The word culture has many different meanings.  For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food.  For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish.  However, for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871.  Tylor said that 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.”  Of course, it is not limited to men.  Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor’s time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology.

Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon.  It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds.  Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture.  They are not culture in themselves.  For this reason, archaeologists cannot dig up culture directly in their excavations.  The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns—they are the things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.

Layers of Culture

There are very likely three layers or levels of culture that are part of your learned behavior patterns and perceptions.  Most obviously, the body of cultural traditions that distinguish your specific society.  When people speak of Italian, Samoan, or Japanese culture, they are referring to the shared language, traditions, and beliefs that set each of these peoples apart from others.  In most cases, those who share your culture do so because they acquired it as they were raised by parents and other family members who have it.

The second layer of culture that may be part of  your identity is subculture. In complex, diverse societies in which people have come from many different parts of the world, they often retain much of their original cultural traditions.  As a result, they are likely to be part of an identifiable subculture in their new society.  The shared cultural traits of subcultures set them apart from the rest of their society. As the cultural differences between members of a subculture and the dominant national culture blur and eventually disappear, the subculture ceases to exist except as a group of people who claim a common ancestry.  That is generally the case with German Americans and Irish Americans in the United States today.  Most of them identify themselves as Americans first.  They also see themselves as being part of the cultural mainstream of the nation.

The third layer of culture consists of cultural universals.  These are learned behavior patterns that are shared by all of humanity collectively.  No matter where people live in the world, they share these universal traits.  Examples of such “human cultural” traits include:

1. Communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences.

2. Using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man).

3. Classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms
to refer to them (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin).

4. Raising children in some sort of family setting.

5. Having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men’s work versus women’s work).

6. Having a concept of privacy.

7. Having rules to regulate sexual behavior.

8. Distinguishing between good and bad behavior.

9. Having some sort of body ornamentation.

10. Making jokes and playing games.

11. Having art.

12. Having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions.

While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own specific ways of carrying out or expressing them.  For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language.  However, sign languages have grammatical rules just as verbal ones do.

Culture and Society

Culture and society is not the same thing.  While cultures are complexes of learned behavior patterns and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms.  People are not the only animals that have societies.  Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies.  In the case of humans, however, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other.  People in human societies also generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations.

While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are inextricably connected because culture is created and transmitted to others in a society.  Cultures are not the product of lone individuals.  They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other.  Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people.  If you were the only human on earth, there would be no need for language or government.

Is Culture Limited to Humans?

There is a difference of opinion in the behavioral sciences about whether or not we are the only animal that creates and uses culture.  The answer to this question depends on how narrowly culture is defined.  If it is used broadly to refer to a complex of learned behavior patterns, then it is clear that we are not alone in creating and using culture.  Many other animal species teach their young what they themselves learned in order to survive.  This is especially true of the chimpanzees and other relatively intelligent apes and monkeys.  Wild chimpanzee mothers typically teach their children about several hundred food and medicinal plants.  Their children also have to learn about the dominance hierarchy and the social rules within their communities.  As males become teenagers, they acquire hunting skills from adults.  Females have to learn how to nurse and care for their babies.  Chimpanzees even have to learn such basic skills as how to perform sexual intercourse.  This knowledge is not hardwired into their brains at birth.  They are all learned patterns of behavior just as they are for humans.

Characteristics of Culture - In order to better understand culture, it is useful to closely examine its characteristics and their ramifications. 

Culture Is an Adaptive Mechanism

The first humans evolved in tropical and subtropical regions of Africa about 2.5 million years ago.  Since then, we have successfully occupied all of the major geographic regions of the world, but our bodies have remained essentially those of warm climate animals.  We cannot survive outside of the warmer regions of our planet without our cultural knowledge and technology.  What made it possible for our ancestors to begin living in temperate and ultimately subarctic regions of the northern hemisphere after half a million years ago was the invention of efficient hunting skills, fire use, and, ultimately, clothing, warm housing, agriculture, and commerce.  Culture has been a highly successful adaptive mechanism for our species.  It has given us a major selective advantage in the competition for survival with other life forms.  Culture has allowed the global human population to grow from less than 10 million people shortly after the end of the last ice age to more than 6.5 billion people today, a mere 10,000 years later.  Culture has made us the most dangerous and the most destructive large animal on our planet.  It is ironic that despite the power that culture has given us, we are totally dependent on it for survival.  We need our cultural skills to stay alive.

