Culture represents the entire database of knowledge, values, and traditional ways of viewing the world, which have been transmitted from one generation ahead to the next--nongenetically, apart from DNA--through words, concepts, and symbols. source
Culture is a learned system of beliefs, feelings, and rules for living around which a group of people organize their lives; a way of life of a particular society. (Kroeber and Kluckhohn in Crapo)
Subcultures are the geographical or social variations that occur within the cultures of societies with large populations. (Kroeber and Kluckhohn in Crapo)
Culture can be viewed as a polyphony of voices rather than as a solo melody. (Crapo)
Even when there are important regularities within the symbolic patterns that make up a culture, those patterns are neither rigidly present nor necessarily consistently adhered to in the behavior of people. Thus, despite some degree of internal consistency, any culture may include contradictory beliefs and competing values. (Crapo)
A culture includes all the rules and regulations that govern a way of life, both conscious, formally stated beliefs and feelings - called an ideology - and unconscious, informal, or implicit beliefs and feelings. (Crapo)
Cultural change: a culture is a system of symbols, customs, ideas, and feelings that is constantly being negotiated and redefined by members of a society as they interact and communicate with one another. This dynamism allows and impels each culture to change with the passing of time. (Crapo)
Ideal vs. Real Culture: Culture is a system of ideals for behavior, but people do not always follow the guidelines of their culture. Ideal culture refers to the ways in which people describe their way of life, perceive their customs and behaviors, often more a reflection of their feelings and ideals about what they should be than an accurate assessment of what they are. Real culture refers to culture portrayed in terms of the actually observable behaviors of a people. (Crapo)
Cultural Differences
Intercultural influences; contact between two cultures can bring tremendous change to both societies, or especially to one of them when they differ greatly in economic and political power. (Crapo, p. 50)
Ethnocentrism: the attitude that one's own culture is the only good one and that the more other cultures differ form one's own, the more inferior they are. . . . ethnocentrism serves a society by creating greater feelings of group unity. . . . Ethnocentrism stands in fundamental conflict with the goals of anthropology: the recognition of the common humanity of all human beings and the understanding of the causes of cultural differences. (Crapo)
Cutlural Relativism: the principle that cultural traits are best understood in the context of the cultural system of which they are a part; the attempt to avoid the narrow bias of judging the value of a custom or entire culture on the basis of the values of one's own culture; the view that meanings of behaviors are best understood when interpreted in terms of the culture of the actors. (Crapo)
Diversity in Conceptualizing Culture
Two competing strains of portraying culture - reflecting the relative influence of physical science and humanities models for understanding the human condition - in anthropological history in contrasting views of students of Franz Boas in the early part of the 20th century.
Alfred Kroeber: culture "though carried by men and existing through them, is an entity in itself, and of another order from life" (Kroeber, 1915, p. 285) What he meant was that although culture is a human phenomenon, it cannot be understood by studying human biology or psychology. Instead, culture is a "superorganic" phenomenon (Kroeber, 1917) that must be studied as a phenomenon in its own right to identify the lawful characteristic that govern cultural processes.
Kroeber's ideas differed markedly from those of his teacher, Boas, and most of Boas students, who paid much more attention to the role of human indivuduals in the history of each culture they studied. Edward Sapir (1934), who was particularly interested in the human use of language, argued that the superorganic view of culture was an unjustified reification, since "the true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals and, on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions" (p. 236) For Sapir (1934), Kroeber's concept of culture was too concrete and fixed, since it portrayed culture as "a neatly packaged up assemblage of forms of behavior handed over piecemeal, but without serious breakage, to the passively inquiring child" (p. 414). Sapir conceived of the transfer of culture as a process in which each child interpreted, evaluated, and modified every cultural pattern during the process of socialization. (Crapo)
Customs, institutions, politics and economics by which society adapts to its natural environoment vs. humanistic focus emphazing the role of human discourse and narratives in defining the meaning of social life and nature.
The unity and diversity of cultures - making other cultures understandable.
Culture shock: the loneliness and depression that often experienced when one is in a foreign cultural setting.