Chapter 2: Culture

I. Introduction
A. According to Edward Tylor, "Culture . . . is that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired as a member of society."
B. Enculturation is the process by which a child learns his or her culture.
II. What Is Culture?
A. Culture Is Learned
1. Cultural learning depends on the uniquely developed human
capacity to use symbols, signs that have no necessary or natural
connection to the things they stand for or signify.
2. Clifford Geertz defined culture as ideas based on cultural learning
and symbols, and he characterizes cultures as "control
mechanisms" or "programs" that govern behavior.
3. Through enculturation, people gradually internalize a previously
established system of meanings and symbols, which helps guide
their behavior and perceptions throughout their lives.
4. Culture is learned through direct instruction as well as observation,
experience, interaction with others, and conscious and unconscious
behavior modification.
B. Culture Is Symbolic
1. Symbolic thought is unique and crucial to humans and to cultural
learning.
2. A symbol is something verbal or nonverbal, within a particular
language or culture, that comes to stand for something else.
3. While human symbol use is overwhelmingly linguistic, there are
also myriad nonverbal symbols (e.g., flags, the golden arches) that
have arbitrary and conventional associations with the things they
symbolize.
4. Every contemporary human population has the ability to use
symbols and thus to create and maintain culture.
5. Although chimpanzees and gorillas have rudimentary cultural
abilities, no other animal has elaborate cultural abilities to the
extent that humans do.
C. Culture Is Shared
1. Culture is transmitted in society; it is an attribute not of individuals
per se, but of individuals as members of groups.
2. Enculturation tends to unify people by providing them with shared
beliefs, values, memories, and expectations.
a. Parents become agents in the enculturation of their
children, just as their parents were for them.
D. Culture and Nature
1. Culture teaches humans how to express natural biological urges in
particular ways.
2. Culture converts natural acts into cultural customs.
 3. Culture, and cultural changes, affect how we perceive nature,
human nature, and "the natural."
E. Culture Is All-Encompassing
1. The anthropological concept of culture encompasses all aspects of
human group behavior.
2. All people are cultured, not just those who are formally educated.
F. Culture Is Integrated
1. Cultures are integrated, patterned systems; if one aspect of a
cultural system changes, other parts change as well.
2. A set of characteristic core values (key, basic, central values)
integrates each culture and helps distinguish it from others.
G. Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive
1. Although humans continue to adapt biologically, reliance on social
and cultural means of adaptation has increased during human
evolution and plays a crucial role.
2. Cultural traits, patterns, and inventions can also be maladaptive,
threatening a group's continued survival and reproduction.
III. Culture's Evolutionary Basis
A. The human capacity for culture has an evolutionary basis that extends
back at least 2.5 millions years—to early toolmakers whose products
survive in the archaeological record.
B. What We Share with Other Primates
1. Apes and monkeys, like humans, learn throughout their lives.
2. Although humans employ tools much more than any other animal
does, tool use turns up among several nonhuman species.
3. Chimps are known to make tools for specific uses in mind (for
example, "termitting").
4. Apes have other abilities essential to culture. For example, wild
chimps and orangs aim and throw things. Gorillas build nests.
5. Hunting was once thought to be exclusively human, but other
primates, especially chimpanzees, are habitual hunters.
C. How We Differ from Other Primates
1. Cooperation and sharing are much more developed in humans.
2. Unlike nonhuman primates, humans tend to mate year-round. An
evolutionary reason for this is that human females lack a visible
estrus cycle. Also, human pair bonds for mating (often in the form
of marriage) are more exclusive and more durable than those of
nonhuman primates.
3. Exogamy and kinship systems are distinctly human.
IV. Universality, Generality, and Particularity
A. Anthropologists accept the doctrine known as "the psychic unity of man."
According to this doctrine, although individuals differ in their emotional
and intellectual tendencies and capacities, all human populations have
equivalent capacities for culture.
B. Cultural universals are features that are found in every culture.
 C. Cultural generalities are features that are common to several but not all
human groups.
D. Cultural particularities are features that are unique to certain cultural
traditions.
E. Universals and Generalities
1. Biologically based universals include a long period of infant
dependency, year-round sexuality, and a complex brain that
enables us to use symbols, languages, and tools.
2. Social universals include life in groups and in some kind of family.
3. One cultural generality (present in many but not all societies) is the
nuclear family, a kinship group consisting of parents and children.
4. Societies can share the same beliefs and customs because of
borrowing or through (cultural) inheritance from a common
cultural ancestor. Another reason for generalities is domination, as
in colonial rule, when customs and procedures are imposed on one
culture by another.
F. Particularity: Patterns of Culture
1. At the level of the individual cultural trait or element, cultural
particularities (features that are confined to a single place, culture,
or society) are becoming increasingly rare because of cultural
borrowing.
2. At a higher level, cultures are integrated and patterned differently
and display tremendous variation and diversity.
3. When cultural traits are borrowed, they are modified to fit the
culture that adopts them.
V. Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice
