2. Culture
• is that complex whole which includes
knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law,
custom and
• any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of
society. (Tylor 187/1958 p. 1)
• enculturation- process by which a child
learns his or her culture

3. • is an elaborate system of such
norms—of standardized, expected
ways of feeling and acting—the
members of a society generally
acknowledge and generally follow.
• refers to the lifestyle of a people,
including all of the ideas, values,
knowledge, behaviors and material
objects that they share.

4. Characteristics of Culture:
1. Culture is All-Encompassing
• culture includes much more than refinement,
taste, sophistication, education, and
appreciation of the fine arts.
• most interesting and significant forces of
culture are those which affects people every
day of their lives, particularly those which
influence children during enculturation.
• encompasses features that are sometimes
regarded as trivial or unworthy of serious
study, such as “popular culture”

5. 2. Culture is General and
Specific
•General- a capacity and
possession shared by hominids
•Specific- to describe the different
and varied cultural traditions of
specific societies.

6. 3. Culture is Learned
Different kinds of learning:
• individual situational learning- occurs when
an animal learns from and bases its future
behavior on its own experience.
• social situational learning- learn from other
members of the social group.

7. •cultural learning- uniquely
developed human capacity to use
symbols, signs that have no
necessary or natural connection
with the things for which they
stand.

8. 4. Culture is Symbolic
• abstract ways of referring to and
understanding ideas, objects,
feelings, or behaviors—and the ability
to communicate with symbols using
language.

9. • Symbol- something verbal or
nonverbal, within a particularly
language or culture, that comes to
stand for something else.
▫ usually linguistic
 language
▫ nonverbal
 flags stands for countries
 holy water symbol for Roman Catholic

10. 5. Culture Seizes Nature
• culture imposes itself on nature
• takes the natural biological urges we
share with other animals and teaches
us how to express them in particular
ways.
▫ people have to eat, but culture teaches us
what, when, and how.
 English people eat fish for breakfast but
Americans prefer hotcakes and cold cereals

11. • human nature is appropriated by
cultural systems and molded in
hundreds of directions.
▫ Frenchmen aren’t embarrassed to
urinate in public
▫ Peasant women in Peruvian
highlands squat in the streets and
urinate in the gutter.

12. 6. Culture is Shared
▫ culture is transmitted in society.
▫ we learn our culture by observing,
listening, talking and interacting with
other people.
▫ shared cultural beliefs, values,
memories, expectations and ways of
thinking and acting override differences
between people.

13. ▫enculturation unifies people by
providing us with common
experiences.
▫people become agents in the
enculturation of their children,
just as their parents were for
them.

14. 7. Culture is Patterned
▫ culture is integrated, patterned systems
▫ customs, institutions, beliefs and values
are interrelated; if one changes, others
changes as well.
 American women in „50s expected to be a
homemakers and mothers
 Today, college women expect to get jobs when
they graduate

15. ▫ cultures are integrated not simply by their
dominant economic activities and social
patterns but also by enduring themes,
values, configurations, and world views.
▫ cultures train their individual members to
share certain personality traits.
▫ a set of characteristic central or core
values (key, basic, or central values)
integrates each culture and helps
distinguish it from others.

16. 8. Culture is Adaptive and
Maladaptive
▫ humans can draw on both biological traits
and learned, symbol-based behavior
patterns.
▫ human groups also employ “cultural adaptive
kits” containing customary patterns, activities,
and tools.
• Adaptive behavior- offers short term
benefits to individuals, it may harm the
environment and threaten the group‟s
long term survival.

17. • Maladaptive- threatening the group‟s
continued existence (survival and
reproduction).
ex. policies that encourage
overpopulation, inadequate food
distribution systems, nuclear arms race,
pollution

18. • set of behavior expectations, a cultural image of how
people are supposed to act. These norms are of
several kinds and several degrees of compulsion, as
seen in the following classification.
• the social rules and guidelines that prescribe
appropriate behavior in particular situations
• These concepts were developed by the early
sociologist William Graham Sumner in his Folkways,
published in 1906.

19. Type of Cultural Norms
1. Folkways- customary, normal, habitual
ways a group does things.
 - sometimes known as “conventions”
or “customs,” are standards of
behavior that are socially approved but
not morally significant.

20. • shaking hands, eating with knives and
forks, wearing neckties on some
occasions and sport shirts on others,
driving on the right-hand of the street,
eating toast for breakfast are some of the
American folkways.
• For example, belching loudly after eating
dinner at someone else's home breaks an
American folkway.

21. 2. Mores
-ideas of right and wrong which attach to
certain folkways which require certain
acts and forbid others.
- norms of morality. Breaking mores, like
attending church in the nude, will offend
most people of a culture

22.  Some mores are irrational
food taboos
▫cattle, hogs or horses unfit to eat
Modesty taboos
▫forbid exposure of the face, the ankle,
the wrist, the breast or whatever is
considered “immodest”
Language Taboos
▫forbid misuse of certain sacred or
obscene words

23.  Mores are beliefs in the rightness or
wrongness of acts.
 Some mores are based upon a very
genuine cause-and-effect relationship.
random killings would threaten group
survival and individual peace of mind
thus, every known society has
condemned the killing of a fellow
member of the society.

24.  All known societies have developed an
incest taboos, disapproving of sexual
intercourse between close blood
relatives because they found that sexual
competition within the family was too
disruptive.
 All mores are ideas which approve
certain acts and forbid others in the
belief that group welfare is being
protected.