Over the last several hundred thousand years, we have developed new survival related cultural skills and technologies at a faster rate than natural selection could alter our bodies to adapt to the environmental challenges that confronted us.  The fact that cultural evolution can occur faster than biological evolution has significantly modified the effect of natural selection on humans.  One consequence of this has been that we have not developed thick fat layers and dense fur coats like polar bears in the cold regions because our culture provided the necessary warmth during winter times.

Culture is learned

Human infants come into the world with basic drives such as hunger and thirst, but they do not possess instinctive patterns of behavior to satisfy them.  Likewise, they are without any cultural knowledge.  However, they are genetically predisposed to rapidly learn language and other cultural traits.  New-born humans are amazing learning machines.  Any normal baby can be placed into any family on earth and grow up to learn their culture and accept it as his or her own.  Since culture is non-instinctive, we are not genetically programmed to learn a particular one.

Every human generation potentially can discover new things and invent better technologies.  The new cultural skills and knowledge are added onto what was learned in previous generations.  As a result, culture is cumulative.  Due to this cumulative effect, most high school students today are now familiar with mathematical insights and solutions that ancient Greeks such as Archimedes and Pythagoras struggled through their lives to discover.

Cultural evolution is due to the cumulative effect of culture.  We now understand that the time between major cultural inventions has become steadily shorter, especially since the invention of agriculture 8,000-10,000 years ago.  The progressively larger human population after that time was very likely both a consequence and a cause of accelerating culture growth.  The more people there are, the more likely new ideas and information will accumulate.  If those ideas result in a larger, more secure food supplies, the population will inevitably grow.  In a sense, culture has been the human solution to surviving changing environments, but it has continuously compounded the problem by making it possible for more humans to stay alive.  In other words, human cultural evolution can be seen as solving a problem that causes the same problem again and again.  The ultimate cost of success of cultural technology has been a need to produce more and more food for more and more people.

The invention of agriculture made it possible for our ancestors to have a more controllable and, subsequently, dependable food supply.  It also resulted in settling down in permanent communities.  This in turn set the stage for further developments in technology and political organization.  The inevitable result was more intensive agriculture, new kinds of social and political systems dominated by emerging elite classes, the first cities, and ultimately the industrial and information revolutions of modern times.  City life brought with it the unexpected consequence of increased rates of contagious diseases.  Large, dense populations of people make it much easier for viruses, bacteria, and other disease causing microorganisms to spread from host to host.  As a result, most cities in the past were periodically devastated by epidemics.

The rate of cultural evolution for many human societies during the last two centuries has been unprecedented.  Today, major new technologies are invented every few years rather than once or twice a century or even less often, as was the case in the past.   Likewise, there has been an astounding increase in the global human population.  It is worth reflecting on the fact that there are people alive today who were born before cell phones, computers, televisions, radios, antibiotics, and even airplanes.  These now elderly individuals have seen the human population double several times.  The world that was familiar to them in their childhood is no longer here.  It is as if they have moved to a new alien culture and society.  Not surprisingly, they often have difficulty in accepting and adjusting to the change.  The psychological distress and confusion that accompanies this has been referred to as future shock.

Cultures Change

All cultural knowledge does not perpetually accumulate.  At the same time that new cultural traits are added, some old ones are lost because they are no longer useful.  For example, most city dwellers today do not have or need the skills required for survival in a wilderness.  Most would very likely starve to death because they do not know how to acquire wild foods and survive the extremes of weather outdoors.  What is more important in modern urban life are such things as the ability to drive a car, use a computer, and understand how to obtain food in a supermarket or restaurant.

