1. © 2013 McGraw-Hill Companies. All Rights Reserved.

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C H A P T E R
CULTURE
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3. CULTURE What Is Culture? Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
Universality, Generality, and Particularity
Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice
Mechanisms of Cultural Change
Globalization 3

4. WHAT IS CULTURE? What is culture and why do we study it?
What is the relation between culture and the individual?
How does culture change—especially with globalization? 4

5. WHAT IS CULTURE?
Tylor: cultures—systems of human behavior and thought—obey natural laws, so they can be studied scientifically
Includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society
Enculturation: the process by which a child learns his or her culture

6. Culture is Learned
CULTURE IS LEARNED, SYMBOLIC, AND SHARED, ALL-ENCOMPASSING AND INTEGRATED
Cultural learning is unique to humans.
It is the knowledge transmitted through symbols. On the basis of cultural learning, people create, remember, and deal with ideas.

7. CULTURE IS LEARNED
Human cultural learning depends on the uniquely developed human capacity to use symbols
Symbols: signs that have no necessary or natural connection with the things for which they stand
Cultural learning includes knowledge transmitted through symbols. Through this, people create, remember, and deal with ideas.

8. Symbols – Peace Sign

9. Symbols – American Flag

10. Symbols – Confederate Flag

11. Symbols – Cross and Crucifix

12. CULTURE IS LEARNED
Clifford Geertz: culture is ideas based on cultural learning and symbols
Set of control mechanisms for instructions for behavior
Culture is learned through direct instruction and observation
Cultural knowledge is gained consciously and unconsciously
Anthropologists in the 19th century argued for a “psychic unity of man”
Individuals vary in emotional and intellectual tendencies and capacities
All human population have the same capacity for culture

13. CULTURE IS SYMBOLIC
Symbolic thought is unique and crucial to cultural learning; ability to use symbols is basis of culture
Verbal and nonverbal symbols
Association between symbols and symbolized is arbitrary and conventional
Chimpanzees and gorillas have rudimentary cultural abilities
No animal has elaborated cultural abilities to extent of Homo sapiens

14. CULTURE IS SHARED Culture is located in and transmitted through groups
Shared beliefs, values, memories, and expectations link people who grow up in the same culture
Enculturation unifies people by providing common experiences
Children learn values and beliefs transmitted over generations
Culture changes but certain fundamental beliefs, values, worldviews, and child-rearing practices remain

15. Culture is Shared

16. CULTURE AND NATURE
Cultural habits, perceptions, and inventions mold human nature
Culture takes natural biological urges and teaches us to express them in particular ways
Teaches what, when and how to eat; teaches bathroom habits
Our culture—and cultural changes—affect the ways in which we perceive nature, human nature, and “the natural” world

17. CULTURE IS ALL-ENCOMPASSING
Anthropology: culture includes features sometimes regarded as trivial or unworthy of serious study; all aspects of human social life
To understand North American culture, one must consider television, fast-food restaurants, sports, and games

18. CULTURE IS INTEGRATED Cultures are integrated, patterned systems
If one part changes, other parts change
Core values: key, basic, or central values that integrate a culture and distinguish it from others
America – work ethic, individualism, materialism, technology, equality

19. CULTURE IS INSTRUMENTAL, ADAPTIVE, AND MALADAPTIVE
Humans have biological (sweating and shivering) and cultural ways (technology and tools) of coping with environmental stress
Culture is also an instrument to fulfill our needs (biological, psychological, and emotional)
Maladaptive
What’s good for an individual isn’t necessarily good for the group’s survival
Many modern cultural patterns may be maladaptive in the long run

20. Oil Spill

23. CULTURE’S EVOLUTIONARY BASIS
Similarities between humans and apes evident in anatomy, brain structure, genetics, and biochemistry
Most closely related to chimps and gorillas
Hominid: member of hominid family; any fossil or living human, chimp, or gorilla
Hominins: hominids excluding the African apes; all human species that ever existed

24. CULTURE’S EVOLUTIONARY BASIS
Many human traits reflect that our primate ancestors lived in trees
Grasping ability and manual dexterity
Five fingered hands with opposable thumbs
Depth and color vision
Learning ability based on a large brain
Substantial parental investment in offspring
Tendencies toward sociality and cooperation

25. WHAT WE SHARE WITH OTHER PRIMATES
Substantial gap between primate society and fully developed human culture
Still, primates share similarities with humans:
Learning - Ability to learn and change behavior
Tools
Aim and throw objects
Habitual hunters

