He is chosen by the elders. He is called either Father or Housefather and everyone in the household obeys him. The anthropological study of culture can be organized along two persistent and basic themes: Diversity and Change.
It is the differences between all cultures and sub-cultures of the worlds regions. Culture generally changes for one of two reasons: selective transmission or to meet changing needs. This means that when a village or culture is met with new challenges for example a loss of a food source, they must change the way they live.
And an anthropologist would look at that and study their ways to learn from them. Related cultural beliefs and practices show up repeatedly in different areas of social life. At its most basic level, the difference between Culture and culture is in the way they are defined. Culture with a capital C refers to the ability of the human species to absorb and imitate patterned and symbolic ideas that ultimately further their survival. Culture is a trait all humans have, whereas culture with a lower case c refers to a particular learned way of life and set of patterns an individual person has picked up, representing one variation amongst many different cultures.
Accessed 11 Nov. More Definitions for culture. Nglish: Translation of culture for Spanish Speakers. Britannica English: Translation of culture for Arabic Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up.
Save Word. Essential Meaning of culture. There was a culture of success at the school. Full Definition of culture Entry 1 of 2. Definition of culture Entry 2 of 2. Examples of culture in a Sentence Noun In this new view, genes allow the human mind to learn, remember, imitate, imprint language, absorb culture and express instincts.
It's important to learn about other cultures. The company's corporate culture is focused on increasing profits. Recent Examples on the Web: Noun Beyond leading a company to succeed financially, women are particularly successful in creating a positive company culture. German speakers may describe keys as hard, heavy, and useful, while Spanish speakers describe them as lovely, little, and intricate. These kinds of findings are now plentiful, but the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has not gone unchallenged for a review, see Bloom and Keil For example, Li and Gleitman showed that Tzetal speakers can reproduce object arrays using relative reference frames in a simplified version of the experiments performed by Pederson et al.
Frank et al. Such experimental critiques suggest that Sapir-Whorf effects are fragile, and may be hard to show under certain conditions, but they also confirm that language plays a role in encoding information, and cognitive differences arise when memory is involved.
Studies on color perception and color comparison suggest that the effects are not limited to memory, and Boroditsky's study of gendered pronouns suggest that language can have an enduring impact on how we think about familiar categories. In summary, it might be said that cognitive science has found evidence in support of the hypothesis that language can influence thought.
Because language is a cultural item, linguistic effects on thought can be characterized as cultural effects. But the interest of such effects is open to debate. Neo-Whorfians will say that language can establish modes of thinking that distinguish one group from another, while critics say these differences are modest and don't imply the radically incommensurable worldviews advertised by Whorf. Research on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis looks for ways in which language influences perception and thought.
But language is not the only way that a culture can influence cognition. Other research looks for cultural differences in language and perception that are not necessarily mediated by language. For example, there is research suggesting that cognition can be affected by methods of subsistence or social values. Field-dependent thinkers tend to notice context and the relationship between things, whereas field-independent thinkers tend to abstract away from context and experience objects in a way that is less affected by their relationships to other things.
For example, field-independent thinkers do better on what Witkin called the embedded figure task, in which one shape left must be found embedded in another right.
Witkin's test was designed to study individual differences within his own culture, but Berry realized that it could also be used to investigate cultural variation. He was interested in how different forms of subsistence might influence cognition. One hypothesis is that hunters and gatherers must be good at differentiating objects plants or prey from complex scenery.
Horticulturalists, on the other hand, must pay close attention to the relationship between the many environmental factors that can influence growth of a crop. To test this, Berry studied Inuit hunters and Temne horticulturalists in Africa, and found that the latter are more field-dependent than the former.
See also Segall et al. Berry was interested in isolated, small-scale societies, but the same research methods and principles have also been applied to much larger cultural groups. Cultures of every size differ on a number of dimensions. One distinction that has been extremely valuable in cross-cultural research is the contrast between individualist cultures and collectivist cultures see Triandis, Individualists place emphasis on individual achievements and goals; they value autonomy and disvalue dependency on others.
