CULTURE

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What is culture?
• Culture is the way of life.
• According to Sir Edward Burnett Taylor: a
complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society.
• It is not actual observable behavior of a group
of people, but an abstraction derived from it.
• It is a set of rules or standards which, when
acted upon by the members of a society,
produces behavior that falls within a range of
variance the members consider proper and
acceptable.

• Culture is manifested in music, literature,

lifestyle, painting and sculpture, theater and
film and similar things.
• * Culture is an instant reality and apparatus of
satisfaction biological delights need.
• Culture is the sum total of integrated long
behavior patterns which are characteristics of
members of society.
• * Religion is one kind of culture.
• Culture shapes our personalities. The totality
of learned, socially transmitted customs,
knowledge, material objects, and behavior. It
consists of all objects and ideas within a
society.
Elements AND Characteristics of Culture

• Symbols
– Is anything that carries a particular meaning
recognized by people who share a culture. It will vary
within single society.

• Language
– Is the critical element of culture that sets human apart
from other species. Members of a society generally
share a common language, which facilitates day to day
exchanges with others. This is the foundation of every
culture.
– The key to the world of culture, is a system of
symbols that allows people to communicate with
one another. Humans have created many
alphabets to express the hundreds of languages
we speak.
– Language not only allows communication but is
also the key to cultural transmission, the process
by which one generation passes culture to the
next. Just as our bodies contain the genes of our
ancestors, our culture contains countless symbols
of those who came before us. Language is the key
that unlocks centuries of accumulated wisdom.
• Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf claimed
that each language has its own distinctive
symbols that serve as the building blocks of
reality. Further, they noted that each
language has worlds or expressions not found
in any other symbolic system. Finally, all
languages fuse symbols with distinctive
emotions so that, as multilingual people know,
a single idea may “feel” different when spoken
in Spanish rather than in English or Chinese.
• Sapir-Whorf thesis states that people see and
understand the world through the cultural
sense of language.
• Values
– Culturally defined standards that people use to
decide what is desirable, good, and beautiful and
that serve as broad guidelines for social living.
– Beliefs – specific idea or thoughts that people hold
to be true. In other words, values are abstract
standards of goodness, and beliefs are particular
matters that individuals consider true or false.
• Norms
– Rules and expectation by which a society guides
the behavior of its members. In everyday life,
people respond to each other with sanctions,
rewards or punishments that encourage
conformity to cultural norms.

• Culture is learned
– Culture is learned, not biologically inherited.
– This is man’s “social heredity”.
• ENCULTURATION: the process whereby culture is
transmitted from one generation to the next.
Through this, one learns the socially appropriate
way of satisfying one’s instinctual needs.

• Culture is symbolic
– All human behavior originates in the use of symbols.
– the most important symbolic aspect of culture is
LANGUAGE – this is the foundation upon which
human cultures are built.
• Culture is series nature.
• Culture is shared.
• Culture is patterned
• Culture diversities for people’s creativity.
• Culture is adaptive
• Culture is general as specific
 Development of Culture
• Language  is the critical element of culture
that sets human apart from other species.
Members of a society generally share a
common language, which facilitates day to day
exchanges with others. This is the foundation
of every culture.
• Cultural Universals
all societies have developed certain common
practices and beliefs.

Culture may be universal, but the manner in

which they are expressed varies from one
culture to another.
 CAUSES OF CULTURAL CHANGE
• Innovation is the process of introducing a new
idea or object to a culture.
• Two types of innovation:
Discovery
Invention
• Diffusion refers to the process by which a cultural
item spread from group to group or society to
society. It can be achieved in a variety of means,
exploration, military conquest, missionary work,
mass media and tourism.
• Cultural integration the close relationship
among various elements of a cultural system.

• Culture lag the fact that some cultural

elements change more quickly than others,
disrupting a cultural system.

• Non-verbal communications—refers to
gestures and hand signals.
• Norms are the established standards of behavior
maintained by a society. The ways of
encouraging and enforcing what they view as
appropriate behavior while discouraging and
punishing what they consider to be improper
behavior.
• 2 Types of Norms
• Formal norms – these are the norms which are
usually written and any violation of the norms
would have a penalty.
• Informal norms - these norms may or may have
not a penalty.
• Mores – are norms deemed highly necessary to the
welfare of a society, often because they embody the
most cherished principles of the people. The norms
that are widely observed and have great moral
significance. Taboos, incestuous relationships

• Folkways - are norms of everyday behavior. The

important role in shaping the daily behavior of
members of a culture. Norms for routine or casual
interactions.

• Social control attempts by society to regulate people’s

thoughts and behavior.
• Attitudes toward cultures:
• Ethnocentrism – practice of judging another
culture based on the standards of one’s culture.
• Cultural Relativism – the practice of judging a
culture by its own standards.
• Culture Shock- anyone who feels disoriented,
uncertain, out of place, even fearful, when
immersed with unfamiliar culture. The inability
to “read” meaning in strange surroundings. Not
understanding the symbols of a culture leaves a
person feeling lost and isolated, unsure of how to
act, and sometimes frightened.
• High culture to refer to cultural patterns that
distinguish a society’s elite.

• Popular culture to designate cultural patterns that are

widespread among a society’s population.

• Subculture refers to cultural patterns that set apart

some segment of a society’s population.

• Multiculturalism is a perspective recognizing the

cultural diversity of a place and promoting equal
standing for all cultural traditions. Represents a sharp
change from the past, when our society downplayed
cultural diversity and defined itself primarily in terms
of well off Spaniards.