CHAPTER
VI
THE
DEFINITIONS OF CULTURE
The work of Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) has uncovered almost three hundred definitions of culture, many of which echo the definition of Edward Tylor (1832-1917). This shows the richness of the complexity of the cultural phenomenon. In this chapter, we will not present the three hundred definitions of culture, but would select a few of these definitions, which would be adequate for our philosophical consideration. Here, we take the definitions of anthropologists, philosophers and theologians.
A. The Idea Culture.
The idea culture has been used to analyze social reality, thus ‘cultural analysis’, and also to act on it. Culture is not only understood as the production of the mind. Culture also shows patterns of behavior of a certain group or a society correlative to a certain human environment.
1. Meanings of Culture.
The word comes from the Latin terms ‘cultus’, ‘cultura’, and ‘colere’, meaning to nurse, to cultivate, and to care for. It evokes man’s activity on physical nature: working the
Etymological meaning: earth, the collective terms for the operations undertaken to obtain from the soil the vegetables that man and domestic animals need. In Latin and French implicitly in German, the word evokes activity, sustained by needs and therefore by lack. Culture therefore, is understood as an act of transforming nature, to serve properly human ends. (Blondel:43)
In the Middle Ages the word was not used. Instead one spoke about "humanitas, civilitas". Only in the 17th century was the Latin word culture introduced in relation to natura and for the development of the spiritual and cognitive capabilities.
During the 17th and 18th century everything that man added to the nature of himself or his environment was considered as cultural good. There was a clear distinction between nature and culture. According to Romano Guardini, nature designates the totality of things, of all that exist before man ever does anything. Thus in nature, we include the earth, the universe, the plants and the animals and man as an organic and spiritual reality. We include everything that existed of its own. While culture would be that which man acquires or produces through the exercise of this faculties: the whole of knowing and doing, science and technique, everything that through knowledge man carves out of nature. Therefore, it is what the human being with his intellective-volitive activity and competence had created.
2. Meaning of Culture in Different Disciplines:
a. In History, it refers to the historic development reflected in a certain style and content of material and spiritual goods of man. For example, Greek culture, Roman culture, and Baroque culture.
b. In Philosophy, mainly historical and social philosophy, we have the works of William Dilthey (1833-1911) which make distinctions between the systems of culture such as art, science, religion, law, and economy, and the "outside" (organizational) forms of culture – the community, state, church etc. Also the distinction between culture and civilization, which will be elaborated later.
c. In Sociology, we refer to the studies of Max Weber (1864-1920), Edward Taylor (1832-1917) – "Primitive Culture: Resources into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Language, Art, and Custom". The recent publication of the works of Raymond Williams (1981) who takes cultural studies as a branch of General sociology. For him, ideology plays a role defined as ""formal and conscious beliefs" and "world view or general perspective."
d. In Anthropology, cultural anthropology studies culture in the historical as the comparative way and from there arrives at social structures in cultural patterns. Social anthropology starts with the social structure and tries to find the interrelations between these structures and culture. Here social change is no longer subordinated to cultural change, but rather helps to cause it.
e. In Theology, the use and study of culture is especially interesting. Vatican council II in Gaudium et Spes deals extensively with the "proper development of culture". Pope John Paul II considers "the church is a creator of culture", thus he proposes "a demanding task to understand the extreme variety of cultures, of customs, of traditions and civilizations." The relationship between a certain culture and the Gospel values. In theology, the incarnation of the gospel values in a given culture is called "inculturation".
1. Some Distinctions:
a. Culture and Civilization:
Culture is not different, but at one point put in opposition with civilization. As we have seen in the etymological meaning of the term culture, we understand very well that what we mean by culture is not something produced by nature but something suppurated to the effects of nature by the agency of the human will and reason. Clearly, then, the general notion of culture refers to rationality-controlled processes.
The Germans adopted later on by the Russians place culture in opposition to civilization in the 19th century. Culture in this conception has a favorable meaning, "civilization" a pejorative one. Culture is all that expresses life, genuineness, and spontaneity, while civilization includes much that is artificial, mechanical, and contrived.
The root of this word is civis, citizen. Taken seriously, then, such contrast between culture and civilization would imply that what pertains to man, as a citizen is something artificial or mechanical, rather than genuine and spontaneous. For instance, legal relationships would thus be relegated to civilization, removed from what is alive and personal to man.
b. Material and Immaterial Culture.
Material culture refers to the concrete cultural objects that are made by man. For example, the stones probably used by the Tasaday, the bow and arrow of the Aetas, chairs and tables used in school, the electric computers, nuclear plants, etc. Immaterial culture refers to cultural ideas, myths, stories, cultural attitudes and behaviors. "a difference in the speed of development of material and immaterial culture might lead to a cultural lag where two parts of culture no longer correspond."
c. Culture and Nation.
"Whereas a nation or even a certain country is a political unit, culture really refers first and foremost to groups of people united in common history, social life and ideas not necessarily organized in a national political unit." There can be different cultures in one nation.
