The Study of Culture
Cultural
The term “culture” encompasses the beliefs, values, traditions, arts, laws, customs, and capabilities that distinguish groups of people from one another. It also refers to a particular social group’s collective behavior and values that are learned over time. The study of culture is interdisciplinary and includes sociology, anthropology, history, and political science.
Various definitions of culture have been proposed by different scholars, with each having its own particular perspective. For example, British poet and critic Matthew Arnold viewed it as cultivation of the humanist ideal. Some 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, viewed high culture as an artificial development that corrupts and obscures people’s natural nature; they saw folk music as authentic expression of a simple way of life. Others, called “diffusionists,” held that a trait once created in a part of the world inevitably spreads throughout the rest of it.
Most cultures are a product of the interaction between a population and its environment. For example, many of the Eskimo cultural practices exhibited impressive adaptability to the harsh conditions in which they lived: tailored fur clothing, harpoons and boats for hunting whales and sea mammals, and hemispherical snow houses (igloos). A more general environmental influence on culture is reflected by the fact that people generally tend to prefer certain state of affairs over other states; this is the basis of the concept of values.
A major concern of anthropologists and historians is to discover the origins of culture. This is a complex and challenging endeavor, because culture often does not seem to have any concrete underlying foundation. Some scholars have argued that culture evolves in a manner similar to language. The first signs of such evolution are linguistic developments and the formation of words, which in turn lead to the construction of phrases. This process of evolution is called lexical diffusion, and it continues to shape the structure and meaning of language.
Psychologists have a more limited interest in the origins of culture, but they do investigate how people’s understanding and interpretation of a particular culture affect their actions. For example, some arithmetic skills are more intuitive to some than to others, and the way that people interpret results of events is also influenced by their cultural beliefs and assumptions.
It is important to understand the importance of culture in a society, because the quality of life and the ability to achieve goals and objectives are directly related to the cultural base on which they are built. For example, when students are able to express their own cultural identities and feel that they are understood by teachers, they perform better in school. In the same way, the inclusion of people from different cultural backgrounds in decision-making processes is a key factor in successful implementation of public policy. It is also crucial to promote the appreciation of cultural differences and to provide schools with a wide range of educational opportunities, including the use of multicultural literature and classroom materials. This will enable students to develop a fuller understanding of the world and will help them to interact more effectively with people from other cultures in an ever-more globalized society.
Cultural The term “culture” encompasses the beliefs, values, traditions, arts, laws, customs, and capabilities that distinguish groups of people from one another. It also refers to a particular social group’s collective behavior and values that are learned over time. The study of culture is interdisciplinary and includes sociology, anthropology, history, and political science. Various definitions of culture have been proposed by different scholars, with each having its own particular perspective. For example, British poet and critic Matthew Arnold viewed it as cultivation of the humanist ideal. Some 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, viewed high culture as an artificial development that corrupts and obscures people’s natural nature; they saw folk music as authentic expression of a simple way of life. Others, called “diffusionists,” held that a trait once created in a part of the world inevitably spreads throughout the rest of it. Most cultures are a product of the interaction between a population and its environment. For example, many of the Eskimo cultural practices exhibited impressive adaptability to the harsh conditions in which they lived: tailored fur clothing, harpoons and boats for hunting whales and sea mammals, and hemispherical snow houses (igloos). A more general environmental influence on culture is reflected by the fact that people generally tend to prefer certain state of affairs over other states; this is the basis of the concept of values. A major concern of anthropologists and historians is to discover the origins of culture. This is a complex and challenging endeavor, because culture often does not seem to have any concrete underlying foundation. Some scholars have argued that culture evolves in a manner similar to language. The first signs of such evolution are linguistic developments and the formation of words, which in turn lead to the construction of phrases. This process of evolution is called lexical diffusion, and it continues to shape the structure and meaning of language. Psychologists have a more limited interest in the origins of culture, but they do investigate how people’s understanding and interpretation of a particular culture affect their actions. For example, some arithmetic skills are more intuitive to some than to others, and the way that people interpret results of events is also influenced by their cultural beliefs and assumptions. It is important to understand the importance of culture in a society, because the quality of life and the ability to achieve goals and objectives are directly related to the cultural base on which they are built. For example, when students are able to express their own cultural identities and feel that they are understood by teachers, they perform better in school. In the same way, the inclusion of people from different cultural backgrounds in decision-making processes is a key factor in successful implementation of public policy. It is also crucial to promote the appreciation of cultural differences and to provide schools with a wide range of educational opportunities, including the use of multicultural literature and classroom materials. This will enable students to develop a fuller understanding of the world and will help them to interact more effectively with people from other cultures in an ever-more globalized society.