Contents
Culture:
Culture (from Latin:
cultura, meaning. "cultivation")is a term that has many different
meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a
list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of
Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most
commonly used in three basic senses:
- Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
- An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
- The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group
Edward Burnett Tylor:
The earliest
anthropological use of "culture" was by E. B. TYLOR (1871), who
defined it memorably as 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."
Tylor's formulation
can still serve today to express anthropologists' views. First, culture
comprises those human traits that are learned and learnable and are therefore
passed on socially and mentally, rather than biologically. Second, culture is
in some sense a "complex whole." Although hotly debated, the
fundamental idea that all those "capabilities and habits" can and
should be considered together is a powerful one. It means that vast areas of
human life, spanning everything from techniques of food production to theories
of the afterlife, have some coherence and a distinct logic that can be
discovered by a single discipline. Tylor had spoken of "culture" in
the singular, on the assumption that all societies possessed a more or less
advanced version of the same heritage, Boas wrote of plural
"cultures" that were different and could not be measured against some
supposed single standard of advancement.
The focus of
anthropology is upon the diversity of ways in which human beings establish and live
their social lives in groups, and it is from this diversity that the
anthropological notion of culture, at least in the twentieth century, is
derived. This idea of the plurality of culture contrasts with the idea of
culture in the singular, an interpretation that began its development in
eighteenth century European thought (see Williams 1983a), and became
predominant in the nineteeth century. Framed through the social evolutionary
thought linked to Western imperialism, culture in the singular assumed a
universal scale of progress and the idea that as civilizations developed
through time, so too did humankind become more creative and more rational, that
is, people’s capacity for culture increased. The growth of culture and of
rationality were thought to belong to the same process. In other words, human
beings became more ‘cultivated’ as they progressed over time intellectually,
spiritually and aesthetically.
|
It was Franz BOAS
who championed the concept of culture, and with it the discipline of
anthropology, to challenge the elaborate and influential
late-nineteenth-century theories that attributed most human differences to
RACE that is, biological inheritance. Anchored in the new science of
biology by evolutionary ideas, they suggested that some races, when compared
to northern Europeans, were more primitive and therefore more animal-like in
bodily form, mental ability, and moral development.
These ideas were
later elaborated by his students, including Edward SAPIR, Alfred KROEBER,
Margaret MEAD, and Ruth BENEDICT. They argued that although human beings
everywhere possessed much the same biological heritage, human nature was so
plastic that it could sustain kaleidoscopically different sets of values,
institutions, and behaviors in different cultures. Margaret Mead, for
example, spent a long career of fieldwork demonstrating how matters that
might appear to be easily explained by human biology the experience of ADOLESCENCE, patterns of
SOCIALIZATION, SEX roles in society vary so greatly that no simple natural
scientific explanation could comprehend them. And Kroeber espoused the notion
that culture is "superorganic," possessing a unique character
within itself that goes beyond anything that could arise in the course of
biological evolution.
|
Alfred Kroeber:
A widely recognized and often repeated
definition of culture was given by Alfred Kroeber and Clyde
Kluckhohn in Culture: A critical
review of concepts and definitions[1]:
“Culture consists of patterns,
explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols,
constituting the distinctive achievements 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 one hand, be considered as products of
action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action.”
Kroeber
is most famous for his idea of culture as ‘super organic’ – a term which
he borrowed from Herbert Spencer. He proposed a three-tier level of
psychological and cultural understanding, Kroeber developed a hierarchy of
fields of inquiry called inorganic, organic and superorganic. The basic fields
dealing with subject matter of non-living forms such as chemistry and physics
were labelled inorganic. Second, the organic were fields dealing with
psychological and biological life. And the third in the hierarchy were what Kroeber
called the superorganic: fields which dealt with collective (as opposed to
individual) phenomena, such as anthropology or sociology.
