutionizable. In art there is a rage between the old and the new (French querelle des anciens et des modern ) from which the opposing pair of tradition and modernity arises. However, this contrast also blinded the fact that modern society for its part has a tradition of purposeful rationality and value rationality , its commitment to change instead of stability, as in traditional societies.

Tradition theories

In addition to approaches from Giambattista Vico , a first theory of tradition is provided by Gottfried Herder in 1784 in his ideas on the philosophy of the history of mankind :

A reshaping of man takes place through tradition and culture, which Herder calls a “second genesis of man” and with Lessing an “education of the human race”. By allowing the chain of tradition to reach back to its beginnings, Herder also enhances it:

For Herder, the concept of tradition is not based on the faithful preservation of an original wisdom, but on the gradual accumulation of valuable knowledge that the inhuman is gradually being eliminated over the entire history of mankind. Sigmund Freud pointed out in his study The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion that the formation of traditions can also be based on irrational fears and violent constraints . Freud’s reconstruction of the content of the traditional events through unconscious compulsions and archaic fears met with broad rejection, but despite everything he deserves the merit of seeing the reasons for tradition and tradition not only from the optimistic point of view of a progressive improvement and thus looking at pathological moments of the tradition to open.

When the institutionalized humanities and historical sciences in the 20th century made it seem that one could approach the past completely objectively and free of theory, Hans-Georg Gadamer pointed out how formative the relationship to tradition is for us today too: the content of Tradition can never be completely objectified by scientific methods and become the mere object of a knowledge removed from tradition. For this, Gadamer coined the concept of the historical consciousness that reflects on tradition and is at the same time aware of its determinateness through tradition.

language

An essential system of order through which coping and communication processes take place is language. Language is a symbolic medium that no single person invents out of himself, but which is handed down to him. Therefore, man can always have always been just the language as a given behavior . As a system of signs, language creates a public space from which people draw when speaking and into which they always speak back. If its cultural meaning is to be understood, language must not only be viewed as a means of communication, but it also fundamentally structures human understanding of the world.

If the meaning of language for humans as a cultural being is to be understood, then it cannot be a question of examining individual concrete languages ​​for their individual characteristics, but rather it must be understood what actually defines language as language . In this case, could essentialist theories of language not prevail, as in ancient times by Democritus (v 460-371. Chr.) Held view a note were that language sounds purely emotional character, or of Charles Darwin followed (1809-1882) language research, which language would like to trace back to evolutionary needs. The more sophisticated holistic language genesis theory proposed by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943) has remained meaningless for the cultural-scientific understanding of language. What these language theories have in common is that they only consider language in terms of its affective and emotional traits. However, this ignores the propositional content of simple statements such as “The sky is blue”, because this statement neither calls for immediate action, nor does it have an emotional object, but symbolically indicates something that may be in the overall context of a culture of importance is.

Language as a system of signs

It was the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who developed a theory of signs of language, semiotics , from the Greek semeion for signs, and who suggested that it be used for the general study of culture. According to Saussure, linguistic signs are characterized by two properties:

• they are arbitrary, d. h., which shows what the character is only by appointment and Convention set
• Characters are linear; That is, the significant word expires in time and therefore cannot be uttered all at once.

When examining existing languages, Saussure differentiates between the synchronic (simultaneous) and the diachronic (changing over time) approach. For Saussure, the first form is the more important. This means that he did not work on the history of language, but tried to use a given language to reveal its internal structure , which is why Saussure is also known as the founder of structuralism . Saussure comes to the conclusion that language does not work because a sound or an idea denoted by it is given in itself. Rather, individual intelligible sounds (form phonemes ) only in distinction from other «. In the language there are only differences» The fact that phonetic sounds are not simply given, shows, for example, the fact that Japanese and Chinese the difference between «L» and Do not hear the «R» because this difference has not been culturally pronounced. So a word is not chained like an anchor to an object which it designates from now on, but from the network of sounds built up by differences, several sounds can be put together to form a new structure that can be distinguished from the others . This word can then be used within the set of ideas. which also develop through demarcation from one another, designate such an idea.