1. Definitions of Culture.
a) Edward Tylor (1871).
It was Edward Tylor, a pioneering British anthropologist in 1871, who gave the first systematic definition of culture in the Anthropology. It is the modern technical definition of culture, as socially patterned human thought and behavior. In his own words:
Culture or civilization is
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.
He considered that culture was a uniquely human trait. Here, he made a distinction between what is biologically inherited and what is socially transmitted human traits. It is helpful to consider the biological and cultural inheritances that make the human. To the biological, it is something naturally given, while the cultural, it is an inheritance learned and therefore can be unlearned and modified to help solve human problems. If all aspects of culture were biologically inherited, we would need to resort to genetic engineering to solve certain human problems (John H. Bodley, 2000).
However, early anthropologists recognized the close biological kinship between humans and the great apes - especially gorillas and chimpanzees - but they still maintained that it was culture that produced a uniquely human way of life. They also assumed that culture requires superior, biologically based mental abilities. Tylor demonstrated this by the human,s use of the powerful symbolism of human speech. In his own words:
To use words in themselves
unmeaning, as symbols by which to conduct and convey the complex intellectual
processes in which mental conceptions are suggested, compared, combined, and
even analyzed and new ones created - this is a faculty, which is scarcely to be
traced in any lower animal. (Tylor 1875)
The use of words and symbols is indeed one of the most important features of culture. But, according to John H. Bodley, there are many unanswered questions on the rest of culture that is left by Tylor (Bodley, 2000). This has been the subject of debate by contemporary anthropologist. For a particular anthropologist, a technical definition of culture is important because the definition influences his choice of research problems, his methods and interpretations, and his positions on public policy issues (Bodley 2000).
There are two positions on this matter. One position would consider culture as a thing itself that simply evolves as an abstract system. This would be an extreme position. It may be helpful for understanding the impact of cultures on the physical environment, but it fails to consider the decision making of individual human actors. Another position is coming from some contemporary anthropologists (the postmodernists). They emphasize that culture itself, as well as every ethnographic description of culture is constructed and interpreted by individuals. In this sense, there is no absolute cultural reality. Rather, culture consists of the narratives and symbolic dialogues that individuals construct - a view that emphasizes the fluidity and dynamism of culture. The postmodern view is a humbling reminder of the difficulties involved in sorting out cultural meanings. It is also a valuable anthropological tool for learning how people construct and manipulate culture to gain power over others (Bodley 2000).
Tylor's basic definition of culture has served anthropology well, but in his day, little was known about the behavior of chimpanzees, our closest nonhuman relatives. Recent research with chimpanzees suggests that many aspects of culture may not be unique to humans (Bodley 2000).
b) Ralph Linton (1936) and Robert Lowie (1937).
Linton is an anthropologist who emphasizes culture as a "social heredity". The individual, inserted in a particular culture, inherits the cultural elements in a given human group or society. Lowie, on the other hand, considers culture as the sum total of what an individual acquires from his society - those beliefs, customs, artistic norms, food-habits, and crafts which came to him not by his own creative activity but as a legacy from the past, conveyed by formal and informal education. Both anthropologists emphasize social inheritance of culture in relation to the making of an individual as a participant in a particular culture.
c) Alfred Kroeber (1948) and Clyde Kluckhon (1949)
Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhon have made modifications to the definition of Tylor. These modifications are more refined, enriched and somehow has become a standard reference to the definitions of culture. For Kroeber, culture is the mass of learned and transmitted motor reactions, habits, techniques, ideas and values - and the behavior induce. For Kluckhon, culture is the total life-way of a people, the social legacy the individual acquires from the group, the behavior acquired through learning.
Culture consists of
patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted
by symbols constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including
their embodiment of artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of
traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their
attached value; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products
of action, and the other, as conditioning elements of further action.
a. Raimon Panikkar (2000)
Panikkar (2000) adds another definition of culture. For Panikkar, if all the later definitions say that culture is constituted by rituals, customs, opinions, dominant ideas, ways of life which characterize a certain people at a given period. If language is an essential element, history and geography are equally cultural factors. He summarizes all that in a word myth.
Myth, understood as symbolizing that which we believe at such a deep level that we are not even aware that we believe it: "it is useless to say it," "it is understood," "it is obvious," "we shall not pursue the investigation any further" ... We question myth only when we already partly stand outside it: this is because it is precisely the myth which offers us the basis from which the question as question makes sense. For the myth gives us the horizon of intelligibility where we must situate any idea, any conviction or any act of consciousness so that they may be held by our mind.
Each culture is a galaxy which secretes its self-understanding, and with it, the criteria of truth, goodness, and beauty of all human actions. Each culture, in a sense, could be described as the encompassing myth of a collectivity at a certain moment in time and space; it is what renders plausible, credible, the world in which we live, where we are. This accounts for the flexibility and mobility of myth as well as the impossibility of grasping our own myth, except when we hear it from the mouth of others because having accorded the latter certain credibility or when it has ceased to be a myth for us. Myth and faith are correlative, just as there exists a special dialectic between mythos and logos (Panikkar 2000).