A. People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly
following its dictates. Cultures are dynamic and constantly changing.
B. Culture is contested—that is, different groups in society struggle with one
another over whose ideas, values, goals, and beliefs will prevail.
C. Common symbols may have radically different meanings to different
individuals and groups in the same culture.
D. Ideal culture consists of what people say they should do and what they say
they do, whereas real culture refers to their actual behavior.
E. Agency refers to the actions that individuals take, both alone and in
groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities.
F. Practice theory recognizes that individuals within a society or culture have
diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and
influence.
1. Practice theory focuses on how individuals influence, create, and
transform the world they live in.
G. Culture shapes how individuals experience and respond to external events,
but individuals also play an active role in how society functions and
changes.
VI. Levels of Culture
 A. National culture refers to the beliefs, learned behavior patterns, values,
and institutions shared by citizens of the same nation.
B. International culture extends beyond and across national boundaries
because of diffusion (borrowing), migration, colonialism, and
globalization
C. Subcultures are different symbol-based patterns and traditions associated
with particular groups in the same complex society.
VII. Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights
A. Ethnocentrism is the 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.
B. Ethnocentrism contributes to social solidarity, a sense of value and
community, among people who share a cultural tradition.
C. Ethnocentrism is universal—that is, people everywhere believe that their
cultural values and customs are true, right, proper, and moral.
D. Cultural relativism is the viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not
be judged by the standards of another culture.
1. Cultural relativism can present problems.
a. At its most extreme, cultural relativism argues that there is
no superior, international, or universal morality, that the
moral and ethical rules of all cultures deserve equal respect.
b. Some argue that the problems with relativism can be solved
by distinguishing between methodological and moral
relativism. In anthropology, cultural relativism is not a
moral position, but a methodological one. It states: to
understand another culture fully, you must try to see how
people in that culture see things. This approach does not
preclude making moral judgments or taking action.
E. The idea of inalienable, international human rights invokes a realm of
justice and morality beyond and superior to the laws and customs of
particular countries, cultures, and religions.
F. Cultural rights are vested in groups rather than individuals, and include a
group's ability to preserve its culture, language, and economic base.
The notion of indigenous intellectual property rights (IPR) attempts to
conserve each society's core beliefs, knowledge, and practices.
1. According to the IPR concept, a particular group may determine
how indigenous knowledge and its products may be used and
distributed and the level of compensation required.
VIII. Mechanisms of Cultural Change
A. Diffusion
1. Diffusion is the borrowing of traits between cultures.
2. Diffusion has gone on throughout human history, as contact
between neighboring groups has always existed and has extended
over vast areas.
 3. Diffusion can be direct—between two adjacent cultures—or
indirect—across one or more intervening cultures or through some
long-distance medium (e.g., mass media, information technology).
4. Diffusion is forced when one culture subjugates another and
imposes its customs on the dominated group.
B. Acculturation
1. Acculturation is the exchange of cultural features that results when
groups come into continuous firsthand contact.
2. Acculturation may occur in either or both groups engaged in such
contact.
With acculturation, parts of the cultures change, but each group
remains distinct.
3. A pidgin—an example of acculturation—is a mixed language that
develops to ease communication between members of different
cultures in contact (e.g., in the context of trade or colonialism).
C. C. Independent Invention
1. Independent invention is the process by which humans innovate,
creatively finding solutions to problems.
2. One reason that cultural generalities exist is that people in different
societies have innovated and changed in similar ways when faced
with comparable problems and challenges (e.g., the independent
invention of agriculture in both the Middle East and Mexico).
IX. Globalization
A. Globalization encompasses a series of processes, including diffusion,
migration, and acculturation, working to promote change in a world in
which nations and people are increasingly interlinked and mutually
dependent.
B. Forces of globalization include international commerce and finance, travel
and tourism, transnational migration, the mass media, and various high-
tech information flows.
C. As a result of globalization, local people must increasingly cope with
forces generated by progressively larger regional, national, and
international systems.
D. Indigenous peoples and traditional societies have devised various
strategies to deal with threats to their autonomy, identity, and livelihood.
X. Anthropology Today: The Advent of Behavioral Modernity
A. Scientists disagree with when, where, and how early anatomically modern
humans (AMHs) achieved behavioral modernity—relying on symbolic
thought, elaborating cultural creativity, and as a result becoming fully
human in behavior as well as anatomy.
B. The traditional view has been that modern behavior originated fairly
recently, perhaps 45,000-40,000 years ago, and only after Homo
sapiens pushed into Europe.
C. Recent discoveries outside Europe suggest a much older, more gradual
evolution of modern behavior.
Vocabulary

