Defining culture

Prof. F BEDJAOUI

Defining Culture

   The concept is highly abstract and also used in an anthropological sense. Thus, cultural anthropology aims at producing concepts and other elements which are universal, objective and theoretically significant. This discipline, for  example,  as compared to Linguistics had developed very little internationally agreed terminology. Everything the researcher may attempt to express in comparing cultures, could be only appropriately tentative, as the conceptual framework does not yet exist to allow it to remain at all definitive.

    Behind such a generalisation lies the  hard  fact that there are  rival  schools of cultural anthropology. Among them, the Functionist school which suggests that each culture is a unique reality and that cross cultural comparison does not make sense.

    Indeed, this might be a respectable theoretical positon to hold. When one tries to translate a target culture into the original culture, one cannot avoid comparing the two cultures nor can one  help judge how far such a  translation  has been  successful. Thus,  one will find oneself inevitably predisposed towards those schools of anthropology which allow cross-cultural contrasts at the  level of individual action, attitude and decision  making. The Configurationist, the school which encourages such analyses, was  founded by Ruth Benedict (1887-1948)  who believes that the cultural patterns, configurations  of a given society select particular character types out of the range of possible human  behaviour that  the society encourages, while inhibiting opposite types.

     R. Benedict(1934) explains that each culture over the ages had developed a distinctive psychological type or orientation towards reality called culture configuration (Murphy@2001) and that this set determines how its  members see and  process information from the environment. Culture is distinctive from one society to the other, as  it plays a great role in structuring the social actions of its members and it affects the way in which the mind works.

    Yet, this model remains too simplistic, lacking any scope for  the individual culture to  be measured against the universal cultural needs of man or for  the  individual human  being to modify the culture into which he was  born. In  Weltes’s theoretical paper entitled   The Interrelationships Of  Individual, Cultural And Pan-Human Values, the authors locates values, defined as  elements of underlying cognitive structure, at the heart of the  decision-making process since values  are  involved  in cognition, emotion and connotation. Whereas  they are distinct from one culture  to another, the power of a culture to shape the individual’s values is in  no  way determinist  ( Welte, 1977 ). In this respect Welte’s point of view follows that  of  Morris Opler’s, notably that the individual uses and modifies his culture for  his own  ends quite  as  much as he is dominated by it (Opler,1964). The psychological basis of a culture  resides in the aptitude to  transcend what has been learned but also a capacity for change, reorganisation and creativity.

Culture as a Component of Individual and Societal Developments

    It is important to recognize and understand the key concepts of this research work. Throughout this study, they are used in many contexts and it is impossible to review with justice, but it deserves to be perused with care and persistence.This is true for culture for it could be either an individual , a national or an ethnic phenomenon . It is considered to be both general and specific. It is general because many expressions  are common, but it is specific, because individuals are different and the differences are also important within a given culture. In other words it is never possible for one person to know  all  of a culture for one  experiences and learns culture, or rather cultures differently. In fact, one is exposed to different sub-cultures and cultures through one’s lives and learns different aspects of these cultures. In a similar way, linguists talk about idiolects, i.e. the individual adaptation of the language that we each speak. Culture is not  an isolated item, it is an integral part of the public and private life :

culture comprises the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, intellectual and emotional  features that characterize society or social groups. It includes not only the  arts  and   letters, but also different modes of life, the fundamental rights of human beings, values ,  systems, traditions and beliefs.

 ( Hooper , 2000 :  22-23 )

   Anthropologists enlarge this concept to the notion of sharing . Culture is a set of shared understandings in terms of which societal interactions occur and includes the means by which shared understandings are generated and maintained through time. It provides its bearers pathways to either a satisfying life or survival. Without culture every where we see the beginnings of confusion and we want a due   to some order and   authority.

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