Characteristics of Culture

CULTURE IS LEARNED

• Children absorb any cultural tradition
• It’s human capacity to learn
• Other animals learn by experience
• Social animals learn from other members of their group, such as hunting strategies of wolves
• Social learning is important among monkeys and apes.
• Our own cultural learning depends on man’s developed human capacity to use symbols, signs that have no necessary or natural connection to the things they stand for or signify.
• culture is non-instinctive, we are not genetically programmed to learn a particular one.
• North American children informally learning the culture of their parents.
• Every human generation potentially can discover new things and invent better technologies.
• The new cultural skills and knowledge are added onto what was learned in previous generations. As a result, culture is cumulative.

Clifford Geertz (1973), an anthropologist – defines culture as IDEAS based on cultural learning and symbols.

• Cultures are sets of “control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions, what computer engineers call PROGRAMS for the governing of behavior.
• Programs are absorbed by people through ENCULTURATION.
• Internalization of learned behavior –Conscious or unconscious learning and interaction (observation or awareness – know which is wrong or right.
• North Americans acquire their culture’s notions about how far apart people should stand when they talk not by being directly told to maintain a certain distance. Latinos stand closer together than North Americans do.
• Taught directly (like parents telling their children to say “thank you” when someone gives them something or does them a favor.

CULTURE IS SHARED

• Culture is an attribute not of individual per se but of individuals as members of groups.
• Culture is transmitted in society.
• We learn our culture thru the interaction with many other people, talking, observing, listening to them.
• Shared beliefs, values, memories, and expectations link people who grow up in the same culture.
• Enculturation unifies people by providing us with common experiences.
• Today’s parents were yesterday’s children.
• Parents grew up in a place and absorbed certain values and beliefs transmitted over the generations.
• People become agents of enculturation of their children.
• Although culture constantly changes, certain fundamental beliefs, values, worldviews, and child-rearing practices stay or endure.
• Not finishing a meal or eating everything on plate- reminds us of starving children in the 3rd world.

CULTURE IS AN ADAPTIVE MECHANISM

• The first humans evolved in tropical and subtropical regions of Africa about 2.5 million years ago.
• Since then, we have successfully occupied all of the major geographic regions of the world, but our bodies have remained essentially those of warm climate animals.
• We cannot survive outside of the warmer regions of our planet without our cultural knowledge and technology.
• What made it possible for our ancestors to begin living in temperate and ultimately subarctic regions of the northern hemisphere after half a million years ago was the invention of efficient hunting skills, fire use, and, ultimately, clothing, warm housing, agriculture, and commerce.
• Culture has been a highly successful adaptive mechanism for our species. It has given us a major selective advantage in the competition for survival with other life forms.
• Culture has allowed the global human population to grow from less than 10 million people shortly after the end of the last ice age to more than 6.5 billion people today, a mere 10,000 years later.
• Culture has made us the most dangerous and the most destructive large animal on our planet. It is ironic that despite the power that culture has given us, we are totally dependent on it for survival. We need our cultural skills to stay alive.

CULTURE IS SYMBOLIC

• A symbol is something verbal or nonverbal, within a particular language or culture, that comes to stand for something else.
• Anthropologist Leslie White defined culture as ....dependent upon symbolling....Culture consists of tools, implements, utensils, clothing, ornaments, customs, institutions, beliefs, rituals, games, works of art, language, etc.
• Language is one of the distinctive possessions of Homo sapiens. No other animal has developed anything approaching the complexity of language, with its multitude of symbols.
• Symbols are often linguistic, like arches for food chains, flags for various countries, and holy water as a potent symbol for Roman Catholicism.
• Our nearest relatives - chimpanzees and gorillas - have rudimentary cultural abilities.
• However, no other animal has elaborated cultural abilities - to learn, communicate;and to store, process, and use information - to the extent that Homo has.

CULTURE AND NATURE

• Culture takes the natural biological urges we share with other animals and teaches us how to express them in particular ways.
• People have to eat, but culture teaches what, when and how.
• In many cultures people have their main meal at noon, but most North American prefer a large dinner. English people eat fish for breakfast, but North Americans prefer hot cakes and cold cereals. Midwesterners dine at five or sic, Spaniards at ten.
• Cultural habits, perceptions, and inventions mold "human nature" into many forms.
• People have to eliminate wastes from their bodies. But some culture teach people to defecate standing, while others tell them to do it sitting down.
• Frenchmen are not embarrassed to urinate in public. Peasant women in the Andean highlands squat in the streets and urinate, getting all the privacy they need from their massive skirts (true to old Filipina women).
• All these habits are parts of cultural traditions that have converted natural acts into cultural customs.

CULTURE IS ALL-ENCOMPASSING

• Culture includes much more than refinement, good taste, sophistication, education, and appreciation of the fine arts.
• Not only college graduates are "cultured".
• Culture encompasses features that are sometimes regarded as trivial or not worthy of serious study, such as those of "popular" culture.
• To understand contemporary North American culture, we must consider TV, fast food restaurants, sports and games.
• As a cultural manifestation, a rock star may be as interesting as a symphony conductor (or vice versa); a comic book may be as significant as a book-award winner.

CULTURE IS INTEGRATED

• Cultures are not haphazard collections of customs and beliefs.
• Cultures are integrated, patterned systems. If one part of the system changes, other parts change as well. For example, early 70's most Filipina women prefered to stay home to take care of the family. Most of today's college women, by contrast, expect to get paying jobs when they graduate.
• Repercussions of this includes change in attitudes and behavior.
• Late marriage, "living together", separation/divorce have become more common.
• Work competes with marriage and family responsibilities and reduces the time available to invest in child care.
• Cultures are integrated not simply by their dominant economic activities and related social patterns but also by sets of values, ideas, symbols, and judgments.
• A set of characteristics CORE VALUES integrates each culture and helps distinguish it from others.

PEOPLE USE CULTURE ACTIVELY

• Although cultural rules tell us what to do and how to do it, people don't always do what the rules say they should do.
• People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly following its dictates.
• We are not passive beings who are doomed to follow our cultural traditions, like programmed robots.
• Instead, people can learn, interpret, and manipulate the same rule in different ways.
• Also, culture is contested. That is, different groups in society often struggle with one another over whose ideas, values, and beliefs will prevail.
• Even common symbols may have radically different meanings to different people and groups in the same culture.
• Golden arches may cause one person to salivate while another plots a vegetarian protest.
• Even if they agree about what should andf shouldn't be done, people don't always do as their culture directs or as other people expect.
• Many rules are violated, some very often (example, automobile speed limits)
• Ideal culture consists of what people say they should do and of what they say they do.
• Real culture refers to their actual behavior as observed by the anthropologist.

CULTURE CAN BE ADAPTIVE AND MALADAPTIVE

• Humans have both biological and cultural ways of coping with environmental stresses.
• Besides our biological menas of adaptation, we also use "cultural adaptive kit," which contain customary activities and tools that aid us.
• Sometimes, adaptive behavior that offers short-term benefits to particular groups or individuals may harm the environment and threaten the group's long-term survival.
• Economic growth may benefit some people while it depletes resources needed for society at large or future generations.
• Thus, cultural traits, patterns, and inventions can also be maladaptive, threatening the group's continued existence.
• Air cons help us deal with heat, as fires and furnaces protect us against the cold.
• Automobiles permit us to make a living by getting us from home to workplace.
• But the by-products of these "beneficial" technology often create new problem. Chemical emissions increase air pollution, deplete the ozone layer, and contribute to global warming.