Culture Contested Concept Culture is another contested concept

Culture

Contested Concept Culture is another contested concept – perhaps more so than any other we have looked at. In 1952, the American anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, critically reviewed concepts and definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164 different definitions.

What can we say for certain? Culture is different from both human nature and unique individual personality Culture is learned, it is not inherited. It does not derive from our genes, it comes from the social environment in which we develop. Human nature is the stuff that all humans share – it would be like the operating system on a computer, it is within our genes, the means to communicate, our physiology. Unique personality is the person’s own personality traits which she does not share with anyone else. It can be based on facets of being which may be partially learned and partially inherited.

Culture is the stuff in between For culture to exist, there has to be more than one person – there is no such thing as the culture of the hermit. For an idea to be considered cultural it must be shared by some type of group or society. Everyone belongs to a number of different groups and categories of people at the same time – so there all these different levels of culture to navigate between in order to create identities. Our identity is who we understand ourselves to be, and who we understand other to be, and who they think we are. An identity requires an other – we have to see ourselves as distinct from others. Culture doesn’t work in that way, it is what is shared, it doesn’t require “othering”.

Different layers of culture As an outsider, looking at a new culture, there will be many different layers – like an onion – of stuff going on. There will be the visible layers of things that can have a physical presence, like the architecture of a building, or a piece of art, or a birthday card – all of these are physical embodiments of a bit of culture. These physical things can tell us what is done, or how it is done. But they can’t tell us why something is done – that’s the really deep cultural stuff. And the fact is, most people living within the culture will not really know why, because to question it would seem weird, it just is. Culture can become so deeply internalised that people just act, and don’t really know why. Anyone who questioned it, or didn’t do it would be seen as deviant. So, although certain aspects of culture are physically visible, their meaning is invisible – their “cultural” meaning lies precisely and only in the way that they are interpreted by insiders.

An outsider might never be able to truly understand the values of a society, as many of the group themselves may not truly understand how they came to think the way they did. This comes from the process of socialisation – it allows the culture and values of the society to pass on.

But it is not homogeneous Culture is not the same throughout a group – it is spread out socially and psychologically throughout a group. Not everyone in the group will have the exact same set of attitudes and beliefs etc. Two individuals will not be the same as they do not share the same sociological location in a population (class, religion, region etc. ). There also individual differences between people – no matter how sociologically similar people are in terms of gender and class, the individual is still going to pick up messages differently, and deal with them differently. Culture is socially distributed through a population.

Different Levels of Culture we all navigate Almost everyone belongs to a number of different groups and categories of people at the same time. National Regional/ethnic/linguistic/religious Gender Generational Role category (eg parent, daughter, friend, assassin, pedestrian) Employment (place within an organisation – eg manager)

No population can be adequately described by a single cultural descriptor, the more complex a population is – the more complex its cultural mappings will appear. This is why we need the concept of subculture.

Culture can influence every aspect of our lives – although culture is not biologically inherited, (as the Nazis might have liked to think) it can influence our biological processes. So all humans need to eat, but what we eat, and how, and when and how often, are all influenced by culture. This was evidenced in the horse meat scandal. Horse meat is clearly just as edible as cow meat, the difference is our cultural barrier to eating it. We are used to eating cows, and we use different words so that we can distance ourselves from it – we say beef and steak and stuff. We hadn’t developed any terms to help us to distance ourselves from the horse. Deep down there seemed to be something wring with eating horse, a gut instinct that it was wrong. This is the internalised value, because obviously it is no worse than eating a cow. It is awful to eat a cow. Weird though, that we haven’t distanced ourselves so much from other meats, like chicken and lamb. I wonder why that is?

Anyway, to continue to go on about the biological processes that are influenced by culture – the great majority of our conscious behaviour is acquired through learning and interacting with members of our culture. When we eat, cough, sneeze or fart – these are all biological needs, but they are influenced by our culture.