acculturation The exchange of cultural features that results when groups come
into continuous firsthand contact; the original cultural patterns of
either or both groups may be altered, but the groups remain distinct.

core values Key, basic, or central values that integrate a culture and help
distinguish it from others.

cultural relativism The position that the values and standards of cultures differ and
deserve respect. Anthropology is characterized by methodological
rather than moral relativism: In order to understand another culture
fully, anthropologists try to understand its members' beliefs and
motivations. Methodological relativism does not preclude making
moral judgments or taking action.

cultural rights Doctrine that certain rights are vested not in individuals but in
identifiable groups, such as religious and ethnic minorities and
indigenous societies.

diffusion Borrowing between cultures either directly or through

enculturation The social process by which culture is learned and transmitted

ethnocentrism The tendency to view one's own culture as best and to judge the
behavior and beliefs of culturally different people by one's own
standards.

generality Culture pattern or trait that exists in some but not all societies.
globalization The accelerating interdependence of nations in a world system
linked economically and through mass media and modern
transportation systems.

hominid A member of the taxonomic family that includes humans and the
African apes and their immediate ancestors.

hominins A member of the human lineage after its split from ancestral
chimps; used to describe all the human species that ever have
existed, including the extinct ones, but excluding chimps and
gorillas.

human rights Doctrine that invokes a realm of justice and morality beyond and
superior to particular countries, cultures, and religions. Human
rights, usually seen as vested in individuals, would include the right
to speak freely, to hold religious beliefs without persecution, and
not to be enslaved.

independent Development of the same culture trait or pattern in separate cultures

intellectual Each society's cultural base—its core beliefs and principles. IPR is
property rights claimed as a group right—a cultural right, allowing indigenous
(IPR) groups to control who may know and use their collective
knowledge and its applications.

international Cultural traditions that extend beyond national boundaries.

national culture Cultural experiences, beliefs, learned behavior patterns, and values
 shared by citizens of the same nation.

particularity Distinctive or unique culture trait, pattern, or integration.

subcultures Different cultural symbol-based traditions associated with

symbol Something, verbal or non-verbal, that arbitrarily and by convention

universal Something that exists in every culture.