By proposing that this model of language be applied to everything culturally produced, Saussure opens the view to understanding culture as a connection between signs and symbols:

With the iconic turn (from ancient Greek ikon «sign»; English iconic turn ), culture has since been understood mainly under the aspect of the theory of signs, whereby now not only abstract signs, but also images based on perceptions are understood as signs. This removes the sharp boundary between text and image and culture shows itself as a universe of symbols of references and references that make up the human environment. Juri Michailowitsch Lotman therefore also speaks of the «semiosphere» in analogy to the biosphere . When «text» or «discourse» is used in modern cultural theories, these two terms are no longer limited to written records, but are used for symbolisms of all kinds: body, things, clothing, lifestyle, gestures, all of these are Parts of the universe of signs, culture.

Following Saussure, Jacques Derrida coined a literary method with his concept of différance , which conceives a text not characterized by unambiguous statements, but as a network in which meanings develop only through differences. The deconstruction tries to investigate the secondary meanings and to call back into consciousness the references that have been dimmed at the «edges» of a text and thus remain unthematic. For Derrida, culture is a text that is read.

Non-proportional language

Martin Heidegger pointed out that linguistic utterances cannot simply be understood as propositional statements in the sense of “A is B”. The structure of language is always branched out in so many ways that individual terms can never be clearly delimited, but only make understanding possible through their secondary meanings and hints . In a statement of the form “A is B”, for example, A is interpreted as B. Heidegger describes this concatenation of A and B with the «As» with the title » apophantic As». It is this form according to which most linguistic statements were interpreted in the philosophical tradition. On the other hand, Heidegger points out that the meaning of A and B is not just torn off at the edges, but is always to be understood in a larger overall context. Even a statement of the scheme “A is B” can only be understood and classified with a larger horizon of understanding. For Heidegger, poetry represents a form of linguistic quality that does not result in statements of the scheme “A is B”, but rather allows the entire richness of a language that has evolved through cultural history to emerge. In poetry, individual moments of meaning stand out, while others become apparent deliberately shaded. So that the seal does not narrows to unique findings, but leaves room for the unsaid, unconscious and unthematic our culturally influenced world and self-reference, which only carried it comes up .

Heidegger also rejected theories of language that see language only as a means of communication, so that statements such as “A is B” can be communicated with it. This functionalist conception sees language only as an aid to jointly coping with practical needs. For Heidegger, such language theories go back to the economic and technical exploitation of the world that began in the modern era. Language is then understood as a tool for communication that can be improved through logical structuring, as Gottlob Frege , Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap strived for in the project of the standard language . Heidegger made poetry strong against such a narrow concept of language and points out that no practical attitude prevails in poetic singing about the world (see, for example, Holderlin’s hymn Der Ister ). On the other hand, Heidegger saw it as a mistake to assume that language communicates a single statement within a world . Rather , language is the world in which a person lives, since all knowledge, thinking and understanding takes place in linguistic structures. Heidegger coined the expression that language is «the house of being».

action

Training institutions

Culture consists not only of linguistically fixed structures of understanding and objectivity, but also of historically acting and suffering people. But not all human activity is already a cultural practice . In order for this to arise, a group of people is required who jointly and regularly carries out important actions for them. If they consolidate activities in this way into events that are regularly repeated or places where the practices are carried out together, one also speaks of institutions . Institutions are places of human activity, for example in the form of work, rule, law, technology, religion, science and art. The differentiation of these practices takes place in institutions, at the same time they develop their own values ​​independently of other institutions.

Culture as practice and culture as a context of meaning

If culture is viewed from the point of view of practical actions and cultural events, this also represents a certain counterbalance to views of which culture primarily (or exclusively; culturalism ) understand as a system of meaning of symbolic codes and see in it a readable text. Culture is not just a fabric of meanings, but these meanings need to be exercised. to maintain and continue. In doing so, however, new contexts of meaning can arise or old ones can be worn down, perceived as inappropriate or insignificant. In resorting to cultural symbols, contexts of meaning and action, which can never be fully realized in practice, there is an interplay that keeps the culture in lively motion: New things also arise from the accidental and unwanted.

