The Characteristics of Culture
Culture has several distinguishing characteristics:
(1) It is based on symbols – abstract ways of referring to and understanding ideas, objects, feelings, or behaviours – and the ability to communicate with symbols using language.
(2) Culture is shared. People in the same society share common behaviours and ways of thinking through culture.
(3) Culture is learned. While people biologically inherit many physical traits and behavioural instincts, culture is socially inherited. A person must learn culture from other people in a society.
(4) Culture is adaptive. People use culture to flexibly and quickly adjust to changes in the world around them.
Exercise 7. Explain the meanings of the following terms in English:
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Exercise 8. Read and translate the text.
The Categories of Culture
Anthropologists have described different categories of culture. For example, a simple distinction can be made between cultural objects, such as types of clothing, and cultural beliefs, such as forms of religion.
Culture includes socially acquired knowledge, beliefs, art, law, morals, customs, and habits. British anthropologist Edward B. Taylor gave one of the first complete definitions of culture in his book Primitive Culture (1871). His definition stated that culture includes socially acquired knowledge, beliefs, art, law, morals, customs, and habits.
In 1930, American anthropologist George P. Murdock went much further, listing 637 major subdivisions of culture. Murdock developed an elaborated coding system, known as the Human Relation Area Files. He used this system to identify and sort hundreds of distinctive cultural variations that could be used to compare different cultures.
Later anthropologists came up with simpler categorizations of culture. A common practice is to divide all of culture into three broad categories: material, social, and ideological. A fourth category, the arts, has characteristics of both material and ideological culture.
Material culture includes products of human manufacture, such as technology.
Social culture pertains to people’s forms of social organization—how people interact and organize themselves in groups.
Ideological culture relates to what people think, value, believe, and hold as ideals.
The arts include such activities and areas of interest as music, sculpture, painting, pottery, theatre, cooking, writing, and fashion.
Anthropologists often study how these categories of culture differ across different types of societies that vary in scale (size and complexity). Anthropologists have identified several distinct types of societies by scale. The smallest societies are known as bands. Bands consist of nomadic (not settled) groups of fewer than a hundred, mostly related people. A tribe, the next largest type of society, generally consists of a few hundred people living in settled villages. A larger form of society, called chiefdom, binds together two or more villages or tribes under a leader. The largest societies, known as civilizations, contain from several thousand to millions of mostly unrelated people, many of whom live in large cities. Some anthropologists characterize the world today as a single global-scale culture, in which people are linked together by industrial technology and markets of commercial exchange.
Exercise 9. Find the words from the text that are:
a) connected with everyday life;
b) belonging to romantic sphere;
c) the product of intellectual activity;
d) disputable and can belong to several categories.
Exercise 10. Write your own questions for the text about Culture.
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Exercise 11. Are the following sentences true or false? Write T or F in the brackets.
1. ( ) Anthropologists have described only one category of culture.
( ) Culture includes socially acquired knowledge, beliefs, art, law, morals, customs, and habits.
( ) Murdock used coding system to hide cultural variations that could be used to compare different cultures.
( ) Material culture includes social organization.
( ) Anthropologists have identified several types of societies by scale.
Exercise 12. Translate the following sentences into English using active vocabulary.
a) Здатність людей мати культуру існує головним чином завдяки фізичним особливостям.
b) Люди одного суспільства мають спільну поведінку та поділяють спосіб мислення один одного.
c) Якщо багато фізичних рис успадковуються людьми завдяки біологічним особливостям, то культура передається завдяки існуванню суспільства.
d) Культура містить такі поняття, як набуті в суспільстві знання, вірування, мистецтво, мораль, звичаї та звички.
e) Він використовував цю систему для визначення та класифікації чітких культурних різновидів, що можуть бути застосовані у різних культурах.
Exercise 13. Choose the most suitable word or phrase to complete each sentence:
1) aware; 2) controlling; 3) derived; 4) included; 5) account; 6) diversity; 7) come from; 8) wealth. |