Introducing culture
Anthropologists agree that culture is
- learned from others while growing up in a particular human society or
group.
- Widely shared by the members of that society
- Responsible for most differences in ways of thinking and behaving that
exist between human societies/groups
- So essential in completing the psychological and social development of
individuals that a person who did not learn culture would not be
considered normal by other people
Defining culture
- Shared: culture is a collective phenomenon. Subculture refers to cultural
variations that exist within a single nation. Not just any difference between
groups should be called subcultural: broader contrast.
- Socially learned: socialization, enculturation
- Knowledge: cultural knowledge generally leads to behavior that is
meaningful to others and adaptive to the natural and social environment.
- Patterns of behavior (behaviors and actions). The concept of role is useful
to describe and analyze interactions and relationships. Role: rights and
duties/obligations that individuals receive because of their personal
identity or membership in a social group.
Complexities: social identities, context and situation, unique and ambiguous.
Cultural knowledge (information, skills, attitudes, conceptions, beliefs, values
and other components of culture that people socially learn during enculturation)
- Norms: standards of propriety and appropriateness (expected behaviors at
weddings and in classrooms for example)
- Values: beliefs about social desirability and worthwhileness (individual
rights)
- Symbols: objects and behaviors with conventional meanings
(interpretations of nonverbal behavior)
- Constructions: divisions of reality into categories and subcategories (kinds
of persons and natural phenomena)
- Worldviews: interpretations of events and experiences (origin of good and
evil)
Material culture: for example: bible or art.
The origins of culture: culture as we socially learn and experience it today
originated earlier than its physical manifestations in the form of instruments, art
and so on. Humanity (understand symbols) had the capacity for culture around
80.000 years ago.
,Culture and human life: culture is necessary for the human existence in at least
three specific ways:
1. Culture provides the knowledge by which we adapt to our natural
environment by harnessing resources and solving other problems of living
in a particular place.
2. Culture is the basis for the human social life (norms, values, attitudes etc.)
3. Culture affects our views of reality (it explains the world around them).
Cultural knowledge and individual behavior
- Is behavior determined by culture? Cultural determinism: the notion that
the beliefs and behaviors of individuals are largely programmed by their
culture. Culture provides rules or instructions that tell individuals what to
do in particular situations.
- Why does behavior vary? Individual life experience and people have to
choose between values and norms that conflict at least sometimes and in
some circumstances.
Biology and culture
- Biology and cultural differences. Biological determinism: the idea that
biologically (genetically) inherited differences between populations are
important influences on cultural differences between them. Three reasons
to claim that physical differences are largely irrelevant as causes for the
cultural differences.
1. Individuals of any physical type are equally capable of learning any
culture.
2. An enormous range of cultural diversity was and is found on all
continents and regions of the world.
3. Different ways of thinking and behaving succeed one another in time
within the same biological population and within the same society.
- Cultural universals: elements of culture that exist in all known human
groups and societies. (ways of assigning tasks and roles, games, etc.)
Chapter 5: methods of investigation
Etnography: the description of a specific culture
Etnology: the study of human cultures from a comparative perspective.
Synchronic: the description of a culture at one period in time.
Diachronic: studies of changes in a culture over time.
Ethnographic methods (the collection of cultural data on a particular society
group of societies, the primary purpose is the collection of descriptive data)
- Ethnographic fieldwork: collecting cultural data by studying and
interviewing living members of a society. Interviewing: collecting cultural
systematic questioning: may be structured (using questionnaires) or
unstructured (open-ended).
, - Ethnohistoric research: studying a people’s culture using written accounts
and other records. Recall ethnography: the attempt to reconstruct a
cultural system at a slightly earlier period by interviewing older individuals
who lived during that period. Participant observation: the main technique
used in conducting ethnographic fieldwork, involving living among a people
and participating in their daily activities.
- Problems and issues in field research: stereotyping, defining the
fieldworker’s role in the community and developing report and identifying
and interviewing consultants. Consultant (informant): a member who
provides information to a fieldworker, often through formal interviews or
surveys. Key consultant: member of a society who is especially
knowledgeable about some subject and who supplies information to a
fieldworker.
- Fieldwork as a rite of passage. Culture shock: the feeling of uncertainty
and anxiety an individual experiences when placed in a strange cultural
setting.
- Ethnohistory: the study of past cultural systems through the use of written
records.
Comparative methods: to compare many societies in a systematic way.
- Cross-cultural comparisons: the testing of hypotheses by using synchronic
data drawn from a number of different societies.
- Controlled comparisons: the comparative use of historically documented
changes in particular groupings of societies over time to define general
cultural patterning and to test hypotheses.
The different: comparative research: to test hypothesis. Ethnographic methods
explain cultural diversity.
Chapter 6: culture and nature: interacting with the environment
How people interact with their natural environment is primary cause of cultural
differences and similarities.
Understanding relationships with nature. Two dimensions to human-environment
relationships are most important: the environment/habitat provides resources.
Second, the environment poses certain problems that people strive to solve or
overcome. At the broadest level anthropologists categorize human-environment
relationships into four major categories:
1. Hunting and gathering/foraging: adaptations based on the harvest of wild
(undomesticated) plants and animals
2. Agriculture/cultivaton: intentional planting, cultivation, care and harvest of
domesticated food plants (crops).
3. Pastoralism/herding: adaptions based on tending, breeding, and
harvesting the products of livestock, which are taken to seasonally
available pasturelands and water.
4. Industrialism: development of technology to harness the energy of fossil
fuels to increase productivity, profits and the availability of consumer
commodities.
Hunting and gathering
- Foraging and culture (how they interact with their environments affect
their cultures): division of labor by age and sex, seasonal mobility,
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