Culture (Things Fall Apart Background)

Culture

Culture - The total way of life held in common by a group of people, including technology, traditions, language, and social roles. It is learned and handed-down from one generation to the next by non biological means. It includes the patterns of human behavior (i.e. ideas, beliefs, values, artifacts, and ways of making a living) which any society transmits to succeeding generations to meet its fundamental needs.
Cultural traits - Distinguishing features of a culture such as language, dress, religion, values, and an emphasis on family; these traits are shared throughout that culture.
(The University of the State of New York The State Education DepartmentAlbany, New York 12234 www.nysed.gov 2006)
These are learned behavior patterns that are shared by all of humanity collectively. No matter where people live in the world, they share these universal traits. Examples of such "human cultural" traits include:
1.
communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences
2.
using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)
3.
classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms to refer tothem (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)
4.
raising children in some sort of family setting
5.
having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men's work versus women's work)
6.
having a concept of privacy
7.
having rules to regulate sexual behavior
8.
distinguishing between good and bad behavior
9.
having some sort of body ornamentation
10.
making jokes and playing games
11.
having art
12.
having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions
While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own specific ways of carrying out or expressing them. For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language. However, sign languages have grammatical rules just as verbal ones do.
Culture is created and transmitted to others in a society. Cultures are not the product of lone individuals. They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other. Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people. If you were the only human on earth, there would be no need for language or government.
O’Neil, Dennis. What Is Culture. © 2002-2006.<>
Cultural Transmission- “The primary channel of transmission of culture is the family: [including] …a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote. No man wholly escapes from the kind, or wholly surpasses the degree, of culture which he acquired from his early environment. It would not do to suggest that this can be the only channel of transmission: in a society of any complexity it is supplemented and continued by other conduits of tradition…”
T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), 115-16.