Culture is a term used by social scientists for a way of life. Every human society has a culture. Culture includes a society’s arts, beliefs, customs, institutions, inventions, language, technology, and values. A culture produces similar behavior and thought among most people in a particular society. To learn about a culture, one may ask such questions as these: What language do the people speak? What do the people of the society wear? How do they prepare their food? What kind of dwellings do they live in? What kind of work do they do? How do they govern themselves? How do they judge right from wrong?
People are not born with any knowledge of a culture. They generally learn a culture by growing up in a particular society. They learn mainly through the use of language, especially by talking and listening to other members of the society. They also learn by watching and imitating various behaviors in the society. The process by which people—especially children—learn their society’s culture is called enculturation. Through enculturation, a culture is shared with members of a society and passed from one generation to the next. Enculturation unifies people of a society by providing them with common experiences.
The term culture has been defined in many ways. It often is used in a narrow sense to refer to activities in such fields as art, literature, and music. In that sense, a cultured person is someone who has knowledge of and appreciation for the fine arts. But under the broader definition used by social scientists, culture includes all areas of life, and all human beings have a culture.
Social scientists identify certain aspects of culture as pop culture or popular culture. Pop culture includes such elements of a society’s arts and entertainment as television, radio, recordings, advertising, sports, hobbies, fads, and fashions.
The term civilization is similar to culture, but it refers mostly to cultures that have complex economic, governmental, and social systems. A civilization is technologically more advanced than other cultures of its time. A culture is any way of life, be it simple or complex, advanced or not advanced.
For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have had at least some of the biological abilities on which culture depends. These abilities are to learn, to use language and other symbols, and to employ tools to organize their lives and adapt to their environments. Besides human beings, other animals also have such elements of culture as the ability to make and use tools and the ability to communicate. For example, elephants break off tree branches and wave them with their trunks to brush off flies. Dolphins communicate with one another by means of barks, whistles, and other sounds. But no other animals have developed language and other symbols as complex as those of human beings. Thus, no other animal possesses to the same extent the abilities to learn, to communicate, and to store, process, and use information. The rest of this article focuses on the main aspects of human culture.
Characteristics of culture
There are several important characteristics of culture. The main ones are these: (1) A culture satisfies human needs in particular ways. (2) A culture is acquired through learning. (3) A culture is based on the use of symbols. (4) A culture consists of individual traits and groups of traits called patterns.
Satisfying basic needs.
All cultures serve to meet the basic needs shared by human beings. For example, every culture has methods of obtaining food and shelter. Every culture also has family relationships, economic and governmental systems, religious practices, and forms of artistic expression.
Each culture shapes the way its members satisfy human needs. Human beings have to eat, but their culture teaches them what, when, and how to eat. For example, many British people eat smoked fish for breakfast, but many Americans prefer cold cereals. In the Midwestern United States, people generally eat dinner at 5 or 6 p.m. However, most Spaniards dine at 10 p.m. Many Turks prefer strong coffee with the grounds left in the cup, but most Australians filter out the grounds for a weaker brew. Many Japanese eat their meals from low tables while sitting on mats on the floor. Canadians usually sit on chairs at higher tables.
Learning.
Culture is acquired through learning, not through biological inheritance. That is, no person is born with a culture. Children take on the culture in which they are raised through enculturation.
Children learn much of their culture through imitation and experience. They also acquire culture through observation, paying attention to what goes on around them and seeing examples of what their society considers right and wrong. Children also may absorb certain aspects of culture unconsciously. For example, Arabs tend to stand closer together when speaking to one another than most Europeans do. No one instructs them to do so, but they learn the behavior as part of their culture.
Children also learn their culture by being told what to do. For example, a parent tells a son or daughter, “Say thank you” or “Don’t talk to strangers.” Individual members of a particular culture also share many memories, beliefs, values, expectations, and ways of thinking. In fact, most cultural learning results from verbal communication. Culture is passed from generation to generation chiefly through language.
Using symbols.
Cultural learning is based on the ability to use symbols. A symbol is something that stands for something else. The most important types of symbols are the words of a language. There is no obvious or necessary connection between a symbol and what it stands for. The English word dog is a symbol for a specific animal that barks. But other cultures have a different word that stands for the same animal—the French word chien, for example, or the Swahili word mbwa.
