MID-TERM TEST

ESSENTIALS OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

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Name : Phạm Quang Vinh

Student’s code : A34090

Chapter I: Language Talking about itself

Introduction
One of the most crucial aspects of every civilization is language. It is how
individuals interact with one another, form bonds with one another, and foster a
feeling of community. Currently, there are about 6,500 spoken languages
worldwide, and each is distinctive in a number of ways.
Communication is the fundamental building block of any civilization, and
language is an integral element of it. As language evolved, many cultural
civilizations constructed shared understandings through sounds. Over time, these
sounds and the meanings associated with them spread, and language developed. A
symbolic process called intercultural communication entails the creation, upkeep,
repair, and alteration of social reality. Language is one of the most difficult barriers
that people from different ethnic backgrounds must overcome while conversing.

The student has to comprehend how language and culture are related. Language
and culture are inextricably linked. It is difficult to understand a culture without
first mastering a language.
A specific language is typically associated with a particular set of individuals. You
engage with the culture of the language's speaker when you converse in that
language.

“LANGUAGE TALKING ABOUT ITSELF”.

Learning objectives such as identifying the origin of language, identifying the
features of language, explaining the link between language and the brain,
explaining tongue tips and slips, and describing aphasia can help us increase our
knowledge. There are several diverse sources that demonstrate the connection
between language and culture.

1. The origin of Language

The divine source
In the biblical God created Adam and “whatsoever Adam called every living
creature that was the name thereof.”
- Hindu tradition: language came from Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, creator of
the universe.
- In most religions, there appears to be a divine source that provides humans
with language.
- In an attempt to rediscover this original divine language, a few experiments
have been carried out, with rather conflicting results.
- The basic hypothesis seems to have been that, if human infants were allowed
to grow up without hearing any language around them, then they would
spontaneously begin using the original God-give language.
- The Greek writer Herodotus reported the story of an Egyptian pharaoh
named Psammetichus (or Psam) who tried the experiment with two new born
babies more than 2,500 years ago. After two yeas of isolation except for the
company of goats and a mute shepherd, the children were reported to have uttered
not an Egyptian word, but some thing that was identified as the Phrygian word
bekos, meaning “bread”. The Pharaoh concluded that an older Phrygian language
spoken in parts of what is modern Turkey, must be the original language.
- King James the Fourth of Scotland (round year 1500) carried out a similar
experiment. Result showed that the children stated speaking Hebrew. Experiments
could not confirm the divine source of human language.
- In 1970, a girl who became known as “Genie” was admitted to a children’s
hospital in Los Angeles.13 years old and had spent most of her life tied to a chair
in a small closed room. She had spent her whole in a state of physical, sensory,
social and emotional deprivation. She was unable to us e language when she was
first brought into care. After some time being in contact with people she went on to
develop some speaking ability and understand a fairly large number of English
words, but her syntax remained very simple. Her poor capacity to develop
grammatically complex speech does seem to support the idea that part of the left
hemisphere of the brain is open to accept a language program during childhood. In
Genie’s case, this facility is closed down.
In Genie’s case, tests demonstrated that she had no left hemisphere language
facility. So how was she was able to learn any part of language? She was using the
right hemisphere of her brain for language for functions. Experiments seem to
support the idea that our capacity for language is not limited to one or two specific
areas, but is based on more complex connections extending throughout the whole
brain.
- If human language did emanate from a divine source, we have no way of
reconstructing that original language, especially given the events in a place called
Babel, “because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth,” as
described in the book of Genesis in the Bible (11:9).
- Herodotus considered the "father of history”, wrote a history of the Persian
War, carefully researched what was fact or fiction.
- Thucydides, who was a general in, writes a history of the Peloponnesian
War. He rejected the idea the gods had any influence and accepted only eye-
witness accounts and stayed impartial. Then he examined causes and effects of the
war, thought that later generations could learn from the past.