Collectivists place emphasis on group membership and often value group cohesion and success above personal achievement. Following Triandis, we can define more precisely as follows:. Collectivism: a social pattern in which individuals construe themselves as parts of collectives and are primarily motivated by duties to those collectives. Individualism: a social pattern in which individuals see themselves as independent of collectives and are primarily motivated by their own preferences and needs.
The difference can be brought out experimentally by giving people in different cultures tasks that assess how much they value autonomy and how much they value inter-dependence. For example, when asked to pick a colored pen from an array of pens, individualists tend to pick the most unusual color, and collectivists tend to pick the most common.
Individualist and collectivist cultures are distributed widely across the globe. It should be obvious that these are vast and remote regions of the globe and highly diverse, culturally speaking.
Any large nation, such as India or America, will have scores of subcultures each of which might vary along these dimensions. The point is not that all collectivist cultures are alike.
Differences between collectivist cultures and within collectivist cultures are often greater than between collectivist and individualist cultures.
The point is simply that collectivist cultures share this one dimension of similarity, and that dimension, as we will see, has an impact on cognitive style.
Likewise for individualists. Future research will offer more finely grained distinctions, but at present, research on the cognitive effects of individualism and collectivism offers some of the strongest evidence for cultural differences in thought. Some researchers trace individualism and collectivism to material conditions.
For example, many Western cultures are individualistic and trace their seminal cultural influence to ancient Greece, which had an economy based on fishing and herding. Far Eastern countries trace their seminal cultural influence to China, which had intensive agriculture.
In the West, free mercantilism and capitalism emerged long ago, emphasizing individual achievement. In the East, capitalism and free trade is comparatively new. Once these differences are in place, they tend to be reflected in many other aspects of culture.
Far Eastern languages use characters that require a fine sensitivity to relationships between parts; Eastern religion often focuses on relationships between human beings and nature; Eastern ethical systems often emphasize responsibilities to the family Nisbett, These cultural differences can be used to transmit and preserve psychological differences from generation to generation. Nisbett et al. Nisbett and his collaborators mostly East Asian psychologists talk about field-dependence and field-independence, but also introduce the closely related terms: holistic and analytic cognitive styles.
They postulate that, as collectivists, East Asians will process information more holistically, seeing the relation between things, and individualists will process information more analytically, focusing on individual agents and objects. They show that these differences come out in a wide variety of psychological tasks. Here are some examples reviewed by Nisbett.
Westerners are more likely than Easterners to attribute a person's behavior to an internal trait rather than an environmental circumstance. In many cases, such attributions are mistaken social psychologists call this the Fundamental Attribution Error. Easterners are more likely to see both sides of a conflict when faced with counter-arguments in a debate; Westerners dig in their heels.
The Eastern responses are more dialectical, whereas Westerners are guided by the principle of Non-Contradiction. This is a principle central to modern logic in the West, which asserts that a claim and its negation can't both be right. Westerners tend to categorize objects based on shared features cows go with chickens because they are both animals , whereas Easterners focus more on relationships between objects cows go with grass, because cows eat grass. When looking at a fish tank, Westerners first notice the biggest, fastest fish and ignore the background.
Easterners are more likely to notice background features and relational events a fish swimming past some seaweed , and they are less likely to recall individual fish on a memory test. In studies of expectations, Westerners tend to expect things to remain the same, whereas Easterners are more likely to expect change.
In assessing the import of these differences, it is important to realize that they are often subtle. But the results show that there are predictable and replicable differences in default cognitive styles as a function of culture.
Several philosophical ramifications deserve note. First, variation in cognitive styles can be used to challenge the idea that the rules used in thought are fixed by a hard-wired mental logic. This idea was promulgated by Boole in his work on formal logic, and it helped pave the way for the advent of computing and, ultimately, for the computational theory of mind. If there is no fixed mental logic, then the study of reasoning may owe more to nurture than has often been assumed, and the traditional computational theory of mind might even need a re-examination.
