6 th Edition
2
Conrad Phillip Kottak
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Overview
• What Is Culture?
• Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• Universality, Generality, and Particularity
• Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice
• Popular, Civic, and Public Culture
• Levels of Culture
• Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights
• Mechanisms of Cultural Change
• Globalization
• Anthropology Today
Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
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What Is Culture?
• “Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
(Tylor 1871/1958)
– Enculturation: process by which child learns his or her culture
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What Is Culture?
• Culture is Learned
– Unique human capacity to use symbols:
signs that have no necessary or natural connection to the things they stand for
– Conscious and unconscious learning
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What Is Culture?
• Culture Is Symbolic
– Symbolic thought is unique and crucial to humans and to cultural learning
– Language one of the distinctive possessions of Homo sapiens
– Symbols often linguistic (“dog,” “chien,” “hund”)
– All humans possess the abilities on which culture rests
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Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
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What Is Culture?
• Culture is Shared
– Culture shared by individuals as members of groups
– Enculturation unifies people by providing common experiences
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Individualism
Finishing food to justify wealth
Justice/fair play
All people are created equal
The law applies to everyone
Hard work will bring success
Wealthy have earned their success
Poor people have earned their poverty
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What Is Culture?
• Culture and Nature
– Culture takes natural biological urges we share with other animals and teaches us how to express them
– Cultural habits, perceptions, and inventions mold “human nature” into many forms
– Culture and cultural changes affect how we perceive nature, human nature, and “the natural”
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What Is Culture?
• Culture Is All-Encompassing
– Culture defined anthropologically, culture encompasses features that are sometimes regarded as trivial or unworthy of serious study
• Culture Is Integrated
– Integrated by dominant economic activities and related social patterns and by sets of values, ideas, symbols, and judgments
– Core values: key, basic, central values
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What Is Culture?
• Culture Is Instrumental,
Adaptive and Maladaptive
– Humans adapt biologically and culturally
• People use culture instrumentally to fulfill basic biological needs
• Also use culture to fulfill psychological and emotional needs
• Many modern cultural patterns may be maladaptive in the long run
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Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• Human capacity for culture has evolutionary basis that extends back at least 2.6 million years
– Hominidae: zoological family that includes fossil and living humans as well as chimps and gorillas
– Hominids: includes chimps and gorillas
– Hominins: group that leads to humans but not to chimps and gorillas
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• Many human traits reflect that primate ancestors lived in trees
– Grasping ability
– Manual dexterity
– Depth and color vision
– Learning ability based on large brain
– Substantial parent investment
– Tendencies toward sociality and cooperation
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• What We Share with Other Primates
– Substantial gap between primate society and fully developed human culture, but similarities exist
• Learn from experience and change behavior
• Tools
• Capacity to aim and throw
• Hunting
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• How We Differ from Other Primates
– Cooperation and sharing much more developed among humans
– Humans maximize reproductive success by mating throughout the year
– Humans have exogamy and kinship systems
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Table 2.1 Cultural Features of Chimpanzees
(Rudimentary) and Humans (Fully Developed)
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Universality, Generality, and Particularity
– “Psychic unity” of humankind
• All human populations have equivalent capacities for culture
– Certain cultural features are universal: features found in every culture
– Others are generalities: features common to several but not all human groups
– Still others are particularities: features unique to certain cultural traditions
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Universality, Generality, and Particularity
• Universals and Generalities
– Biologically based universals
• Long period of infant dependency
• Year-round sexuality
• Complex brain
• Life in groups and in some kind of family
• Nuclear family: kinship group consisting of parents and children, present in many but not all societies
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Universality, Generality, and Particularity
• Particularity: patterns of culture
– Cultural particularities becoming increasingly rare because of cultural borrowing
• Borrowed cultural traits modified to fit the culture that adopts them
– Many cultures observe and celebrate such universal life-cycle events as birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, and death
• Cultures vary in beliefs, practices, integration, and patterning
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Culture and the Individual:
Agency and Practice
• Cultures are dynamic and constantly changing
– Culture is contested
– Ideal culture: what people say they do and should do
– Real culture: actual behavior
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Culture and the Individual:
Agency and Practice
• Culture is public and individual
– Agency: actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities
– Practice theory: recognizes that individuals within a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and influence
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Popular, Civic, and Public Culture
• Systems we participate in have national and international scope
– Any contemporary nation has national culture traditions, its own media and popular culture, and its own civic culture consisting of laws, institutions, and associations
– Today’s consumption patterns reflect and fuel popular culture
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Popular, Civic, and Public Culture
• All of us consume and interpret popular culture products
– Civic culture: includes citizens’ compliance with the legal system, participation in formal elections, and membership in associations
– Public culture: represents generally accepted social behaviors, dress codes, speech, and expression that citizens enact in public spaces
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Levels of Culture
• National culture: beliefs, learned behavior patterns, values, and institutions shared by citizens of the same nation
• International culture: extends beyond and across national boundaries
– Many cultural traits and patterns acquired international scope due to diffusion (borrowing), migration, colonialism, and globalization
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Levels of Culture
• Subcultures: different symbol-based patterns and traditions associated with particular groups in the same complex society
– “Sub” not meant to denote importance
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Ethnocentrism, Cultural
Relativism, and Human Rights
• Ethnocentrism: tendency to view one’s own culture as superior and to apply one’s own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures
– Trans-Fly region of Papua New Guinea
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Ethnocentrism, Cultural
Relativism, and Human Rights
• Cultural relativism: behavior in one culture should not be judged by standards of another culture
– Female genital modification
– In anthropology, cultural relativism is a methodological one
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Ethnocentrism, Cultural
Relativism, and Human Rights
• Human rights: justice and morality beyond and superior to the laws and customs of particular countries, cultures, and religions
– Cultural rights: right of group to preserve its culture, language, and economic base
– Indigenous intellectual property rights
(IPR): conservation of each society’s core beliefs, knowledge, and practices
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Mechanisms of Cultural Change
• Diffusion: borrowing of traits between cultures
– Direct diffusion: between two cultures that trade with, intermarry among, or wage war on one another
– Forced diffusion: one group subjugates another and imposes its customs
– Indirect diffusion: across one or more intervening cultures without first-hand contact
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Mechanisms of Cultural Change
• Acculturation: exchange of cultural features that results when groups come into continuous first-hand contact
• Independent invention: process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems
– Comparable inventions in different societies result in cultural generalities
• Independent invention of agriculture
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Globalization
• Globalization: series of processes that promote change in a world in which nations and people increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent
– Forces of globalization include international commerce and finance, travel and tourism, transnational migration, and mass media – including the Internet and other high-tech information flows
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Globalization
– Media play key role
– Local people increasingly cope with larger regional, national, and international forces
– Indigenous peoples and traditional societies devised strategies to protect their autonomy, identity, and livelihood
– New forms of cultural expression and political mobilization emerging
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Anthropology Today
• Experiencing Culture: Personal
Space and Displays of Affection
– World’s cultures have strikingly different notions about displays of affection and personal space
– Brazil – touch and kiss one another more frequently than North Americans do
– May be changing in U.S. to include more contact among teenagers
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