Culture: Customary/traditional behaviours and beleifs which are

transmitted through enculturation.

culture :it is the complex whole which includes knowledge,

customs,belief,morals,laws,art and any other capabilities and habits
which is acquired by a man as a member of society.
-Tylor

Enculturation is the process by which a child learns his or her culture.

Features of culture:
Culture is ‘learned’
It is depended on the elaborated human capacity to learn.
-symbols,observation,unconsciously,experience.
it is learned through -
individual learning
social situational learning
cultural learning-enriched with signs and symbols
(it can also be learned unconsciously)peoples subsconscious
observation can teach them social norms too.
Culture is symbolic
Culture consists of tools,utensils,works of
art,language,clothes,rituals,ornaments,beleifs,games,institutions etc.

There is no necessary or natural connection between the symbol and

the thing that it symbolizes.

Semiotics is the study of sign processes, which are any activity, conduct,
or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that
communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the sign's
interpreter.

-Culturural practice run upon symbolic meaning, which can be cross

culturally different.
-Culture rests on symbolized,meaning making process because humans
have the ability to symbol and to create and maintain culture.
-cultural meaning defines our diff dimesnions of identity.
Culture is general
everyone has some sort of culture.Humans are social beings.Culture of
all sorts develop in communal life.
Culture is all-encompassing
the most interesting and significant cultural forces are those that affect
people everyday of their lives,particularly those that influence children
during enculturation.
-culture encompasses feature that are sometimes considered trivial or
unworthy .
Therefore everything needs to be studied meticulously.
Culture is shared
people learn culture through upbringing and learning.
enculturation-cultural learning process,through which people
become unified by going through common experiences
Culture is patterned
cultures are not haphazard collection of beleifs and customs.They are
integrated and patterned.if one part of the system changes,other parts
also change.
culture train their individual to share certain personality traits.A set of
core values(key basics or central values) helps to integrate each
culture and helps to distinguish from other culture.

Culture is used creatively

Culture has traditions, standard rules. People are expected to obey
them. But even if people try to be creative(which means, of course,
working against standard regulations and rules), that is also welcomed
from the standard tradition.

*People are agents. Sometimes they work in accordance with structure.

Sometimes they play against it. Again, sometimes they are suppressed,
toughly disciplined and tamed by structure, & sometimes structure is
defeated by them.
Culture is adaptive & mal-adaptive
Human adapts to culture.
Culture adapts to human

Sometimes its detrimental to both.

cultural traits are adaptive as they help humans cope with

environmental stresses. Such traits can also be detrimental or mal-
adaptive. I.e-policies that encourage overpopulation, overconsumption,
poor food distribution systems, environmental degradation.

By convention,a symbol stands for sth for which it has no natural or

necessary relation.

symbols have special meaning for people who share values,

memories,common beleifs because of common enculturation.

Ethnocentrism describes judging other cultures by using ones own

cultural standards.

Cultural relativism : is the idea of avoiding the use of outside standards

to judge behaviour in a given society

National culture : Shared beleifs,values,learned behaiour patterns and

institutions shared among citizens of the same nation.

International culture :cultural traditions that extend beyond national

boundaries

Subculture: Different symbol based patterns and traditions associated

with subgroups in the same complex society.

ethnocentrism:the idea that ones own culture is superior and applying

ones own cultural values in judging the behaviour and belief of people
raised in other cultures.

culturalrelativism: the idea that behaviour in one culture shouldnt be

judged by the standards of another culture
problem with cultural relativism :Deniesthe existence of any
internal/universal morality.