THE CONCEPT OF

CULTURE
© Dr. Ramjit Kumar
 shaping social relationship
Culture is one of the most
important concepts within
sociology. Sociologists
recognize that culture plays a
crucial role in our social lives.

Culture is
maintaining and challenging
social order

important in Culture is important for

sociology. determining how we make

sense of the world and our
place in it

and in shaping our everyday

actions and experiences in
society
What is Culture?

02
01 03
Culture is a term that in Culture consists of Culture is distinct
common usage refers values, beliefs, systems from social
to a large and diverse of language, structure and economic
set of mostly intangible communication, and aspects of society, but it
aspects of social life. practices that people is connected to both;
share in common. continuously informing
them and being
informed by them.
 Culture is made up of our knowledge, common
sense, assumptions, and expectations. It is also
the rules, norms, laws, and morals that govern
society, the words we use as well as how we
speak and write and the symbols, we use to
What is express meaning, ideas, and concepts.

Culture? Culture includes the collective practices we

participate in, such as religious ceremonies, the
celebration of secular holidays, and attending
sporting events.
This can be used to define them as a collective.
 Culture is composed of both non-material and
material things common to the group or society.

Aspects of The non-material aspects of culture includes the

values and beliefs, language, communication, and

Culture practices that are shared in common by a group of

people.

Material culture emerges from and is shaped by the

non-material aspects of culture. In other words, what
we value, believe, and know (and what we do
together in everyday life) influences the things that
we make. This is a two-way relationship.
 Culture is organic.

Culture is shared part,

symbolic and integrated.

Culture is… Culture is gratifying.

Culture is both stable and

dynamic.
 Culture is unique
Culture is a
to the human
historical.
species.

Culture is
Culture is a
deliberate
design for living.
Culture is… process.

Culture is given
(historic).
Anthropological
Definition of
Culture
 • 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.

Edward Tylor, 1871

Primitive Culture
• Most-quoted of definitions of culture.
• Edward Tylor’s was the first who specified
that culture is learned and acquired, as
opposed to being a biological trait.
• This was revolutionary against the
backdrop of colonialism, racism, and
social evolutionism -- the dominant
ideologies of the 19th century.
 • Malinowski defined culture as an
“instrumental reality, and apparatus
for the satisfaction of the biological
and derived need”.

Malinowski, 1944 • It is the integral whole consisting of

implements in consumer’s goods, of
constitutional characters for the
various social groupings, of human
ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs.
 Culture in general as a descriptive
concept means the accumulated
treasury of human creation: books,
paintings, buildings, and the like; the
Kluckhohn &
knowledge of ways of adjusting to our
surroundings, both human and
Kelly, 1945 physical; language, customs, and
systems of etiquette, ethics, religion
and morals that have been built up
through the ages.
 • Culture or civilization, taken in its
wide ethnographic sense, is that
complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
E. B. Tylor custom, and any other capabilities
and habits acquired by man as a
1871 member of society.
 • Culture is the product of
agrofacts (product of
civilisation), artifacts (products
of industry), socifacts (social
organisation) and mentifacts
Bidney (language, religion, art and so
on)."
 • Culture refers to the component of
accumulated resources, materials as
well as non-material which the people
J R Firth inherit, employ, transmute and add to
transmit.
 • Culture is an organized body of
conventional understanding
manifest in art and artifact
which persisting through
Redfield tradition characterizes a human
group.
 • Each specific culture constitutes
a kind of blueprint/framework
for all of life's activities.
• Explicit and implicit aspects of
Clyde culture.
Kluckhohn
 • Culture is the complex whole
that consists of everything that
we think, do and have as
Bierstedt members of society.
 • Culture is the expression of our
nature in our mode of living,
thinking, religion, recreation,
literature and enjoyment.
MacIver and Page:
 • Culture is the man-made part of
the society.
Herkovits
Bronislaw Malinowski
• Era- 1920- 1930
• British Social Anthropologist
• Pedagogy- Socratic Method
• Functional School of Thought
• Context - World war I brought great havoc
• Presented failures of failures of Functionalism
• Underlying quest was to understand the
principle of continuity amidst change and
upheaval
• Changed anthropological situation: New social
problems
• New anthropological sites are social structure,
social organisation, social process and social
changes
• Man and Culture, edited by Professor Raymon
Firth, an evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw
Malinowski
• The Argonauts of the Western Pacific
• Scientific Theory of Culture (One of the
chapter is theory of organised behavior)