The social interaction source

The sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our
language. A group of early humans might develop a set of hums, grunts, groans
and curses. The development of human language in a social context. Human
sounds, however they were produced, must have had some principled use within
the life and social interaction of early human groups. Apes and other primates do
not seem to have developed the capacity for speech.

The physical adaptation source

Physical features humans possess our ancestors made a very significant transition
to an upright posture, with bipedal (on two feet) locomotion, features in
reconstructions of fossilized skeletal structures that begin to resemble those of
modern humans. They are good clues that a creature possessing such features
probably has the capacity for speech.

Teeth, lips, mouth, , larynx and pharynx

Human teeth are upright (not slanting outward like those of apes). They are very
helpful in making sounds such as f or v. Human lips have flexibility to facilitate
the making sounds like p or b. Human mouth (small compared to other primates)
can be opened and closed rapidly, and contains a smaller, thicker and more
muscular tong which can be used to shape a wide variety of sounds inside the oral
cavity. In addition, unlike other primates, humans can close off the airway through
the nose to create more air pressure in the mouth. The overall effect of these
differences taken together is a face with more intricate muscle interlacing in the
lips and mouth, capable of a wider range of shapes and more rapid and powerful
delivery of sounds produced throught these different shapes.
The human larynx or “voice box” (containing the vocal folds or vocal cords)
differs significantly in position from the larynx of other primates such as monkeys.
The assumption of an upright posture moved the head more directly above the
spinal column and the larynx dropped to a lower position. This created a longer
cavity called the pharynx, above the vocal folds, which acts as a resonator for
increased range and clarity of the sounds produced via the larynx and the vocal
tract.

The tool-making source

Tool-making, or the outcome of manipulating objects and changing them
using both hands, is evidence of a brain at work. A similar development is believed
to have taken place with human hands and some believe that manual gestures may
have been a precursor of language. It may be that there was an evolutionary
connection between the language-using and tool-using abilities of humans and that
both were involved in the development of the speaking brain. The human brain is
not only large relative to human body size, it is also lateralized, that is, it has
specialized functions in each of the two hemispheres. Those functions that control
the motor movements involved in complex vocalization (speaking) and object
manipulation (making or using tools) are very close to each other in the left
hemisphere of the brain. It may be that there was an evolutionary connection
between the language-using and tool-using abilities of humans and that both were
involved in the development of the speaking brain. In terms of language structure,
the human may have first developed a naming ability by producing a specific and
consistent noise (e.g. bEEr) for a specific object. The crucial additional step was to
bring another specific noise (e.g. gOOd) into combination with the first to build a
complex message (bEErgOOd).

The genetic source

At birth, the baby’s brain is only a quarter of its eventual weight and the larynx is
much higher in the throat, allowing babies, like chimpanzees, to breathe and drink
at the same time. In a relatively short period of time, the larynx descends, the brain
develops, the child assumes an upright posture and starts walking and talking. This
almost automatic set of developments and the complexity of the young child’s
language have led some scholars to look for something more powerful than small
physical adaptations of the species over time as the source of language. Even
children who are born deaf (and do not develop speech) become fluent sign
language users. This seems to indicate that human offspring are born with a special
capacity for language. It is innate, no other creature seems to have it, and it isn’t
tied to a specific variety of language. It possible that this language capacity is
genetically hard-wired in the newborn human? The innateness hypothesis would
seem to point to something in human genetics, possibly a crucial mutation, as the
source.

PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE

 While we tend to think of communication as the primary function of human
language, it is not a distinguishing feature. All creatures communicate in some
way. Other creatures are not reflecting on the way they create their communicative
messages or reviewing how they work (or not). That is, one barking dog is
probably not offering advice to another barking dog along the lines of “Hey, you
should lower your bark to make it sound more menacing.” They’re not barking
about barking. Humans are clearly able to reflect on language and its uses. Indeed,
without this general ability, we wouldn’t be able to reflect on or identify any of the
other distinct properties of human language. We’ll look in detail at another five of
them: displacement, arbitrariness, productivity, cultural transmission and duality.
Displacement
Animal communication seems to be designed exclusively for this moment, here
and now. Humans can refer to past and future time. It allows language users to talk
about things and events not present in the immediate environment (Bee
communication seems to have some version of displacement). Yes, but it is
displacement of a very limited type. It just doesn’t have the range of possibilities
found in human language.
Arbitrariness
There is no “natural” connection between a linguistic form and its meaning. The
connection is quite arbitrary. We can’t just look at the Arabic word ‫ﻠﮐﺐ‬and, from
its shape, for example, determine that it has a natural and obvious meaning any
more than we can with its English translation form dog. The linguistic form has no
natural or “iconic” relationship with that hairy four-legged barking object out in
the world. This aspect of the relationship between linguistic signs and objects in
the world is described as “arbitrariness”. There are some words in language with
sounds that seem to “echo” the sounds of objects or activities and hence seem to
have a less arbitrary connection. English examples are cuckoo, crash, slurp,
squelch or whirr.
Productivity
For the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be a clear connection
between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it. Humans are
continually creating new expressions and novel utterances by manipulating their
linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations. The communication
systems of other creatures are not like that. Cicadas have four signals to choose
from and vervet monkeys have thirty-six vocal calls. Nor does it seem possible for
creatures to produce new signals to communicate novel experiences or events. The
honeybee, normally able to communicate the location of a nectar source to other
bees, will fail to do so if the location is really “new.” This limiting feature of
animal communication is described in terms of fixed reference. The human, given
similar circumstances, is quite capable of creating a “new” signal, after initial
surprise perhaps, by saying something never said before, as in Hey! Watch out for
that flying snake!

Cultural transmission
While we may inherit physical features such as brown eyes and dark hair
from our parents, we do not inherit their language. We acquire a language in a
culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. This process whereby a
language is passed on from one generation to the next is described as cultural
transmission. It is clear that humans are born with some kind of predisposition to
acquire language in a general sense. We acquire our first language as children in a
culture. The general pattern in animal communication is that creatures are born
with a set of specific signals that are produced instinctively. Cultural transmission
of a specific language is crucial in the human acquisition process.

Duality
Human language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. This property
is called duality (or “double articulation”). At one level, we have distinct sounds,
and, at another level, we have distinct meanings. We can produce individual
sounds, like n, b and i (no meaning). In a particular combination such as bin, we
have another level producing a meaning that is different from the meaning of the
combination in nib. So, at one level, we have distinct sounds, and, at another level,
we have distinct meanings. This duality of levels is, in fact, one of the most
economical features of human language because, with a limited set of discrete
sounds, we are capable of producing a very large number of sound combinations
(e.g. words) which are distinct in meaning.
Duality of patterning is a characteristic of human language whereby speech can be
analyzed on two levels: as made up of meaningless elements (i.e., a limited
inventory of sounds or phonemes), and as made up of meaningful elements (i.e., a
virtually limitless inventory of words or morphemes). Also called double
articulation.

LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN

Neurolinguistics
The study of the relationship between language and the brain is called
neurolinguistics. The field of study dates back to the nineteenth century.
Establishing the location of language in the brain was an early challenge. Mr. Gage
suffered the type of injury on his head from which, it was assumed, no one could
recover. However, a month later, he was up and about, with no apparent damage to
his senses or his speech. The medical evidence was clear. A huge metal rod had
gone through the front part of Mr. Gage’s brain, but his language abilities were
unaffected. And while language may be located in the brain, it clearly is not
situated right at the front.

