HANDOUT: NOTES ON "CULTURE"

Human behavior is too complex to allow simple, precise definitions however much scholars may wish to be "scientific", precise, and quantitative. "One has `a sense of the term' rather than an explicit, precise definition."

"Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual systems and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought." Raymond Williams.   Keywords P. 87.

Edward B. Tylor: "Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." (1871)

OED 1. Worship, 2. Cultivating of soil, 3. Cultivation of a plant or crop, 4. "Fig. The cultivating or development of the mind, faculties, manners, etc.); improvement or refinement by education and training." 5.a. "The training, development, and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners; the condition of being thus trained and refined; the intellectual side of civilization." 5.b. "A particular form or type of intellectual development. Also, the civilization, customs, artistic achievements, etc., of a people, esp. at a certain stage of its development or history. (In many contexts it is not possible to separate this sense from sense 5 a.)" Metaphorical or figurative from cultivating.

Academic American Encyclopedia 1995 Ref/Bib AE5 A23 1995 v.5 384-5 "Human culture in the technical sense includes the insignificant and mundane behavior traits, as well as the refined arts of a society. (p.384)

High culture, low culture: = more or better cultivated -- implies a value judgement.

[Culture as]"...being the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world." Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy.

Britannica "Culture, the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior."

Encyclopedia Americana AZ5 E333 1994 v.8 315- keen to distinguish humans from animals. "Cultural style" patterned behavior.

"Acculturation" change of culture towards...

Collier's Encyclopedia "Culture" Ref/Bib AE5 C82 1990 v.7. "Culture in its anthropological usage, is the man-made part of the human environment. A culture is the way of life of a specific group." (p. 558)

*Culture is shared, learned, based on symbols, and integrated " (Haviland, William A. 1994. Anthropology. Harcourt Brace, p. 305)

"Learned" is not the same as "taught".

"By extension" a "culture" as label / name for a group characterized by that culture. Very common to call something by one attribute, e.g. "Blacks" from skin color; also "whites", the "Reds" (Communists)

Culture is symbolic behavior, but not only symbolic.

A. L. Kroeber & Clyde Kluckhohn: "Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for, behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected ) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the other hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action." (1952, p. 181)

Not only "ethnic" but any group, community: "culture of poverty", "gay culture", "corporate culture".

Cultural relativism all cultures equally reasonable in their own terms, cf. multiculturalism. Killing bulls for fun is OK for Spaniards and French?

Progress? 1911: Stages of civilization: bestiality -- savagery -- barbarism -- civilization.

Cultural institutions: Social institutions that influence culture in either sense.

One's own culture is about as easy to perceive as fish perceiving water, some comparison / change is needed, e.g. mix in some other culture..

Material Culture, "i.e. that range of cultural phenomena which is constituted by or embodied in physical objects. Here we have once again buildings, vessels, tools, weapons and works of art, but with the difference that in this case they are not dug up from archaeological sites but observed and used from day to day. The concept of "material culture" harbours a significant difficulty, well expressed by Kroeber & Kluckhohn: "The underlying point is often expressed in conversation somewhat as follows `Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as "material culture". A pot is not a culture--what is culture is the idea behind the artifact. A prayer or a ceremony is merely the outward and visible manifestation of a cultural idea'" (Culture, p.67). This however is a philosopher's riddle. After all, ideas can only deduced form actions--or in this case from the material precipitate of an action, such as a pot. Note, for example, the rigorous and thoughtful definition of culture by Redfield taken from an unpublished lecture: "An organization of conventional understandings manifest in act and artifact, which, persisting through tradition, characterizes a human group." (Ibid, p.61).

The notion of culture is itself a part of our culture.

"It began to seem that what culture is isn't quite as important as what culture does."