MEANING OF CULTURE: (S.

D)
Culture is used in a special sense in anthropology and sociology. It refers to
the sum of human beings’ life ways, their behaviour, beliefs, feelings, thought; it
connotes everything that is acquired by them as social beings.

Culture has been defined in number of ways. There is no consensus among

sociologists and anthropologists regarding the definition of culture. One of the
most comprehensive definitions of the term culture was provided by the British
anthropologist Edward Tylor. He defined culture as ” that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society”.The British anthropologist
Malinowski included ‘inherited, artifacts, implements and consumer goods’ and
‘social structure’ within his definition of culture.Some of the other important
definitions of culture are as follows. “Culture is the expression of our nature in our
modes of living and our thinking. Intercourse in our literature, in religion, in
recreation and enjoyment”, says Maclver.“Culture is the total content of the
physio-social, bio-social and psycho-social universe man has produced and the
socially created mechanisms through which these social product operate”,
According to Anderson and Parker.

Combining several of these definitions, we may define culture as the sum-

total of human achievements or the total heritage of man which can be transmitted
to men by communication and tradition. It is a way of life of the people in a certain
geographical area. Life style and social pattern of a society being the direct
consequence of the accumulated heritage of ages past distinguish and differentiate
one community from another.

Culture therefore, is moral, intellectual and spiritual discipline for

advancement, in accordance with the norms and values based on accumulated
heritage. It is imbibing and making ours own, the life style and social pattern of the
group one belongs to. Culture is a system of learned behaviour shared by and
transmitted among the members of the group.

Culture is a collective heritage learned by individuals and passed from one

generation to another. The individual receives culture as part of social heritage and
in turn, may reshape the culture and introduce changes which then become part of
the heritage of succeeding generations.

Characteristics of Culture:

From various definition, we can deduce the following characteristics:

1. Learned Behaviour:
Not all behaviour is learned, but most of it is learned; combing one’s hair, standing
in line, telling jokes, criticising the President and going to the movie, all constitute
behaviours which had to be learned.

Sometimes the terms conscious learning and unconscious learning are used to
distinguish the learning. For example, the ways in which a small child learns to
handle a tyrannical father or a rejecting mother often affect the ways in which that
child, ten or fifteen years later, handles his relationships with other people.

Some behaviour is obvious. People can be seen going to football games, eating
with forks, or driving automobiles. Such behaviour is called “overt” behaviour.
Other behaviour is less visible. Such activities as planning tomorrow’s work (or)
feeling hatred for an enemy, are behaviours too. This sort of behaviour, which is
not openly visible to other people, is called Covert behaviour. Both may be, of
course, learned.

2. Culture is Abstract:
Culture exists in the minds or habits of the members of society. Culture is the
shared ways of doing and thinking. There are degrees of visibility of cultural
behaviour, ranging from the regularised activities of persons to their internal
reasons for so doing. In other words, we cannot see culture as such we can only see
human behaviour. This behaviour occurs in regular, patterned fashion and it is
called culture.

3. Culture is a Pattern of Learned Behaviour:

The definition of culture indicated that the learned behaviour of people is
patterned. Each person’s behaviour often depends upon some particular behaviour
of someone else. The point is that, as a general rule, behaviours are somewhat
integrated or organized with related behaviours of other persons.
4. Culture is the Products of Behaviour:
Culture learnings are the products of behaviour. As the person behaves, there occur
changes in him. He acquires the ability to swim, to feel hatred toward someone, or
to sympathize with someone. They have grown out of his previous behaviours.

In both ways, then, human behaviour is the result of behaviour. The experience of
other people are impressed on one as he grows up, and also many of his traits and
abilities have grown out of his own past behaviours.

5. Culture includes Attitudes, Values Knowledge:

There is widespread error in the thinking of many people who tend to regard the
ideas, attitudes, and notions which they have as “their own”. It is easy to
overestimate the uniqueness of one’s own attitudes and ideas. When there is
agreement with other people it is largely unnoticed, but when there is a
disagreement or difference one is usually conscious of it. Your differences
however, may also be cultural. For example, suppose you are a Catholic and the
other person a Protestant.

