Human Culture: Key Factors and Social Learning
Humanizing Factor: Culture
Culture is a main humanizing factor. In the process of hominization, over millions of years, not only is the production of hominization important, but also culture is in everything and produces humanization. The social realm determines the appearance of culture. If we consider that the biological and genetic connection with the world is our natural dimension, then we can consider culture as the set of information acquired through social learning. Therefore, animals would not have culture, and hominids would have the capacity to transmit behaviors.
Language and the Acquisition of New Behaviors
Language permits the transmission and assimilation of new behaviors, techniques, knowledge, or information at a distance. Therefore, language could be the cause of the cumulative character of cultural information in human culture, highlighting the dynamic range and richness of human culture. Thus, we can say that culture is the set of information acquired socially and transmitted through language. Culture has an adaptive value.
Fundamentals of Human Culture
- Cultural Diversity in Individuals: Cultural contents are stored in the brain, but the information is shared by the different members of a group.
- Types of Information:
- Descriptive: Explains the characteristics of the environment, permitting the understanding of its operation. They can be grouped into different grades of certainty and objectivity (science, myths, etc.).
- Practical: Provides action patterns, teaches how to act effectively, and trains in techniques for environmental modification.
- Value: Originates feelings of attraction or rejection towards what surrounds us, allowing us to value what surrounds us as estimable and worthy goods. They also allow for the possession of valuations, prejudices, and ethics.
Cultural Diversity
Culture is a differentiating feature of humans. We can say that we have not only one culture but many. This plurality of cultures is called cultural diversity. Humans are open beings, not animals scheduled to respond in a fixed way, but they possess the liberty to determine their behavior. Throughout history, isolation and lack of contact between groups that populate the Earth have favored difference and diversity.
Positions on Cultural Diversity
- Ethnocentrism: The attitude by which other groups are judged and valued from one’s own culture.
- Racism: Any attitude or behavior based on the consideration that there are superior races.
- Xenophobia: Attitude of contempt and rejection towards foreigners or strangers.
- Cultural Relativism: Based on the belief that each culture has value in itself.
- Universalism: Avoids ethnocentric propositions that oppose one culture to another, based on dialogue.
- Interculturalism and Dialogue: This position arises from the recognition of enriching multiculturalism.
Convergence Towards Culture
Currently, the development of the media is erasing distances and ending isolation. For this reason, it is said that we are in a moment of cultural convergence without precedent.
Cultural Dynamics
These transformations occur in a process called the dynamics of culture.
Types of Cultural Transformations
- Cultural Mutation: The mutation may be due to a voluntary intention called invention.
- Cultural Transmission: Cultural information is transmitted vertically or horizontally.
- Diffusion or Cultural Transmission: Transfer of elements from other cultures and their adoption as one’s own.
- Cultural Drift: This occurs when a culture fragments into cultural groups or subgroups.
- Cultural Selection: Cultural innovations that are effective are maintained, and the members of the group prefer and choose them rationally.