This
view was first put forward by A. L. Kroeber in a famous 1917 article, and it
occupied him through much of his lifetime. Kroeber regarded culture as, above
all, sui generis: this meant that it could only be explained in terms of
itself, and not reduced to racial, psychological or (other) non-cultural
factors. It was also ‘superorganic’ (a term which he borrowed from Herbert
Spencer) in the sense that it had to be explained with reference to a level of
understanding above that of the individual organism. Thus Kroeber and his
followers came to see culture less as a product of individual human beings, and
rather more as that which produced or directed those actions. While his initial
formulation of the idea was in part an attack on racism (as stemming from
racial determinism), the radical thrust of his more general concern was that
culture developed its own logic independently of the thoughts of specific
individuals. He cited objects and ideas in the history of science which came to
be invented or discovered simultaneously by more than one individual, and later
he described cyclical features in culture, most famously women’s fashions,
which he saw as the product of the laws of culture, and not merely of the whims
of individual women or fashion designers. By 1952 it came time for American
anthropologists to take stock of what they meant by ‘culture’. In that year
Kroeber and Kluckhohn divided ‘complete’ definitions of culture into six
categories: descriptive (e.g. Tylor’s), historical (those with an emphasis on
tradition), normative (with an emphasis on rules or values), psychological
(e.g. with an emphasis on learning or habit), structural (with an emphasis on
pattern), and genetic. The last was certainly the most diverse and included
definitions with an emphasis on culture as a product or artefact, definitions
with an emphasis on ideas or on symbols, and residual-category definitions.
Leslie White:
Leslie
White was a neoevolutionist at a time when nineteenth century evolutionism virtually
disappeared from anthropology following its rejection by Franz Boas and his
students. He is best known for his strict materialist approach to evolution,
particularly his model relating energy use to social complexity (White 1943).
At the same time he argued equally strongly for a theory of cultural
determinism he labelled "culturology" (White 1940). His position,
stated most completely in The evolution of culture (1959), was strongly
materialist and became best known for its assertion that use of energy per
capita was the best way to measure social complexity and rank societies in an
evolutionary scheme.
White
(1959) asserted that, in some hypothetical beginning, "Between man and
nature hung the veil of culture, and he could see nothing save through this
medium . . . the meanings and values that lay beyond the senses." Over the
next half-century the ceaseless efforts of biological scientists to comprehend
the whole of human behaviour in their schemes would only confirm
anthropologists in this faith. He was of the opinion that culture is a process,
sui generis.
Clifford Geertz:
Clifford
Geertz and David Schneider, both of whom had been in Parsons’ Harvard
Department of Socal Relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s, advanced this
position in their work of the 1960s, culminating in Geertz’s massively
influential Interpretation of Cultures:
The concept of culture I
espouse…is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is
an animal suspended in webs of significance he has himself spun, I take culture
to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (Geertz
1973:5)
For
Geertz, culture is like a novel. It is an “ensemble of texts… which the
anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they
properly belong” (Geertz 1973: 531). He meant that culture is a story people
tell themselves about themselves. Like all good stories, culture engrosses us
and helps us understand the nature and meaning of life. It comments on who we
are and how we should act in the world. Geertz, together with Schneider and
Sahlins, managed something denied to their American predecessors - the partial
conversion of non-American anthropology. In Britain, the symbolic or
interpretive approach of the 1970s chimed with the vague talk of the
‘translation of culture’.
The
difference between an explanatory science and an interpretative science is also
a feature that tends to distinguish between the social and the cultural
anthropologists. However, the differences between them need not be so rigidly
defined, as people who concentrate on social organisation, social phenomena “on
the ground,” must also pay attention to culture and conversely, those whose
primary interest is ‘culture’ – the symbols and meanings – must investigate the
way they are expressed and embedded in social activity.
N.K. Bose:
Culture
“As the crystallised phase of Man’s life-activities. It includes certain forms
of action closely associated with particular objects and institutions habitual
attitudes of mind transferable from one person to another with the aid of
mental images conveyed through speech-symbols.
Kroeber, Alfred Louis; Kluckhohn,
Clyde. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Harvard
University Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology Papers 47, p.
357.
