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- Culture... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. In Anthropology (1881) Tylor made it clear that culture, so defined, is possessed by man alone. This conception of culture served anthropologists well for some 50 years.
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Jan 10, 2019 · This paper examines two influential and important notions of the concept of culture as they developed in the last three decades, with a particular emphasis on why the notion of culture fell out of favor as an explanatory concept, how efforts were made to revive it, and why these efforts fall short of their goal of redeeming the explanatory ...
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May 17, 2021 · This article outlines how the historical human sciences see ‘culture’ and its dynamic developments over time and over generations. The operations of human culture are systemically self-reflexive and, as a result, exhibit a complexity that sets them apart, as a semiotic system, from mere communicative information transfer.
- Joep Leerssen
- 2021
Mar 30, 2020 · ‘Culture’ should be understood as an entirety of relational processes of sense-making of experiences that are self-centred, intentional and future-oriented, however, always rooted in historically constructed sociocultural systems.
- Vladimer Lado Gamsakhurdia
- ladogamsakhurdia@gmail.com
- 2020
- Overview
- Unilinear theory
cultural evolution, the development of one or more cultures from simpler to more complex forms. In the 18th and 19th centuries the subject was viewed as a unilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of human behaviour as a whole. It has since been understood as a multilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of individual cultures or societies (or of given parts of a culture or society).
Unilinear cultural evolution was an important concept in the emerging field of anthropology during the 18th and 19th centuries but fell out of favour in the early 20th century. Scholars began to propagate theories of multilinear cultural evolution in the 1930s, and these neoevolutionist perspectives continue, in various forms, to frame much of the research undertaken in physical anthropology and archaeology, the branches of anthropology that focus on change over time.
The Age of Discovery introduced 15th- and 16th-century Europeans to a wide variety of “primitive” cultures. Almost immediately, European intellectuals began efforts to explain how and why the human condition had come to be so diverse. Although the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was very much mistaken when he described indigenous peoples as living in conditions in which there were “no arts, no letters, no society” and experiencing life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” his description encapsulates the era’s popular conception of the “savage.” Ignoring or unaware of a variety of facts—many indigenous peoples enjoyed a much better standard of living than European peasants, for instance—Hobbes and other scholars posited that everything that was good and civilized resulted from the slow development away from this “lowly” state and toward the “higher” state represented by the cultures of Europe. Even rationalistic philosophers such as Voltaire implicitly assumed that the “upward” progress of humankind was part of the natural order.
This Enlightenment notion that there was, in fact, a “natural order” derived from the philosophers of ancient Greece, who had described the world as comprising a Great Chain of Being—a view in which the world is seen as complete, orderly, and susceptible to systematic analysis. As a result, scholarship during the Enlightenment emphasized categorization and soon produced various typologies that described a series of fixed stages of cultural evolution.
Most focused on three major stages, but some posited many more categories. For instance, in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795; Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind), the Marquis de Condorcet listed 10 stages, or “epochs,” of cultural evolution. He posited that the final epoch had begun with the French Revolution and was destined to usher in universal human rights and the perfection of the human race. The Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgenson Thomsen is widely acknowledged as the first scholar to have based such a typology on firm data rather than speculation. In Ledetraad til nordisk Oldkyndighed (1836; A Guide to Northern Antiquities), he categorized ancient European societies on the basis of their tools, calling the developmental stages the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages.
In the later 19th century, theories of cultural evolution were enormously influenced by the wide acceptance of the theory of biological evolution put forward by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859). Social scientists found that the framework suggested by biological evolution offered an attractive solution to their questions regarding the origins and development of social behaviour. Indeed, the idea of a society as an evolving organism was a biological analogy that was taken up by many anthropologists and sociologists and that persisted in some quarters even into the 20th century.
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In Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952), U.S. anthropologists A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn cited 164 definitions of culture, ranging from “learned behaviour” to “ideas in the mind,” “a logical construct,” “a statistical fiction,” “a psychic defense mechanism,” and so on.
A notion of culture as heuristics or rules of thumb that aid in decision making is described. Because cultural traits evolve based upon relative fitness, historical shocks can have persistent effects if they alter the costs and benefits of different traits.
Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch made such an appeal in 2009 in their important book Shattered Past, proposing that“cultural history explores the ways and means by which individual and social bodies constitute them-selves, how they interact with each other, and how they rip themselves apart. ” Such an.