6. Culture also includes Material Objects:

Man’s behaviour results in creating objects. Men were behaving when they made
these things. To make these objects required numerous and various skills which
human beings gradually built up through the ages. Man has invented something
else and so on. Occasionally one encounters the view that man does not really
“make” steel or a battleship. All these things first existed in a “state nature”.

Man merely modified their form, changed them from a state in which they were to
the state in which he now uses them. The chair was first a tree which man surely
did not make. But the chair is more than trees and the jet airplane is more than iron
ore and so forth.

7. Culture is shared by the Members of Society:

The patterns of learned behaviour and the results of behaviour are possessed not by
one or a few person, but usually by a large proportion. Thus, many millions of
persons share such behaviour patterns as Christianity, the use of automobiles, or
the English language.
Persons may share some part of a culture unequally. For example, as Americans do
the Christian religion. To some persons Christianity is the all important,
predominating idea in life. To others it is less preoccupying/important, and to still
others it is of marginal significance only.

Sometimes the people share different aspects of culture. For example, among the
Christians, there are – Catholic and Protestant, liberal or conservation, as
clergymen or as laymen. The point to our discussion is not that culture or any part
7of it is shred identically, but that it is shared by the members of society to a
sufficient extent.

8. Culture is Super-organic:
Culture is sometimes called super organic. It implies that “culture” is somehow
superior to “nature”. The word super-organic is useful when it implies that what
may be quite a different phenomenon from a cultural point of view.

For example, a tree means different things to the botanist who studies it, the old
woman who uses it for shade in the late summer afternoon, the farmer who picks
its fruit, the motorist who collides with it and the young lovers who carve their
initials in its trunk. The same physical objects and physical characteristics, in other
words, may constitute a variety of quite different cultural objects and cultural
characteristics.

9. Culture is Pervasive:
Culture is pervasive it touches every aspect of life. The pervasiveness of culture is
manifest in two ways. First, culture provides an unquestioned context within which
individual action and response take place. Not only emotional action but relational
actions are governed by cultural norms. Second, culture pervades social activities
and institutions.

According to Ruth Benedict, “A culture, like an individual is a more or less

consistent pattern of thought and action. With each culture there come into being
characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society. In
obedience to these purposes, each person further consolidates its experience and in
proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogeneous items of behaviour;
take more and more congruous shape”.
10. Culture is a way of Life:
Culture means simply the “way of life” of a people or their “design for living.”
Kluckhohn and Kelly define it in his sense, ” A culture is a historically derived
system of explicit and implicit designs for living, which tends to be shared by all or
specially designed members of a group.”

Explicit culture refers to similarities in word and action which can be directly
observed. For example, the adolescent cultural behaviour can be generalized from
regularities in dress, mannerism and conversation. Implicit culture exists in
abstract forms which are not quite obvious.

11. Culture is a human Product:

Culture is not a force, operating by itself and independent of the human actors.
There is an unconscious tendency to defy culture, to endow it with life and treat it
as a thing. Culture is a creation of society in interaction and depends for its
existence upon the continuance of society.

In a strict sense, therefore, culture does not ‘do’ anything on its own. It does not
cause the individual to act in a particular way, nor does it ‘make’ the normal
individual into a maladjusted one. Culture, in short, is a human product; it is not
independently endowed with life.

12. Culture is Idealistic:

Culture embodies the ideas and norms of a group. It is sum-total of the ideal
patterns and norms of behaviour of a group. Culture consists of the intellectual,
artistic and social ideals and institutions which the members of the society profess
and to which they strive to confirm.

13. Culture is transmitted among members of Society:

The cultural ways are learned by persons from persons. Many of them are “handed
down” by one’s elders, by parents, teachers, and others [of a somewhat older
generation]. Other cultural behaviours are “handed up” to elders. Some of the
transmission of culture is among contemporaries.

For example, the styles of dress, political views, and the use of recent labour
saving devices. One does not acquire a behaviour pattern spontaneously. He learns
it. That means that someone teaches him and he learns. Much of the learning
process both for the teacher and the learner is quite unconscious, unintentional, or
accidental.

14. Culture is Continually Changing:

There is one fundamental and inescapable attribute (special quality) of culture, the
fact of unending change. Some societies at sometimes change slowly, and hence in
comparison to other societies seem not to be changing at all. But they are
changing, even though not obviously so.