Contents
Culture:
Culture (from Latin:
cultura, meaning. "cultivation")is a term that has many different
meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a
list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of
Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most
commonly used in three basic senses:
- Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
- An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
- The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group
Edward Burnett Tylor:
The earliest
anthropological use of "culture" was by E. B. TYLOR (1871), who
defined it memorably as 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."
Tylor's formulation
can still serve today to express anthropologists' views. First, culture
comprises those human traits that are learned and learnable and are therefore
passed on socially and mentally, rather than biologically. Second, culture is
in some sense a "complex whole." Although hotly debated, the
fundamental idea that all those "capabilities and habits" can and
should be considered together is a powerful one. It means that vast areas of
human life, spanning everything from techniques of food production to theories
of the afterlife, have some coherence and a distinct logic that can be
discovered by a single discipline. Tylor had spoken of "culture" in
the singular, on the assumption that all societies possessed a more or less
advanced version of the same heritage, Boas wrote of plural
"cultures" that were different and could not be measured against some
supposed single standard of advancement.
The focus of
anthropology is upon the diversity of ways in which human beings establish and live
their social lives in groups, and it is from this diversity that the
anthropological notion of culture, at least in the twentieth century, is
derived. This idea of the plurality of culture contrasts with the idea of
culture in the singular, an interpretation that began its development in
eighteenth century European thought (see Williams 1983a), and became
predominant in the nineteeth century. Framed through the social evolutionary
thought linked to Western imperialism, culture in the singular assumed a
universal scale of progress and the idea that as civilizations developed
through time, so too did humankind become more creative and more rational, that
is, people’s capacity for culture increased. The growth of culture and of
rationality were thought to belong to the same process. In other words, human
beings became more ‘cultivated’ as they progressed over time intellectually,
spiritually and aesthetically.
|
It was Franz BOAS
who championed the concept of culture, and with it the discipline of
anthropology, to challenge the elaborate and influential
late-nineteenth-century theories that attributed most human differences to
RACE that is, biological inheritance. Anchored in the new science of
biology by evolutionary ideas, they suggested that some races, when compared
to northern Europeans, were more primitive and therefore more animal-like in
bodily form, mental ability, and moral development.
These ideas were
later elaborated by his students, including Edward SAPIR, Alfred KROEBER,
Margaret MEAD, and Ruth BENEDICT. They argued that although human beings
everywhere possessed much the same biological heritage, human nature was so
plastic that it could sustain kaleidoscopically different sets of values,
institutions, and behaviors in different cultures. Margaret Mead, for
example, spent a long career of fieldwork demonstrating how matters that
might appear to be easily explained by human biology the experience of ADOLESCENCE, patterns of
SOCIALIZATION, SEX roles in society vary so greatly that no simple natural
scientific explanation could comprehend them. And Kroeber espoused the notion
that culture is "superorganic," possessing a unique character
within itself that goes beyond anything that could arise in the course of
biological evolution.
|
Alfred Kroeber:
A widely recognized and often repeated
definition of culture was given by Alfred Kroeber and Clyde
Kluckhohn in Culture: A critical
review of concepts and definitions[1]:
“Culture consists of patterns,
explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols,
constituting the distinctive achievements 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 one hand, be considered as products of
action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action.”
Kroeber
is most famous for his idea of culture as ‘super organic’ – a term which
he borrowed from Herbert Spencer. He proposed a three-tier level of
psychological and cultural understanding, Kroeber developed a hierarchy of
fields of inquiry called inorganic, organic and superorganic. The basic fields
dealing with subject matter of non-living forms such as chemistry and physics
were labelled inorganic. Second, the organic were fields dealing with
psychological and biological life. And the third in the hierarchy were what Kroeber
called the superorganic: fields which dealt with collective (as opposed to
individual) phenomena, such as anthropology or sociology.
