The Importance of Culture
Culture refers to a way of life and the attitudes, values, beliefs and ideals that define it. It includes everyday habits, customs, and traditions as well as more formal artistic productions such as music, cuisine, fashion, and religions. It also covers the broader sphere of human behavior from sex and sexuality to gender roles and racial hierarchies. Culture can be stronger than any individual, influencing even the most basic overt motor activity. It can hold the sex urge in check and cause premarital chastity, or it can lead people to die of hunger though nourishment is available if they eat foods that their culture has branded unclean.
Culture is a system of rules and expectations that defines how members of a society relate to each other, to their surroundings, and to strangers. It can provide a sense of belonging and security that is different from the feeling one gets when they recognize someone from another country or from an entirely different part of their own community or nation. This is because culture reflects the way that the community relates to itself and others, and it changes and evolves along with the ways in which people interact within the society.
It has been argued that the direction of biologic evolution is toward greater stability and security of life, and that some cultures are more effective than others at providing these advantages. Some examples include the advantages of agriculture over hunting and gathering, the superior survival rates in certain cultures compared to others in surviving epidemics, the superior capacity of some societies to produce more food from the land, the ability of some to develop technologies for coping with climate change, and so on.
A recent development in cultural history has been the attempt to incorporate psychological ideas and theories of behavior into the field. These are based on the assumption that some kinds of cultural productions — especially those involving art and music — have a strong influence over people’s mental processes and may serve as “cognitive fossils.”
A number of writers have emphasized that, despite these claims, most studies that have claimed to show an effect of such cultural products are correlational (i.e., they do not establish causation) and have poor temporal stability and replicability. These concerns have not dampened the enthusiasm for this new approach, however, and it looks as if the 1980s and 1990s will be remembered as a kind of Golden Age of Cultural History. It might be said that this new turn is a response to the perceived rigidity of social history and the related disciplines of sociology and psychology. In this context, cultural historians have been influenced by the work of social historians such as Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, and by theories of human nature developed by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich. Other influences have included the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, such as his concepts of’symbolic capital’ and ‘distinction’. In addition, cultural historians have benefited from the work of anthropologists such as Alfred L. Kroeber and Norbert Elias.
Culture refers to a way of life and the attitudes, values, beliefs and ideals that define it. It includes everyday habits, customs, and traditions as well as more formal artistic productions such as music, cuisine, fashion, and religions. It also covers the broader sphere of human behavior from sex and sexuality to gender roles and racial hierarchies. Culture can be stronger than any individual, influencing even the most basic overt motor activity. It can hold the sex urge in check and cause premarital chastity, or it can lead people to die of hunger though nourishment is available if they eat foods that their culture has branded unclean. Culture is a system of rules and expectations that defines how members of a society relate to each other, to their surroundings, and to strangers. It can provide a sense of belonging and security that is different from the feeling one gets when they recognize someone from another country or from an entirely different part of their own community or nation. This is because culture reflects the way that the community relates to itself and others, and it changes and evolves along with the ways in which people interact within the society. It has been argued that the direction of biologic evolution is toward greater stability and security of life, and that some cultures are more effective than others at providing these advantages. Some examples include the advantages of agriculture over hunting and gathering, the superior survival rates in certain cultures compared to others in surviving epidemics, the superior capacity of some societies to produce more food from the land, the ability of some to develop technologies for coping with climate change, and so on. A recent development in cultural history has been the attempt to incorporate psychological ideas and theories of behavior into the field. These are based on the assumption that some kinds of cultural productions — especially those involving art and music — have a strong influence over people’s mental processes and may serve as “cognitive fossils.” A number of writers have emphasized that, despite these claims, most studies that have claimed to show an effect of such cultural products are correlational (i.e., they do not establish causation) and have poor temporal stability and replicability. These concerns have not dampened the enthusiasm for this new approach, however, and it looks as if the 1980s and 1990s will be remembered as a kind of Golden Age of Cultural History. It might be said that this new turn is a response to the perceived rigidity of social history and the related disciplines of sociology and psychology. In this context, cultural historians have been influenced by the work of social historians such as Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, and by theories of human nature developed by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich. Other influences have included the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, such as his concepts of’symbolic capital’ and ‘distinction’. In addition, cultural historians have benefited from the work of anthropologists such as Alfred L. Kroeber and Norbert Elias.