15. Culture is Variable:

Culture varies from society to society, group to group. Hence, we say culture of
India or England. Further culture varies from group to group within the same
society. There are subcultures within a culture. Cluster of patterns which are both
related to general culture of the society and yet distinguishable from it are called
subcultures.

16. Culture is an integrated system:

Culture possesses an order and system. Its various parts are integrated with each
other and any new element which is introduced is also integrated.

17. Language is the Chief Vehicle of Culture:

Man lives not only in the present but also in the past and future. He is able to do
this because he possesses language which transmits to him what was learned in the
past and enables him to transmit the accumulated wisdom to the next generation. A
specialised language pattern serves as a common bond to the members of a
particular group or subculture. Although culture is transmitted in a variety of ways,
language is one of the most important vehicles for perpetuating cultural patterns.

To conclude culture is everything which is socially learned and shared by the

members of a society. It is culture that, in the wide focus of the world,
distinguishes individual from individual, group from group and society.

Functions of Culture:
Among all groups of people we find widely shared beliefs, norms, values and
preferences. Since culture seems to be universal human phenomenon, it occurs
naturally to wonder whether culture corresponds to any universal human needs.
This curiosity raises the question of the functions of culture. Social scientists have
discussed various functions of culture. Culture has certain functions for both
individual and society.

Following are some of the important functions of culture:

1. Culture Defines Situations:
Each culture has many subtle cues which define each situation. It reveals whether
one should prepare to fight, run, laugh or make love. For example, suppose
someone approaches you with right hand outstretched at waist level. What does
this mean? That he wishes to shake hands in friendly greeting is perfectly obvious
– obvious, that is to anyone familiar with our culture.

But in another place or time the outstretched hand might mean hostility or warning.
One does not know what to do in a situation until he has defined the situation. Each
society has its insults and fighting words. The cues (hints) which define situations
appear in infinite variety. A person who moves from one society into another will
spend many years misreading the cues. For example, laughing at the wrong places.

2. Culture defines Attitudes, Values and Goals:

Each person learns in his culture what is good, true, and beautiful. Attitudes, values
and goals are defined by the culture. While the individual normally learns them as
unconsciously as he learns the language. Attitude are tendencies to feel and act in
certain ways. Values are measures of goodness or desirability, for example, we
value private property, (representative) Government and many other things and
experience.

Goals are those attainments which our values define as worthy, (e.g.) winning the
race, gaining the affections of a particular girl, or becoming president of the firm.
By approving certain goals and ridiculing others, the culture channels individual
ambitions. In these ways culture determines the goals of life.

3. Culture defines Myths, Legends, and the Supernatural:

Myths and legends are important part of every culture. They may inspire, reinforce
effort and sacrifice and bring comfort in bereavement. Whether they are true is
sociologically unimportant. Ghosts are real to people who believe in them and who
act upon this belief. We cannot understand the behaviour of any group without
knowing something of the myths, legends, and supernatural beliefs they hold.
Myths and legends are powerful forces in a group’s behaviour.

Culture also provides the individual with a ready-made view of the universe. The
nature of divine power and the important moral issues are defined by the culture.
The individual does not have to select, but is trained in a Christian, Buddhist,
Hindu, Muslim or some other religious tradition. This tradition gives answers for
the major (things imponderable) of life, and fortuities the individual to meet life’s
crises.

4. Culture provides Behaviour Patterns:

The individual need not go through painful trial and error learning to know what
foods can be eaten (without poisoning himself), or how to live among people
without fear. He finds a ready-made set of patterns awaiting him which he needs
only to learn and follow. The culture maps out the path to matrimony. The
individual does not have to wonder how one secures a mate; he knows the
procedure defined by his culture.

If men use culture to advance their purposes, it seems clear also that a culture
imposes limits on human and activities. The need for order calls forth another
function of culture that of so directing behaviour that disorderly behaviour is
restricted and orderly behaviour is promoted. A society without rules or norms to
define right and wrong behaviour would be very much like a heavily travelled
street without traffic signs or any understood rules for meeting and passing
vehicles. Chaos would be the result in either case.

Social order cannot rest on the assumption that men will spontaneously behave in
ways conducive to social harmony.