Culture is the set of all life forms and expressions of a given society. As such it includes customs, practices, codes, standards and rules of the manner, dress, religion, rituals, norms of behavior and belief systems. From another point of view we could say that culture is all the information and skills that humans possess. The concept of culture is fundamental to the disciplines that deal the study of society, especially anthropology and sociology.
UNESCO in 1982, said culture
... that gives man the ability to reflect on itself. It is she who makes us specifically human beings, rational, critical and ethically compromised. Through it we discern values \u200b\u200band make choices. Through it man expresses himself, becomes aware of itself, is recognized as an unfinished project, questions his own achievements, seeks untiringly for new meanings and creates works that transcend.
(UNESCO, 1982: Declaration of Mexico)
Origin of the term of the term's origins are a metaphor between the practice of an activity (eg farming, which is agriculture) the cultivation of the human spirit, of the intellectual faculties of the individual. In this meaning is still preserved in everyday language, culture is identified with learning. Thus, a person "educated" is someone who has great knowledge in varied areas of knowledge.
classical conception of culture
The word culture comes from the Latin culture, which in turn derives from the word anger means care field or livestock. By the thirteenth century, the term used to designate a plot of land, and three centuries later it had changed its meaning as a state of a thing for measure: the cultivation of land or livestock care (Cuche, 1999: 10), approximately in the sense that English is used in our days in words such as agriculture, apiculture, fish farming and others. By the mid-sixteenth century, the term acquires a metaphorical connotation, as the cultivation of any faculty. Either way, the figurative meaning of culture does not extend to the seventeenth century, when it also appears in some academic texts.
The Age of Enlightenment (eighteenth century) is the time when the figurative sense of the term as "cultivation of the spirit" is imposed on broad academic fields. For example, the Dictionaire de l'Academie Française, 1718. And though the encyclopedia includes only the narrow sense of land cultivation, not figuratively unknown, which appears in the articles devoted to literature, painting, philosophy and science. Over time, as a culture means the formation of mind. That is, it is converted back in a word for a state, but this time is the state of the human mind, and not the state of the plots.
The Age of Enlightenment (eighteenth century) is the time when the figurative sense of the term as "cultivation of the spirit" is imposed on broad academic fields. For example, the Dictionaire de l'Academie Française, 1718. And though the encyclopedia includes only the narrow sense of land cultivation, not figuratively unknown, which appears in the articles devoted to literature, painting, philosophy and science. Over time, as a culture means the formation of mind. That is, it is converted back in a word for a state, but this time is the state of the human mind, and not the state of the plots.
The classic opposition between nature and culture has its roots in this period. In 1798, the Dictionaire includes a sense of culture that stigmatizes the "natural spirit." For many of the thinkers of the time, like Jean Jacques Rousseau, culture is a distinctive phenomenon in humans, which puts them in a different position from that of other animals. Culture is the set of skills and knowledge accumulated by mankind over the millennia of its history. As a universal characteristic, the word used in the singular number as found in all societies regardless of race, geographical location or historical moment
descriptive definition of culture
Definition Tylor
As Thompson notes, the descriptive definition of culture was present in those early nineteenth-century authors of anthropology. The main interest in the work of these authors (who addressed issues as diverse as the origin of the family and the matriarch, and the remnants of ancient cultures in Western civilization of his time) was the search for the reasons which led the people to behave in this or that way. In these explorations, meditated on the relationship between environment and society, past and present, or between technology and the rest of the social system. One of the most important ethnographers of the period was Gustav Klemm. In the ten volumes of his work-Geschitchte Allgemeine Cultur der Menschheit (1843-1852) tried to show the gradual development of humanity through the analysis of technology, customs, art, tools, religious practices. A monumental work, it included ethnographic examples of people around the world.
Klemm's work would be echoed in his contemporaries, engaged in defining the scope of a scientific discipline was born. Twenty years later, in 1871, Edward B Tylor in Primitive Culture published one of the most widely accepted definitions of culture. According to Tylor, culture is ...
... that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man. The state of culture in different societies human species, to the extent that can be investigated according to general principles, is a suitable subject for the study of the laws of thought and action of man.
Klemm's work would be echoed in his contemporaries, engaged in defining the scope of a scientific discipline was born. Twenty years later, in 1871, Edward B Tylor in Primitive Culture published one of the most widely accepted definitions of culture. According to Tylor, culture is ...
... that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man. The state of culture in different societies human species, to the extent that can be investigated according to general principles, is a suitable subject for the study of the laws of thought and action of man.
Thus, one of the main contributions of Tylor was the elevation of culture as a matter of systematic study. Despite this remarkable progress Conceptually, Tylor proposal suffered from two major weaknesses. On the one hand, the concept took its emphasis humanist culture by making the object of science. On the other hand, the analytical procedure was too descriptive. In the text quoted above, Tylor states that "a first step in the study of civilization is to dissect in details, and sort them into appropriate groups. "According to this premise, the mere compilation of the" details "would allow the knowledge of a culture. Once known, it would be ranked on a scale from more to less civilized premise that inherited Social Darwinists.
cultural evolution
There were at least a large conceptual distance between the proposal of White and Steward. The first was inclined the study of culture as a whole phenomenon, while the second remained more likely relativism. Therefore, among the constraints that his successors had to overcome was the concatenation of two positions, to unify the theory of cultural ecology studies. Thus, Marshall Sahlins suggested that cultural evolution follows two directions. On the one hand, creates diversity "through a change adaptation: the new forms are different from the old. Moreover, the evolution generates progress: the higher forms arise from the lower and beyond" (Sahlins, 1992: 371 .) The idea that culture is transformed along two simultaneous lines was developed by Darcy Ribeiro, who introduced the concept of the civilizing process to understand the transformations culture.