Language areas in the brain

Two important parts of the brain are the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.
If we put the right hemisphere aside for now, and place the left hemisphere down
so that we have a side view, we’ll be looking at something close to the
accompanying illustration (adapted from Geschwind, 1991).
Specific aspects of language ability can be accorded specific locations in the brain.
This is called the localization view and it has been used to suggest that the brain
activity involved in hearing a word, understanding it, then saying it, would follow
a definite pattern. The word is heard and comprehended via Wernicke’s area. This
signal is then transferred via the arcuate fasciculus to Broca’s area where
preparations are made to produce it. A signal is then sent to part of the motor
cortex to physically articulate the word. This is certainly an oversimplified version
of what may actually take place, but it is consistent with much of what we
understand about simple language processing in the brain. In an earlier age,
dominated more by mechanical technology, Sigmund Freud subtly employed a
“steam engine” metaphor to account for aspects of the brain’s activity when he
wrote of the effects of repression “building up pressure” to the point of “sudden
release.” In a sense, we are forced to use metaphors mainly because we cannot
obtain direct physical evidence of linguistic processes in the brain. We have all
experienced difficulty, on some occasion(s), in getting brain and speech production
to work together smoothly. The tip of the tongue phenomenon in which we feel
that some word is just eluding us, that we know the word, but it just won’t come to
the surface. This experience also mainly occurs with uncommon words and names.

Tongue tips and slips

Another type of speech error is commonly described as a “slip of the tongue”. This
produces expressions such as make a long short story (instead of “make a long
story short”), use the door to open the key, and a fifty-pound dog of bag food.
Spoonerisms the interchange of two initial sounds. You have hissed all my mystery
lectures. They are often simply the result of a sound being carried over from one
word to the next. A sound used in one word in anticipation of its occurrence in the
next word.

Slips of the ear

How the brain tries to make sense of the auditory signal it receives is called the
“slip of the ear”, such as “great ape” and “gray tape” or a bear called “Gladly” who
was cross-eyed and Gladly the cross I’d bear. Some of these humorous examples
of slips may give us a clue to the normal workings of the human brain as it copes
with language.

Aphasia
People who suffer from different types of language disorders, generally described
as “aphasia”. Aphasia is defined as an impairment of language function due to
localized brain damage that leads to difficulty in understanding and/or producing
linguistic forms. The classification of different types of aphasia is usually based on
the primary symptoms of someone having difficulties with language.
“Broca’s aphasia” is a substantially reduced amount of speech, distorted
articulation and slow, often effortful speech. It also the lexical morpheme (ex:
nouns, verbs). The frequent omission of functional morphemes (ex: articles,
prepositions).

“Wernicke’s aphasia” is the type of language disorder that results in difficulties in

auditory comprehension is sometimes called “sensory aphasia,” (Wernicke’s
aphasia). Someone suffering from this disorder can actually produce very fluent
speech which is, however, often difficult to make sense of. It makes us difficult in
finding the correct word, sometimes referred to as anomia.

Chapter II. WHAT IS CULTURE?

Introduction
Every action our body performs is controlled by our brains, and every input from
the external world is made sense of by our brains. We think with our brains. There
is no other choice. Thought is physical. Ideas and the concepts that make them up
are physically “computed” by brain structures. Reasoning is the activation of
certain neuronal groups in the brain given prior activation of other neuronal
groups.
Flow across the synapses is relatively slow compared to the speed of computers:
about 5 one-thousandths of a second (5 milliseconds) per synapse. A word
recognition task — Is the following word a word of English? — takes about half a
second (500 milliseconds). This means that word recognition must be done in
about 100 sequential steps. Since so much goes into word recognition, it is clear
that much of the brain’s
processing must be in parallel, not in sequence. This timing result also shows that
well learned tasks are carried out by direct connections.
What exactly culture is? What is the grasp key characteristics of culture? Culture is
manifested at different layers of depth; culture affects behaviour and
interpretations of behavior; culture can be differentiated from both universal
human nature and unique individual personality; culture influences biological
process; culture is both individual construct and social construct.

