Culture – Chapter 2 Notes (Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age)

2.1 What is Culture?

Culture: A system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, shared, and contested by a group of people.
Culture Is Learned and Taught
- Enculturation: The process of learning culture.
Culture Is Shared Yet Contested
Culture Is Symbolic and Material
- Norms: Ideas or rules about how people should behave in particular situations or toward certain other people.
- Values: Fundamental beliefs about what is important, what makes a good life, and what is true, right, and beautiful.
- Symbol: Anything that represents something else.
- Mental maps of reality: Cultural classifications of what kinds of people and things exist, and the assignment of meaning to those classifications.
Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights
- Cultural relativism: Understanding a group’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural context, without making judgments.
Cultural Appropriation
- Cultural appropriation: The unwanted taking of cultural practices or knowledge from one group by another, more dominant group.

Early Evolutionary Frameworks
- Unilineal cultural evolution: The theory proposed by nineteenth- century anthropologists that all cultures naturally evolve through the same sequence of stages from simple to complex.
American historical Particularism
- Historical particularism: The idea, attributed to Franz Boas, that cultures develop in specific ways because of their unique histories.
British Structural Functionalism
- Society: The focus of early British anthropological research whose structure and function could be isolated and studied scientifically.
- Structural functionalism: A conceptual framework positing that each element of society serves a particular function to keep the entire system in equilibrium.
Culture and Meaning
- Interpretivist approach: A conceptual framework that sees culture primarily as a symbolic system of deep meaning.
- Thick description: A research strategy that combines detailed description of cultural activity with an analysis of the layers of deep cultural meaning in which those activities are embedded.

Power: The ability or potential to bring about change through action or influence.
Stratification: The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among members of a group or culture.
Power and Cultural Institutions
Hegemony
- Hegemony: The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force.
Human agency
- Agency: The potential power of individuals and groups to contest cultural norms, values, mental maps of reality, symbols, institutions, and structures of power.

Nature and Nurture
From Human Beings to Human Becomings
- Epigenetics: An area of study in the field of genetics exploring how environmental factors directly affect the expression of genes during one’s lifetime.
- Human microbiome: The complete collection of microorganisms in the human body’s ecosystem.
Connecting Culture and Behavior