Assignment

Topic: Define culture & characteristics of culture.

Defining Culture
Culture is the social behavior and norms found in human societies. Culture is
considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of
phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in
human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies; these include
expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool
usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the
physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas
the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social
organization, mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral),
and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.
In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the
degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts,
sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also
sometimes been seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such
hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions
between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk
culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural
capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the
symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from
each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to
the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in
the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory,
have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to
manipulate the lower classes and create a false consciousness, and such
perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social
sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human
symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans
create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found
in evolved biological dispositions.
Characteristics of Culture

 Culture is Learned
Culture is not biologically passed from older generations to the newer ones. It is
learned through experience. The members of a culture share certain ideals which
shape their lives. The future generations learn to follow the same ideals. Culture
propagates through generations, which adopt their old customs and traditions as a
part of their culture. The ideals they base their lives on, is a part of their culture.
Cultural values are imparted from one generation to another, which is the reason
why they continue. The language, the literature, and the art forms pass down from
generation to generation. Culture is learned, understood, and adopted from what is
taught by society and assimilated from the environment. No individual is born with
a sense of culture. In the course of life, he learns it.

 Culture is Social

It is not an individual phenomena but it is the product of society. It develops in the

society through social interaction. It is shared by the man of society No man can
acquire it without the association of others. Man is man only among men. It helps
to develop qualities of human beings in a social environment. Deprivation of a man
from his company is the deprivation of human qualities.

 Culture is shared
Culture is something shared. It is nothing that an individual can passes but shared
by common people of a territory. For example, customs, traditions, values, beliefs
are all shared by man in a social situation. These beliefs and practices are adopted
by all equally.

 Culture is transmitted
.

Culture is capable of transmitted from one generation to the next. Parents papas
cultural traits to their children and in return they pass to their children and son on.
It is not transmitted through genes but through language. Language is means to
communication which passes cultural traits from one generation to another.
 Culture is continuous
It is continuous process. It is like a stream which is flowing from one generation to
another through centuries. “Culture is the memory of human race.”

 Culture is accumulative
Culture is not a matter of month or a year. It is the continuous process and adding
new cultural traits. Many cultural traits are borrowed from out side and these
absorbed in that culture which adopt it, as culture is accumulative and combines
the suitable cultural traits.

 Culture is integrated
All the cultural aspects are inter-connected with each other. The development of
culture is the integration of its various parts. For example, values system is
interlinked with morality, customs, beliefs and religion.

 Culture is changing
It remains changing but not static. Cultural process undergoes changes. But with
different speeds from society to society and generation to generation.

 Culture varies from society to society

Every society has its own culture and ways of behaving. It is not uniform every
where but occurs differently in various societies. Every culture is unique in itself is
a specific society. For example, values, customs, traditions, ideologies, religion,
belief, practices are not similar but different in every society. However the ways of
eating, drinking, speaking, greeting, dressing etc are differs from one social
situation to another in the same time.

 Culture is responsive
Culture is responsive to the changing conditions of a physical world. It intervenes
in the natural environment and helps man from all dangers and natural calamities
e.g. our houses are responsible to give us shelter and safety from storm and heavy
rains.
 Culture is gratifying
It is gratifying and provide all the opportunities for needs and desires satisfaction.
These needs may be biological or social but It is responsible to satisfy it. Our needs
are food, shelter, clothing and desires are status, fame, money, sex etc are all the
examples which are fulfilled according to the cultural ways. In fact it is defined as
the process through which human beings satisfy their needs.

 Culture is Super-organic
Culture is sometimes called super organic. It implies that “culture” is somehow
superior to “nature”. The word super-organic is useful when it implies that what
may be quite a different phenomenon from a cultural point of view.

 Culture is pervasive
Culture is pervasive it touches every aspect of life. The pervasiveness of culture is
manifest in two ways. First, culture provides an unquestioned context within which
individual action and response take place. Not only emotional action but relational
actions are governed by cultural norms. Second, culture pervades social activities
and institutions.

 Culture is Idealistic
Culture embodies the ideas and norms of a group. It is sum-total of the ideal
patterns and norms of behaviour of a group. Culture consists of the intellectual,
artistic and social ideals and institutions which the members of the society profess
and to which they strive to confirm.

 Culture is a way of life

Culture means simply the “way of life” of a people or their “design for living.”
Kluckhohn and Kelly define it in his sense, ” A culture is a historically derived
system of explicit and implicit designs for living, which tends to be shared by all or
specially designed members of a group.”Explicit culture refers to similarities in
word and action which can be directly observed. For example, the adolescent
cultural behaviour can be generalized from regularities in dress, mannerism and
conversation. Implicit culture exists in abstract forms which are not quite obvious.