Understanding Nature, Culture, and Human Society
Item 7: Nature, Culture, and Human Society
1. The Meaning of Nature
- Generic Sense: The entire natural cosmos, as opposed to the realm of the supernatural, divine, or sacred.
- Production Sense: That which is not a human product, not made by humans, not artificial.
- Omnibus Sense: A set of characteristics of a “type of cases,” i.e., its essence.
- Ethological Sense: That which is genetically encoded, inborn, that you are born with, as opposed to that which is socially learned.
2. Culture: Anthropological Meaning and Legal Significance
- Normative Sense: Culture is the set of knowledge or social skills that give a person the status of being cultured. It is specific to each age and group.
- Anthropological Sense: The totality of knowledge, behavior patterns, codes, technological resources, etc., that a community develops over time.
3. The Meaning of Education
“Education” is the act of educating, typical of teachers and the Ministry (as in that which organizes the work of teachers). This is to transmit culture and knowledge valuable to the population. But “getting an education” is to know and respect the right ways of dealing with others in a society that considers them as such.
4. Culture in Animals
If we define the term culture as any form of behavior that is not genetically transmitted, we could say that animals have culture. We know that some animals have many behavioral patterns invented by them and transmitted by learning; that is, their intelligence allows them to invent ways of behavior that are not instinctive, which will be recognized as cultural. In animals, learning is always done by imitation.
5. Preculture, Protoculture, and Culture
Preculture is the culture of animals. Protoculture is the culture of the hominins before us, those who are not of our own species. And yet, culture is peculiar to humans.
6. Differences Between Animal and Human Culture
There are important differences between animal and human culture.
- Quantitatively: Humans are able to learn many more things, and very complicated things. Animals learn through imitation.
- Qualitatively: The biggest difference we find is that humans transmit information through language, and are capable of transmitting both orally and in writing, which allows them to describe realities at a distance. Although animals have culture, it is much less complex than ours.
7. Discuss the Sentence: “Man is a Social Animal”
We can only admit that humans are by nature social animals if we define social status as living with other like-minded individuals. In that sense, we are social and perhaps too much so, because we do it all thinking of others, from, for example, writing a poem to getting rich.
8. Discuss the Sentence: “Man is a Social Animal, is Gregarious”
There are no natural laws that lead humans to organize themselves into states, confederations of states, etc. The reasons or causes of the creation of this organization are purely cultural and not natural. The natural form of human organization is the herd, like apes. Humans are not social animals; they are gregarious animals.
9. Agriculture and Livestock as Agents of Society Generation: The Origin of the Village or Tribe
Agriculture and livestock stabilize the population, set to land through property. Livestock in itself is homeless, it cannot exceed a level of social organization that is very poor, at most, scattered tribes. In contrast, agriculture is produced in the village, where the group of related families that use the surrounding territory lives. This is, more or less, the tribe or village setting.
10. Passing from the Village to the City-State
The agricultural tribes or villages frequently come into contact with neighboring tribes, pastoralists, or those in the environment. A village is applied to others and nomads, and so increases in population or power. That is the origin of the city-state, which unifies the subject tribes, and the winner still retains its power and sometimes, the feeling of superiority.
11. Overcoming the City-State: Kingdom or Empire
The city-state, which unites several tribes subject to a greater power, cancels the primitive feelings of belonging to a tribe and produces the first feeling of something akin to a nation. The city-state conflicts with others, and some of them manage to establish their dominance, leading to the early kingdoms. When the kingdoms absorb others, empires appear, the primitive form of the state. Here are the citizens (subjects), and the tribesman disappears completely.