The regular addition and subtraction of cultural traits results in culture change.  All cultures change over time—none is static.  However, the rate of change and the aspects of culture that change vary from society to society.  For instance, people in Germany today generally seem eager to adopt new words from other languages, especially from American English, while many French people are resistant to it because of the threat of “corrupting” their own language.  However, the French are just as eager as the Germans to adopt new technology.

Change can occur as a result of both inventions within a society as well as the diffusion of cultural traits from one society to another.  Predicting whether a society will adopt new cultural traits or abandon others is complicated by the fact that the various aspects of a culture are closely interwoven into a complex pattern.  Changing one trait will have an impact on other traits because they are functionally interconnected.  As a result, there commonly is a resistance to major changes. 

People Usually are not Aware of Their Culture

The way that we interact and do things in our everyday lives seems “natural” to us.  We are unaware of our culture because we are so close to it and know it so well.  For most people, it is as if their learned behavior was biologically inherited.  It is usually only when they come into contact with people from another culture that they become aware that their patterns of behavior are not universal.

The common response in all societies to other cultures is to judge them in terms of the values and customs of their own familiar culture.  This is ethnocentrism being fond of your own way of life and condescending or even hostile toward other cultures is normal for all people.  Alien culture traits are often viewed as being not just different but inferior, less sensible, and even “unnatural.”  Ethnocentrism is not characteristic only of complex modern societies.  People in small, relatively isolated societies are also ethnocentric in their views about outsiders.

Our ethnocentrism can prevent us from understanding and appreciating another culture.  When anthropologists study other societies, they need to suspend their own ethnocentric judgments and adopt a cultural relativity approach.  That is, they try to learn about and interpret the various aspects of the culture they are studying in reference to that culture rather than to the anthropologist’s own culture.  This provides an understanding of how such practices as polygamy can function and even support other cultural traditions.  Without taking a cultural relativity approach, it would otherwise be difficult, taking a cultural relativity approach is not only useful for anthropologists.  It is a very useful tool for diplomats, businessmen, doctors, and any one else who needs to interact with people from other societies and even other subcultures within their own society.  However, it can be emotionally difficult and uncomfortable at first to suspend one’s own cultural values in these situations.

From an objective perspective, it can be seen that ethnocentrism has both positive and negative values for a society.  The negative potential is obvious.  Ethnocentrism results in prejudices about people from other cultures and the rejection of their “alien ways.”  When there is contact with people from other cultures, ethnocentrism can prevent open communication and result in misunderstanding and mistrust.  This would be highly counterproductive for businessmen trying to negotiate a trade deal or even just neighbors trying to get along with each other.  The positive aspect of ethnocentrism has to do with the protection that it can provide for a culture.
By causing a rejection of the foods, customs, and perceptions of people in other cultures, it acts as a conservative force in preserving traditions of one’s own culture.  It can help maintain the separation and uniqueness of cultures.

 We Do Not Know All of Our Own Culture

No one knows everything about his or her own culture.  In all societies, there are bodies of specialized cultural knowledge that are gender specific—they are known to men but not women or vice versa.  In many societies there are also bodies of knowledge that are limited largely to particular social classes, occupations, religious groups, or other special purpose associations.

Gender based skills, knowledge, and perceptions largely stem from the fact that boys and girls to some extent are treated differently from each other in all societies.  While there may be considerable overlap in what they are taught, there are some things that are gender specific.  In the Western World, for instance, it is more common to teach boys about the skills of combat and how machines work.  Girls are more often exposed to the subtleties of social interaction and the use of clothing and makeup to communicate intentions.  Not surprisingly, men are more likely to know how to fix their car or computer, while women generally are better at predicting the outcome of social interaction and make finer distinctions in fabric and color terms. 

There are many professions in large-scale societies.  Each one usually has its own terminology and specialized tools.  Lawyers, medical doctors, soldiers, and other specialists use numerous technical terms in their professions.  To make it even more obscure for outsiders, these professionals often use abbreviations to refer to their technical terms.
 
