(Page Updated 2/22/25)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture#p-search
Culture is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities and habits of the individuals in these groups.
Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.
A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change.
Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies; these include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.
In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing, or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the lower classes and create a false consciousness. Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.
When used as a count noun, a "culture" is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation… Sometimes "culture" is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. "bro culture"), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.
It has been estimated from archaeological data that the human capacity for cumulative culture emerged somewhere between 500,000–170,000 years ago.
Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation. In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress. Rein Raud, building on the work of Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander, has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question.
Starting in the 1990s, psychological research on culture influence began to grow and challenge the universality assumed in general psychology. Culture psychologists began to try to explore the relationship between emotions and culture, and answer whether the human mind is independent from culture… On the other hand, some researchers try to look for differences between people's personalities across cultures… As different cultures dictate distinctive norms, culture shock is also studied to understand how people react when they are confronted with other cultures. Culture is important for psychologists to consider when understanding the human mental operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_culture
The sociology of culture, and the related cultural sociology, concerns the systematic analysis of culture, usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a member of a society, as it is manifested in the society.
As no two cultures are exactly alike, they do all have common characteristics.
A culture contains:
The belief that culture is symbolically coded and can thus be taught from one person to another means that cultures, although bounded, can change. Cultures are both predisposed to change and resistant to it. Resistance can come from habit, religion, and the integration and interdependence of cultural traits.
Cultural change can have many causes, including: the environment, inventions, and contact with other cultures.
Several understandings of how cultures change come from anthropology. For instance, in diffusion theory, the form of something moves from one culture to another, but not its meaning... A variant of the diffusion theory, stimulus diffusion, refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention in another.
Contact between cultures can also result in acculturation. Acculturation has different meanings, but in this context refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with those of another, such as what happened with many Native American Indians. Related processes on an individual level are assimilation and transculturation, both of which refer to adoption of a different culture by an individual.
Griswold outlined another sociological approach to cultural change. Griswold points out that it may seem as though culture comes from individuals – which, for certain elements of cultural change, is true – but there is also the larger, collective, and long-lasting culture that cannot have been the creation of single individuals as it predates and post-dates individual humans and contributors to culture. The author presents a sociological perspective to address this conflict.
Sociology suggests an alternative to both the view that it has always been an unsatisfying way at one extreme and the sociological individual genius view at the other. This alternative posits that culture and cultural works are collective, not individual, creations. We can best understand specific cultural objects... by seeing them not as unique to their creators but as the fruits of collective production, fundamentally social in their genesis. In short, Griswold argues that culture changes through the contextually dependent and socially situated actions of individuals; macro-level culture influences the individual who, in turn, can influence that same culture. The logic is a bit circular but, illustrates how culture can change over time yet remain somewhat constant.
See More: Cultures and Societies in a Changing World by Wendy Griswold
Glenn Hendler, Instructor
What do we talk about when we talk about "culture"? This class will explore this keyword in and around literary studies along two parallel tracks. First, we will explore the historical development of different concepts of culture over the last two centuries or so. Second, we will explore a range of theoretical perspectives from the past three decades that fit loosely under the rubric of Cultural Studies. Both tracks will necessitate broadly interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. We will explore, for instance, a relatively literary manifestation of the concept in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, but also how the concept of culture figures in the early history of the human sciences, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Similarly, since work in the contemporary field of Cultural Studies only rarely limits its objects of study to the literary; we will sample theoretical developments in the study of popular music, film, and television, etc.
Over the course of the semester, you will be contributing to two keyword archives.
Transculturation and “contact zones” (Lina Jiang)
Mary Mouise Pratt in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation uses the term “contact zone” to refer to the social spaces where “disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination,” and such relations are not confined to the colonial period or slavery since they even “lived out across the globe today” (4). She further points out that transculturation is “a phenomenon of the contact zone” (6). It is interesting and significant to discuss cultural interaction in the sense of visible space and borders. The rise of the concept to early national culture is closely related with visible borders and territories. She thinks that the entity of Europe was also “constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out” (6). Cultural contact is a mutual process of recognition (or interpellation in Althusser’s word) and mutual construction.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Lina Jiang)
Fred Turner in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture notices that computers, embodied in mechanical conformity as a tool for the cold war, haunted the American popular culture during the 60s. However, in the 1990s with the rise of the Internet, computers function in a different way—being turned into “a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.” Turner sharply points out such ironic transformation and discusses the connection between counterculture and cyberculture. He thinks that “counterculture opened the doors of the youth movement to the complex delights of consumer culture.” To other cultural theorists like Herbert Marcuse, the hippies’ hedonism marked “the birth of a new, performative sensibility with which to challenge the social and emotional rigidities of mainstream culture” (32). In this sense, counterculture is not equivalent to subculture, since counterculture has the dynamic desire of challenging and subverting the mainstream. It tries to reform rather than merge into the mainstream culture.
"Transcultured" (Maya Raquel Castellanos)
In his article “The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes’s George Washingon Gómez and Chicano Literature at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Ramón Saldívar writes: “Other types of national narratives constructed to provide the etiologies of identity, such as narratives of the immigrant experience, for instance, simply will not apply to the situation of such bordered, transcultured subjects. Standing in the borderlands of culture, these metaleptic figures exist on a much more problematic and unstable ground of heterogeneous determinations and crisscrossed negations….” I am interested in his theorizing through Paredes’s novel a Chicano subjectivity as specifically “transcultured;” he explains that if “the category of the subject is to remain viable, it must be seen as a category at once essential and provisional, sovereign and bifurcated…” (283).
Back to: Transculturation