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Definitions of culture; Some key characteristics of culture; Inadequate conceptions of culture; Levels of analysis and fallacies to avoid; Culture and related terms culture and nation; Culture and race; Culture and ethnicity; Culture, subculture, and coculture; Culture and identity.
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Course: Human and Culture Definitions 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.’ Some Key Characteristics of Culture
all human beings, from the Russian professor to the Australian aborigine, have in common: it represents the universal level in one’s mental software. It is inherited with one’s genes; within the computer analogy it is the ‘operating system’ which determines one’s physical and basic psychological functioning. 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. However, what one does with these feelings, how one expresses fear, joy, observations, and so on, is modified by culture. Human nature is not as ‘human’ as the term suggests, because certain aspects of it are shared with parts of the animal world. 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. It is based upon traits which are partly inherited with the individual’s unique set of genes and partly learned. ‘Learned’ means: modified by the influence of collective programming (culture) as well as unique personal experiences.
To summarize about emics and etics, 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. Triandis 1994: 20 It is in this way that etics and emics can coexist in relation to our behaviors. Our understanding of cultures and cultural influences on behavior will be vastly improved if we avoid tendencies to compartmentalize behaviors into one or the other category and, instead, search for ways in which any given behavior actually represents both tensions. Matsumoto 1996: 21– 2
However, our notion of culture is not something exclusive to certain members; rather it relates to the whole of a society. Moreover, it is not value-laden. It is not that some cultures are advanced and some backward, some more civilised and polite while others are coarse and rude. Rather, they are similar or different to each other. Inadequate Conceptions of Culture [There are] at least six mutually related ideas about culture that we call inadequate.
cultures. Similarly Triandis et al suggest the use of ‘idiocentric’ to describe a culture member who endorses individualist values. The proposal is a good one, but level-appropriate terms have not yet been adopted by other researchers. Smith and Bond 1998: 60– 2 Culture and Related Terms Culture and Nation In our everyday language, people commonly treat culture and nation as equivalent terms. The culture, or cultures, that exist within the boundaries of a nation-state certainly influence the regulations that a nation develops, but the term culture is not synonymous with nation. Culture and Race Race commonly refers to genetic or biologically based similarities among people, which are distinguishable and unique and function to mark or separate groups of people from one another. Though racial categories are inexact as a classification system, it is generally agreed that race is a more all-encompassing term than either culture or nation. Sometimes race and culture do seem to work hand in hand to create visible and important distinctions among groups within a larger society; and sometimes race plays a part in establishing separate cultural groups. Race can, however, form the basis for prejudicial communication that can be a major obstacle to intercultural communication. Culture and Ethnicity Ethnic group is another term often used interchangeable with culture. Ethnicity is actually a term that is used to refer to a wide variety of groups who might share a language, historical origins, religion, identification with a common nationstate, or cultural system. It is also possible for members of an ethnic group to be part of many different cultures and/or nations. Culture, Subculture, and Coculture Subculture is also a term sometimes used to refer to racial and ethnic minority groups that share both a common nation-state with other cultures and some aspects of the larger culture. the term coculture is occasionally employed in an effort to avoid the implication of a hierarchical relationship Culture and Identity
Culture is not the same as identity. Identities consist of people’s answers to the question: Where do I belong? They are based on mutual images and stereotypes and on emotions linked to the outer layers of the onion, but not to values.