Culture Gives Us a Range of Permissible Behavior Patterns

Cultures commonly allow a range of ways in which men can be men and women can be women.  Culture also tells us how different activities should be conducted, such as how one should act as a husband, wife, parent, child, etc.  These rules of permissible behavior are usually flexible to a degree—there are some alternatives rather than hard rules.  In North America, for instance, culture tells us how we should dress based on our gender, but it allows us to dress in different ways in different situations in order to communicate varied messages and statuses.  The clothing patterns of women in this society can be particularly rich and complex.  Their clothing can be intentionally business-like, recreational, as well as sexually attractive, ambiguous, neutral, or even repulsive.  

The range of permissible ways of dressing and acting as a man or woman are often very limited in strictly fundamental Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Hindu societies.  In Afghanistan under the Taliban rule during the late 1990’s, men were expected to wear traditional male clothing and were beaten or jailed by morality police for not having a full beard, playing or listening to music, or allowing female family members to go out in public unchaperoned.  Women were similarly punished for being in public without wearing a plain loose outer gown that covered their face and entire body including their feet.  They also were not allowed to go to school or to work outside of the home.  To the surprise of Europeans and North Americans, many of these conservative cultural patterns did not disappear with the end of Taliban control.  They are deeply ingrained in the Islamic tradition of Afghanistan and in the more conservative nations of the Middle East.

Cultures No Longer Exist in Isolation

It is highly unlikely that there are any societies still existing in total isolation from the outside world.  Even small, out of the way tribal societies are now being integrated to some extent into the global economy.  That was not the case a few short generations ago. They are developing a growing knowledge of other cultures through schools, radios, and even televisions and the Internet.  As a result of this inevitable process, their languages and indigenous cultural patterns are being rapidly replaced.  Virtually all societies are now acquiring cultural traits from the economically dominant societies of the world. However, even these societies are rapidly adopting words, foods, and other cultural traits from all over the world.

The emergence of what is essentially a shared global culture is not likely to result in the current major cultures disappearing in the immediate future the same way many of the small indigenous ones have.  Language differences and ethnocentrism will very likely prevent that from happening.  There are powerful conflicting trends in the world today.  At the same time that many people are actively embracing globalism, others are reviving tribalism. 

Methods for Learning about Culture

Anthropologists learn about the culture of another society through fieldwork and first hand observation in that society.  This kind of research is called ethnography.  Since culture primarily relates to the way people interact with each other, it is not possible to adequately observe it in a laboratory setting.  Cultural anthropologists also do systematic comparisons of similar cultures.  This is called ethnology. An example of an ethnological study would be a comparison of what cultures are like in societies that have economies based on hunting and gathering rather than agriculture.  The data for this sort of ethnology would come from the existing ethnographies about these peoples.  In other words, ethnology is essentially a synthesis of the work of many ethnographers

Ideal, Actual, and Believed Behavior

When learning about another culture or subculture first hand, it is always wise to be cautious about taking at face value what people say about their way of life.  They may be politely deceiving you because they are not sure of your intentions or they may want to provide a more favorable view of themselves, their culture, and their society.  That is natural.  Most of us would do the same thing.  If you knew that important visitors from another country were coming to your home, would you clean it first, put on nicer clothes, and make sure that everyone in the house will be on their best behavior?  In other words, would you want them to see your home and family as you think that they should be rather than how they actually are most of the time?

Human social behavior is often complicated.  In trying to comprehend the interaction between people, it is useful to think in terms of a distinction between ideal, actual, and believed behavior.  Ideal behavior is what we think we should be doing and what we want others to believe we are doing.  Actual behavior is what is really going on.  Believed behavior is what we honestly think we are doing.  In reality, our actions are often different from what we believe them to be at that time. Anthropologists are not only interested in learning about actual behavior.  Ideal and believed behavior also can tell us much about how a society and its culture work.

…………It thus should be to everyone’s evolutionary advantage to encourage and maintain diversity. We thought that was what the 60s were all about, allowing everyone to ‘do their own thing.’ That is what is so frightening about this post-modern world where ethnic tensions are growing, racism is re-emerging, and ethnic cleansing seems to be a high priority political goal. If we want to survive we need to get back to a tolerance for our differences and an appreciation for and celebration of human diversity………….
(John McCreery)