Culture is a term used by social scientists for a way
of life. Every human
society has a culture. Culture includes a society's
arts, beliefs, customs,
institutions, inventions, language, technology, and
values. A culture
produces similar behavior and thought among most
people in a particular
society. To learn about a culture, one may ask such
questions as these:
What language do the people speak? What do the people
of the society
wear? How do they prepare their food? What kind of
dwellings do they live
in? What kind of work do they do? How do they govern
themselves? How
do they judge right from wrong?
People are not born with any knowledge of a culture.
They generally learn
a culture by growing up in a particular society. They
learn mainly through
the use of language, especially by talking and
listening to other members
of the society. They also learn by watching and
imitating various
behaviors in the society. The process by which
people-especially childrenlearn
their society's culture is called enculturation.
Through enculturation,
a culture is shared with members of a society and
passed from one
generation to the next. Enculturation unifies people
of a society by
providing them with common experiences.
The term civilization is similar to culture, but it
refers mostly to cultures
that have complex economic, governmental, and social
systems. A
civilization is technologically more advanced than
other cultures of its
time. A culture is any way of life, be it simple or
complex, advanced or not
advanced.
For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have
had at least some
of the biological abilities on which culture depends.
These abilities are to
learn, to use language and other symbols, and to
employ tools to organize
their lives and adapt to their environments. Besides
human beings, other
animals also have such elements of culture as the
ability to make and use
tools and the ability to communicate. For example,
elephants break off
tree branches and wave them with their trunks to brush
off flies. Dolphins
communicate with one another by means of barks,
whistles, and other
sounds. But no other animals have developed language
and other symbols
as complex as those of human beings. Thus, no other
animal possesses to
the same extent the abilities to learn, to
communicate, and to store,
process, and use information.
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