Cultural differences do not refute computational approaches, but they raise a question: if some cultures tend to rely on formal principles and others rely on stochastic approaches to reasoning, then we should not by default assume that the mind naturally functions like a classical computer as opposed to, say, a connectionist computer.
Second, variation in reasoning can also be used to raise questions about whether certain cognitive norms such as a preference for the principle of non-contradiction are culturally inculcated and contestable. This issue is related to contemporary debates about whether classical logic is privileged. It was also the subject of a provocative paper by Winch , who, following ethnographic work by Evans-Pritchard on the logic of witchcraft among the Azanda, argued that the Western allegiance to bivalence is culturally contingent, rather than normatively compulsory.
Third, variation in perception raises questions about modularity; if values can influence how we see, then seeing may be more amendable to top-down influences than defenders of modularity have supposed. Citing work on the Mueller-Lyer illusion, Fodor argues that modularity is consistent with the possibility that cultural settings can, over protracted time periods, alter how information is processed.
But this concession may be inadequate: perceptual processing styles can be altered very quickly by priming cultural values such as individualism and collectivism. Moreover, unlike the Mueller-Lyer illusion, which may involve bottom-up perceptual learning, research on individualism and collectivism suggests that values can influence how we see.
That's close in spirit to the idea that perception is theory-laden, which was the central thesis of New Look psychology—the theory that the modularity hypothesis is supposed to challenge Bruner, ; Hanson, Emotions are a fundamental feature of human psychology. They are found in all cultures, and arguably, in all mammals. Indeed, we seem to share many emotions with other animals. Dogs, for example, show signs of fear they cower , sadness they cry , and delight they wag their tails giddily.
This suggests that emotions are evolved responses. There is a good explanation for why emotions would be selected for: they help us cope with challenges that have a tremendous impact on life and well-being. Fear protects us from dangers, sadness motivates us to withdraw when resources or kin are lost, and joy registers accomplishments and motivates us to take on new challenges.
Thus, it seems highly likely that emotions are part of human nature. But emotions can also be influenced by nurture. Some researchers even suggest that emotions can be socially constructed—they say some emotions come into existence through social learning. The thesis is controversial, of course, but the claim that culture has an impact on emotional states is hard to deny for a review, see Mesquita and Frijda, To see how culture might impact emotions, consider various things that normally occur when people have emotional responses.
There is some elicitor of the emotion; there is characteristically some appraisal of that elicitor; this occurs along with feelings ; and these are associated with motivational states as the body prepares to react; the emotion is also expressed ; and can lead to a decision about what actions to carry out, including complex strategic actions extended over time.
Each of these things can come under cultural influence. Begin with elicitors. Culture can clearly influence what arouses our emotions. In Bali, crawling babies are said to arouse disgust Geertz, , and in Japan, disgust can be caused by failing an exam Haidt et al. In Sumatra, an encounter with a high status individual can cause shame Fessler, In Iran, a woman without a headscarf might cause anger, and in France, a woman with a headscarf might cause the same reaction.
Feelings can differ cross-culturally, as well. For example, it has been reported that, while anger is typically associated with high arousal in the West, in Malay, anger or marah is more strongly associated with sullen brooding Goddard, There are corresponding differences in motivational states. Anger might instill a disposition to aggress in the West, whereas sulking behavior may be more typical in Malaysia.
In Malay, aggression is associated with amok , which refers as the imported homophone does in English to a frenzied state. Thus, there seems to be no exact synonym for anger: a state that is prototypically aggressive but not frenzied.
Culture can also impact expressions of emotions. This is sometimes done through active suppression. Ekman and Friesen present evidence that public expression of negative emotions is discouraged in Japan.
New expressions may also be cultivated culturally. There is evidence that tongue biting is used by women to express shame in parts of India Menon and Shweder, There are also cultural difference in gestures used to express anger, such as the middle finger in North America or the double finger salute in Britain.
As these gestures become habitual, they may become incorporated into automatic ways of expressing emotions in some contexts. In addition to emotional expressions, cultures can promote highly complex behavioral responses. Love is sometimes taken to be grounds for marriage, but less so in cultures where marriage is arranged. Grief in Biblical contexts might have been expressed by tearing ones clothes or covering oneself with dirt. Shame can require culturally specific behaviors of self-abasement, such as bowing low.
