This document discusses key aspects of culture and communication. It covers: 1. Definitions of culture, including that culture consists of knowledge, values, and objects passed between generations in human groups. 2. The distinction between material culture (artifacts) and nonmaterial culture (symbols, language, values, beliefs). 3. Descriptions of values, beliefs, and social norms including folkways, mores, taboos, and laws. 4. Views on animal communication, finding that while some signals are innate, some species can communicate specific environmental information or learn symbolic communication systems. 5. What makes human language unique - its use of symbols to represent ideas, think, and communicate in

1. CULTURE
Dr. John Bradford

2. Uncontacted Tribes
Brazil, 2009

3. Uncontacted Tribes
Peru 2011

4. Culture
• Culture is the
knowledge, language, values, customs, and
material objects that are passed from person to
person and from one generation to the next in a
human group or society. (p. 61)
• Features of Human Culture:
1. Behaviors that are learned and not innate
2. Because they are learned, they vary (differ or
change) across space and across time.
3. The use of symbolic Language distinguishes
human from non-human cultures.

5. Material and Nonmaterial Culture
• Material Culture - made up of artifacts.
– Artifacts are by-products of human behavior.
• Related to the word ‘artificial.’
– includes all the things that humans make or adapt
from the raw stuff of nature:
computers, houses, forks, bulldozers, sandwiches, etc.
• Nonmaterial Culture – made up of intangible or
abstract things that influence people’s behavior.
– Five basic categories:
symbols, language, norms, values, and beliefs.

6. Values and Beliefs
Values – general or abstract ideas about what is
good and desirable, as opposed to what is bad
and undesirable, in a society.
– Sometimes values can come into conflict
– Examples of values: work ethic;
equality, freedom, democracy, etc.
Ideas/Beliefs – a belief refers to a person’s ideas
about what is real and what is not real.

7. Norms
Norms- rules about behavior.
– Key point: the way to judge the importance of a norm
(and even whether it exists) is to observe how people
respond to behavior.
Types of Norms: (these are not mutually exclusive)
i. Folkways: Casual norms; violations are not taken very
seriously. (e.g. eating pizza for breakfast)
ii. Mores: important rules (e.g. norms against unjustified
assaults)
iii. Taboos: norms that are so deeply held that even the
thought of violating upsets people. (e.g. eating human
flesh; incest)
iv. Laws: formal, standardized norms enforced by formal
sanctions.

8. Norms
• Norms are enforced by sanctions.
– Positive sanctions = rewards.
– Negative sanctions = punishments
– Formal sanctions = official responses from specific
organizations within society
– Informal sanctions = unofficial responses from
individuals within the group
Positive Negative
Formal 1 2
Informal 3 4
Types of sanctions:

9. Do animals communicate?
(Old View)
• Up until the 1980s, it was widely
believed that communication
among non-human animals was:
1. Not controlled (or ‘selected’) by
the animal; its communicative
behavior was simple a hard-wired
response to an environmental
stimulus, and…
2. Communicated only the
emotional states of the animal, i.e.
its states of ‘arousal’ or
excitement, and did not convey
information about the external
environment.

10. Do animals communicate?
(New Findings)
• Honeybee dance also communicates information about
the environment, but is innate and not learned.
– Decoded by von Frisch (1974)- tail-wagging dance is in the
shape of a figure-eight. The amount of time it takes to
traverse the straight, central portion of the dance indicates
the distance to the food source; the angle of this traverse
gives the angle of the source using the position of the sun
as a reference; the degree of vigorousness of the dances
indicates the quality of the food.

11. Do animals communicate?
(New Findings)
‘Domestic’ Apes
• Koko the Gorilla can
understand more than 1,000
words based in American Sign
Language (ASL)
• Kanzi the Bonobo is believed to
understand more human words
(coded in symbols called ‘lexigrams’) than
any other nonhuman animal in
the world.

12. What makes human symbolic
language so different?
• Several species engage in
referential communication:
they communicate specific
information about their
environment using signs.
– Example: vervet monkeys have
several warning calls depending
on the type of predator.

13. What makes human symbolic
language so different?
• However, most are limited to
using (non-symbolic) SIGNALS:
one-word behavioral
commands like “attack!”, “fire!”
1. Primarily manipulative, not
informative; intended to
influence others immediate
behavior.
2. Context, situation-dependent.
3. Cannot be true or false.

14. SYMBOLS and Language
• SYMBOL: anything that re-
presents something else to more
than one person.
• LANGUAGE: set of symbols that
expresses ideas and enables
people to think and communicate
with one another. (p. 66)
• Symbols and Language both a)
REFLECT reality, and b) CREATE
reality.
“These Letters
are symbols”

15. Symbols and Institutions
Symbolic Language is necessary to
create institutions.
‘X counts as Y’
• Examples:
– Money. We can agree that paper
counts as money. But money (Y)
has no existence apart from our
definition of it.
– Rules of chess: the rules of chess
create chess. Chess would not exist
apart from these rules. (vs. rules of
traffic, for example) Rules of chess