CULTURE

EDWARD BURNETT TYLOR

 Culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
 It encompasses all of the different aspects of being a member of a social group.
 In this sense, everyone has a culture yet expressed in different ways; as such, it is the same for the lawyer in
the city, a farmer in the fields, or a hunter in the forest.

TWO FORMS OF CULTURE (CULTURAL HERITAGE)

MATERIAL CULTURE NONMATERIAL CULTURE

Refers to the physical products of a culture, such as Refers to the ideas that are shared by a
artifacts, dwellings, and artistic expressions. cultural group. Examples of this include
Archeologists use these to understand how extinct religion, myths, legends, and language.
cultures used to live. For example, most of what we Evidence of these are much more difficult to
know of the ancient Egyptian civilization, which obtain because they usually have no direct
existed from 1300 BCE to 332 BCE thanks to the physical form and are easily lost.
buildings, statues, paintings, objects, and mummified
bodies that they left behind.

ELEMENTS OF CULTURE
1. Language
 This refers to a system of symbols which serves as a medium of communication between people.
 According to Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, language is a manifestation of culture that shapes how we
perceive and interpret the world.
 Used not only to articulate thinking and perception, but language itself has the ability to shape
reality as understood by a group of individuals.
 Considered as the most important part, “The Soul” and “The Storehouse” of culture.
2. Values
 Standards that people use to determine what is good, beautiful, and desirable.
 Transsituational goals that vary in importance and serve as guiding principles in people’s lives
 Tends to be strongly held and become bases for judging the words and actions of other people.
 Helps shape a society by suggesting what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, sought or avoided.
3. Norms
 Are rules and expectations about what are appropriate behaviors in particular situation.
 Society’s standards of acceptable behavior.
 However, norms are complex standards –each has different kinds and severities.
 Classified into four: Folkways, Mores, Taboos, Laws
 Folkways are norms which members of society have come to accept as the proper way of
dealing with their everyday living and social interaction.
 Mores - From Latin term “mos” which means “custom”. Considered as a Moral Norms.
Violation of Mores usually has corresponding consequences/sanctions and is considered
antisocial.
 Taboos - Deliberated as “Negative Norms”. Form of prohibited or restricted behavior.
Things that people find offensive and socially inappropriate if you are caught doing them.
 Laws are formalized mores that are legislated, approved, and implemented in Society.
4. Beliefs
 The means by which people make sense of their experiences, or ideas that people hold to be true,
factual, and real.
 Can be classified either as Scientific or Nonscientific.
 Based on religious, mythical, and/or metaphysical ideas that try to explain the realities of the world
or cosmos.
 It is a known fact that most, if not all, ancient societies and indigenous communities in the world
have given high respect to nature, believing that spirits or unseen entities inhabit the physical
world.
 A custom for people to behave in a way that they think will pleasure the nature.

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 5. Symbols
 Are illustrations used to represent a particular meaning of something.
 May be anything that is used to represent, express, and/or stand for an event, situation, person, or
idea.
 According to an Anthropologist Leslie White, “It was the symbol which transformed our anthropoid
ancestors into men and made them human. All civilizations have been generated, and are
perpetuated, only by the use of symbols.”