25.  Mores arise from a group belief that a particular
act seems to be harmful and must be forbidden.
Mores were a practical group belief about group
welfare.
 suppose trough some coincidence, several
members of a tribe have nasty accidents after
swimming in a certain pool.
▫ thus, any misfortune will be interpreted as a
punishment and will reinforce these mores.
▫ mores become self-validating and self
perpetuating.

26. 3. Institutions
• an organized system of social relationships
which embodies certain common values
and procedures and meets certain basic
needs of the society.
• most formal and compelling of the norms of
a society.

27. • Five basic institutions
▫ family life
▫ religion
▫ government
▫ education
▫ organization of economic activities

28. Includes the institution:
a set of behavior patterns which
have become highly standardized
▫ a set of supporting mores, attitudes
and values
▫ body of traditions, rituals and
ceremonies, symbols and
vestments and other paraphernalia

29. 4. Laws
• are a formal body of rules enacted by the state
and backed by the power of the state.
• many people will obey mores automatically or
beacuse they want to do the “right” thing.
• few people are tempted to violate mores.
• these people may be forced to conform by the
threat of legal punishment
• the law serves to reinforce the mores.

30. • those who still will not conform are
punished, imprisoned or even executed.
• Mores do change and the actions they
command in one era, they may forbid in
another.
• the change is seldom conscious and
deliberate but is gradual adaptation to
changing circumstances.
▫ crescive- a type of natural development little
affected by conscious human decisions.
 no legislature decreed the end of corsets for women
 burning of witches

31. • this is a functionalist view of law- law
as a tool of powerful in controlling and
exploiting the powerless.
• in any complex society, law enforces
the mores and also protects and
preserves the social system in which
there are always some who are more
privileged than others.

32. 5. Values
• are ideas about whether experiences
are important or unimportant.
• guide a persons‟ judgements and
behavior.
• ex. no moral debate about
wether classical music is right or wrong.
• some values are prized more highly
than others.

33. • the members of a simple society generally
are closely agreed upon a single set of
values, while complex societies develop
conflicting value systems.
• is it more important to promote maximum
economic development or to protect the
environment.
• is change better than stability

34. • values disagreements are endless in complex
societies and values change from time to time.
• values shifts also affect the folkways and
mores
• the value shift toward sexual permissiveness is
changing the mores of courtship, legal
decisions about palimony aand patterns of
family life.
• values is closely related to price.
• Price- is the money cost of a good or service,
and the price one will pay measures how
highly one values one good or service

35. A. Introduction
• 1. Cultural universals are features that are
found in every culture.
• 2. Cultural generalities include features that
are common to several, but not all human
groups.
• 3. Cultural particularities are features that
are unique to certain cultural traditions.

36. UNIVERSALITY
• 1. Cultural universals are those traits that
distinguish Homo sapiens from other species.
• 2. Some biological universals include a long period
of infant dependency, year-round sexuality, and a
complex brain that enables us to use symbols,
languages, and tools.
• 3. Some psychological universals include the
common ways in which humans think, feel, and
process information.
• 4. Some social universals include: incest taboos, life
in groups, families (of some kind), and food sharing.

37. UNIVERSALITY
Something that exists in every culture
• Shared by all human populations in every
culture
• Among the social universals is life in
groups and in some kind of family.
• In all human societies culture organizes
social life and depends on social
interactions.

38. UNIVERSALITY
• Most significant cultural universals
• Exogamy- marriage outside one‟s group
• Incest taboo- prohibition against marrying
or mating with a close relative
• The violation of this taboo is incest,
which discouraged and punished in a
variety of ways in different cultures.

39. UNIVERSALITY
• Because exogamy links human
groups together into larger networks,
it has been crucial in homind
evolution.
• It elaborates on tendencies observed
among other primates

40. PARTICULARITY
• Distinctive or unique culture trait,
pattern, or integration
• Different cultures emphasize
different things.
• Cultures are patterned and
integrated differently and display
tremendous variation and diversity.

41. PARTICULARITY
• Uniqueness and particularity stand at the
opposite extreme from universality.
• Unusual and exotic beliefs and practices
lend distinctiveness tp particular cultural
traditions.
• Many cultures ritually observe such
universal life cycle events as birth,

42. PARTICULARITY
• Puberty, marriage, parenthood, and
death.
• However, cultures vary in just which
event merits special celebration.
• Ex.
• Americans regard expensive weddings
than lavish funerals
• The marriage ceremony of the Betsileo

43. PARTICULARITY
▫ Event that brings together just the couple and
a few close relatives.
▫ However, a funeral is a measure of the
deceased person‟s social position and lifetime
achievement
Cultures vary tremendously in their beliefs and
practices.
By focusing on and trying to explain alternative
customs, anthropology forces us to
reappriase our familiar ways of thinking.

44. Generality
• Between universal and uniqueness is a
middle ground that consists of cultural
generalities: regularities that occur in
different times and places but not in all
cultures.
• Culture pattern or traits that exists in
some but not all societies.

45. Generality
One reason for generalities:
• Diffusion- borrowing between cultures
either directly or through intermediaries.
• Independent invention-development of
the same culture trait or pattern in
separate cultures as a result of
comparable needs and circumstances.

46. Generality
• One cultural generality:
• Nuclear Family- Kinship group consisting
of parents and children.
• Although many Americans
ethnocentrically view the nuclear family
as a proper and natural group, it is not
universal.
• It is totally absent among the Nayars live
in female-headed households and

47. Generality
• In many societies, the nuclear family is
submerged in larger kin groups such as
extended families, lineages and clans.