Validity

Things that in some way claim to have a meaning for the way people think and act have a certain validity . In interpersonal dealings, such demands and challenges to individuals or groups can be accepted or rejected. Views, laws, and meanings can therefore be controversial. The question which addresses this issue is the validity of

• symbolic,
• practical,
• cognitive,
• narrative and
• aesthetic

Validity claims.

identity

People mostly meet as individuals based on their gender, physicality, psychological drive structures and biographical uniqueness. These characteristics can have an identity-forming effect for the individual or for the group and, in the case of groups, raise questions of belonging and membership. In this way, social groups in cultural life give people an answer to the question of who they are in comparison to the rest, they determine their identity. Through the formation of groups and the form of action in them, communities or societies are formed which close themselves off from other groups, accept or exclude members. These processes determine the identity of the group and the individual regardless of the specific content.

time

Human culture is preserved by being passed on. This moment of tradition is closely related to the historical development of cultures. On the one hand, history can be retrospectively divided into epochs based on various criteria , on the other hand, every culture has a historically grown zeitgeist inherent in it.

room

Spatial perception

Rooms are not simply perceived as three-dimensional structures like mathematical Euclidean space and only then and under certain circumstances are given meaning or interpretations: It always makes a difference whether you look five meters straight ahead or five meters below. The view five meters down may be more uncomfortable for the north German coastal dweller than for the alpine dweller. The perception of space is never a neutral mathematical one, but is subject to cultural influences.

orientation

In this way, relationships in the room are primarily discovered which enable physical orientation in it: paths, obstacles, seating and dangers. Orientation in urban space requires understanding the network of streets, intersections and traffic lights and being able to correctly assess the distances based on houses of known size, while indigenous peoples find their way in the jungle without roads and paths, but use trees, rivers and the like . Both times, culturally learned skills and viewing habits structure the perception of space. The house is also a space that is determined by a “meaningful” structure, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes it: everyday objects have their “place”, they belong in an “area” of other similarly useful objects. Things are not simply “above” or “below” in three-dimensional space, but “on the ceiling” or “on the floor”. Not insignificant objects in physical space are seen first, but something is “in the wrong place” or “stands in the way”, there “where it doesn’t belong”. However, these regulations are not absolute, but depend on the culture and the environment in which the person grew up.

the atmosphere

Already in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe one can find the distinction between neutral space and meaningful place: “The field and the forest and the rock and the gardens were always to me, and you make them, beloved, a place” ( Vier Jahreszeiten ) .

Such atmospheric qualities also determine the perception of the room. Gernot Böhme examines how representative rooms or halls are furnished with objects that actually have no practical value or whose value lies precisely in creating atmosphere. Luc Ciompi was able to show the extent to which what is perceived as pleasantly atmospheric is culture-dependent. While Italians feel comfortable in high, cool and dark rooms, northerners prefer low, bright and warm rooms, which can be attributed to the different climatic conditions and the living atmosphere familiar from childhood.

The common space

Cultural life takes place in rooms. These spaces are not simply the three-dimensional space of physics that encloses the cultural goods like a container. Rather, culture itself creates space, i. In other words, it creates symbolic and figurative spaces for itself. These rooms are primarily not determined by their property as a container, but by a meaningful context, for example the hearth of the house forms a place of assembly, where the members of rural house communities come together after the day’s work is done. The temple or the church are places where the sacred gives a measure of human life and where different laws and behavior apply than in the profane sphere of the kitchen . Boundaries are also propagated politically, which are not based on geographic, but rather cultural spaces, or rather prescribe them, when George W. Bush , for example, combines America and Europe into the » Western World » and opposes them with the » axis of evil «.

Cultural spaces can be fixed arrangements in an excellent place , such as in a monastery, or they can appear as moving arrangements , for example when mobile radio subscribers bridge space-time gaps.

Early emergence of cultural space: sacred places

One of the earliest divisions in the world divides profane and sacred places . Sacred places are those where the divine appears through special events. For people who think mythically, gods or spirits remain bound to this place, it is that stone or that oak in which the sacred manifests itself. This results in a division of the living space that is no longer based solely on physiological needs (water, food), as is the case with animals, but is based on a symbolic content .