ASPECTS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE

1. Dynamic, Flexible, and Adaptive
 Cultural behaviors allow people to fit into and adapt to their respective environments.
 The cumulative and social nature of human ideas, activities, and artifacts gives a tremendous
potential source of variability in adaptation.
 This means that some cultures through experience have developed diverse ways in adapting to
their environment, which is even tantamount to their survival in the planet.
 Conscious or not, people have adapted significantly to their environments and cultural ways rather
than evolve biologically or naturally and, in so doing, have gained a prowess and momentum in
maneuverability and flexibility in environmental adaptation, simply unchallenged by other forms of
life.
2. Shared and Contested
 Various members of society or group commonly share ideas, activities, and artifacts.
 Behavior of people in a group or society often becomes socially and conventionally standardized in
form and manner.
 Shared culture provides order and meaning in interpreting behavioral patterns of individuals in a
society.
 Since culture is extragenetic, its transmission is not simply automatic but largely depends on the
willingness of the people to give and receive.
 If culture is learned and shared, it is also contested in various ways and situations. Because of
diversity, culture is subjected to debate and analysis
3. Learned through Socialization or Enculturation
 Behavior patterns that constitute a specific culture are not genetically or biologically determined.
 Socialization is the process through which we learn the norms, customs, values, and roles of the
society, from birth through death. Enculturation, on the other hand, is the process by which we
learn the requirements of our surrounding culture and acquire the behaviors and values
appropriate for this culture.
4. Patterned Social Interactions
 A set of patterned social interactions that people practice in a society.
 Social interaction, as commonly viewed, implies theories of reciprocity, complementarity, and
mutuality of response.
 The most common forms of social interactions are conflict, competition, cooperation,
accommodation, etc.
5. Integrated and at times Unstable
 For a society or group, ideas, activities, and artifacts are not only shared; their arrangement more or
less fit together and interlock to form a consistent whole. For example, technology and its relation
with social and political patterns.
 The patterns of social interaction are connected to each other and may change from time to time.
The type of our social interaction may change. A simple social exchange may lead to cooperation. A
small competition may result in a big conflict.
6. Transmitted through Socialization or Enculturation
 Acquired through learning, cultural ideas, activities, and artifacts are handed down from generation
to generation as a super organic inheritance, which means it is inherently passed on through
generations.
 Some forms of cultural ideas, activities, and artifacts are also required through social learning – by
imitating the act of others – and through communication and language.
7. Requires Language and Other Forms of Communication
 Language has been called “The Storehouse of Culture”. It is the primary means of capturing,
communicating, discussing, changing, and passing shared understandings to new generations.

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  An important means of cultural transmission, the process by which one generation passes culture
to the next.
 Aside from language, much of human behavior involves symbols or non-verbal forms, such as signs,
sounds, emblems, and other things that are linked to something or someone else and represented in
meaningful ways.

DIFFERENT ORIENTATION IN VIEWING OTHER CULTURES

1. Ethnocentrism
 The view that one’s group is superior compared to another
 A group is considered as the center or core of everything and all other groups are scaled and rated
in relation to it or called peripheral.
 In many cases, a group or society uses their own values and norms as yardsticks in measuring other
folkways and values. The ways of other groups are oftentimes labelled as different, strange or
queer, and to be viewed with hostility and suspicion
 The tendency to evaluate other cultures in terms of one’s own and to conclude that other cultures
are inferior, barbaric, or immoral.
 Ethnocentrism in excess leads to conflict with groups considered inferior or, in a situation in which
one group is more powerful than the other, to oppression and sometimes genocide.
 It should be noted that ethnocentric mentality cultivates helplessness and hopelessness and simply
an end by itself. In fact, ethnocentrism is a by-product of day-to-day socialization.
2. Xenocentrism
 Ethnocentrism has an opposite relative – Xenocentrism, or the belief that one’s culture is inferior to
another.
 A xenocentric person usually has a high regard for other cultures but disdains his/her own or is
embarrassed by it.
 Xenocentrism is very evident in many Filipinos, especially those who are influenced by other
cultures. Many Filipinos prefer imported products rather than locally-made ones, thinking that the
quality is better if the product is made abroad.
3. Cultural Relativism
 Advocates a way of mitigating the negative effect of ethnocentrism.
 Viewed and analyze culture on their own terms, in the context of their societal setting.
 No culture should be considered better than another; different cultures should be accepted,
tolerated, and appreciated rather than condemned.
 Cultural relativism states that there are no universal norms or moral absolutes; in specific
circumstances, any act can appear either good or bad.
 This approach proposes that one must suspend judgment on other people’s practices in order to
better understand them in their own cultural terms and through this, one can gain a meaningful
view of the values and beliefs that underlie the behaviors and institutions of other people and
societies.

References:
Abulencia, A. S., & Padernal, R. S. (2016). Social Dynamic A Worktext on Understanding Culture, Society, and
Politics. Quezon City: Brilliant Creations Publishin, Inc.
Enverga, M. R. (2019). Understanding Culture, Society, and Politics A Global Perspective. Mandaluyong City: Anvil
Publishing, Inc.
Santarita, J. B., & Madrid, R. M. (2016). Understanding Culture, Society, and Politics. Quezon City: Vibal Group, Inc.

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