The Nature of Culture The Brief Definition Culture is that which is learned, shared, and transmitted – Learning: we are taught culture, as opposed to it being instinctual or purely biological – Shared: culture is a characteristic of groups. An individual’s learned behaviors are not cultural unless others share them. – Transmitted: Cultural behaviors are multi- generational, often lasting for hundreds or thousands of years. A Brief History of Culture Since Homo habilis, if not before, hominins have been cultural (over 2 million years) Culture was, and is a means of adaptation Culture is, to some extent, a solution to problems and cultural differences throughout the world are rooted in different problems and/or different solutions to similar problems Culture is learned The process of learning culture is called “Enculturation” The “Mama Theory”: culture is how your mama raises you Human behavior is malleable and any infant can be enculturated into any culture Culture is Shared By definition culture is about groups of people Those groups can be of varying scales – Societies: a group of people who interact with each other on a regular basis Societies are groups, culture is something that binds them together – Smaller groups: ethnic groups, religious groups, kin groups – These smaller groups may possess distinctive forms of behavior, belief, speech, etc. that we can define as a sub-culture Sub-Cultures Sub-cultures always stand in a relationship to the broader (society-wide) dominant culture Examples: In greater LA we might (hypothetically)identify sub-cultures defined by ethnicity, such as Latino culture, African American culture, Armenian culture, etc. Each of these articulates with the others through intersection with the dominant culture, which, arguably, is based on Western European cultural traditions such as the use of English for most official business. Culture is transmitted Learning is transmission, but learning over generations builds cultural traditions Not just what is learned, but how it is learned is part of culture Sources of learning (agents of enculturation may include – Observation – Oral history – Formal schools – apprenticeships – Public media (TV, movies, advertising, music, literature) Culture: The Long definition Tylor (1871) – “Culture is that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom and any other capabilities acquired by man (sic) as a member of society Culture is Integrated Culture isn’t transmitted piecemeal, but more commonly as a whole package Economics, social organization, subsistence, politics, religion, all fit together (the key insight of the functionalist school). Even when we study aspects of culture in isolation, it is important to remember the constitution of the whole Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism Ethnocentrism is the belief that your own culture is su ...

1. The Nature of Culture
The Brief Definition
Culture is that which is learned, shared,
and transmitted
– Learning: we are taught culture, as opposed
to it being instinctual or purely biological
– Shared: culture is a characteristic of groups.
An individual’s learned behaviors are not
cultural unless others share them.
– Transmitted: Cultural behaviors are multi-
generational, often lasting for hundreds or
thousands of years.
A Brief History of Culture
Since Homo habilis, if not before, hominins
have been cultural (over 2 million years)
Culture was, and is a means of adaptation
Culture is, to some extent, a solution to

2. problems and cultural differences
throughout the world are rooted in different
problems and/or different solutions to
similar problems
Culture is learned
The process of learning culture is called
“Enculturation”
The “Mama Theory”: culture is how your
mama raises you
Human behavior is malleable and any
infant can be enculturated into any culture
Culture is Shared
By definition culture is about groups of people
Those groups can be of varying scales
– Societies: a group of people who interact with each
other on a regular basis

3. Societies are groups, culture is something that binds them
together
– Smaller groups: ethnic groups, religious groups, kin
groups
– These smaller groups may possess distinctive forms
of behavior, belief, speech, etc. that we can define as
a sub-culture
Sub-Cultures
Sub-cultures always stand in a relationship to
the broader (society-wide) dominant culture
Examples: In greater LA we might
(hypothetically)identify sub-cultures defined by
ethnicity, such as Latino culture, African
American culture, Armenian culture, etc. Each
of these articulates with the others through
intersection with the dominant culture, which,
arguably, is based on Western European
cultural traditions such as the use of English for
most official business.
Culture is transmitted
Learning is transmission, but learning over

4. generations builds cultural traditions
Not just what is learned, but how it is learned is
part of culture
Sources of learning (agents of enculturation may
include
– Observation
– Oral history
– Formal schools
– apprenticeships
– Public media (TV, movies, advertising, music,
literature)
Culture: The Long definition
Tylor (1871)
– “Culture is that complex whole, which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom and
any other capabilities acquired by man (sic)
as a member of society
Culture is Integrated

