Culture

Introduction
• Culture is one of the most important concepts in social sciences.
• It is commonly used in psychology, political science and economics.
• It is the main concept in anthropology and a fundamental in
sociology.
• The study of human society necessarily lead to the study of its
culture.
• The study of society or any aspects of it becomes incomplete without
a proper understanding of the culture of that society.
• Culture and society go together. They are inseparable.

Culture is unique to man
• Culture is a unique possession of man.
• Only man is born and brought up in a cultural environment.
• Other animals live in a natural environment.
• Every man is born into a society is the same as saying that every man
is born into a culture.
• Culture is the unique quality of man which separates him from the
lower animals.
• Culture includes all that man has acquired in his individual and social
life.

Meaning
• Culture is a very broad term that includes in itself all our walks of life,
our modes of behaviour, our philosophies and ethics, our morals and
manners, our customs and traditions, our religious, political,
economic and other types of activities.

Definition
• Tylor – Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities acquired by
man, as a member of society.
• E.V. de Roberty – Culture is the body of thought and knowledge, both
theoretical and practical, which only man can possess.
• C.C. North - Culture consists in the instruments constituted by men
to assist him in satisfying his wants.
• Robert Bierstadt – culture is the complex whole that consists of all the
ways we think and do and everything we have as members of society.

Characteristics of culture
• Culture is learnt
• Culture is social
• Culture shard
• Culture is transmissive
• Culture is continuous and cumulative
• Culture is consistent and integrated
• Culture is dynamic and adaptive
• Culture is gratifying
• Culture is varies from society to society

• Culture is learnt
• Culture is not inherited biologically, but leant socially by man.
• It is not an inborn tendency.
• There is no cultural instinct as such.
• Culture is often called ‘learned ways of behaviour’.
• Unlearned behaviour, such as closing the eyes while sleeping, the eye blinking
reflex and so on, are purely physiological and not cultural.
• Shaking hands or saying ‘namaskar’ or ‘thanks’ and shaving and dressing, on
the other hand, are cultural.
• Similarly, wearing clothes, combing the hair, wearing ornaments, cooking the
food, drinking from a glass, singing, worshipping, etc., are all ways of
behaviour learned by man culturally.

• Culture is social
• Culture does not exist in isolation.
• It is a product of society.
• It originates and develops through social interactions.
• It is shared by the members of society.
• No man can acquire culture without association with other human beings.
• Man becomes man only among men.
• It is the culture which helps man to develop human qualities in a human
environment.

• Culture shard
• Culture in the sociological sense, is something shared.
• It is not something that an individual alone can possess.
• For Ex. customs, traditions, beliefs, ideas, values, morals, etc., are all shared
by people of a group or society.
• The inventions of Arya Bhatta or Albert Einstein, Charaka or Charles Darwin;
the literary works of Kalidasa or Keats, Dandi or Dante; the philosophical
works of Confucious or Lao Tse, Shankaracharya or Swami Vivekananda; the
artistic works of Ravi Verma or Raphael, etc., are all shared by a large number
of people.

• Culture is transmissive
• Culture is capable of being transmitted from one generation to the next.
• Parents pass on culture traits to their children and they in turn to their
children, and so on.
• Culture is transmitted not through genes but by means of languages.
• Language is the main vehicle of culture.
• Language in its different forms like reading, writing and speaking makes it
possible for the present generation to understand the achievements of earlier
generations.
• Transmission of culture may take place by imitation as well as by instruction.

• Culture is continuous and cumulative
• Culture exists as a continuous process.
• In its historical growth it tends to become cumulative.
• Culture is a ‘growing whole’ which includes in itself, the achievements of the
past and the present and makes provision for the future achievements of
mankind.
• Culture is consistent and integrated
• Culture, in its development has revealed a tendency to be consistent.
• At the same time different parts of culture are interconnected.
• For example, the value system of a society is closely connected with its other
aspects such as morality, religion, customs, traditions, beliefs, and so on.

• Culture is dynamic and adaptive
• Though culture is relatively stable it is not altogether static.
• It is subject to slow but constant changes.
• Change and growth are latent in culture.
• We find amazing growth in the present Indian culture when we compare it
with the culture of the Vedic times.
• Culture is hence dynamic.
• It is also adaptive.

• Culture is gratifying
• Culture provides proper opportunities and prescribes means for the
satisfaction of our needs and desires.
• These need may be biological or social in nature.
• Our need for food, shelter, and clothing on the one hand, and our desire for
status, name, fame, money, mates, etc., all, for example, fulfilled according to
the cultural ways.
• Culture determines and guides the varied activities of man.
• In fact, culture is defined as the process through which human beings satisfy
their wants.