26. HOW WE DIFFER FROM OTHER PRIMATES
Cooperation and sharing are much more developed among humans
Human females lack a visible estrus cycle and ovulation is concealed
Humans mate throughout the year
Human pair bonds for mating are more exclusive and durable than those of chimps
Humans have exogamy and kinship systems
Exogamy creates ties with the spouses’ different groups; allies in two kin groups rather than one
Humans maintain lifelong ties with sons and daughters

27. UNIVERSALITY GENERALITY AND PARTICULARITY
Universal: exists in every culture
Generality: exists in some but not all societies
Particularity: distinctive or unique culture trait, pattern, or integration
UNIVERSALITY GENERALITY AND PARTICULARITY

28. UNIVERSALS AND GENERALITIES
Universality
Universal traits are the ones that more or less distinguish Homo sapiens from other species:
Biological: a long period of infant dependency, year-round sexuality, and a complex brain
Social: life in groups and families, marriage, birth, death, spiritual beliefs
Psychological: common ways in which humans think, feel, and process information

29. UNIVERSALS AND GENERALITIES
Generalities – occur in certain times and places, but not in all cultures
Nuclear family
Agriculture
Formal education
Santa Claus
Cultural generalities may
arise through:
Inheritance
Diffusion (borrowing)
Colonization (domination)
Invention

30. PARTICULARITY: PATTERNS OF CULTURE
Particularity – unique to single place, culture, or society
Cultural particularities are increasingly rare:
Diffusion
Independent invention
When cultural traits are borrowed, traits modified to fit the adopting culture
- Cultures display a lot of variation and diversity (life cycle events such as birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, and death are observed and celebrated differently; occasion is same but observance is different)

31. CULTURE AND THE INDIVIDUAL: AGENCY AND PRACTICE
Generations of anthropologists theorized about the “system” (culture, society, social relations, and social structure) and “individual”:
Cultural rules provide guidance, but people don’t always follow the rules
Culture is contested
Culture is public/collective and individual (how one thinks, feels, and acts); individuals internalize meanings of public/cultural messages and then (alone and in groups) people influence culture by turning their private (often divergent) understandings into public expression

32. Culture and the Individual

33. Agency
Agency: Day-to-day actions make and remake culture (process of action, practice, and resistance)
Agency: the actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities
Practice theory: individuals within society have diverse motives; how individuals, through their actions, influence, create, and transform the world.

34. LEVELS OF CULTURE
National culture: cultural features shared by citizens of the same nation
International culture: cultural traditions that extend beyond national boundaries
Subcultures: identifiable cultural patterns existing within a larger culture

35. Table 2.1: Levels of Culture, with Examples from Sports and Foods35

36. ETHNOCENTRISM, CULTURAL RELATIVISM, AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Ethnocentrism: tendency to view one’s own culture as superior and to use one’s own standards and values in judging outsiders
Cultural relativism: methodological position; to know another culture requires full understanding of its members’ beliefs and motivations
What are they thinking?
What motivates them?

37. ETHNOCENTRISM, CULTURAL RELATIVISM, AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Human rights: rights based on justice and morality beyond and superior to particular countries, cultures, and religions
rights vested in the individual
Inalienable: nations cannot terminate them
Free speech, religion without persecution, right to not be murdered, injured, enslaved, or imprisoned without charge
Cultural rights: rights vested in religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies
Preserve its cultural traditions
Raise children in the ways of its ancestors
Speak their language
Not to be deprived of economic base
Being objective, sensitive, and cross-cultural does not mean anthropologists have to ignore justice and morality. They do not have to approve of customs like infanticide, to recognize their existence and determine their causes and motivations.

38. MECHANISMS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
Diffusion: borrowing of traits between cultures
Direct
Forced
Indirect

39. MECHANISMS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
Acculturation: exchange of features that results when groups come into consistent first-hand contact; parts of the culture change but each group remains distinct
Mexicans celebrating Mexican Revolution and Cinco de Mayo and the Fourth of July
Independent invention: process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems
Canoes to travel
Domesticating animals
Agriculture
Cultural generalities are partly explained by the independent invention of similar responses to comparable cultural and environmental circumstances (independent invention of agriculture – led to many social, political, and legal changes, including notions of property and distinctions in wealth, class, and power)
al8

40. GLOBALIZATION
Globalization: series of processes that work to make modern nations and people increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent
Economic and political forces
International commerce and finance, travel and tourism, transnational migration, and media
Information technologies/long-distance communication
Internet: influential in spread of information, emergence of transnational culture of consumption, and ease of long distance communication
Local people must increasingly cope with forces generated by progressively larger systems
Tourism (world’s number one industry) threatens autonomy, identity, and livelihood of many indigenous people

41. Misanthropology