What Is Culture?
Culture is a broad and complex concept encompassing the values, beliefs, traditions, and practices that define a group of people as part of a culture. Humans across the globe create, share and maintain many cultures. Some are geographically-specific, while others are based on particular ideas or values.
In sociology, the study of society and social structure, cultural theory emphasizes the importance of a person’s culture in shaping their thoughts, emotions, desires and behaviors. Sociologists generally favor culture over biology when explaining variations among people. For example, biology cannot explain why men kiss differently from women, or why suicide rates west of the Mississippi River are so much higher than those east of it. Sociologists cite several reasons why they believe culture is such an important factor in these differences.
One of the first English-speaking scholars to use the term “culture” was Edward Tylor, a nineteenth century anthropologist. Tylor used the term to describe a collection of practices, habits, and ways of thinking that distinguish one people from another. He believed that a person’s culture was learned through social interaction, and was passed on from generation to generation.
Many historians viewed the term culture as a synonym for religion, but it was soon expanded to encompass a much wider range of social activities and attitudes. A growing interest in examining the cultural roots of various events led to the development of an era of history called cultural history, or Kulturgeschichte. This discipline has embraced a variety of topics that would have been neglected previously, such as laws and military history, art and music, or language and thought.
Some historians have criticized cultural history for being too general or unfocused, but there is more than a grain of truth in the idea that cultural history can be exercised on all aspects of life, from courts and armies to ideas and poetry. The field of cultural history can be as illuminating when applied to the study of a nation’s religion as it is to the analysis of its art or fashion, food and music.
When defining what constitutes a culture, it is necessary to decide whether a certain set of values is central or peripheral. Values are general tendencies for preferences in some state of affairs over others (good-evil, right-wrong, natural-unnatural). They can be seen as the core of a culture. Other components of a culture include heroes and rituals, symbols and euphemisms, roles and hierarchies, concepts of time, space relations, and notions of the universe.
To analyze a culture, a historian must decide what strategy to employ. Selective strategies focus on specific cultural artifacts in a given context that are inferred to fulfill a function for a similar audience. Comprehensive strategies, on the other hand, attempt to examine all cultural artifacts in a given area or time period. The use of a selective or comprehensive approach depends on the research question at hand and the available resources. Regardless of the method employed, it is essential that the historian be mindful of the limitations of their source material and the biases of the sources themselves.
Culture is a broad and complex concept encompassing the values, beliefs, traditions, and practices that define a group of people as part of a culture. Humans across the globe create, share and maintain many cultures. Some are geographically-specific, while others are based on particular ideas or values. In sociology, the study of society and social structure, cultural theory emphasizes the importance of a person’s culture in shaping their thoughts, emotions, desires and behaviors. Sociologists generally favor culture over biology when explaining variations among people. For example, biology cannot explain why men kiss differently from women, or why suicide rates west of the Mississippi River are so much higher than those east of it. Sociologists cite several reasons why they believe culture is such an important factor in these differences. One of the first English-speaking scholars to use the term “culture” was Edward Tylor, a nineteenth century anthropologist. Tylor used the term to describe a collection of practices, habits, and ways of thinking that distinguish one people from another. He believed that a person’s culture was learned through social interaction, and was passed on from generation to generation. Many historians viewed the term culture as a synonym for religion, but it was soon expanded to encompass a much wider range of social activities and attitudes. A growing interest in examining the cultural roots of various events led to the development of an era of history called cultural history, or Kulturgeschichte. This discipline has embraced a variety of topics that would have been neglected previously, such as laws and military history, art and music, or language and thought. Some historians have criticized cultural history for being too general or unfocused, but there is more than a grain of truth in the idea that cultural history can be exercised on all aspects of life, from courts and armies to ideas and poetry. The field of cultural history can be as illuminating when applied to the study of a nation’s religion as it is to the analysis of its art or fashion, food and music. When defining what constitutes a culture, it is necessary to decide whether a certain set of values is central or peripheral. Values are general tendencies for preferences in some state of affairs over others (good-evil, right-wrong, natural-unnatural). They can be seen as the core of a culture. Other components of a culture include heroes and rituals, symbols and euphemisms, roles and hierarchies, concepts of time, space relations, and notions of the universe. To analyze a culture, a historian must decide what strategy to employ. Selective strategies focus on specific cultural artifacts in a given context that are inferred to fulfill a function for a similar audience. Comprehensive strategies, on the other hand, attempt to examine all cultural artifacts in a given area or time period. The use of a selective or comprehensive approach depends on the research question at hand and the available resources. Regardless of the method employed, it is essential that the historian be mindful of the limitations of their source material and the biases of the sources themselves.