This
view was first put forward by A. L. Kroeber in a famous 1917 article, and it
occupied him through much of his lifetime. Kroeber regarded culture as, above
all, sui generis: this meant that it could only be explained in terms of
itself, and not reduced to racial, psychological or (other) non-cultural
factors. It was also ‘superorganic’ (a term which he borrowed from Herbert
Spencer) in the sense that it had to be explained with reference to a level of
understanding above that of the individual organism. Thus Kroeber and his
followers came to see culture less as a product of individual human beings, and
rather more as that which produced or directed those actions. While his initial
formulation of the idea was in part an attack on racism (as stemming from
racial determinism), the radical thrust of his more general concern was that
culture developed its own logic independently of the thoughts of specific
individuals. He cited objects and ideas in the history of science which came to
be invented or discovered simultaneously by more than one individual, and later
he described cyclical features in culture, most famously women’s fashions,
which he saw as the product of the laws of culture, and not merely of the whims
of individual women or fashion designers. By 1952 it came time for American
anthropologists to take stock of what they meant by ‘culture’. In that year
Kroeber and Kluckhohn divided ‘complete’ definitions of culture into six
categories: descriptive (e.g. Tylor’s), historical (those with an emphasis on
tradition), normative (with an emphasis on rules or values), psychological
(e.g. with an emphasis on learning or habit), structural (with an emphasis on
pattern), and genetic. The last was certainly the most diverse and included
definitions with an emphasis on culture as a product or artefact, definitions
with an emphasis on ideas or on symbols, and residual-category definitions.
Leslie White:
Leslie
White was a neoevolutionist at a time when nineteenth century evolutionism virtually
disappeared from anthropology following its rejection by Franz Boas and his
students. He is best known for his strict materialist approach to evolution,
particularly his model relating energy use to social complexity (White 1943).
At the same time he argued equally strongly for a theory of cultural
determinism he labelled "culturology" (White 1940). His position,
stated most completely in The evolution of culture (1959), was strongly
materialist and became best known for its assertion that use of energy per
capita was the best way to measure social complexity and rank societies in an
evolutionary scheme.
White
(1959) asserted that, in some hypothetical beginning, "Between man and
nature hung the veil of culture, and he could see nothing save through this
medium . . . the meanings and values that lay beyond the senses." Over the
next half-century the ceaseless efforts of biological scientists to comprehend
the whole of human behaviour in their schemes would only confirm
anthropologists in this faith. He was of the opinion that culture is a process,
sui generis.
Clifford Geertz:
Clifford
Geertz and David Schneider, both of whom had been in Parsons’ Harvard
Department of Socal Relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s, advanced this
position in their work of the 1960s, culminating in Geertz’s massively
influential Interpretation of Cultures:
The concept of culture I
espouse…is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is
an animal suspended in webs of significance he has himself spun, I take culture
to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (Geertz
1973:5)
For
Geertz, culture is like a novel. It is an “ensemble of texts… which the
anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they
properly belong” (Geertz 1973: 531). He meant that culture is a story people
tell themselves about themselves. Like all good stories, culture engrosses us
and helps us understand the nature and meaning of life. It comments on who we
are and how we should act in the world. Geertz, together with Schneider and
Sahlins, managed something denied to their American predecessors - the partial
conversion of non-American anthropology. In Britain, the symbolic or
interpretive approach of the 1970s chimed with the vague talk of the
‘translation of culture’.
The
difference between an explanatory science and an interpretative science is also
a feature that tends to distinguish between the social and the cultural
anthropologists. However, the differences between them need not be so rigidly
defined, as people who concentrate on social organisation, social phenomena “on
the ground,” must also pay attention to culture and conversely, those whose
primary interest is ‘culture’ – the symbols and meanings – must investigate the
way they are expressed and embedded in social activity.
N.K. Bose:
Culture
“As the crystallised phase of Man’s life-activities. It includes certain forms
of action closely associated with particular objects and institutions habitual
attitudes of mind transferable from one person to another with the aid of
mental images conveyed through speech-symbols.
Following are a few lectures (bilingual, meant for for my students)
[1] Kroeber, Alfred Louis; Kluckhohn,
Clyde. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Harvard
University Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology Papers 47, p.
357.
