Nature and Culture: Understanding Human Social Dynamics

Posted on Jan 16, 2025 in Psychology and Sociology

Nature and culture are not contradictory but complementary:

• Nature is, in large part, our heritage and biological evolution.
• Culture is everything a human being has incorporated through their own human and social activity, the natural process of development of their lives, their biological culture. We produce nature creatively; we can overcome environmental constraints.

Culture is the set of all components of our human life that are transmitted, socially learned, and taught, whether they belong to the material or the spiritual realm, as E.B. Tylor defined it: “The arts, in a wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, law, customs, and any other capabilities and areas acquired by the human being as a member of society.”

Enculturation is the process by which individuals acquire patterns and models.

Cultural anthropology aims to describe and analyze cultures using an appropriate method.

Features of Culture

1. Culture is learned: It is not something given, which simply appears. We need to integrate into a culture and learn it.
2. Culture is a symbolic form of communication and union between individuals.
3. Culture is subjected to nature: Biological needs do not live directly but are interpreted by culture, are covered by the cultural.
4. Culture is general and specific.
5. Culture encompasses everything: Nothing is outside of culture.
6. Culture is shared: It is an attribute not of isolated individuals but of individuals as a group.
7. Culture is adaptive and maladaptive: Humans can adapt to nature through culture, but certain cultural forms can be maladaptive because they endanger the continuity of the human species on Earth.

Elements of Culture

• Institutions: Patterns of normative behavior.
• Ideas: Knowledge, beliefs, or values shared by a group.
• Material: What is produced by it is the physical cultural world.
• Techniques: Ways to make and produce at large.

Typologies

• Real culture: What a particular society thinks and does during their life.
• Ideal culture: The ideal model for a society.
• Subculture: Formed by a social group that owns and transmits a series of cultural patterns that differ from those of the dominant culture.
• Counterculture: A subculture whose ways of feeling or acting deliberately challenge the dominant culture.

Relationship to the Individual

Without culture, there is no individual, but individuals are merely a result of the culture to which they belong, the one who can change the culture, the culture that keeps us alive. It determines us, but it conditions us.

Attitudes Towards Cultural Diversity

1. Ethnocentric attitude: The attitude to other cultures is referred from one’s own. Others must adapt to my culture if they want to live with me.
2. Attitude of cultural relativism: Cultures cannot be judged from outside. Each culture entails a way of understanding the world exclusive of any other.
3. Attitude of cultural hospitality: Respect for other cultures is necessary.

Dialogue is Central

• An awareness of our own tradition.
• A process of distancing from cultural heritages.
• A novel rediscovery of their own tradition through the eyes of another culture.
• An encounter that reveals deep common humanity.

Schools of Thought in Cultural Anthropology