• Culture is varies from society to society
• Every society has a culture of its own.
• It differs from society to society.
• Culture of every society is unique to itself.
• Culture are not uniform.
• Cultural elements such as customs, traditions, morals, ideals, values,
ideologies, beliefs, practices, philosophies, institutions, etc., are not uniform
everywhere.
• Ways of eating, speaking, greeting, dressing, entertaining, living, etc., of
different societies differ significantly.
• Culture varies from time to time also.
• No culture ever remains constant or changeless.

Evolution of Culture
• For a century and more Archaeologists have dug up the tools,
weapons, pottery, idols, coins and other material things of people
who have long since died out.
• It is the clues to their social life.
• The Archaeologists do not reveal the origin of culture, they only
indicate its olden days.
• If they reveal something about the evolution of culture, it is only
about its material aspects.

Evolution of Culture
• To trace the origin of a specific cultural trait is difficult.
• All cultural traits – material as well as non-material – have been
invented at some time and in some place by some person.
• No single invention contributes very much to the development of a
culture, it is only an addition to what already exists.
• Culture is only partly new.
• Ex: The music composer of a new song take bits from number of
pervious compositions.

Functions of Culture
• Culture is the treasury of knowledge
• Culture defines situations
• Culture defines attitudes, values and goals
• Culture decides our career
• Culture provides behaviour pattern
• Culture moulds personality

• Culture is the treasury of knowledge
• Culture provides knowledge which is essential for the physical, social and
intellectual existence of man.
• Brides and animals behave instinctively.
• But man has greater intelligence and learning capacity.
• With the help of these he has been able to adapt himself with the
environment or modify it to suit his convenience.
• Culture has made such an adaptation and modification possible and easier by
providing man the necessary skills and knowledge.
• Culture preserves knowledge and helps its transmission from generation
through its element, that is, language.

• Culture defines situations
• Culture defines social situations for us.
• It not only defines but also conditions and determines –
• what we eat and drink,
• what we wear,
• when to laugh, weep, sleep, love, to make friends with,
• what work we do,
• what God we worship,
• what knowledge we rely upon,
• what poetry we recite and so on.

• Culture defines attitudes, values and goals
• Attitudes refer to the tendency to feel and act in certain ways.
• Values are the measure of goodness or desirability.
• Goals refer to the attainments which our values define as worthy.
• It is the culture which conditions our attitude towards various issues such as
religion, morality, marriage, science, family planning and so on.
• Our values concerning private property, fundamental rights, representative
government, romantic love, etc., are influenced by our culture.
• Our goals of winning the race, understanding others, attaining salvation,
being obedient to elders and teachers, being loyal to husband and wife, being
patriotic, etc., are all set forth by our culture.

• Culture decides our career
• Whether we should become a politician, a social worker, a doctor, an
engineer, a soldier, a farmer, a professor, an industrialist, a religious leader,
and so on is decided by our culture.
• What career we are likely to pursue is largely decided by our culture.
• Culture sets limitations on our choice to select different careers.
• Individuals may develop, modify or oppose the trends of their culture but
they always live within its framework.
• Only a few can find outlet in the culture.

• Culture provides behaviour pattern
• Culture directs and confines the behaviour of an individuals.
• Culture assigns goals and provides means for achieving them.
• It rewards his noble works and punishes the ignoble ones.
• It assigns him statuses and roles.
• We see, dream, aspire, work, strive, marry, enjoy according to the cultural
expectation.
• Culture not only controls but also liberates human energy and activities.
• Man, indeed, is a prisoner of his culture.

• Culture moulds personality
• Culture exercises a great influence on the development of personality.
• No child can develop human qualities in the absence of a cultural
environment.
• Culture prepares man for group life and provides him the design of living.
• It is the culture that provides opportunities for the development of
personality and sets limits on its growth.

Elements of Culture
• Cognitive elements
• Beliefs
• Norms
• Values
• Signs
• language

Elements of Culture
• Cognitive elements
• Cultures of all societies whether pre-literate or literate include a vast amount
of knowledge about the physical and social world.
• The possession of this knowledge is referred to as the cognitive element.
• Even the most primitive or pre-literate peoples such as the Andaman and
Trobriand Islanders must know about many things in order to survive.
• Their knowledge is practical knowledge and never “knowledge for tis own
sake”.
• Knowledge, relating to how to get food, how to build shelter, how to travel
and transport, how to protect themselves against storms, etc.
• Every society has in its culture many ideas about its own social organisation
and how it works.

