User:AlotToLearn

THIS IS MY USER PAGE

IT CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT I AM REVIEWING

PLEASE DO NOT EDIT IT

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") is difficult to define — in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. — but most commonly means an excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities; an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning; or 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 began to argue that culture signifies a universal human capacity. In the twentieth century, the concept emerged as central to American anthropology and referred to all non-genetic human phenomena. Specifically, the term was used in two senses: first, to refer to the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences symbolically, and to act imaginatively and creatively; second, it referred to 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 sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.

British poet and critic Matthew Arnold viewed "culture" as the cultivation of the humanist ideal

British anthropologist Edward Tylor was one of the first English-speaking scholars to use the term culture in an inclusive and universl sense

Johann Herder called attention to national cultures

Adolf Bastian developed a universal model of culture

Zuñi girl with jar, 1903

Edward Curtis photo of a Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch

Turkish nomad clan with the nodes as marriages

Mexican village with the nodes as marriages

Iroqois Kinship Structure

Culinary triangle

American kinship

A cockfight in India

Huli Wigman from the Southern Highlands

File:CowHA.jpg

In Hinduism, the cow is a symbol of wealth, strength, and selfless giving

Cleveley's depiction of Captain Cook

Vietcong troops pose with new AK-47 rifles

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."

"...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."

culture referred to an élite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine.

"culture" was identified with "civilization" (from lat. civitas, city).

distinction .... between "high culture", namely the culture 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.

Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with "anarchy;" other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes 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.

in the 19th century this opposition was also expressed through the contras between "civilized" and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one can 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.

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.

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."

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 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.

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" (Volkergedanken), are local modifications of the elementary ideas. 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.

Anthropology

In American anthropology, "culture" most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode their experiences symbolically, and communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially.

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)? Second, how did human culture evolve among human beings?

The question of whether culture should be defined as any or all learned behavior remains. Physical anthropologists who focus on human evolution are concerned with how human beings evolved to be different from other species. The mainstream view among these researchers is that a more precise definition of culture, and one that is exclusively human, is necessary.

Cultural Anthropology

1899-1946: Universal versus Particular

Franz Boas established modern American anthropology as the study of the sum total of human phenomena

Ruth Benedict was instrumental in establishing the modern conception of distinct cultures being patterned

in the 19th century with German anthropologist Adolf Bastian's theory of the "psychic unity of mankind," which challenged the identification of "culture" with the way of life of European elites

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."

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.

In 1973 Gerald Weiss 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).

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 that societies based on agriculture and Eskimo kinship terminology.

Boas established the principle of cultural relativism and trained students to conduct rigorous participant observation field research in different societies.

Boas argued that cultural "types" or "forms" are always in a state of flux.

His student Alfred Kroeber argued that the "unlimited receptivity and assimilativeness of culture" made it practically impossible to think of cultures as discrete things..

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, and the many ways individuals were shaped by and acted creatively through their own cultures. 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 — and the life histories of members of other societies.

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.

Since Boas, 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. 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. Boas, however, argued that complete integration is rare and that a given culture only appears to be integrated because of observer bias. For Boas, the appearance of such patterns — a national culture, for example — was the effect of a particular point of view.

The second debate has been over the ability to make universal claims about culture. 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. Opposing Boas and his students, 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. 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.

Perhaps the most notable attempt to resolve this tension is structuralist anthropology. This approach was developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who brought together ideas of Boas (including, through Boas, 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 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. Structuralism came to dominate French anthropology and, in the late 1960s and 1970s, came to have great influence on American and British anthropology.

Culture and Functionalism

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.

Culture and social functionism

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.

Structural functionalism drew its inspiration primarily from the ideas of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Functionalism emphasizes the central role that agreement (consensus) between members of a society on morals plays in maintaining social order. This moral consensus creates an equilibrium, the normal state of society. Durkheim was concerned with the question of how societies maintain internal stability and survive over time. Durkheim proposed that such societies tend to be segmentary, being composed of equivalent parts that are held together by shared values, common symbols, or, as his nephew Mauss held, systems of exchanges

Talcott Parsons developed a theory of social action 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.

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.

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 noted 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."

Culture and society

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, are typically porous, permeable, and plural. 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.

Culture and symbols

Symbolic anthropology is the study of the social construction and social effects of symbols. It is a diverse set of approaches within cultural anthropology that view culture as a symbolic system that arises primarily from human interpretations of the world. Symbolic anthropology may be contrasted with more empirically oriented approaches in anthropology such as cultural materialism

Victor Turner was an important bridge between American and British symbolic anthropology.

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."

Culture and adaption

Leslie 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." 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".

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, 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.

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 each society has its own cultural history.

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.

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.

Archeology and culture

Excavated dwellings at Skara Brae, Europe's most complete Neolithic village.

The making of a Levallois Point

File:BBC-artefacts.jpg

Bifacial points, engraved ochre and bone tools from the c. 75 -80 000 year old M1 & M2 phases at Blombos cave.

Monte Alban archaeological site

Excavations at the South Area of Çatal Höyük

Mural of an aurochs, a deer, and humans from Çatalhöyük, sixth millennium BC - Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey

Archaeology is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, features, biofacts, and landscapes. Because archaeology's aim is to understand humankind, it is a humanistic endeavor.. Furthermore, due to its analysis of human cultures, it is therefore a subset of anthropology, which contains: Physical anthropology, Cultural anthropology, Archaeology, and linguistics.

In the 1920s and 1930s, archeologists V. Gordon Childe and W. C. 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 subassemblages 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 "archeological culture." Childe and others viewed "each archeological culture ... the manifestation in material terms of a specific people."

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 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. 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. 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.

In 1962 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." 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.

In the 1980s, archeologist Ian Hodder developed "post-processual archeology". Hodder views artifacts not as objectifications of culture but as culture itself. 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." 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.

Sub-cultures and community studies

Community studies is the study of distinct communities (whether identified by race, ethnicity, or economic class), often in cities. Drawing on sociology,anthropology and social research methods of ethnography and participant observation in the study of community, community studies is often interdisciplinary and geared toward practical applications rather than purely theoretical perspectives.

The term "sub-culture" has also been used by some anthropologists and sociologists to describe culturally distinct communities that are 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 states, culture is very closely linked to nationalism, thus government policy is to assimilate immigrants.
• 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.

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.

Cultural Studies

Independently, in the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism, such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, developed "Cultural Studies." Following 19 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. 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.

Cultural change

A 19th century engraving showing Australian "natives" opposing the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770.

Sense of time is highly dependent on culture. This photograph was taken in 1913 but can be difficult to date for a Western viewer, due to the absence of cultural cues. (This photo was originally b/w. Digital color composite made for the Library by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, 2004; Digital color rendering, with hand editing, made by WalterStudio, 2000-2001.)

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. (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.

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.