Over time, the neoevolucionismo served as a major hinge between the social sciences and natural sciences, especially as a bridge to the biology and ecology. In fact, his own vocation as a holistic approach has made him one of the most current interdisciplinary disciplines that study mankind. From the 1960's, ecology became a very close relationship with cultural studies of evolutionary cut. Biologists have discovered that humans are not the only animals that have culture: they had found traces of it among some insects, but especially among primates. Roy Rappaport introduced in the discussion of the social idea that culture is part of the same human biology, and evolution of the human being is due to the presence of culture. He pointed out that ...
... superorganic or not, it must be remembered that culture itself belongs to nature. Emerged in the course of evolution by natural selection processes differ only in the part of those who produced the octopus [...] Although the culture is highly developed in males, recent ethological studies have indicated a symbolic capacity among other animals. [...] Although cultures can be imposed on ecological systems, there are limits to these impositions, as the cultures and their components are subject to selective processes in turn.
(Rappaport, 1998: 273-274)
New discoveries in ethology (the science that studies the behavior of animals) encouraged many biologists to intervene in the debate sociology of culture. Some of them sought to establish relationships between human culture and the culture primitive forms observed, for example, among Japanese macaques. One of the best known examples is the Sherwood Washburn, a professor of anthropology at the University of California. Leading a multidisciplinary team was given the task of finding what were the origins of human culture. As a first parte de su proyecto, analizó el comportamiento social de los primates superiores. En segundo lugar, suponiendo que los bosquimanos kung eran los últimos reductos de las formas más primitivas de cultura humana, procedió al estudio de su cultura. El tercer tiempo en el programa de Washburn (en el que colaboraron Richard Lee e Irven de Vore, y que se prolongó durante la primera mitad de los años sesenta) era proceder a la comparación de los resultados de ambas investigaciones, y especuló sobre esta base acerca de la importancia de la cacería en la construcción de la sociedad y la cultura.
Esta hipótesis fue presentada en un congreso llamado Man, the Hunter, realizado en la Universidad de Chicago en 1966. Fuera porque research was based on assumptions about the cultural evolution that were discarded from the time of Boas, or because it was a thesis that denied the importance of women in the construction of culture, the thesis of Washburn, Lee and De Vore was not well received.
This definition serves the main feature of the culture, which is strictly a work of human creation, unlike the processes that nature, for example, the movement of the earth, the seasons, mating rituals species, the tides and even the behavior of bees make their honeycombs, making honey, are directed to find the way back but that despite that, there are a culture, because all the bees in the world do exactly the same, mechanically, and can not change anything. Exactly the opposite occurs in the case of works, ideas and human actions, because these altered or added to nature, for example, designing a home, the recipe for a sweet honey or chocolate, the development of a plane, the simple idea of \u200b\u200bmathematical relations, are culture and no human creation would not exist by nature work.
Over time, the neoevolucionismo served as a major hinge between the social sciences and natural sciences, especially as a bridge to the biology and ecology. In fact, his own vocation as a holistic approach has made him one of the most current interdisciplinary disciplines that study mankind. From the 1960's, ecology became a very close relationship with cultural studies of evolutionary cut. Biologists have discovered that humans are not the only animals that have culture: they had found traces of it among some insects, but especially among primates. Roy Rappaport introduced in the discussion of the social idea that culture is part of the same human biology, and evolution of the human being is due to the presence of culture. He pointed out that ...
... superorganic or not, it must be remembered that culture itself belongs to nature. Emerged in the course of evolution by natural selection processes differ only in the part of those who produced the octopus [...] Although the culture is highly developed in males, recent ethological studies have indicated a symbolic capacity among other animals. [...] Although cultures can be imposed on ecological systems, there are limits to these impositions, as the cultures and their components are subject to selective processes in turn.
(Rappaport, 1998: 273-274)
New discoveries in ethology (the science that studies the behavior of animals) encouraged many biologists to intervene in the debate sociology of culture. Some of them sought to establish relationships between human culture and the culture primitive forms observed, for example, among Japanese macaques. One of the best known examples is the Sherwood Washburn, a professor of anthropology at the University of California. Leading a multidisciplinary team was given the task of finding what were the origins of human culture. As a first parte de su proyecto, analizó el comportamiento social de los primates superiores. En segundo lugar, suponiendo que los bosquimanos kung eran los últimos reductos de las formas más primitivas de cultura humana, procedió al estudio de su cultura. El tercer tiempo en el programa de Washburn (en el que colaboraron Richard Lee e Irven de Vore, y que se prolongó durante la primera mitad de los años sesenta) era proceder a la comparación de los resultados de ambas investigaciones, y especuló sobre esta base acerca de la importancia de la cacería en la construcción de la sociedad y la cultura.
Esta hipótesis fue presentada en un congreso llamado Man, the Hunter, realizado en la Universidad de Chicago en 1966. Fuera porque research was based on assumptions about the cultural evolution that were discarded from the time of Boas, or because it was a thesis that denied the importance of women in the construction of culture, the thesis of Washburn, Lee and De Vore was not well received.
This definition serves the main feature of the culture, which is strictly a work of human creation, unlike the processes that nature, for example, the movement of the earth, the seasons, mating rituals species, the tides and even the behavior of bees make their honeycombs, making honey, are directed to find the way back but that despite that, there are a culture, because all the bees in the world do exactly the same, mechanically, and can not change anything. Exactly the opposite occurs in the case of works, ideas and human actions, because these altered or added to nature, for example, designing a home, the recipe for a sweet honey or chocolate, the development of a plane, the simple idea of \u200b\u200bmathematical relations, are culture and no human creation would not exist by nature work.