Elements of Culture
• Beliefs
• Beliefs in empirical terms are neither true nor false.
• Example: the Christian missionary who gives medicine to and advices the
patient to take sufficient rest also utters a silent prayer for the speedy
recovery of the patient.
• Such action imply some kind of beliefs.
• The belief behind these actions cannot be confirmed or rejected on the basis
of empirical evidence.
• For example, if the patient dies in spite of the efforts, of Shaman, he will have
some “explanation” that will make him to stick on to the belief in evil spirits.
• Civilised men too create similar beliefs and pass them on to the succeeding
generations.

Elements of Culture
• Norms
• Norms as elements of culture are the rules and the guidelines which specify
the behavior of an individual. Norms keep a person within the boundary of
society and its culture. It gives us restriction about something which to do and
which not to do. It molds our behavior and gives as knowledge about wrong
and right. Norms can be divided into:
• a. Folkways. Folkways are the simple customary ways of the people. It is the
normal and habitual action of people within a culture. Folkways are the
recognized or accepted ways of behavior. These are the behavior pattern
which a person use generally in his daily life.
• b. Mores. Mores is a Latin word and the plural of mos which means customs
or beliefs accordance with a group customary expectation. It is the “must”
behavior of a person. Mores refers to “what ought to be and what ought not
to be.” Mores are serious norms but are informed like folkways. They have a
serious binding on a group the violation of mores threats to social order.
Punishment may be both formal and informal for the violation of mores.

Elements of Culture
• Values
• Anything getting importance in our daily life becomes our values.
• The origin of values is not biological but it is social production while living in
society the values develop.
• Values depend upon the culture. Culture varies from society to society and
thus values are different in every social situation.
• Values are what we like and what we say will in our society values are the
good idea and thinking of a person.
• Some values are hereditary which we gain from our elders, books and
parents.
• The culture is full of values and can transmit from one generation to another.
• When a natural object get a meaning it becomes a value.

Elements of Culture
• Signs
• Sings include signals and symbols.
• A signals (also means sign) indicates the existence – past, present, or future –
of a thing, event or conditions.
• Example: wet streets are a signal that it has rained. Soldiers going to parade
ground with uniform signal that they are going to have their parade.
• Thus, signal and its objects are both parts of a more complex event or unit.
• A number of invented or artificial symbols are used in social life which assume
as an importance.
• Example: a shot may mean the beginning of a running race, the sighting of
dancer, the commencement of a parade, the starting of war, the killing of a
wild animal, a terrorist activity, and so on.

Elements of Culture
• Language
• A group of words or ideas having common meaning and is shared to a social
situation is called language.
• Language is the entrance to a culture.
• Language is a set of socially sound pattern, words, and sentences having
specific meaning and terminology common to the same culture.
• Language is a source of communication and to transmit message from one
person to another.
• It is the method to mold the behavior and experience of a person.
• Language is the foundation of a culture and ticket to the entrance of a social
life.

Cultural Lag
• The idea of a cultural lag was developed by W.F. Ogburn in response
to crude economic determinism in which cultural, political and social
phenomena change in direct and immediate response to changes in
the economic basis of society.
• He noted that changes in culture were not always congruent with
economic changes.
• For example: he argued that economic changes influencing the
division of labour in the family had not been accompanied by a
change in the ideology that ‘a women’s place is in the home’.
• A cultural lag exists when two or more social variables which were
once in some form of agreement become dissociated and mal-
adjusted by their differential rate of change.

Cultural Lag
• Scholars envision some balance or adjustment existing between
material and non-material culture.
• That balance is upset by the appearance of raw material objects.
• Ogburn and others believe that material culture tends to change
faster than non-material culture.
• The imbalance of adjustment between material and non-material
culture is called cultural lag.
• Example: the automobiles increased their speeds, the highways were
not improved rapidly enough.

Cultural Lag
• Within this century, life has been transformed by invention of the
radio, TV, automobiles, airplanes, rockets, transistors, and computers
and so on.
• While this has been happening in material culture, change in
government, economic system, family life, education, and religion
seems to have been much slower.
• This difference in rates of cultural change led Ogburn to formulate the
concept of culture lag.

Civilisation
• The term ‘Civilisation’ is derived from the Latin word ‘Civitas’ which means
city.
• Hence the term refers to all the attainments characteristics of human life in
an organised city.
• Since cities appeared relatively at a later stage in human history,
‘Civilisation’ indicates a particular stage in the evolution of man.
• In contrast with this, culture represents the group life of man at all the
stages of his social development.
• The term civilisation is also used to cover all the social organisations and
other attainments of man which mark him off from other animals.