5. Culture isn’t transmitted piecemeal, but
more commonly as a whole package
Economics, social organization,
subsistence, politics, religion, all fit
together (the key insight of the
functionalist school).
Even when we study aspects of culture in
isolation, it is important to remember the
constitution of the whole
Ethnocentrism and Cultural
Relativism
Ethnocentrism is the belief that your own culture
is superior
Relativism is the suspension of judgment in an
attempt to understand another culture in its own
terms
Relativism is an essential aspect of anthropology
Relativism does not imply nihilism, nor the
abandonment of personal beliefs, simply the
willingness to understand how other cultures
view the world
This week we start a new part of the course. Up until now we

6. have been concerned with
the evolution of the human species, both physically and
culturally. As we’ve taken pains to point
out, those two types of evolution have gone together. The
genus Homo is cultural, from Homo
habilis up to modern times. That’s nearly 2.5 million years of
being cultural. While we define
culture in contrast to biologically based, or instinctual behavior,
the evolution of the capacity to
be cultural was an important aspect of the survival and
reproduction of our genus. The increasing
capacity to be cultural was a product of natural selection.
As I pointed out when we discussed the Late Pleistocene, the
paradox of the last 30000
years is that while biological diversity is probably at an all-time
low in the genus homo, cultural
diversity is tremendous. Cultural diversity really began to
flourish in the Upper Paleolithic with
the radiation of modern homo sapiens throughout the world.
Cultural differences developed as
groups of people adapted to new environments, both physical
and social. That diversity was
further heightened as some cultures went down the path of
intensification involved in food

7. production and sedentism, resulting the development of urban
societies with pronounced social
inequality, economic specialization, and state-level political
institutions.
After that point we really can’t look at human societies and
cultures collectively: There’s
no single story to tell. So in this section of the course we’re
going to examine cultural diversity,
the various ways of being human in the world today and in the
recent past. I told you at the
beginning of the course that one thing that distinguishes
anthropology from other human sciences
is use of the comparative method. We’re going to examine in a
comparative framework various
aspects of cultural and social life around the world. We’re
going to examine various aspects of
culture around the world: things like language, mode of
subsistence, economic organization,
political organization, religion, and art. All of these things are
cultural products.
Before we begin that study, however, we need to discuss in
greater depth what culture is.

8. We’ve done that in a cursory fashion in the first part of the
course, but now we need to flesh out
the definition.
Summary of what we have said about culture to date.
1. The brief definition of culture is: culture is that which is
learned shared and
transmitted.
Learned: contrasts with behaviors that are instinctual or
biologically based. So far we’ve
talked about several cultural products: tools, modes of
subsistence, language. But culture also
produces things like economic systems, and political systems.
Contrary to what you hear on wall
Street, Capitalism is not natural. It is a cultural product,
developed in western europe under
certain historical circumstances. Other economic systems
develop in other types of societies,
reflecting both modes of social organization and the cultural
norms of a given group. We’re
going to look various types of economic organizations in a few
weeks.
Shared: Culture by definition is about groups of people.
Culture is linked to groups.

9. The things that you learn as an individual aren’t necessarily
cultural unless you share that
knowledge with others.
Culture and society
Culture is linked to the concept of society. Society is a group
of people who interact
together on a consistent basis; culture is a system of ideas and
behavior that bind them together
There are different scales of social interaction: this classroom,
the campus, the city of Los
Angeles, the world. There are also different types of cultural
systems operating at each of those
levels, and those cultural systems may or may not map onto the
social networks.
When anthropology focused on the study of small societies,
non-industrial societies with
some degree of isolation from the rest of the world, the relation
between culture and society was
easy to define. Quite often the two words were used
interchangeably, so that Boas could talk
about the Kwakiutl culture and mean both the group of people
and the ways of life that

10. characterized them. If you remember when I talked about the
early history of anthropology, I
discussed the culture area concept developed by Ratzel and then
by Boas, in which culture was
taken to be a characteristic way of life shared by people living
in a given region of the world.
That approach to culture doesn’t work, though, in a more
complex society like Los
Angeles. Here we have many different people, and different
groups
As anthropologists have become interested in studying more
complex societies, the
distinction between culture and society is much more important
to emphasize.
A society can have different networks, different groups within
it. Each of these can have
their own culture, which we would call a sub-culture.
Examples of sub-cultures within modern LA would be things
such as: Latino culture,
Armenian culture, gay culture, military culture. Any group that
shares ideas about what to
believe, how to act, how to look can be said to have a culture
that is distinct from other groups. .
One of these cultures may be dominant. In the United State

