Culture is the complex whole of a society: a way of life, beliefs, values, rules, customs, traditions, and more. It influences the ways that people think, feel, and act, and determines many other aspects of their lives – like humor, loyalties, and even their worries and fears. For this reason, it’s important to have a good understanding of what culture is before you can effectively work with people.
There are numerous definitions of culture, but there are a few common themes that run throughout them all: culture is learned, shared, symbolic, holistic, integrated, and dynamic. It also tends to be a fluid concept, changing and evolving as people adapt and evolve over time.
Cultural theory seeks to understand how and why these characteristics come about. Some scholars believe that cultures are the product of evolution; others take a more historical approach to this question and focus on particular events or epochs that shape and guide the development of cultural characteristics. Some researchers also view culture as a construct, created by socially minded individuals or groups who seek to organize their society and make sense of their world in particular ways.
The way that a culture develops is often determined by the environment in which it exists, with some cultural traits having more adaptive value in one place than in another. For example, the Eskimo culture developed specific features in response to its cold climate: tailored fur clothing, harpoons and boats for hunting sea mammals, and hemispherical snow houses known as igloos. Other cultural traits, however, may not be so adaptive and remain unchanged over time.
While these factors are certainly influential, it’s important to remember that culture is an evolving construct that is not fixed in the past. People will change and adapt over time, and it’s important to recognize these changes and incorporate them into your cultural knowledge base.
This is where the field of anthropology comes in, and the articles featured in this spotlight series offer new and different approaches to understanding and investigating cultural diversity and differences in human behavior and development. These six articles all go that extra conceptual step to move our thinking about and investigations of culture into new substantive directions.
This collection is a valuable resource for teachers and students alike. It contains high quality, curated resources on all aspects of culture, from its origins to its current state. It’s easy to search by time period and topic, making it a useful tool for research in global cultural history. It also includes primary sources, which is something that is often difficult to find elsewhere. This small but growing collection should help you better understand the complexity of culture and all it encompasses. This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the study of culture, and it should be a must-have for any library or classroom.