Definition
• Goldenweiser – the term ‘civilisation’ identically with culture to refer
to all the human achievements.
• Kant – the term civilisation to mean outward behaviour of man.
• Gillin and Gillin – civilisation is a more complex and evolved form of
culture.
• Ogburn and Nimkoff – civilisation as the later phase of the super-
organic culture.

Distinction between culture and civilisation
• Civilisation has a precise standard of measurement but not culture.
• Civilisation is always advancing but not culture.
• The products of civilisation are more easily communicated than those
of culture.
• Civilisation is borrowed without loss or changes but not culture.
• Civilisation is external, but culture is internal.
• The products of culture reveal the nature of an individual or a social
group or a nation but not the products of civilisation.

• Civilisation has a precise standard of measurement nut not culture.
• The products of civilisation are such that they can be measured quantitatively
on ground of efficiency.
• We can easily say that a motor car is superior to hand plough or the currency
and the banking system are superior to the primitive barter system.
• But we cannot measure the cultural products.
• We can only assess the cultural products by our personal judgement; but we
cannot measure or quantify them.
• Cultural things such as, values, opinions, ideas, ideologies, morals, customs
beliefs, fashions, etc., are beyond measurement.

• Civilisation is always advancing but not culture.
• Civilisation always marches on if there is no break of social continuity.
• It always shows a persistent already stored upward trend.
• Once our instrument is discovered man goes on improving it.
• Example: change from mud road to tar road then to cement concrete road.
• Progress in the case of culture is not assured.
• Culture is not always advancing.
• Example: The height reached by Buddha, Vivekananda in the field of religion
and spirituality had not been reached by their follows.
• But in the field of civilisation, what Newton or Edison discovered became the
basis for further discovery.

• The products of civilisation are more easily communicated than those
of culture.
• The products of civilisation is open to all.
• Knowledge regarding civilisation can be passed on very easily and without
much effort.
• Example: millions may use radio, TV, telephone, camera, etc., without
understanding their techniques and mechanism.
• Products of culture on the other hand, can be communicated only between
like-minded.
• Example: Those who have poetic talent can alone appreciate poetry. The work
of an artist is only for a man with artistic appreciation.

• Civilisation is borrowed without loss or changes but not culture.
• People can borrow the products of civilisation very easily.
• Technical devices and plants can easily be borrowed or transferred.
• It will be easy for an Indian to borrow a scientific technique invented in the
West, but it will be difficult for a foreigner to borrow the Indian cultural
elements.
• Hence civilisation is far more widespread than culture.
• Different groups may make use of similar products and yet may possess
different cultures.
• Example: Many of the Eastern countries have borrowed Western technology
but all of them have retained their original cultures.

• Civilisation is external, but culture is internal.
• Civilisation is external, mechanical and utilitarian in character.
• It caters to the external needs of man.
• In a way it reflects the material wealth of mankind.
• Culture is something internal.
• It refers to the intrinsic values.
• It is the expression of living and thinking, in behaving and in acting, in
philosophy, and religion, etc.,
• Kant has pointed out, “Civilisation is a matter of outward behaviour whereas
culture requires morality as an inward state of man”.
• As MacIver and Page have said “Civilisation is what we have, culture is what
we are”.

• The products of culture reveal the nature of an individual or a social
group or a nation but not the products of civilisation.
• In the realm of culture, an artists or a poet, or a painter can express his love
of beauty, his admiration for literature, his fascination towards art by means
of his artistic, literary or painting works.
• On the other hand, an engineer cannot express his personality, his love and
beauty, his likes and dislikes, his morals and values by means of his machines,
discoveries or inventions.

Inter-dependence of and inter-relationship
between culture and civilisation
• Civilisation and culture do not reveal two independent and separate
system.
• The distinction between them is only relative and not absolute.
• The are not only interdependent but also interactive.
• Both are man-made.
• One is for his comfort and luxury and the other for his satisfaction and
happiness.

Inter-dependence of and inter-relationship
between culture and civilisation
• Some objects of civilisation become old acquire cultural character.
• The tools and implements of the primitive communities are also the
symbols of culture.
• Various articles such as pots, vessels, ornaments, coins, weapons,
tools, etc., found in excavations reveal the culture of the ancient
people.
• We look at the new inventions and techniques in the light of our way
of life and our values.
• New aspirations and values may bring about a new civilisation.

• According to Ogburn, civilisation represents ‘material culture’ and
culture implies ‘non-material culture’.
• If civilisation is like a body, culture is its soul.

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