11. today, Anglo-american
culture is in many senses the dominant culture. English is the
dominant language; the Christian
calendar structures when we work, our political system is based
on English and western
European philosophical traditions, and many of our laws are
derived from English common law.
Each of the sub-cultures we can identify articulates with the
larger, dominant culture. If
they did not articulate, they could not function together. The
dominant culture provides a means
of integration and coordination.
So culture always is about groups, but the nature of those
groups and the larger society in
which they operate is very complex these days as you may have
noticed if you’ve ordered falafel
and hummus from the Chicanos running the food truck out on
Reseda Boulevard or the nice
Chinese couple running the Mexican restaurant.
Culture is transmitted.
Cultural knowledge is passed from generation to generation
through the process we call

12. enculturation. Enculturation is the education of the young into
a cultural system: the
reproduction of culture. Young humans are programmed to
learn. But as they are raised in
different cultures, they learn different things.
Still, any human child can learn any culture. Take an Inuit
infant from arctic Canada to
Guatemala and she can learn Spanish and learn to make
tortillas. You can take an Arunta child
from Australia to Chicago, and teach her to speak English with
an flattened vowels, invest in the
stock market, and to love the Cubs even though they can’t win a
pennant.
The reproduction of culture results in traditions. Cultural
patterns endure and they are a
large part of what give social groups a collective identity.
The Mama Theory of Culture
When I was young, my mother would take the family to
Alabama every summer, to visit
her family. Being raised on the edge of Napa Valley and the
wine country, Alabama struck me as

13. a very strange place. I was accustomed to rare beef, lightly
steamed vegetables, and Tiramisu for
desserts. But every Sunday after church we would sit down to a
“dinner” (the midday meal in the
south, as opposed to “supper” which is the evening meal). The
meal would include fried chicken
and well-done brisket, which weren’t so bad. But my aunts
would take beautifully fresh green
beans from the garden and boil them with a piece of pork fat
until they were an overcooked
glutinous mass of green sludge. When I asked my mother why
they did such a thing, she would
just say “that the way their mamas taught them.” After the
meal, I’d go out with my cousins,
who were fine specimens of young Southern manhood. They
liked to shoot birds with BB guns
and pull the wings off of butterflies. When I asked my mother
why my cousins liked to torture
other living creature, she would again reply “that’s the way
their mamas taught them.” I soon
learned that was my mother’s answer to any question about why
the South was different.
But that is what culture is: it is “the way your mama taught
you.” But it’s not just your

14. mama, its hundreds or even thousands of mamas teaching their
kids the same things.
Going Beyond the basic Definition of Culture
Culture as an Integrated whole:
E.B. Tylor’s definition (1871): Culture is that complex whole
which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, custom and any other capabilities acquired
by man as a member of society.
Tylor points out that Culture is Integrated.
In the next few weeks we are going to examine various aspects
of culture: the processes
of enculturation, language, economics, subsistence, religion.
You should bear in mind that each
of these topics is worthy of a semester long course in and of
itself. Of necessity, we will move
fast and somewhat superficially.
However, it is important to remember that culture is an
integrated whole. Economics,
social organization, subsistence, politics, religion, all fit
together to form a totality. No aspect of
a culture can be understood in isolation.

15. Examples: Economics: In most pre-capitalist societies,
economics doesn’t include the
exchange of money. Economics is synonymous with social
relations. Goods and services are
exchanged as part of commitments that are social.
Examples: Bride price and bride wealth.
Potlatch: symbolic destruction of goods in fulfillment of social
relationships
Cargo: payments in support of saints in order to achieve social
standing.
Maya: Politics and religion in the classic.
A Final Word
In order to study culture in a comparative framework, you must
avoid ethnocentrism.
Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism:
Ethnocentrism: the belief that your own culture is superior.
Relativism: the suspension of judgement and the attempt to
understand another culture in
its own terms.
Relativism doesn’t mean that you abandon your own cultural
beliefs or that you have to

16. like everything another culture does.
You don’t have to like human sacrifice
You don’t have to like genital mutilation.
But you should be willing to suspend your judgment in order to
understand how human
sacrifice fit into the world view of the Aztec, why they viewed
it as necessary and not horrible.
If I was able to understand why southerners overcook their
vegetables and pull the wings off
dragonflies, you should be able to understand the Aztec.