Understanding Cultural Dynamics: Infrastructure to Superstructure
Infrastructure, Structure, and Superstructure
Culture can be understood through three interconnected levels:
1. Infrastructure
This level comprises two key components:
- Technologies and productive/reproductive activities: These activities provide food and shelter, protect against disease, and address basic human needs and impulses.
- Environmental influence: This refers to how a corporation’s natural habitat limits or enables the production of goods and reproduction, including the methods used to manage population growth.
2. Structure
This level consists of the groups, organizations, and institutions that facilitate human action. They distribute, regulate, and exchange goods, labor, and information.
The elements of the structure are the ways in which a human group is equipped to carry out its functions. The structure is the specific organization of production and reproduction, responding to the functions individuals must perform, such as education.
3. Superstructure
This level encompasses thoughts and behaviors related to artistic, recreational, religious, and intellectual pursuits. It includes all mental aspects of a culture.
The superstructure defines a society’s thought. Religion, for example, provides tools for social control. All people possess some form of religious thought as part of their culture.
Emic and Etic Perspectives
1. Emic Perspective
This includes the descriptions, judgments, reasons, and justifications provided by participants within a culture regarding their actions, customs, beliefs, and values. It’s an internal, endocentric viewpoint, often referred to as the culture’s idiosyncrasy. It always begins with the participant’s perspective and justifies behaviors with cultural materials.
2. Etic Perspective
This encompasses the reasons an external observer provides for a culture’s events, behavioral patterns, and ideologies, regardless of the internal viewpoint. It’s an external critique of the culture, serving as an analysis of its workings.
Ethnocentrism and Cultural Processes
Ethnocentrism
This is the tendency to believe one’s own culture is superior, more beautiful, important, and natural than others. It involves judging other cultures’ features, styles, ideas, and values as inferior and less natural. This often leads to intolerance and has historically characterized Western culture’s view of other cultures as savage, backward, or even inhumane.
Enculturation
Culture within a society tends to exhibit similarities across generations. Enculturation is the process by which subsequent generations acquire the behaviors and norms of previous ones. This occurs as a means of control, with older generations encouraging younger ones to adopt traditional ways of behaving. When encouragement becomes obligation, enculturation is more pronounced.
Inculturation
Inculturation involves inserting the mental and behavioral aspects of one culture into another.
Inculturation establishes a new culture and the recognition of its superiority. Any act of inculturation benefits the culture being imposed. It’s an exercise of power, pressing the individual to conform. It operates on the three levels of culture:
- Superstructure (Ideological): It conveys the idea that cultural change will be beneficial.
- Structural: It involves legal, religious, and political structures distinct from the original culture.
- Infrastructure: It offers immediate material benefits as an incentive for change.