UNDERSTANDING CULTURE SOCIETY and POLITICS

FIRST QUARTER: WEEK 7

LESSON 1: Museum as the Door to the Past

● Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms buried in the earth’s surface.

● Artifacts usually are simple object (such as a tool or ornament) showing human workmanship or modification as
distinguished from a natural object especially an object remaining from a particular period.

● Museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, and open to the
public, which acquires, conserves, research, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and
enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment.

● Heritage Sites is an official location where pieces of political, military, cultural, or social history have been preserved
due to their cultural heritage value. They are usually protected by law, and many have been recognized with the
official national historic site status. A historic site may be any building, landscape, site, or structure that is of
local, regional, or national significance.

Through museums and heritage sites, we learn about material culture and nonmaterial culture that
gave rise to it, as well as the context in which both cultures are embedded. Through museums, we tap into human
experiences of the past.

LESSON 2: The Biological and Cultural Evolution of Human Beings

Culture is something that human beings created in response to social needs. Its characteristics and knowledge
of a particular group of people encompass language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.

The Elements of Culture The Characteristics of Culture

Belief System Objective reality can be assumed as Culture is Behaviors and actions mostly are
being represented within a person by Learned learned/ taught from the society.
certain beliefs or expectations which
to one degree or another are accepted
as true, and other beliefs or
expectations accepted as false.

Cultural Values Culture provides people with values Culture is People living together in a society share
that are ordered in a hierarchical Shared the same culture.
system of moral codes that is
centrally located within one’s belief
system about how one ought to and
ought not to behave.

Attitudes Defined at least implicitly as Culture is Culture is a dynamic system that

responses that locate objects of Dynamic responds to motions and actions within
thoughts on dimensions of judgment. and and around them.
Changing

LESSON 3: The Dynamics of Culture and Human Evolution

In 1957, William S. Beck, in Modern Science and Nature of Life wrote:

 “To understand culture one must have some understanding of biological thought.” Most people will argue that
many behaviors and actions of people are rooted in biology like road rage, depression, mental problems,
intelligence, criminal behavior, and physical strength. In social sciences, there are those who argue that
culture is the most important, if not the only thing that matters in defining the beliefs, practices, and attitudes
of people.
There are those who argue that culture is secondary to biology. They believed that the
biological nature of human beings predisposes them to behave in certain ways and develop specific
characteristics. This is called essentialism.
⮚ Essentialism is an assumption that human beings have an underlying “universal nature”, or
common unchanging characteristics that is more fundamental than any
variations that may exist among us, and that is in some sense always present.
This is the famous controversy between “nature” and “nurture”.
⮚ The eugenics movement advocates changing the biological traits of human beings to change
society.
⮚ The euthenics movement advocates changing social and cultural structures to shape people’s
social character.
● Charles Darwin believed that while human beings evolved from primates, the culture that human
produce also shapes the evolutionary development of human beings. A
contemporary biological anthropologist sums up this interaction:

“Our behavior is a product of our culture and our biology. We live our lives immersed in a culture,
and in some ways culture transforms us, but we also transform our culture. What we bring from biology to the
cultural arena is a set of basic predispositions to behave in certain ways.”
(Smith 2002, p.3)
⮚ Predispositions - to behave in a particular way or to be affected by a particular condition.