Human Culture: Understanding Its Impact and Diversity
Culture as a Humanizing Factor
Culture is the main factor in humanization. Over millions of years, a process of hominization and humanization has occurred. Culture appears in all its essential aspects. If the biological and genetic determination with which we come into the world is what we consider our natural dimension, then culture is the set of information acquired through social learning. Even animals would have some kind of hominid culture because they can transmit behaviors. Language allows the transmission and assimilation of new behaviors, skills, knowledge, or information at a distance. We can say that language is the cause of cumulative cultural information and highlights the dynamic range of human culture. Thus, human culture is the set of socially transmitted information acquired through language. Culture has an adaptive value.
Fundamental Content of Human Culture
Culture resides in individuals as cultural content that is stored in the brain, but each individual has information that is shared by different members of the same group. Types of information:
- Descriptive: Explains and represents reality, permitting the operation and understanding of the characteristics of our environment. These are grouped into different groups depending on the degree of certainty and objectivity provided (e.g., science, myths).
- Practical: Provides guidelines for action, teaches tasks effectively, and trains in developing and modifying the environment.
- Value: Originates feelings of attraction or rejection of what surrounds us, allowing us to appreciate what surrounds us as desirable and worthy goods. It allows for the possession of rules, prejudices, and ethical values.
Cultural Diversity
Culture is a differentiating trait of human beings. We can say that there is not only one culture but many. This plurality of cultures is known as cultural diversity. Unlike animals, humans are open and not scheduled to be set permanently but respond to the freedom to determine their conduct. Throughout history, the isolation and lack of contact between different groups inhabiting the land have favored difference and cultural diversity.
Different Perspectives on Cultural Diversity
- Ethnocentrism: The attitude of judging and valuing the culture of other groups from one’s own.
- Racism: Any belief, attitude, or behavior based on the consideration that there are superior races.
- Xenophobia: An attitude of contempt and rejection of anything foreign or strange.
- Cultural Relativism: Based on the belief that every culture has value in itself.
- Universalism: Rejection of ethnocentric proposals to prevent conflict with other cultures, based on dialogue.
- Interculturalism and Dialogue: This position stems from the recognition of cultural plurality as an enriching fact.
Towards Cultural Convergence
Today, the powerful development of communication media is erasing the gap and ending isolation. For this reason, we say that we are at a time of unprecedented cultural convergence.
Cultural Dynamics
These transformations occur in a process called cultural dynamics. Types of cultural transformations:
- Cultural Mutation: The mutation may be due to voluntary intention and is then called invention.
- Cultural Transmission: Cultural information is transported vertically or horizontally.
- Cultural Diffusion or Contagion: Assumes the transfer of elements from other cultures and their adoption as their own.
- Cultural Drift: This fact is given when a culture is fragmented into sub-groups or cultural selection.
- Cultural Selection: Cultural innovations that are effective remain, and members of the group choose and prefer them rationally.