What is Culture (Study Material), Study notes of Humanities

Download What is Culture (Study Material) and more Study notes Humanities in PDF only on Docsity! UNIVERSITAS NEGERI MALANG 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 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 (c) basic underlying assumptions. 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: ‘their cultural meaning ... lies precisely and only in the way these practices are interpreted by the insiders.’ For example, a gesture such as the ‘ring gesture’ (thumb and forefinger touching) 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. Similarly, choice of clothing can be interpreted differently by different groups of people, in terms of indications of wealth, ostentation, appropriateness, and so on. 3. Culture can be differentiated from both universal human nature and unique individual personality Culture is learned, not inherited. It derives from one’s social environment, not from one’s genes. Culture should be distinguished from human nature on one side, and from an individual’s personality on the other (see Fig. 2), although exactly where the borders lie between human nature and culture, and between culture and personality, is a matter of dis ssion among social scientists. Human nature is what 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. 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 is 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. 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. Clearly there is nothing in rattlesnake meat that causes people to vomit, for those who have internalised the opposite idea, that rattlesnake meat should be eaten, have no such digestive tract reversals. 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. There is, in other words, no such thing as the culture of a hermit. If a solitary individual thinks and behaves in a certain way, that 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. 1. Culture is homogenous. This presumes that a (local) culture is free of internal paradoxes and contradictions such that (a) it provides clear and unambiguous behavioural “instructions” to individuals — a program for how to act — or (b) once grasped or learned by an outsider, it can be characterized in relatively straightforward ways (“the Dobuans are paranoid”). A homogenous view of culture makes the second inadequate idea easier to sustain, namely that: Culture is a thing. The reification of culture — regarding culture as a thing — leads to a notion that “it” is a thing that can act, almost independently of human actors. There is no hint of individual agency here. A good contemporary example of this sort of thinking is Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” argument. It is easy to fall into the semantic trap of reification. Read the earlier remark in this essay about the constitutive power of culture to construct a definition of itself! The term is used as a shorthand way of referring, as we shall see, to bundles of complicated cognitive and perceptual processes, and it is a series of short (cognitive) steps from shorthand to metonymy to reification. But we should be on guard, particularly since by reifying culture it is easy to overlook intracultural diversity, underwriting the third inadequate idea. Culture is uniformly distributed among members of a group. This idea imputes cognitive, affective, and behavioural uniformity to all members of the group. Intracultural variation, whether at the individual or group level, is ignored or dismissed as “deviance”. Connected to this is the further misconception that: An individual possesses but a single culture. He or she is simply a Somali, a Mexican, or an American. Culture is thus synonymous with group identity. The root of this misconception stems from the privileging of what we can call tribal culture, ethnic culture, or national culture, over cultures that are connected, as we shall see, to very different sorts of groups, structures, or institutions. In part this came from the social settings in which anthropologists first developed the culture idea: small-scale and relatively socially undifferentiated tribal or ethnic groups. It was then compounded by political scientists who took up the notion of culture (as “political culture”) and privileged the nation-state as their unit of analysis — hence the “national character” idea. In fact, as we will argue, for any individual, culture always comes in the plural. A person possess and controls several cultures in the same way, as sociolinguists tell us, that even a so-called monolingual speaker controls different “registers” of the same language or dialect. 5. Culture is custom. This idea holds that culture is structurally undifferentiated, that what you see is what you get. And mostly what you see (especially in a culture different from your own), naively of course, is custom. Culture here is virtually synonymous with “tradition”, or customary ways of behaving. The important things to know, if you come from outside, are the customary rules for correct behavior. Culture here reduces to a sort of surface-level etiquette. Cultural variation is, as Peter Black once put it, merely a matter of “differential etiquette”. Once again, individual agency is downplayed. In this view there is no sense of struggle, except perhaps for the struggle of deviants (see number 3, above) who cannot or will not abide by tradition and custom: after all, the smoothing out of difference and the mitigation of struggle are precisely what rules and etiquette are for. 6. Culture is timeless. Closely related to the culture-is-custom view (indeed, to all of the above views), the idea that culture is timeless imputes a changeless quality to culture, especially to so-called traditional ones. We speak here, for example, of “the Arab mind” as though a unitary cognising element has come down to us from Muhammed’s Mecca. These six inadequate ideas about culture are related and mutually reinforcing. Using them, we argue, greatly diminishes the utility of the culture concept as an analytical tool for understanding social action, in this case, conflict and conflict resolution. Avruch 1998: 14-16 Levels of Analysis and Fallacies to Avoid Triandis et al. (1985) proposed that in order to avoid confusion between analyses conducted at the level of cultures and analyses based at the level of individuals, we should use different but related pairs of concepts. Their suggestion was that we use the term ‘allocentric’ to describe a culture member who endorses collectivist values, but the point of making the distinction is that there will also be a minority of such persons individualist 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