Culture is usually understood to mean improvements that result from the refinement of thought and action. Just as one cultivates a garden, one may also cultivate one's abilities, including physical abilities. A cultured person is typically an educated person with refined ways of thinking, talking and acting. A social group is considered to be cultured in the same manner. An important consideration here is whether the members of a social group have acquired the ability to live together harmoniously, a skill most needed among the inhabitants of a city who by necessity live in larger numbers and in closer physical proximity than people living in rural areas. Culture is often understood for this reason to be the 'city' of human beings. If the city is the centre of culture as compared with the village, a nation may be viewed as more cultured than other nations. This was the view that dominated the world in the era of colonialism when the 'white man's burden' as Rudyard Kipling put it was to 'better' the rest of the world. Culture thus created a divide between nations, groups and persons in terms of the presence or absence of culture of at least in terms of the level of culture that had been achieved.
This view is unacceptable in the current social scientific usage. Culture now means the way of life of a people, a whole society or a particular group within it. It includes not only beliefs, values and rules of conduct but also the material resources of a society or a group. The emphasis now is on differentiating human beings from animals, for much of our behaviour is supposed to be socially learned. Culture is socially acquired and is passed from one generation to the next. It is thus our social rather than biological inheritance. A Kashmiri boy or girl, for example, if taken away at the time or birth and brought up by different parents in an alien culture will grow up acquiring that culture, including the language of that society. There will be nothing to show by way of Kashmiri culture in that child. Language plays a significant role in our attempt to communicate with each other. What is not noticed often is that language organises our experiences. If a word does not exist for an object in a language it is likely that the object does not exist in that society or if it does it is not given any importance in the cultural world of the people speaking the language. Bengalis do not have a differentiated vocabulary for snow in their language, and Kashmiris do not have such a differentiated vocabulary for snow as exists among Eskimos. Eskimos are thus in a position to share understanding and communicate with each other in a differentiated manner about snow, something relevant to their physical existence.
It is now recognised that all societies are cultured and not just those who claim superiority for themselves. Culture has thus become a descriptive term, not evaluative as it was earlier. It becomes the task of a researcher then to study the culture of a society or a group in a descriptive manner. Each culture has its own inner principles that govern it. To eat in the Western style then is not to be considered superior to the way we in India usually eat without such tools as knife and fork. To uphold the standards of one's own culture in relation to the culture of others is to be guilty of ethnocentrism which is not acceptable any longer. What provides then the standard of evaluation for a culture? The standard is provided by the principles of values internal to a culture. This allows for greater tolerance.
The modern concept of culture in the social sciences takes into account several principles for understanding social behaviour. One of them has already been identified. This is the principle of social learning. Not all of this learning though takes place consciously. A good example once again is language. The best way to learn a language is at the knees of one's parents as a child. This learning takes place
Answered by
Vipan Thapar
at
2:08 PM on October 17, 2008