Social space

Different places can be merged into new places based on ethnicity, class or gender. This can lead to demarcations between those who are included and those who are excluded, and certain spatial arrangements can reflect or establish social inequalities. While VIP rooms deliberately separate “important” from “less important” people, spatial-social demarcations usually take place over a longer period of time. Houses, apartments and districts are selected according to the corresponding income and class relationships are reproduced, which are then also physically inscribed in the space. Pierre Bourdieu sums up this inscription in the room in the words that the habitus defines the habitat . The urban space thus reflects the social and gender-specific conditions: Young workers spend more time in public places and street corners, boys more than girls.

While a corresponding ability enables the appropriation and structural redesign of public space according to their own needs, this is not easily possible for the lower social strata of a society. Even children and adolescents cannot materially create their own rooms and are therefore dependent on occupying them with their physical presence: The tolerated smoking area behind the gym provides a place of retreat for the students opposite the authoritarian room on the school grounds. However, this place is not physically inscribed, but is created solely through frequent visits and the presence of the students. Here it becomes particularly clear that cultural space is not simply given, but is created by referring to it individually and collectively in action.

The global capitalist economy also creates a new social space that is now for the first time expanding across the globe. However, this space, whose connecting lines are held together by airplanes, expressways and train routes, cannot be used by everyone. For example, only five percent of the world’s population have ever sat in an airplane, and air traffic only connects the “islands of wealth” on the planet. Peter Sloterdijk has dedicated himself to this “interior” of the planet, to which only those who can pay enough have access.

Gender-specific spaces

Gender-specific rooms have become rarer in modern western societies and are limited to changing rooms, saunas and toilets. The Herbertstraße continue but in the Hamburg red light district marks a gender space to which women and young people, access is denied.

Protection of culture

With regard to the protection of culture and cultural heritage, there are a number of international agreements and national laws. The UNESCO and its partner organizations such as Blue Shield International co-ordinate international protection and the local implementations.

Basically, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Diversity deal with the protection of culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with cultural heritage in two ways: it gives people the right to participate in cultural life on the one hand and the right to the protection of their contributions to cultural life on the other.

The protection of culture and cultural goods is increasingly taking up a large area nationally and internationally. Under international law, the UN and UNESCO try to set up and enforce rules for this. The aim is not to protect a person’s property, but rather to preserve the cultural heritage of mankind, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. It is also intended to affect the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, region or municipality.

Cultural criticism

In cultural criticism, individual cultural achievements are critically questioned in terms of their unwanted, destructive, immoral and nonsensical consequences. This can expand into an overall view of human history, which then appears overall as a history of decline. The core message of many cultural-critical approaches is that they assume a naturally given state in relation to human (co-) life — a natural state that corresponds to the nature of the human being. This original state is then adjusted and distorted through artificiality as cultural development progresses . It is superimposed by artificial social relationships and forms of rule ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau ) or, through the invention of new relations of production, leads to the alienation of people from themselves, as Karl Marx believes. Friedrich Nietzsche sees the pre-Socratic antiquity as an age in which the will to power was lived unchecked, while with the “scientifically” thinking Socrates and the morality of Christianity, a disintegration set in, which reaches its climax in the age of decadence . Martin Heidegger also sees an open and reflexive relationship between people and philosophical views and considerations among the pre-Socratics , while in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle these insights are set absolutely for the first time and thus force people’s thinking into categories for centuries from which it cannot free himself easily. Sigmund Freud’s morality-critical approach assumes fixed natural needs with regard to the mental constitution of the human being, which are denied him by artificial moral regulations and thus urge the human being to compulsive compensatory actions.

Many works critical of culture played an important role in understanding what constitutes culture. It is only through critical distancing and possible condemnation of the existing conditions that culture does not show itself today as something that cannot be changed, but as an event that could also have taken a different course. They reveal culture as the contingency of what has become .