Definition of culture
Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define. In 1952, the American
anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, critically reviewed concepts and
definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164 different definitions. Apte (1994:
2001), writing in the ten-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics,
summarized the problem as follows: ‘Despite a century of efforts to define culture
adequately, there was in the early 1990s no agreement among anthropologists
regarding its nature.’ Avruch provides an historical perspective to some of the
ways in which the term has been interpreted:

“Much of the difficulty [of understanding the concept of culture] stems from the
different usages of the term as it was increasingly employed in the nineteenth
century. Broadly speaking, it was used in three ways (all of which can be found
today as well). First, as exemplified in Matthew Arnolds’ Culture and Anarchy
(1867), culture referred to special intellectual or artistic endeavors or products,
what today we might call “high culture” as opposed to “popular culture” (or
“folkways” in an earlier usage). By this definition, only a portion – typically a
small one – of any social group “has” culture. (The rest are potential sources of
anarchy!) This sense of culture is more closely related to aesthetics than to social
science.”
Partly in reaction to this usage, the second, as pioneered by Edward Tylor in
Primitive Culture (1870), referred to a quality possessed by all people in all social
groups, who nevertheless could be arrayed on a development (evolutionary)
continuum (in Lewis Henry Morgan’s scheme) from “savagery” through
“barbarism” to “civilization”. Tylor’s definition of culture 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”. The greatest
legacy of Tylor’s definition lay in his “complex whole” formulation. Cultures were
wholes – integrated systems and great heuristic value.

The third and last usage of culture developed in anthropology in the twentieth-
century work of Franz Boas and his students, though with roots in the eighteenth-
century writings of Johann von Herder. As Tylor reacted to Arnold to establish a
scientific (rather than aesthetic) basis for culture, so Boas reacted against Tylor and
other social evolutionists. Boas emphasized the uniqueness of the many and varied
cultures of different peoples or societies. Moreover he dismissed the value
judgments he found inherent in both the Arnoldian and Tylorean views of culture;
for Boas, one should never differentiate high from low culture, and one ought not
differentially valorize cultures as savage or civilized.
Here, then, are three very different understandings of culture. Part of the difficulty
in the term lies in its multiple meanings. But to compound matters, the difficulties
are not merely conceptual or semantic. All of the usages and understandings come
attached to, or can be attached to, different political or ideological agendas that, in
one form or another, still resonate today (Avruch 1998: 6–7).

SOME KEYS CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE

1. Culture is manifested at different layers of depth.
In analyzing the culture of a particular group or organization it is desirable to
distinguish three fundamental levels at which culture manifests itself: (a)
observable artifacts, (b) values, and (c) basic underlying assumptions. When one
enters an organization one observes and feels its artifacts. Physical layout, the
dress code, the manner in which people address each other, the smell and feel of
the place, its emotional intensity, and other phenomena,.
To analyze why members behave the way they do, we often look for the
values that govern behaviour. But as values are hard to observe directly, it is often
necessary to infer them by interviewing key members of the organization or to
content analyze artifacts such as documents and charters. However, in identifying
such values, we usually note that they represent accurately only the manifest or
espoused values of a culture. To the more permanent archival manifestations such
as company records, products, statements of philosophy, and annual reports.
Yet, the underlying reasons for their behaviour remain concealed or unconscious.
To really understand a culture and to ascertain more completely the group’s values
and over behaviour, it is imperative to delve into the underlying assumptions,
which are typically unconscious but which actually determine how group members
perceive, think and feel. Such assumptions are themselves learned responses that
originated as espoused values. But, as a value leads to a behavior, and as that
behaviour begins to solve the problem which prompted it in the first place, the
value gradually is transformed into an underlying assumption about how things
really are. To put it another way, the domain of values can be divided into ultimate,
non-debatable, taken- for-granted values, for which the term “assumptions” is
more appropriate; and debatable, overt, espoused values, for which the term
“values” is more applicable.

2. Culture affects behaviour and interpretations of behaviour.

 Hofstede (1991:8) makes the important point that although certain aspects of
culture are physically visible, their meaning is invisible: the ‘ring gesture’ may be
interpreted as conveying agreement, approval or acceptance in the USA, the UK
and Canada, but as an insult or obscene gesture in several Mediterranean countries.
Choice of clothing can be interpreted differently by different groups of people, in
terms of indications of wealth, ostentation, appropriateness, and so on. Examples to
be read from the material.

