LESSON 3 : Aspects of Culture
Society and Culture
A human society is characterized by:
❖ Territorially localized population
❖ Members of which inter-act in a network of relationship
❖ Distinctive, culturally defined limited
❖ Affectively bonded by the common linguistic and other forms of symbolic
representations.
Culture is the “that complex whole which encompasses beliefs, practices, values, attitudes, laws,
norms, artifacts, symbols, knowledge, and everything that a behavior and the fact that humans
are characterized by them by the virtue of being born as “human beings” apart from other
creatures in the animal kingdom suggests the universal nature of the concept.
John Honigmann has pointed(1959)
IDEAS
ACTIVITIES
CULTURE
ARTIFACTS
Ideas are thoughts, beliefs, feelings and rules.
Activities are the dynamic components of culture.
Artifacts are man-made products of ideas and activities.
Aspects of Culture
Culture is dynamic, flexible and adaptive; shared and contested; learned through socialization or
enculturation; patterned social interactions; integrated at times unstable; transmitted to
socialization/enculturation; and requires language and other forms of communication
Dynamic, Flexible and Adaptive
Cultural behaviors permits human to fit into and adaptive to their respective environments. In
contemporary societies, culture has even developed allowing people to fit the environment to
their daily need. The cumulative and social nature of human ideas, activities and artifacts gives a
tremendous potential from other groups if their cultural behaviors have found to have survival
value.
Shared and Contested
This means that ideas, activities and artifacts are shared in common by the various members of a
society or group. They have become socially and conventionally standardized in form and
manner. Since culture is extra geneticist, transmission is not simply automatic but largely
depends on the willingness of humans to give and receive it.
Learned Through Socialization or Enculturation
Every normal infant has the potential to learn any culture as he grows and survives the various
stages of life.
Through the process of socialization or enculturation, the child eventually acquires the prevailing
attitudes and believes, the forms of behavior appropriate to the social role he occupies, and the
behavior patterns and values of society into which he is born.
Patterned Social Interactions
Social Interaction implies theories of reciprocity, complementarily, and mutuality of response.
The patterns of social interactions may be viewed as inherent characteristics of the participants
merely given the opportunity to be exposed or as emergent in the sense that they arise in the
interaction as a product.
Integrated and at Times Unstable
The various behaviors we observe are different kinds of cultural expressions and are behaved for
different reasons and purposes.
Transmitted Through Socialization/Enculturation
Being acquired by learning, cultural ideas and artifacts are handed down from generation to
generation as a super-organic inheritance. That is accomplished by social learning, by imitating
the act of others, though most often is transmitted more directly by human language, which in
itself a part of culture and considered the most important part, the “soul” of every culture.
Requires Language and Other Forms of Communication
Language is shared set of spoken symbols and rules for combining those symbols in meaningful
ways. Language has been called “the store house of culture”. It is the primary means of
capturing, communicating, discussing, changing and passing shared understanding to new
generations. Language is the most important means of cultural transmission, the process by
which one generation passes culture to the next.