Hope may promote the use of lucky charms or prayers, depending on one's cultural beliefs. These examples suggest that culture can impact emotional response in a wide variety of ways. As a consequence, emotions that are widely recognized in one culture may go unnoticed or uninstantiated in another. One example is amae , a Japanese emotion construct, which is characterized as a positive feeling of dependency on another person, group, or institution Doi, Another example is the Samoan emotion of musu , which expresses a person's reluctance to do what is required of him or her.
In more isolated societies, it has even been argued that none of the named emotions correspond exactly to emotions that we would recognize here.
This may be the case among the Ifaluk, a small group in Micronesia Lutz, In arguing for cultural variation in emotions, researchers often cite differences in emotional vocabulary.
Such differences would not be especially powerful evidence were it not for independent evidence just discussed that culture can exert a causal impact. Vocabulary differences may also be evidential in another way. The very fact that a label exists in a language may have a causal impact on the frequency or manifestation of a psychological state.
For example, incidence and symptoms of depression may increase as a consequence of public discourse about depression Ryder et al. Depression as we know it may be culturally specific in the way it presents, even if there are related disorders in other cultures, such as melancholia and acidia in medieval Europe Jackson, Some emotional disorders may be common in one society and virtually unheard of elsewhere.
One example is latah , a disorder found among women in parts of South East Asia, in which victims enter a trance-like state, shout obscenities, repeat what others say to them, and exhibit an extremely strong and sensitive startle response Simons, Others resist this idea, arguing that emotions are innate biological programs, shared across the species despite differences in emotion vocabulary.
The latter position has been associated with evolutionary approaches to emotion Plutchik, , and research on universal recognition of emotional facial expressions Ekman et al.
Ekman and his collaborators studied an isolated culture, the Fore, in Papua New Guinea. These people had little contact with the West, and Ekman wondered whether they assign the same significance to emotional expressions as we do. He identified six emotions that are very reliably identified in Western nations joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust , and found corresponding words in Fore. He asked his respondents to look at photos of expressions and identify which faces go with which words.
He also described various scenarios such as seeing an old friend or smelling something bad and asked them to choose the face that best expressed how someone in those situations would feel. Using these methods, he was able to show that the Fore give responses that are very similar to the responses we give in the West. Ekman concluded that emotional expressions are not cultural inventions, but rather, are biologically determined.
A close look at Ekman's data suggests that he may exaggerate the degree of universality. The Fore do indeed respond similarly to their Western counterparts, but not identically. For example,they are more likely to label as fear the faces that we identify as surprise, and they also associate sadness with the faces we label angry. So the dominant response among the Fore differs from ours in two of six cases. Moreover, the Fore who had more exposure to outsiders also gave answers that were more like outsiders', suggesting some cultural influence see Russell, , for more discussion.
It doesn't follow that emotions are mere social constructions. Rather, it seems that we have biologically basic emotions that can be altered by culture. Whether these alternations qualify as different emotions or simply different manifestations of the same emotion depends on what one takes emotions to be.
The nature of emotions is a matter of considerable debate Prinz, For those who take emotions to essentially involve judgments, constructivist theories of emotion are attractive, because culture can influence how people construe situations Solomon, Constructivism is also appealing to those who think of emotions as analogous to scripts, which include everything from canonical eliciting to conditions to complex behavioral sequalae Russell, ; Goddard, ; Goldie, Those who see emotions as automatic behavioral programs or patterned bodily changes have been less inclined towards constructivism James, ; Darwin, ; Ekman, ; though see Prinz, Griffiths has argued that emotions are not a natural kind: some are culturally constructed scripts, others are automatic behavioral programs, and others are evolved strategic responses that unfold over longer timescales.
It might seem that we can't settle on the question of whether culture shapes emotions without deciding between these theories of what emotions are.
On the other hand, the evidence suggests that culture can influence every aspect of our emotional responses, and this suggests that, whatever emotions really are, culture can have an impact.