See also

• Cultural asset
• UNESCO world heritage
• Protection of cultural property
• Everyday culture
• Local cultural policy
• Cultural policy
• Cultural technique
• Cultural landscape
• Comparative cultural research

literature

Culture philosophy:

• Ernst Cassirer : Experiment on Man. Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-7873-1829-2 .
• Ernst Cassirer: Philosophy of symbolic forms . 3 volumes, In: Gesammelte Werke. 1. Language, 2. Mythical thinking, 3. Phenomenology of knowledge, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 2001–2002.
• Jürgen Fohrmann: Hostility / Culture . Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8498-1250-8 .
• Clifford Geertz : Density Description. Contributions to understanding of cultural systems. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-518-06745-1 .
• Oswald Schwemmer : The cultural existence of humans. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-05-003107-7 .
• Oswald Schwemmer: Culture Philosophy: A Media Theoretical Foundation. Fink, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-7705-4181-2 .

Edited volumes on cultural theories:

• Hubertus Busche: What is culture? The four basic historical meanings. In: Dialectic. Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie, 2000/1, pp. 69–90.
• Martin Ludwig Hofmann, Tobias F. Korta, Sibylle Niekisch (eds.): Culture Club: Classics of cultural theory . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-518-29268-4 .
• Martin Ludwig Hofmann, Tobias F. Korta, Sibylle Niekisch (eds.): Culture Club II: Classics of cultural theory. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 3-518-29398-2 .
• Stephan Moebius , Dirk Quadflieg (ed.): Culture. Present theories. VS-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-531-14519-3 .
• Stephan Moebius (Ed.): Culture, from cultural studies to visual studies, an introduction. Transcript, Bielefeld 2012, ISBN 978-3-8376-2194-5 (= Edition Kulturwissenschaft , Volume 21).
• Gerhart Schröder, Helga Breuninger (Hrsg.): Cultural theories of the present. Approaches and positions. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-593-36866-8 .

Important studies:

• Pierre Bourdieu : The Subtle Differences : Critique of Societal Judgment. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2000, ISBN 3-518-28258-1 .
• Norbert Elias : About the process of civilization . Sociogenetic and psychogenetic studies. 2 volumes, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1976.
• Norbert Elias: Studies on the Germans: Power struggles and habitus development in the 19th and 20th centuries. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-57998-3 .
• Michel Foucault : The order of things . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-06734-6 .
• Egon Friedell : Cultural History of the Modern Age . The crisis of the European soul from the black plague to the world war. 3 volumes. Beck, Munich 1927–1931.
• Siegfried Kracauer : The employees . From the newest Germany. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-518-36513-4 (first published 1930).
• Georg Simmel : Philosophy of Money . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 3-518-28406-1 .
• Max Weber : The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism . Various editions.

Others:

• Kunz Dittmar: General ethnology. Forms and development of culture. Braunschweig 1954.
• Kaj Birket-Smith : History of Culture. A general ethnology. 3. Edition. Zurich 1956.

Web links

 Files: Culture  — local collection of images and media files

Wiktionary: Culture  — explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

• What is that: culture? (Lecture by Oskar Negt )

Individual evidence

Author Biography

Arthur Asa Berger

None

Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.

The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (opens in new tab) goes a step further, defining culture as shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned by socialization. Thus, culture can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to the group. 

«Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones and a million other things,» Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist at Barnet and Southgate College in London (opens in new tab), told Live Science.

Many countries, such as France, Italy, Germany, the US, India, Russia and China are noted for their rich cultures, the customs, traditions, music, art and food being a continual draw for tourists. 

The word «culture» derives from a French term, which in turn derives from the Latin «colere,» which means to tend to the earth and grow, or cultivation and nurture, according to Arthur Asa Berger (opens in new tab). «It shares its etymology with a number of other words related to actively fostering growth,» De Rossi said.

Western culture

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The term «Western culture» has come to define the culture of European countries as well as those that have been heavily influenced by European immigration, such as the United States, according to Khan University (opens in new tab). Western culture has its roots in the Classical Period of the Greco-Roman era (the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.) and the rise of Christianity in the 14th century. Other drivers of Western culture include Latin, Celtic, Germanic and Hellenic ethnic and linguistic groups. 

