Characteristics of Culture

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Chapter 14

• Characteristics of Culture

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Chapter Outline

• The Concept Of Culture
• Characteristics of Culture
• Studying Culture in the Field
• Cross-cultural Comparisons
• Culture and Adaptation
• Culture, Society, and the Individual
• Evaluation of CULTURE

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Culture

• A societys shared and socially transmitted
  ideas, values, and perceptions, which are used to
  make sense of experience and generate behavior
  and are reflected in that behavior.

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Characteristics Of Culture

• Every culture is
• learned
• shared
• based on symbols
• integrated
• dynamic

5
Society

• An organized group or groups of interdependent
  people who share a common territory, language,
  and culture and who act together for collective
  survival and well-being.

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Enculturation

• The process by which a societys culture is
  transmitted from one generation to the next and
  individuals become members of their society.

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Culture is Shared

• Although culture involves a groups shared
  values, ideas, and, behavior everything within a
  culture is not uniform.
• In all cultures there is some difference between
  men and womens roles.
• Anthropologists use the term gender to refer to
  the meanings cultures assign to the biological
  differences between men and women.

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Gender

• The cultural elaborations and meanings assigned
  to the biological differentiation between the
  sexes.

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Subculture

• A set of standards and behavior patterns by which
  a group within a larger society operates.

10
Ethnic Group

• People who collectively and publicly identify
  themselves as a distinct group based on cultural
  features such as shared ancestry and common
  origin, language, customs, and traditional
  beliefs.

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Some Ethnic Groups of the Russian Federation
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Ethnicity

• Term, rooted in the Greek word ethnikos
  (nation) and related to ethnos (custom) is
  the expression of the set of cultural ideas held
  by an ethnic group.

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Pluralistic Society

• A society in which two or more ethnic groups or
  nationalities are politically organized into one
  territorial state but maintain their cultural
  differences.

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Culture is Based on Symbols

• Symbols are signs, sounds, gestures, and other
  things that are arbitrarily linked to something
  else and represent it in a meaningful way.
• The most important symbolic aspect of culture is
  languageusing words to represent objects and
  ideas.
• Through language, humans transmit culture from
  one generation to another.

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Culture is Integrated

• Anthropologists customarily imagine a culture as
  a well-structured system made up of distinctive
  parts that function together as an organized
  whole.
• While they distinguish each part as a clearly
  defined unit with its own features,
  anthropologists recognize that divisions between
  cultural units arent clear.
• They view each unit in terms of its larger
  context and carefully examine its connections to
  related cultural features.

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Societys Cultural Features

• A societys cultural features fall within three
  categories
• Social structure
• Infrastructure
• Superstructure

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Culture is Integrated
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Infrastructure

• The economic foundation of a society, including
  its subsistence practices, and the tools and
  other material equipment used to make a living.

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Social Structure

• The rule-governed relationshipswith all their
  rights and obligationsthat hold members of a
  society together.
• This includes households, families, associations,
  and power relations, including politics.

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Social Structure

• Rule-governed relationships that hold members of
  a society together, with all their rights and
  obligations.
• Households, families, associations, and power
  relations, including politics, are all part of
  social structure.
• It establishes group cohesion and enables people
  to consistently satisfy their basic needs,
  including food.

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Superstructure

• A societys shared sense of identity and
  worldview.
• The collective body of ideas, beliefs, and values
  by which a group of people makes sense of the
  worldits shape, challenges,and opportunitiesand
  their place in it.

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Culture Is Dynamic

• Cultures are dynamic systems that respond to
  motions and actions within and around them.
• To function adequately, a culture must be
  flexible enough to allow adjustments in the face
  of unstable or changing circumstances.
• When a culture is too rigid and fails to provide
  its members with the means required for long-term
  survival under changing conditions, it is not
  likely to endure.

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Functions of Culture

• To survive, a culture must
• satisfy the basic biological and psychological
  needs of its members
• provide some structure for reproduction to ensure
  their continuity
• maintain order among its members as well as
  between its members and outsiders.

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Three Kinds of Cultural Data

• Peoples own understanding of their culture and
  the rules they share.
• The extent to which people believe they are
  observing those rules.
• Behavior that can be directly observedwhat the
  anthropologist actually sees happening.

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Culture Change

• Culture change takes place in response to
  population growth, technological innovation,
  environmental crisis, intrusion of outsiders, or
  modification of values and behavior within the
  culture.
• Although cultures must change to adapt to new
  circumstances, sometimes the consequences of
  change are disastrous for a society.

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Ethnocentrism

• The belief that ones own culture is superior to
  all others.
• To avoid making ethnocentric judgments,
  anthropologists adopt the approach of cultural
  relativism, which requires that each culture be
  examined in its own terms, according to its own
  standards.

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Evaluation of Culture

• We can evaluate a culture based on how well it
  satisfies the needs of those whose behavior it
  guides according to the following factors
• nutritional status and physical and mental health
• incidence of violence
• stability of domestic life
• the groups relationship to its resource base.