It is open to debate whether the impact is sufficiently significant to warrant the conclusion that some emotions are social constructs. Few deny that biology makes some contribution to morality. There is a vast literature on prosocial behavior in primates, moral behavior in early childhood, and universal dispositions to empathy and altruism e. But no account of moral psychology can stop with biology. Morality is also influenced by culture.
This raises traditional philosophical question about moral relativism. Evidence for cultural variation in values is easy to come by see Prinz, Consider, for example, attitudes towards various forms of violence. Cannibalism, slavery, honor killing, headhunting, public executions, and torture have been widely practiced by a range of societies, but are reviled in the contemporary West. There is also considerable diversity in the sexual domain: polygamy, cousin marriage, masturbation, bestiality, pre-marital sex, prostitution, concubinage, homosexuality, and other practices are accepted in some places and morally condemned elsewhere.
The anthropological record suggests that just about every behavior that we consider immoral has been an accepted cultural practice somewhere. Of course, a society wouldn't survive very long if it encouraged random killing of next-door neighbors, but societies that encourage murder of people in the next village can endure indefinitely see Chagnon, , on the Yanamamo. One can find further support of moral diversity by conducting psychological experiments on members of different cultures and subcultures.
Nisbett and Cohen compared Americans from Southern States with Americans from the North, and found that Southerners were much more likely to endorse violence of various forms in response to moral transgression killing to defend property, corporal punishment, gun possession, and so on. Cultural differences in morality have also been tested using economic games Henrich et al. If the stranger rejects the division, no one gets any of the money. In the U.
If they offer too little, the other person typically rejects the split out of spite, and both players go home empty handed. This is a measure of moral attitude towards fairness, and there are subtle differences across cultures. The Machiguenga of Peru, who have an economic system that does not depend much on cooperation, make lower offers on average than Americans, and they accept lower offers.
Hyper-fair offers may be regarded as ostentatious or as trying to achieve some kind of dominance by making the recipient feel indebted. Some philosophers have resisted the claim that there is cultural variation in morality.
Rachels chap. Inuits tolerate infanticide, but so would we if we lived in the Arctic tundra where resources are rare. Against this kind of reply, one might argue that, in fact, values don't tend to change right away when we change environments the U. Southern culture of honor may be a hold-over from hard times in Northern Ireland prior to U. Moreover, the fact that our attitudes toward infanticide might shift in the tundra might be taken as evidence for relativism rather than evidence against it; morality is highly sensitive to environmental variables.
Other critics have argued that we cannot adequately assess whether cultures differ in values. Moody-Adams argues that, absent a complete understanding of another culture's beliefs, we might mistake differences in factual beliefs for moral differences. For example, did the Aztecs really think cannibalism was okay, or were they driven to this practice because of a cosmology that made them think this was the only way to appease the Gods?
We may never know. On the other hand, anyone who is willing to concede that culture can alter people's non-moral beliefs might also concede that values can be altered. The most enduring philosophical debate about moral variation concerns metaethical relativism. Does moral diversity imply that there is no single true morality? On its own, the answer is no. But some relativists argue that that there is no source of morality other than our attitudes e. Others argue that appeals to cultural history adequately explain why we have moral values, so there is no pressure to posit a further domain of values that transcend culture Harman, These views do not entail that any morality is possible.
There may be a plurality of acceptable value systems, given human nature and the situations we find ourselves in Wong, Opponents of relativism think such pluralism is still too generous. Demands of reason Kant , intrinsic goods consequentialism , natural conditions for flourishing Aristotle , ideal observers Smith , and divine commands have all been explored as sources of absolute values. Cultural variation bears on traditional philosophical questions, such as questions about moral relativism, the modularity of perception, and incommensurability of meaning.
Cultural variation also bears on the practice of philosophy itself. Some have argued that philosophical theories are culturally informed, and that, therefore, philosophers who take themselves to be seeking universal truths must either revise their aspirations or alter their methodology. One place where this issue has been confronted is comparative philosophy. For example, scholars of philosophical traditions in East Asia sometimes wonder to what extent these are related to traditions in the West.
