Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 60

Whatever end you hope to achieve through cultural anthropology, the means are going to be a study of culture. Culture has been defined in many ways; I give you a definition in the section “The biocultural animal” earlier in this chapter, and you can take entire graduate-level courses just to grapple with culture theory. Generally speaking, culture encompasses everything from attitudes toward material objects to philosophical, political, and religious concepts.

Important features of culture include the following:

 Culture isn’t genetic; it’s learned. Each new generation doesn’t receive it in genes but from parents, siblings, and anyone else in the culture (largely through language).

 Culture is shared among a population, but it allows variation within it. Individuals of a culture may have their own interpretations of the culture’s set of descriptions of the universe and instructions for how to live properly in it. This discrepancy is important because it recognizes a major characteristic of humanity: individuality, the fact that humans aren’t typically of one mind but rather are individuals with a great deal of individual personality (humans are messy in this way!).

 Cultural information is often symbolic. Symbols — which are linguistic, visual, and gestural metaphors that stand for something else — are heavily influential in the communication of culture from one generation to the next.

Although cultural information rides in the brain, humans can also express it physically. Material objects — for example, seagoing canoes, totem poles, or sports cars — are also expressions of certain cultural ideas. Even the most apparently utilitarian artifacts, like writing pens, can and often do carry cultural information. A glitter-spangled, bubblegum-pink pen is more likely to belong to an adolescent girl than to a public official; the official probably requires a fancier pen to project a certain image in public ceremonies. Material objects, then, constitute culture; some call the study of such items the study of material culture. Because archaeologists study ancient cultures through their artifacts — which are material culture — they’ve made the most thorough studies of material culture.