There are many other kinds of symbols besides the words in a language. A flag, for example, stands for a country. Colors have symbolic meaning, and the meanings vary from culture to culture. For Chinese people, white is a color of mourning. In Western societies, black is the color of mourning. White is a symbol of purity, and brides wear white. All human societies use symbols to create and maintain culture.
Forming patterns.
Cultures are made up of individual elements called cultural traits. A group of related traits is a cultural pattern.
Cultural traits may be divided into material culture and nonmaterial culture. Material culture consists of all the things that are made by the members of a society. It includes such objects as buildings, jewelry, machines, and paintings. Nonmaterial culture refers to a society’s behaviors and beliefs. A handshake, a marriage ceremony, and a system of justice are examples of nonmaterial culture.
Cultural patterns may include numerous traits, both material and nonmaterial. The pattern for agriculture, for example, includes the time when crops are harvested (nonmaterial), the methods (nonmaterial) and machinery (material) used in harvesting, and the structures for storing the crops (material).
Most traits that make up a cultural pattern are connected to one another. If one custom, institution, or value that helps form a cultural pattern changes, other parts of the pattern will probably change, too. For example, until the 1950’s, the career pattern for most women in Western societies was to work full-time as homemakers and mothers. By the late 1900’s, the pattern was for most women to get jobs outside the home. As part of the new pattern, attitudes about marriage, family, and children also changed. The new pattern includes marriage at a later age than ever before, a dependence on alternative child-care systems, and more frequent divorce.
The boundaries of cultures
Every human society has a culture. People who grow up in the same nation can be said to share a national culture. But they may be part of other societies within the nation that have separate cultural traditions.
Social scientists sometimes use the term subculture to describe variations within a culture. Social groups often develop some cultural patterns of their own that set them apart from the larger society they are part of. Subcultures may develop in businesses, ethnic groups, occupational groups, regional groups, religious groups, and other groups within a larger culture. For example, Amish people in Pennsylvania and several Midwestern States make up a subculture, as do members of a teenage street gang.
Many cultural traits and patterns are limited to a particular culture, but many others are common to more than one culture. For example, cultures in the same part of the world often have similar patterns. A geographical region in which two or more cultures share cultural traits and patterns is called a culture area. Northern Europe is an example of a culture area.
Some cultural traits have spread throughout the world. For example, some clothing, music, sports, and industrial processes are the same in many areas of the world. Cultural traditions that extend beyond national boundaries form what is called international culture. For example, countries that share an international culture include Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Their common cultural traditions include the English language and a heritage of British founders.
Culture and society
Multiculturalism.
Some societies—such as those of Tibetans in Tibet and various peoples of the Pacific Islands—have traditionally been associated with a single culture. Other societies—such as those of the United States and Canada—are multicultural societies. They include many distinct cultures.
A shared cultural background makes people feel more comfortable with other people from their own culture. Many people initially may feel confused and uneasy when they deal with people of another culture. The discomfort that people often feel when they have contact with an unfamiliar culture is called culture shock. Culture shock usually passes if a person stays in a new culture long enough to understand it and get used to its ways.
People of one culture who move to a country where another culture dominates may give up their old ways and become part of the dominant culture. The process by which they do this is called assimilation. Through assimilation, a minority group eventually disappears because its members lose the cultural characteristics that set them apart. In a multicultural society, however, assimilation does not always occur.
A multicultural society supports the view that many distinct cultures are good and desirable. The multicultural view encourages such diversity. Thus, in the United States, millions of people speak both English and the language of their own culture. They eat both American food (apple pie and hamburgers) and ethnic food. They celebrate both national holidays (Fourth of July and Thanksgiving) and their ethnic holidays. For example, many Mexican Americans celebrate Mexican Independence Day on September 16. In Chinese communities across the country, parades and other festivities mark the Chinese New Year.
Multiculturalism succeeds best in a society that has many different ethnic groups and a political system that promotes freedom of expression and awareness and understanding of cultural differences. Ethnic groups can bring variety and richness to a society by introducing their own ideas and customs. However, ethnic groups that keep their own values and traditions can also threaten national unity. In many parts of the world, neighboring ethnic groups dislike and distrust one another. In some cases, these feelings have even led to war. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, a civil war broke out in the early 1990’s between Serbs and non-Serbs, who included Bosniaks (sometimes called Bosnian Muslims) and Croats.
Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.
Many people in all cultures think that their own culture is right, proper, and moral. They tend to use their own cultural standards and values to judge the behavior and beliefs of people from different cultures. They regard the behavior and beliefs of people from other cultures as strange or savage.