A skeptical view would say that the starting assumptions, guiding questions, and dominant methods are so different that comparison is of limited value. On the other extreme, one might think that one can simply treat Eastern and Western philosophers as if they were part of a single domain, and compare them easily just as one might compare two figures coming out of the same cultural heritage.
The idea that philosophical ideas are culturally informed has also been investigated empirically. Experimental philosophers have converted standard philosophical thought experiments into survey studies in an effort to see whether untutored intuitions align with those that have been endorsed by professional philosophers. Some experimental philosophers have used the survey method to do cross-cultural comparisons, most often comparing philosophical intuitions in the United States to those in China and other East Asian Countries.
The results suggest that there is cultural variation. In one pioneering study, Weinberg et al. Within recent Western epistemology, the most influential thought experiments owe to Edmund Gettier , who devised them in an effort to argue against the prevailing view that knowledge is justified true belief. These cases are supposed to show that a belief can be justified and true, without being an intuitive case of knowledge. For example, it is a majority view within Western philosophy that the following Gettier-inspired case does not qualify as knowledge:.
Bob has a friend, Jill, who has driven a Buick for many years. Bob therefore thinks that Jill drives an American car. He is not aware, however, that her Buick has recently been stolen, and he is also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a Pontiac, which is a different kind of American car.
Does Bob really know that Jill drives an American car, or does he only believe it? Weinberg et al. Most European Americans shared the intuition that Bob does not know that Jill drives an American car, but the majority of East and South Asians had the opposite intuition. Another cross-cultural study of philosophical intuitions is reported by Machery et al.
They turned from epistemology to semantics, and found that one of the most influential thought experiments in the philosophy of language elicits different intuitions across cultural groups. The thought experiment owes to Kripke , who was arguing against descriptive theories of reference. According to descriptive theories, a proper name refers to the individual who satisfies the descriptions most associated with that name. That intuition counts against descpritvism and in favor of a causal-historical theory of reference.
Machery et al. In another study, Huebner et al. Block argued against functionalism using thought experiments in which the functional organization of a human mind is realized by a population of people rather than a biological brain. Block's intuition is that this collective would not be conscious, and therefore functional organization in not sufficient for consciousness.
Huebner et al. They conclude that the intuitions underlying Block's argument are not cross-culturally shared. The authors of these studies emphasize two points. First, the standard method of drawing philosophical conclusions by consulting intuitions may be problematic because those intuitions are not consistently held across cultures. If philosophers seek to discover the nature of knowledge, reference, or consciousness, by analyzing the corresponding concepts, they must reckon with the fact that these concepts vary, and no single analysis is likely to emerge.
Second, some of the variance may be accounted for by cultural variables. This suggests that concepts are culturally influenced, and that philosophical theories based on concepts may reflect the attitudes of a cultural group, rather than universally shared understanding of the target domain.
From this perspective, philosophy based on intuitive judgments begins to look more like auto-anthropology than a window into absolute truths. Opponents of experimental philosophy argue that surveys of college students reveal less about concepts than the intuitions of professional philosophers.
These critics suggest that intuitions among professional philosophers engaged in careful discussion and argumentation are more likely to converge and are more reliable. But, this prognosis may be overly optimistic. Professional philosophers within the same culture do not converge, so there is little prima facie reason to expect cross-cultural converge.
Moreover, it's important to bear in mind that intuitions are tapping into semantic knowledge, and semantic knowledge is not based on recollection of perfect forms in Plato's heaven. Rather, it is informed by everything from explicit instruction to language use within the community, and salient exemplars. These sources of semantic knowledge may vary cross-culturally.
Thus, it remains possible that cherished philosophical theories are more parochial than we assumed. If so, research on the cognitive science of culture has important implications for philosophical practice. What is Culture? Cultural Transmission 2. Examples of Cultural Influence 3.
Emotions 3. Cultural Transmission One common thread in the definitions just surveyed is that culture is socially transmitted.
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