This document defines culture and discusses how it is learned and shared within social groups. It also examines how culture can constrain individuals and change over time due to factors like innovation, diffusion of ideas from other groups, acculturation during contact between societies, and revolution. While globalization has increased cultural similarities in some domains, cultural diversity persists and new cultures continue emerging through processes like ethnogenesis.

1. Culture and Culture Change

2. Defining Culture
• Culture is the set of learned behaviors and ideas (including beliefs, attitudes, values, and
ideals) that are characteristic of a particular society or other social group.
• Behaviors can also produce products or material culture, including houses, musical
instruments, and tools that are the products of customary behavior.
• Anthropologists have traditionally been concerned with the cultural characteristics of
societies. Societies may or may not correspond to countries; many countries, particularly
newer ones, contain many societies.
• The terms society and culture are not synonymous. Society refers to a group of people;
culture refers to the learned and shared behaviors, ideas, and characteristic of those
people.
• Even when anthropologists refer to something as cultural, there is always individual
variation, and not everyone in a society shares a particular cultural characteristic of that
society.
• For something to be considered cultural, it must be not only shared but also learned.
• Cognitive anthropologists are most likely to say that culture refers not to behaviors but to
the rules and ideas behind them, and that culture therefore resides in people’s heads.
• Another view is that culture is an entity, a force, that profoundly affects the individuals
who live within its influence.

3. Cultural Constraints
• Because members of a culture generally conform to that culture, they
are not always aware of being constrained by its standards and rules
for acceptable behavior, which social scientists refer to as norms.
• Cultural constraints can be direct or indirect.

4. Attitudes That Hinder the Study
of Cultures
• Ethnocentrism—a view of one’s cultural behaviors and attitudes as
correct and those of other cultures as immoral or inferior—can bias
objectively observing another culture.
• Ethnocentrism also keeps a person from understanding his or her
own customs.
• Glorification of one’s own culture or that of another also hinders
effective anthropological study.

5. Cultural Relativism
• The idea of cultural relativism rejects the notion that Western cultures are
at the highest or most progressive stage of evolution.
• Cultural relativism attempts to objectively describe and understand a
society’s customs and ideas in the context of that society’s problems and
opportunities.
• Following the idea of cultural relativism helps anthropologists be alert to
perspectives in other cultures that might challenge their own cultural
beliefs about what is true and that might lead them to make moral
judgments.
• Approaches using cultural relativism pose conflicts with efforts to create
universal standards of human rights. However, universal human rights
advocates might increase their persuasiveness if they are aware of the
viewpoints and values within a particular culture.

6. Describing a Culture
• Understanding what is cultural involves (a) separating what is shared from what is
individually variable and (b) understanding whether common behaviors and ideas
are learned.
• Variations in behavior are typically confined within socially acceptable limits.
• Anthropologists try to distinguish actual behavior from ideal cultural traits—the
ideas about how People in particular situations ought to feel and
• behave. Ideal cultural traits may differ from actual behavior because the ideal is
based on the way society
• used to be.
• When a domain of behavior includes many individual variations or when the
people studied are unaware of their pattern of behavior, the anthropologist may
need to collect information from a larger sample of individuals to establish what
the cultural trait is.
• Anthropologists suspect that something is largely learned if it varies from society
to society and is genetically influenced when it is found in all societies.

7. Culture Is Patterned
• A culture that is mostly integrated is one in which elements or traits
are mostly adjusted to or consistent with one another.
• Integration may be influenced by psychological processes and by
people transferring experiences from one area of life to another.
• Cultural traits may become patterned through adaptation. Customs
that diminish the survival chances of a society are not likely to persist.
However, what may be adaptive in one environment may not be
adaptive in another.

8. How and Why Cultures Change
• Examining the history of a society will reveal that its culture has changed over time. Consequently, in describing a culture, it is
important to understand that a description pertains to a particular time period.
• A good deal of culture change may be stimulated by changes in the external environment.
• Inventions and discoveries (including behavior and ideas), when accepted and regularly used by a society, will change the culture.
These inventions and discoveries might be unintentional or intentional.
• Relatively little is known about why some people are more innovative than others. The ability to innovate may depend in part on
such individual characteristics as high intelligence and creativity. Creativity may be influenced by social conditions.
• In general, people are more likely to adopt a behavior or innovation as it becomes more common. The speed with which an
innovation is adopted may depend partly on how new behaviors and ideas are typically transmitted—or taught—in a society.
• New cultural elements in one society may come from another society. Innovation occurring in this way is called diffusion. The three
basic patterns of diffusion are direct contact, intermediate contact, and stimulus diffusion.
• Diffusion is a selective process. New traits and elements will be rejected or accepted depending on complex variables. •
Acculturation is another type of change that occurs when different cultural groups come into intensive contact. Acculturation
occurs primarily when one of the two societies in contact is more powerful than the other. • One of the most drastic and rapid way
a culture can change is as a result of revolution—replacement, usually violent, of a country’s rulers. • The sources of revolution may
be mostly internal, or partly external. Revolutions are not always successful in their goals, nor necessarily in bringing about culture
change.
• Not all people who are suppressed, conquered, or colonialized eventually rebel against established authority. Revolutions are more
likely in countries that are just becoming industrialized.

9. Culture Change and Adaptation
• The frequency of a new learned behavior will increase over time and
become customary in a population if the people exhibiting that
behavior are most likely to survive and reproduce. It is possible for
culture change to occur much more rapidly than genetic change.
• When circumstances change, individuals are particularly likely to try
ideas or behaviors that are different from those of their parents.

10. Globalization: Problems
and Opportunities
• The process of globalization has resulted in the worldwide spread of cultural features, particularly
in the domain of economics and international trade.
• In some ways, cultures are changing in similar directions.
• They have become more commercial, more urban, and more international. • A form of
continental diffusion between Asia, Africa, and Europe had been occurring since at least the
beginning of written history, in large part because of the scope and power of empires.
• Worldwide diffusion of a culture trait does not mean that it is incorporated in exactly the same
way among societies, and the spread of certain products and activities through globalization does
not mean that change happens in the same way everywhere.
• Negative effects of globalization include unemployment, native peoples’ loss of land, increasing
class inequality, undernutrition and starvation, and spread of disease.
• Positive effects of globalization include increases in life expectancy and literacy, less warfare, and
growth of middle classes, which have become agents of social change.
• Movement of ideas, art, music, and food among cultures tends to be reciprocal.

11. Ethnogenesis: The Emergence
of New Cultures
• Despite the trend of globalization, many cultures still vary
considerably, and new cultures have been created—a process called
ethnogenesis.
• In particular, cases of violent events such as depopulation, relocation,
enslavement, and genocide can lead to ethnogenesis.

12. Cultural Diversity in the Future
• Although modern transportation and communication facilitate the
rapid spread of some cultural characteristics to all parts of the globe,
it is highly unlikely that all parts of the world will end up the same
culturally.
• Many people are affirming ethnic identities in a process that often
involves deliberately introducing cultural difference.
• One study suggests that there are many more cultural groups nearer
to the equator than in very northern and southern latitudes, possibly
associated with levels of greater environmental predictability.