Analyzing one of the definitions of culture (original) (raw)
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A DISCUSSION OF THE NOTION OF CULTURE
The concept of culture has long been a hotly contested issue. In his 1997 work Anthropological Linguistics, Duranti (1997: 23-50) makes a review of six theories of culture in which language plays a particularly important role.-CULTURE AS DISTINCT FROM NATURE The first view of culture is that of something learned, transmitted, passed down from one generation to the next, through the human actions, either in face-to-face interaction or through linguistic communication. This view of culture as learned is often understood in opposition to the view of human behaviour as a product from nature, hence the nature/nurture dichotomy.-CULTURE AS KNOWLEDGE The second view is to interpret culture in terms of knowledge of the world. This does not only mean that members of a culture must know certain facts or be able to recognize objects, places, and people. It also means that they must share certain patterns of thought, ways of understanding the world, making inferences and predictions.-CULTURE AS COMMUNICATION The third view is the semiotic theory of culture that takes culture as communication, i.e., as a system of signs. In its most basic version, this view holds that culture is a representation of the world, a way of making sense of reality by objectifying it in stories, myths, descriptions, theories, proverbs, artistic products and performances.-CULTURE AS A SYSTEM OF MEDIATION The fourth theory sees culture as a system of mediation. The common use of a language is believed to take place at the same level as the common use of all of the objects which surround us in the society in which we were born and in which we live. In this view, culture includes material objects such as the umbrella and ideational objects such as belief systems and linguistic codes. Both material and ideational structures are instruments through which humans mediate their relationship with the world.-CULTURE AS A SYSTEM OF PRACTICES The fifth theory views culture as a system of practices. It emphasizes the fact that the human actor can culturally exist and function only as a participant in a series of habitual activities that are both presupposed and reproduced by his individual actions.-CULTURE AS A SYSTEM OF PARTICIPATION Related to culture as a system of practices is the sixth theory, the idea of culture as a system of participation. It is based on the assumption that any action in the world, including verbal communication, has an inherently social, collective, and participatory quality. This notion of culture is particularly useful for looking at how language is used in the real world because to speak a language means to be able to participate in interactions with a world that is always larger than we as individual speakers, and even larger than what we can see and touch in any given situation.
Analyzing a definition of Culture
Analyzing one of the definitions of culture which is : “Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving”
The Concept of Culture from a Logical and Epistemological Perspective
Asian Culture and History, 2016
The concept of culture refers to many states of meaning. Among these, the most common ones are those that are related to institutional phenomena. Institutional phenomena express different lifestyles. Each lifestyle has its specific structure. This structure is based on special rules deriving from social use and tradition. Special rules make the epistemological and logical aspects of the life different and unique. In this respect, the boundaries of knowledge in a certain lifestyle are determined by the scope of that specific lifestyle; the possibility of knowledge depends on participation in this lifestyle; the source of knowledge is the tradition on which the relevant lifestyle relies, and the criterion of knowledge is coherence. Besides, each lifestyle has its unique and special logical structure. When this logical structure is considered as a parallel logic that observes all the rules of the general logic, then the expressions and inferences that are based on it seem to be consistent and valid.
The term of ‘culture’ is probably noticeable by a large amount of society. If you are a graduated person—have taken the series of educational level, at least elementary school in common, hearing this word is quite a usual thing. Even though it seems like almost all of you are already familiar with the term of ‘culture’, can you give your own interpretation of what culture really is? Do you recognize the culture’s existence within your community? How much does culture influence your way of thinking or doing something? Which culture does occur in you environment? Why should you understand and learn about this matter?
Culture, a micro and macro-historical phenomenon and process
Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences
Culture, as a sign of identity, becomes a contentious issue now more alive when creating a strategy more strongly integrated cultures. Cultural identities have become, contrary to these trends integrative elements beyond stereotype, structures considered "standard", saying the multiplicity of cultural phenomenon, where the plurality of forms and cultures does not threaten anything universality. Recognition of cultural diversity as a phenomenon, but also as a process, involving value, historical essential condition of survival. Cultural entities, in all their the inner diversity demonstrates that universal as the key concept of the contemporary world cannot be understood outside the cultural analysis that structures, identity. Evaluation and enhancement of a specific ethno-geographic zones and areas, in our case that presented the works they submit to analysis, demonstrates once again that involves macro-history "local history" means universal and the particular cultural level, not as simple mathematical sum, but primarily as a historical value.
Thesis Eleven, 1997
The article inquires into the uneasiness of sociological systems theory about culture. Culture alternatively is called the solution to the problem of double contingency (Parsons) and removed from this solution (Luhmann). It is shown that meaning is the more basic term whose description reveals a form rule of social systems which is only patterned, yet not understood by culture. Culture is a memory and control device of society. It may be conceived of as providing the distinction of correct versus incorrect behaviour. But who decides on the correctness or incorrectness of this distinction? Sociological thinking takes off where the cultural and the social are distinguished. key words: closure, culture, meaning, society, systems