3. Culture can be differentiated from both universal human nature and

unique individual personality.
Culture is learned, not inherited. Human nature is what all human beings. The
human ability to feel fear, anger, love, joy, sadness, the need to associate with
others, to play and exercise oneself, the facility to observe the environment and
talk about it with other humans all belong to this level of mental programming. The
personality of an individual, on the other hand, is her/his unique personal set of
mental programs which (s)he does not share with any other human being.

4. Culture influences biological processes.

If we stop to consider it, the great majority of our conscious behavior is
acquired through learning and interacting with other members of our culture. Even
those responses to our purely biological needs (that is, eating, coughing,
defecating) are frequently influenced by our cultures. For example, all people share
a biological need for food. Unless a minimum number of calories are consumed,
starvation will occur. Therefore, all people eat. But what we eat, how often, we eat,
how much we eat, with whom we eat, and according to what set of rules are
regulated, at least in part, by our culture.
The Navajo eat the rich, white flesh of freshly killed rattlesnakes. A biological
process is caught into a cultural web (1968: 25–26). Such a kind of food may
maybe the cause of vomiting, often violent vomiting for many white people . This
is a dramatic illustration of how culture can influence biological processes. In fact,
in this instance, the natural biological process of digestion was not only influenced,
it was also reversed. A learned part of our culture (that is, the idea that rattlesnake
meat is a repulsive thing to eat) actually triggered the sudden interruption of the
normal digestive process.

5. Culture is associated with social groups.

Culture is shared by at least two or more people, and of course real, live
societies are always larger than that. For an idea, a thing, or a behavior to be
considered cultural, it must be shared by some type of social group or society.
People unavoidably carry several layers of mental programming within
themselves, corresponding to different levels of culture.
A national level according to one’s country (or countries for people who migrated
during their lifetime); a regional and/or ethnic and/or religious and/or linguistic
affiliation, as most nations are composed of culturally different regions and/or
ethnic and/or religious and/or language groups; a gender level, according to
whether a person was born as a girl or as a boy; a generation level, which separates
grandparents from parents from children; a role category, e.g. parent, son/daughter,
teacher, student; a social class level, associated with educational opportunities and
with a person’s occupation or profession; for those who are employed, an
organizational or corporate level according to the way employees have been
socialized by their work organization (Hofstede 1991: 10). So in this sense,
everyone is simultaneously a member of several different cultural groups and thus
could be said to have multicultural membership.
Individuals are organized in many potentially different ways in a population, by
many different (and cross-cutting) criteria: for example, by kinship into families or
clans; by language, race, or creed into ethnic groups; by socio-economic
characteristics into social classes; by geographical region into political interest
groups; and by occupation or institutional memberships into unions, bureaucracies,
industries, political parties, and militaries. No population can be adequately
characterized as a single culture or by a single cultural descriptor.

