Culture

1. 13 Culture Anthropology:The Exploration of Human Diversity 11th Edition Conrad Phillip Kottak

2. Culture • What Is Culture? • Universality, Generality, and Particularity • Mechanisms of Cultural Change • Globalization

3. What Is Culture? • Therefore, culture can be studied scientifically • Tylor proposed that culture are systems of human behavior and thought and obey natural laws Enculturation—process by which a child learns his or her culture

4. What Is Culture? • Cultural learning unique to humans • Accumulation of knowledge about experiences and information not perceived directly by the organism, but transmitted to it through symbols—signs that have no necessary or natural connection with the things for which they stand • Culture Is Learned

5. What Is Culture? • Geertz defines culture as ideas based on cultural learning and symbols • Culture learned through both direct instruction and observation • Anthropologists in the 19th century argued for “psychic unity of man” • Acknowledges individuals vary in emotional and intellectual tendencies and capacities • However, doctrine asserted that all human populations share same capacity for culture • Culture Is Learned

6. What Is Culture? • Culture located and transmitted in groups • Social transmission of culture tends to unify people by providing common experience • Commonality of experience tends to generate common understanding of future events • Culture Is Shared

7. What Is Culture? • Human ability to use symbols is basis of culture • Human symbol use overwhelmingly linguistic, but symbol is anything used to represent any other thing, when the relationship between the two is arbitrary • Other primates demonstrated rudimentary ability to use symbols • Culture Is Symbolic

8. What Is Culture? • Only humans have elaborated cultural abilities—to learn, to communicate, to store, to process, and to use symbols • Culture Is Symbolic

9. What Is Culture? • Humans interact with cultural constructions of nature rather than directly with nature itself • Culture and Nature Culture converts natural urges and acts into cultural customs

10. What Is Culture? • Anthropological concept of culture is a model that includes all aspects of human group behavior • Culture Is All-Encompassing Everyone is cultured

11. What Is Culture? • Culture is a system • Changes in one aspect will likely generate changes in other aspects • Culture Is Integrated Core values—sets of ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that are basic in that they provide an organizational logic for the rest of the culture

12. What Is Culture? • Humans have biological and cultural ways of coping with environmental stress • What’s good for individual isn’t necessarily good for group • Adaptive behavior that offers short-term benefits to individuals may harm the environment and threaten the group’s long-term survival • Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive

13. What Is Culture? • Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive Determining whether cultural practice is adaptive or maladaptive frequently requires viewing results of that practice from several perspectives

14. What Is Culture? • People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly following its dictates • Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice

15. What Is Culture? • Ideal culture—what people say they should do, not what they say they do • Real culture—actual behavior as observed by anthropologist • Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice • People don’t always do as their culture directs or as other people expect

16. What Is Culture? • Contemporary anthropologists now emphasize how day-to-day action, practice, or resistance can make and remake culture • Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice • Culture is both public and individual Agency—actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities

17. What Is Culture? • Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice Practice Theory—recognizes that individuals within a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and influence

18. What Is Culture? • National culture—experiences, beliefs, learned behavior patterns, and values shared by citizens of the same nation • International culture—practices common to identifiable group extending beyond boundaries of one culture • Subcultures are identifiable cultural patterns existing within a larger culture • Levels of Culture

19. What Is Culture? • Direct diffusion occurs when members of two or more previously distinct cultures interact with each other • Indirect diffusion occurs when cultural artifacts or practices are transmitted from one culture to another through intermediate third (or more) culture • Levels of Culture • Cultural practices and artifacts are transmitted through diffusion

20. What Is Culture? • Use of values, ideals, and mores from one’s own culture to judge behavior of someone from another culture • Ethnocentrism contributes to social solidarity • Ethnocentrism is a cultural universal • Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights

21. What Is Culture? • Cultural relativism—asserts cultural values are arbitrary, and therefore values of one culture should not be used as standards to evaluate behavior of persons from outside that culture The idea of universal, unalienable, individual human rights challenges cultural relativism by invoking moral and ethical code that is superior to any country, culture, or religion

22. What Is Culture? • Cultural relativism does not preclude anthropologist from respecting “international standards of justice and morality” • Cultural rights are vested in groups and include a group’s ability to preserve its cultural tradition

23. What Is Culture? • Levels of Culture, with Examples from Sports and Foods • Insert Table 13.1

24. Universality, Particularity, and Generality • Universals traits are ones that more or less distinguish Homo sapiens from other species • Universality Most reflect human biological universals

25. Universality, Particularity, and Generality • Regulatories that occur in different times and places but not in all cultures • Generality Nuclear family—kinship group consisting of parents and children

26. Universality, Particularity, and Generality • Particularity—trait or feature of culture not generalized or widespread • Confined to single place, culture, or society • Many cultural traits shared as cultural universals and as a result of independent invention • Paticularity: Patterns of Culture Particularities may be getting rare

27. Mechanisms of Cultural Change • Defined as spread of culture; traits through borrowing from one culture to another • Source of culture changes throughout human history • Diffusion can be direct (between to adjacent cultures) or indirect (across one or more intervening cultures or through some long-distance medium) • Diffusion

28. Mechanisms of Cultural Change • Diffusion can be forced (through warfare, colonization, or some other kind of domination) or unforced (e.g., intermarriage, trade, and the like) • Diffusion

29. Mechanisms of Cultural Change • Acculturation—exchange of features that results when groups come into continuous firsthand contact May occur in any or all groups engaged in such contact

30. Globalization • Economic and political forces take advantage of modern systems of communication and transportation to promote globalization • Encompasses series of processes that work to make modern nations and people increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent

31. Globalization • Globalization allows for domination of local peoples by larger economic and political systems