The attitude that one’s culture is best is called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is harmful if carried to extremes. It may cause prejudice, automatic rejection of ideas from other cultures, and even persecution of other groups.
The opposite view of ethnocentrism is called cultural relativism. It contends that no culture should be judged by the standards of another. This view can also present problems if carried to extremes. An extreme cultural relativist would say there is no such thing as a universal morality. An extreme cultural relativist would argue that the rules of all cultures deserve equal respect, even rules that allow such practices as cannibalism and torture. But many social scientists would reply that certain values are common to all societies—a prohibition against incest, for example, and support for marriage. They would argue that international standards of justice and morality should not be ignored.
How cultures change
Every culture changes. But all parts of a culture do not change at the same time. For example, science and technology may sometimes change so rapidly that they lessen the importance of customs, ideas, and other nonmaterial parts of a culture. At other times, changes in ideas and social systems may occur before changes in technology. The failure of certain parts of a culture to keep up with other, related parts is referred to as cultural lag.
A number of factors may cause a culture to change. The two main ones are (1) contact with other cultures and (2) invention.
Contact with other cultures.
No society is so isolated that it does not come in contact with other societies. When contact occurs, societies borrow cultural traits from one another. As a result, cultural traits and patterns tend to spread from the society in which they originated. This spreading process is called diffusion. Corn growing, for example, began in what is now Mexico thousands of years ago and eventually spread throughout the world.
Diffusion can occur without firsthand contact between cultures. Products or patterns may move from group A to group C through group B without any contact between group A and group C. Today, diffusion is rapid and widespread because many cultures of the world are linked through advanced means of transportation and communication.
When two cultures have continuous, firsthand contact with each other, the exchange of cultural traits is called acculturation. Acculturation has often occurred when one culture has colonized or conquered another, or as a result of trade. In addition to adopting each other’s traits, the two cultures may blend traits. For example, if the people of the cultures speak different languages, they may develop a mixed language called pidgin in order to communicate. The cultures may also exchange or blend such traits as clothing, dances, music, recipes, and tools. Through acculturation, parts of the culture of one or both groups change, but the groups remain distinct. In this way, acculturation differs from assimilation. Through assimilation, one group becomes part of another group and loses its separate identity.
Invention
is the creation of a new device, process, or product. Inventions provide a new solution to an old or new problem. Without inventions, human beings would be at the mercy of the climate and the land. Inventions have given people much control over their environment and enabled them to lead easier lives.
Inventions have led to many changes in a culture. The invention of agriculture, for example, made it possible for people to settle in farm villages. Their values and social organization changed. They placed importance on using land and animals to produce crops. They began to build permanent housing. They developed systems of irrigation and a number of tools.
The invention of spinning and weaving machines and an improved steam engine in the 1700’s produced another great change in the way people lived. These inventions led to the opening of factories. Many people who had worked at home in rural areas flocked to the cities to work in the new factories. As cities became more crowded, new kinds of political, economic, and social systems developed.
The invention of the electronic computer in the mid-1900’s has had enormous impact. It has brought far-reaching changes in communication, education, entertainment, and numerous other areas of modern life.
How people study culture
The scientific study of human beings is called anthropology. One of the main branches of anthropology is cultural anthropology, which studies human cultures. The work of cultural anthropologists is comparative and cross-cultural—that is, cultural anthropologists study various societies to determine their cultural similarities and differences.
Cultural anthropologists study the artwork, houses, tools, and other material products of contemporary cultures. They also investigate the nonmaterial creations, including social groups, religious beliefs, symbols, and values. They gather information primarily by living for a time among the people they are studying and by observing them and talking with them. They organize the information into a scientific description called an ethnography.
Another main branch of anthropology is archaeology. It focuses on cultures of the past. Archaeologists study the remains of these cultures, including buildings, clothing, pottery, tools, and artwork. They trace the development of cultures by examining the things the people made and used. Archaeologists work at a specific site. They dig carefully for buried objects in a process called excavation. They describe whatever they find and take photographs of representative samples.
Archaeological research is the chief method available for learning about societies that existed before the invention of writing about 5,500 years ago. However, some archaeologists study later cultures, even contemporary cultures. For example, an archaeological project begun in 1973 in Tucson, Arizona, has provided information about contemporary American life through a study of people’s garbage.
Other social scientists who study aspects of culture include sociologists and political scientists. They work mainly in a single urban, industrial society, and they make cross-cultural comparisons less often than anthropologists.