6. Culture is both individual and social construct

While the norms of any culture should be relevant to all the people within
that culture, it is also true that those norms will be relevant in different degrees for
different people. It is this interesting blend of culture in anthropology and
sociology as a macro concept and in psychology as an individual construct that
makes understanding culture difficult but fascinating. Our failure in the past to
recognize the existence of individual differences in constructs and concepts of
culture has undoubtedly aided in the formation and maintenance of stereotypes.
Our failure in the past to recognize the existence of individual differences in
constructs and concepts of culture has undoubtedly aided in the formation and
maintenance of stereotypes (Matsumoto 1996: 18). Our idea of culture focuses less
on patterning and more on social and cognitive processing than older ideas of
culture do. For another, by linking culture to individuals and emphasizing the
number and diversity of social and experiential settings that individuals encounter,
we expand the scope of reference of culture to encompass not just quasi- or
pseudo- kinship groups (tribe, ethnic group, and nation are the usual ones) but also
groupings that derive from profession, occupation, class, religion, or region.
7. Culture is always both socially and psychologically distributed in a group,
and so the delineation of a culture’s features will always be fuzzy.
This assumption [that culture is uniformly distributed] is unwarranted for
two reasons: one sociogenic (having to do with social groups and institutions) and
the other psychogenic (having to do with cognitive and affective processes
characteristic of individuals).
The first reason is a corollary of the social complexity issue noted above. Two
individuals do not share the same sociological location in a given population (the
same class, religious, regional, or ethnic backgrounds, for example). These
locations entail (sub)cultural differences, then the two individuals cannot share all
cultural content perfectly. This is the sociogenic reason for the non-uniform
distribution of culture. Culture is socially distributed within a population. The
second, psychogenic, reason culture is never perfectly shared by individuals in a
population. Many culture theorists have preferred to think of culture only as “out
there”, in publish and social constructions, including symbols, that are wholly
independent of mind – of cognition and affect. Other scholars, especially from
economics or international relations prefer to ignore mind completely, treating it as
essentially a “black box” phenomenon. It is by approaching mind – cognition and
affect, we support the idea that cultural representations.. Images and encodements,
schemas and models are internalised by individuals. They are not internalised
equally or all at the same level. This is the psychogenic reason for the non-uniform
distribution of culture. Culture is psychologically distributed with a population.
Just as there is no epidemic without individual organisms being infected by
particular viruses or bacteria, there is no culture without representations being
distributed in the brains/minds of individuals. From this perspective, the
boundaries of a given culture are not any sharper than those of a given epidemic.
An epidemic involves a population with many individuals being afflicted to
varying degrees by a particular strain of micro-organisms over a continuous time
span on a territory with fuzzy and unstable boundaries. And a culture involves a
social group (such as a nation, ethnic group, profession, generation, etc.) defined in
terms of similar cultural representations held by a significant proportion of the
group’s members.

8. Culture has both universal (etic) and distinctive (emic) elements.

Humans have largely overlapping biologies and live in fairly similar social
structures and physical environments, The same happens with language. The words
“etics” for universal cultural elements and “Emics” for the culture-specific, unique
elements. Science deals with generalizations When the emic elements are local
adaptations of etic elements, they are of great interest. When we study cultures for
their own sake, we may well focus on emic elements, and when we compare
cultures, we have to work with the etic cultural elements.

9. Culture is learned.
Culture is learned from the people you interact with as you are socialized. Two
babies born at exactly the same time in two parts of the globe may be taught to
respond to physical and social stimuli in very different ways. Some babies are
taught to smile at strangers, whereas others are taught to smile only in very specific
circumstances. Culture is also taught by the explanations people receive for the
natural and human events around them. Certainly there are variations in what a
child is taught from family to family in any given culture.

10. Culture is subject to gradual change.

Change is a constant feature of all cultures. Culture change occurs as a result of
both internal and
external forces. Mechanisms of change that operate within a given culture are
called discovery and invention. The result of borrowing from other cultures.
Cultural diffusion is a selective process. Cultural borrowing is a two-way process.
European contact with the American Indians. The total configuration of the
recipient culture. The various parts of a culture are all, to some degree, interrelated.
Cultures should be thought of as integrated wholes. It is, rather, an organized
system in which particular components may be related to other components. A
change in one part of the system is likely to produce concomitant changes in other
parts of the system. And the reason for these changes is that cultures tend to be
integrated systems with a number of interconnected parts, so that a change in one
part of the culture is likely to bring about changes in other parts.

11. Cultural is a descriptive not an evaluative concept

‘High’ and ‘low’ culture. Culture is often linked with terms and concepts such as
civilised, well educated, refined, cultured, and is associated with the results of such
refinement– a society’s art, literature, music, and so on. Our notion of culture is not
something exclusive to certain members. It relates to the whole of a society. It is
not value-laden. They are similar or different to each other.