What is Culture ?

What is Culture ? | The word culture has many different meanings. For example, we sometimes say that people who know about art, music and literature are cultured. However, the word culture has different meaning for anthropologists (people who study humankind). To an anthropologists the word culture means all the ways in which a group of people act, dress, think and feel. People have to learn the cultural ways of their community; they are not something that the people in the group are born with.

Instinctive behavior is a pattern of behavior that an animal is born with. Spiders spinning their webs are examples of instinctive behavior. The mother spider does not teach her babies how to spin webs (in fact, she is not even there when they are born). They know how to do it when they are born. This is what we mean by instinctive behavior. Baby birds will instinctively run away if a cardboard shape of a hawk is moved forwards over their heads. However, they do not run if the cardboard shape is moved backwards. Hawks do not fly backwards, so the baby birds instinct does not tell them that trere is any danger. Their instinct is quite specific. The shape of the hawk must be moving in the correct direction.

As humans, we learn some of the ways of our culture by being taught by our teachers or parents. We learn more of the ways of our culture by growing up in it. We see how other people in our culture do things, and we do them in the same way. We even learn how to think and feel in this way.

All human beings have certain basic needs, such as eating, drinking, keeping warm and dry, and so on. However, the way in which they take care of these needs depends on the culture in which they grow up. All cultures have ways of eating, drinking, dressing, finding shelter, marrying, and dealing with death. The foods that we think are good to eat, the kinds of clothes we wear, and how many people we can marry at one time are all parts of our culture.

Our own culture seems very natural to us. We feel in our hearts that the way that we do things is the only right way to do them. Other people’s cultures often make us laugh or feel disgusted or shocked. We may laugh at clothing that seems ridiculous to us. Many people think that eating octopus or a juicy red piece of roast beef is disguisting. The idea that brothers and sisters can marry each other may shock other cultures.

Ideas of what is beautiful differ from one culture to another. The flathead Indians of North America used to bind the heads of babies between boards so they would have long sloping foreheads. In the flathead culture, long sloaping foreheads were beautiful. Other cultures might think that they are strange – looking and unattractive. 

The chinese used to bind women’s feet because they regarded small feet as beautiful. (These small were also a sign that the husband was wealthy. Because the women could not work very well, they could not do much housework, and so the small feet showed that the husband could afford to have many servants.)

When people die, different cultures dispose of their bodies in different ways. Sometimes bodies are burned. Sometimes bodies are buried in the ground. In many cultures in the past, people were buried with food, weapons, jewelry, and other things that might be useful in the next life. For example, the ancient Egyptians buried people with little human figures made from clay. These clay figures were supposed to work for the dead person in the other world. A religious group called the Parsees exposed their dead on platforms for birds to eat. Some people practice a second burial. After the bodies have been in the earth for several years, the bones are dug up and reburied, sometimes in a smaller container.