Category: Contours of Culture

The concept of culture that we have discussed was evolved by scholars studying uni-cultural societies—small tribal societies that were regarded as non-changing, Western societies sharing a common civilization, and large indigenous societies of the East having a civilizational spread. Such large societies became some sort of melting pot in which regional and religious cultures merged…

A culture consists of elements or traits, complexes, norms and institutions. The smallest unit of culture is a Trait or an Element. It is a pattern of behaviour or a material product of such behaviour that is easily identifiable. Each item of the material culture, be it in the kitchen or the drawing room or the marketplace, is an…

Let us now enumerate the key characteristics of culture. This consequence alerts us to the fact that cultures change as a result of interactions, both between members of a society and with non-members—with visitors, or when natives visit other societies. Integration also suggests that different aspects of culture are so intertwined that any change brought…

The concept of culture is one of the significant contributions of the discipline of anthropology to the understanding of society in an interdisciplinary perspective, meticulously developed by Talcott Parsons and his co-authors. Since sociology is the study of the social sphere, the concept of culture is central to its concerns. Studying far-off, pre-literate societies, anthropologists…

A new line of research that took social and cultural anthropologists to our primitive contemporaries8 gave prime focus to living cultures. Those following the evolutionary approach regarded these primitive communities/tribes living in isolated existence as the contemporary representatives of the culture that we ‘moderns’ might have lived. Their approach can be illustrated thus:   Figure 4.3 Evolution…

Preliterate societies, with no written history, passed on information from one generation to another through oral communication. Anthropologists working with them had the difficult task of documenting their material and non-material culture. Archaeologists working on long-disappeared cultures unearthed the origins of culture by developing the skills to read or hear stories from fossils, and from…

It is only Man whose behaviour is largely learnt and, therefore, differs from society to society. He has an enormous capacity to learn, to forget, and to relearn. A child of Indian parentage brought up, say, in an African tribal setting, will acquire the culture of the place of his habitation; similarly, a Nuer or a…

Living in groups is a characteristic that humans share with other animals, particularly primates. Some animals lower than Homo Sapiens (meaning intelligent being) are also found to be gregarious, having some sort of group life. Even ants are found to have social organization! What distinguishes Man from other biological beings, however, is his capacity to build culture.…