Cultures are not folklore, as certain mainly political milieu is in the habit of interpreting them, when they speak arrogantly and condescendingly of multicultural tolerance. Cultures are not mere specific forms of a genus called human civilization. Each culture is a genus. Cultures are not abstract species of a single sovereign genus. The sovereign genus, which would be human culture, exists only as an abstraction (Panikkar 2000).
There are no cultural universals. But there are, for sure, human invariants. But the way according to which each one of the human invariants is lived and experienced in each culture is distinct and distinctive in each case. By saying that there are no cultural universals, we are using a way of thinking which is foreign to the modern "scientific" mentality, in which predominates (when not dominates) simple objectivity (and objectibility) of the real. Culture is not simply an object, since we are constitutively immersed in it as subjects. It is the one that makes it possible for us to see the world as objects, since self-consciousness, i.e. subjectivity, essentially belongs to the human being (Panikkar 2000).
Cultural respect requires that we respect those ways of life that we disapprove, or even those that we consider as pernicious. We may be obliged to go as far as to combat these cultures, but we cannot elevate our own to the rank of universal paradigm in order to judge the other ones (Panikkar 2000).
e) Louis Luzbetak (1988)
Louis Luzbetak, a missiologist, in his book "The Church and Cultures", underlines the symbolic or semiotic view of culture as of special importance for the church (1988: 1.39).
As basic elements for a definition of culture the following must be considered:
Culture is:
· a plan
· consisting of a set of norms, standards and associated notions and beliefs
· for coping with the various demands of life
· shared by a social group
· learned by the individual from the society, and
· organized into a
· dynamic system of control.
Thus, for Luzbetak, culture is a "socially shared design for living", it is a "plan according to which society adapts itself to its physical, social and ideational environment." (1988: 155,157)
According to him, a plan for coping with the physical environment would include such matters as: food production and all technological knowledge and skill. The social adaptation would include: political systems, kinship, family organization and law as a plan according to which one is to interact with his fellows. The ideational environment would refer to knowledge, art, magic, science, philosophy and religion. He considers different cultures as "but different answers to essentially the same human problems." (1963:61)
f) Karl Rahner (1980)
Karl Rahner, a famous catholic theologian, sees the necessity of culture as the human being's fundamental task: "This term designates the shaping of man himself and of his world through the exercise of his own mind and freedom. Man can never exist without culture, for he necessarily exists as an embodied being (objectifying himself in his corporeality and its surroundings) and as a personal being who has freely fulfilled himself; therefore, culture is his fundamental task (Gen. 1:28), in accomplishing which he also realises his relationship with God."
Therefore, a culture is a complex but integrated and interacting dynamic whole. In short, "culture is the way of life, ethos, or life-style of a people. People create cultures and cultures influence and mould their growth and behaviour."
1.5. Aspects and Functions of Culture.
There are three aspects of culture: (1) mental, or what people think, (2) behavioral, or what people do, and (3) material, or what people produce. Thus, just as Tylor originally proposed, mental processes, beliefs, knowledge, and values all can be considered part of culture, but human actors and actions also are important. In this respect, culture is the socially transmitted information that shapes human action. Some anthropologists would define culture entirely as mental rules guiding behaviour, although they would recognize as well the often wide gap between the acknowledge rules for correct behaviour and peoples actual conduct. Consequently, some researchers focus on human behaviour and its material products rather than on the underlying mental information producing them (Bodley 2000).
In addition to these aspects, culture has several important features. As already noted, culture is socially transmitted and shared, symbolic and patterned. Culture is conservative, yet it cahnges, it has a history, and it tells people what is best and proper. The shared aspect of culture means that it is a social phenomenon; idiosyncratic behavior is not cultural. Culture is leaned, not biogically inherited, and as Tylor noted, it involves arbitrarily assigned, symbolic meanings. For example Americans are not born knowing that the color white means purity, and indeed this is not a universal symbol for purity. (In East Asia, white often symbolizes death). The human ability to assign arbitrarily meaning to any object, behavior or condition makes culture enormously creative and helps distinguish culture from animal behavior. This also means that people can change cultures in positive ways (Bodley 2000)
Culture also has primary functions. Culture exists to guarantee human survival and reproduction. Culture is the unique means by which people in a given society satisfy their human needs, regulate the size of their society and the distribution of social power; and manage natural resources. Culture gives people power to produce and distribute resources in ways that can make entire groups prosper or decline. How culture is used as a means of power over the natural environment is clearly one of the keys to human survival and well-being. Effective adaptation to the natural environment implies more than mere survival. It involves establishing a sustainable balance between resources and consumption while maintaining a satisfying and secure society. Because environments change constantly, adaptation is an ongoing process (Bodley 2000).
Tylor's basic definition of culture has served anthropology well, but in his day, little was known about the behavior of chimpanzees, the human being's closest non-human relatives. Recent research on chimpanzees suggests that many aspects of culture may not be unique to humans (Bodley 2000).