Any number of historical events have helped shape Western culture during the past 2,500 years. The fall of Rome, often pegged to A.D. 476, cleared the way for the establishment of a series of often-warring states in Europe, according to Stanford University (opens in new tab) historian Walter Scheidel, each with their own cultures. The Black Death of the 1300s cut the population of Europe by one-third to one-half, rapidly remaking society. As a result of the plague, writes Ohio State University (opens in new tab) historian John L. Brooke, Christianity became stronger in Europe, with more focus on apocalyptic themes. Survivors in the working class gained more power, as elites were forced to pay more for scarce labor. And the disruption of trade routes between East and West set off new exploration, and ultimately, the incursion of Europeans into North and South America. 

Today, the influences of Western culture can be seen in almost every country in the world.

Eastern culture

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Eastern culture generally refers to the societal norms of countries in Far East Asia (including China, Japan, Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea) and the Indian subcontinent. Like the West, Eastern culture was heavily influenced by religion during its early development, but it was also heavily influenced by the growth and harvesting of rice, according to a research article published in the journal Rice (opens in new tab) in 2012. In general, in Eastern culture there is less of a distinction between secular society and religious philosophy than there is in the West. 

However, this umbrella covers an enormous range of traditions and histories. For example, Buddhism originated in India, but it was largely overtaken by Hinduism after the 12th century, according to

Britannica

(opens in new tab).

As a result, Hinduism became a major driver of culture in India, while Buddhism continued to exert influence in China and Japan. The preexisting cultural ideas in these areas also influenced religion. For example, according to

Jiahe Liu and Dongfang Shao

(opens in new tab), Chinese Buddhism borrowed from the philosophy of Taoism, which emphasizes compassion, frugality and humility.

Centuries of interactions — both peaceful and aggressive — in this region also led to these cultures influencing each other. Japan, for example, controlled or occupied Korea in some form between 1876 and 1945. During this time, many Koreans were pressured or forced into giving up their names for Japanese surnames, according to History.com (opens in new tab). 

Latin culture

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 The geographic region encompassing «Latin culture» is widespread. Latin America is typically defined as those parts of Central America, South America and Mexico where Spanish or Portuguese are the dominant languages. These are all places that were colonized by or influenced by Spain or Portugal starting in the 1400s. It is thought that French geographers used the term «Latin America» to differentiate between Anglo and Romance (Latin-based) languages, though some historians, such as Michael Gobat, author of «The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy and Race» (opens in new tab) (American Historical Review, Voll 118, Issue 5, 2013), dispute this.

Latin cultures are thus incredibly diverse, and many blend Indigenous traditions with the Spanish language and Catholicism brought by Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. Many of these cultures were also influenced by African cultures due to enslaved Africans being brought to the Americas starting in the 1600s, according to the African American Registery (opens in new tab). These influences are particularly strong in Brazil and in Caribbean nations. 

Latin culture continues to evolve and spread. A good example is Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a holiday dedicated to remembering the departed that is celebrated on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2. Day of the Dead dates back to before Christopher Columbus landed in North America, but was moved to its current celebration date by Spanish colonizers, who merged it with the Catholic All Saints Day. 

Mexican immigrants to the United States brought the holiday with them, and in the 1970s, artists and activities brought focus to Día de los Muertos as a way of celebrating their Chicano (Mexican-American) heritage, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (opens in new tab). The holiday is now well-known in the United States. 

Middle Eastern culture

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Roughly speaking, the Middle East encompasses the Arabian peninsula as well as the eastern Mediterranean. The North African countries of Libya, Egypt and Sudan are also sometimes included, according to Britannica (opens in new tab). The term  «Middle Eastern culture» is another umbrella that encompasses a huge diversity of cultural practices, religious beliefs and daily habits. The region is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and is home to dozens of languages, from Arabic to Hebrew to Turkish to Pashto. 

While there is significant religious diversity in the Middle East, the predominant religion by numbers is Islam, and Islam has played a large role in the cultural development of the region. Islam originated in what is today Saudi Arabia in the early seventh century. An influential moment for the culture and development of the Middle East came after the death of the religion’s founder, Muhammad, in 632, according to the Metropoliton Museum (opens in new tab). 

Some followers believed the next leader should be one of Muhammad’s friends and confidants; others believed leadership must be passed through Muhammad’s bloodline. This led to a schism between Shia Muslims, those who believed in the importance of the bloodline, and Sunni Muslims, who believed leadership should not pass through the family. Today, about 85% of Muslims are Sunni, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (opens in new tab). Their rituals and traditions vary somewhat, and divisions between the two groups often fuel conflict. 

Middle Eastern culture has also been shaped by the Ottoman Empire, which ruled a U-shaped ring around the eastern Mediterranean between the 14th and early 20th centuries, according to Britannica. Areas that were part of the Ottoman Empire are known for distinctive architecture drawn from Persian and Islamic influences.

African culture

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Africa has the longest history of human habitation of any continent: Humans originated there and began to migrate to other areas of the world around 400,000 years ago, according to the Natural History Museum (opens in new tab) in London. Tom White, who serves as the museum’s senior curator of non-insect invertebrates, and his team were able to discover this by studying Africa’s ancient lakes and the animals that lived in them. As of the time of this article, this research provides the oldest evidence for hominin species in the Arabian peninsula.

African culture varies not only between national boundaries, but within them. One of the key features of this culture is the large number of ethnic groups throughout the 54 countries on the continent. For example, Nigeria alone has more than 300 tribes, according to Culture Trip (opens in new tab). Africa has  imported and exported its culture for centuries; East African trading ports were a crucial link between East and West as early as the seventh century, according to The Field Museum (opens in new tab). This led to complex urban centers along the eastern coast, often connected by the movement of raw materials and goods from landlocked parts of the continent. 

It would be impossible to characterize all of African culture with one description. Northwest Africa has strong ties to the Middle East, while Sub-Saharan Africa shares historical, physical and social characteristics that are very different from North Africa, according to Britannica (opens in new tab) . 

Some traditional Sub-Saharan African cultures include the Maasai of Tanzania and Kenya, the Zulu of South Africa and the Batwa of Central Africa. The traditions of these cultures evolved in very different environments. The Batwa, for example, are one of a group of ethnicities that traditionally live a forager lifestyle in the rainforest. The Maasai, on the other hand, herd sheep and goats on the open range. 

What is cultural appropriation?

Oxford Reference (opens in new tab) describes cultural appropriation as: «A term used to describe the taking over of creative or artistic forms, themes, or practices by one cultural group from another.» 

An example might be a person who is not Native American wearing a Native American headdress as a fashion accessory. For example, Victoria’s Secret was heavily criticized in 2012 after putting a model in a headdress reminiscent of a Lakota war bonnet, according to USA Today (opens in new tab). These headdresses are laden with meaningful symbolism, and wearing one was a privilege earned by chieftains or warriors through acts of bravery, according to the Khan Academy (opens in new tab). The model also wore turquoise jewelry inspired by designs used by Zuni, Navajo and Hopi tribes in the desert Southwest, illustrating how cultural appropriation can lump together tribes with very different cultures and histories into one stereotyped image. 

More recently, in 2019, Gucci faced a similar backlash for selling an item named «the indy full turban» which caused considerable anger from the Sikh community, according to Esquire (opens in new tab). Harjinder Singh Kukreja, a Sikh restaurateur and influencer, wrote to Gucci on Twitter (opens in new tab), stating: «the Sikh Turban is not a hot new accessory for white models but an article of faith for practising Sikhs. Your models have used Turbans as ‘hats’ whereas practising Sikhs tie them neatly fold-by-fold. Using fake Sikhs/Turbans is worse than selling fake Gucci products.»

Constant change

No matter what a culture looks like, one thing is for certain: Cultures change. «Culture appears to have become key in our interconnected world, which is made up of so many ethnically diverse societies, but also riddled by conflicts associated with religion, ethnicity, ethical beliefs, and, essentially, the elements which make up culture,» De Rossi said. «But culture is no longer fixed, if it ever was. It is essentially fluid and constantly in motion.» 

This makes it difficult to define any culture in only one way. While change is inevitable, most people see value in respecting and preserving the past. The United Nations has created a group called The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (opens in new tab) (UNESCO) to identify cultural and natural heritage and to conserve and protect it. Monuments, buildings and sites are covered by the group’s protection, according to the international treaty, the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (opens in new tab). This treaty was adopted by UNESCO in 1972.

Additional reporting by Live Science Contributors Alina Bradford, Stephanie Pappas and Callum McKelvie.