Culture can be defined as many things, but it is never a static entity; it changes and evolves over time and through the generations. That is not to say that all cultures adapt well or that all adaptations are beneficial. This paper will briefly discuss cultural adaptation and its effects.
Miller et al. (2010) defines culture as people’s learned and shared beliefs (p.4). However it can also be said that culture is the cumulative knowledge of a people, such as the use of fire technology by the natives of Northern Alberta and Northern Australia as described by Lewis (1989). In both instances fire was used as a tool to increase the people’s ability to survive in an environment, without which, survival would have been much more difficult or perhaps impossible.
The knowledge of how to wield the tool of fire effectively was not that of only one individual, it was a knowledge held by multiple people within the society. It was also knowledge that did not come into being suddenly and completely; it was learned and added to over time and generations by individuals and their experiences. In other words, it was adapted and evolved in response to changes in the environment and the culture’s cumulative knowledge.
“Culture allows the relatively rapid accumulation of better strategies for exploiting local environment” (Boyd and Richerson, p.16) and the use of fire technology is merely one example of how cultures adapt to their environments and increase their cumulative knowledge. Another example would be the adaptation of Chinampas farming by the Aztecs, which transformed them from a small tribe exiled on a few islands in a lake, into an empire that survived for centuries and covered most of what is now modern Mexico (Coe, 1964).
Culture a...
... middle of paper ...
...1): 90-98.
DOI:10.1038/scientificamerican0764-90. [online]
Diamond, J. 2008, October. Jared Diamond: Why do Societies Collapse? [Video File]
Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.htm
Fegan, Brian. 2003. “Plundering the seas.” Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003: Retrieved from: http://www.insideindonesia.org/feature-editions/plundering-the-sea Lewis, Henry T. 1989. “A Parable of Fire: Hunter-Gatherers in Canada and Australia.” In
Traditional Ecological Knowledge: A Collection of Essays, pp. 11-19; 77-77. R. E. Johannes, ed. Cambridge, UK: IUCN Publication Services. [PDF]
Retrieved from: http://wcs.lms.athabascau.ca/file.php/106/PDFs/ANTH275_Lewis_1989.pdf
Miller, Barbara D., & Penny Van Esterik, & John Van Esterik. 2010. Cultural Anthropology, 4th Canadian edition. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada Inc.
William Haviland, Harald Prins, Dana Walrath, Bunny McBride, Anthropology: The Human Challenge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011), 58.
Robbins Burling, David F. Armstrong, Ben G. Blount, Catherine A. Callaghan, Mary Lecron Foster, Barbara J. King, Sue Taylor Parker, Osamu Sakura, William C. Stokoe, Ron Wallace, Joel Wallman, A. Whiten, Sherman Wilcox and Thomas Wynn. Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), pp. 25-53
Cultures are infinitely complex. Culture, as Spradley (1979) defines it, is "the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experiences and generate social behavior" (p. 5). Spradley's emphasizes that culture involves the use of knowledge. While some aspects of culture can be neatly arranged into categories and quantified with numbers and statistics, much of culture is encoded in schema, or ways of thinking (Levinson & Ember, 1996, p. 418). In order to accurately understand a culture, one must apply the correct schema and make inferences which parallel those made my natives. Spradley suggests that culture is not merely a cognitive map of beliefs and behaviors that can be objectively charted; rather, it is a set of map-making skills through which cultural behaviors, customs, language, and artifacts must be plotted (p. 7). This definition of culture offers insight into ...
The author describes how ingenuity and technology changed social organization in early civilizations. Why was this “one of the major turning points in the social history of humankind?” How does this alteration of social structure reflect our modern societies? Give specific examples from your own culture to demonstrate how this change persists today.
“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves.”(Diamond 25) This statement is the thesis for Jared Diamond’s book Guns Germs and Steel the Fates of Human Societies.
From the frozen tundra of the arctic north to the arid deserts of sub-Saharan Africa – humans not only survive, but even thrive in some of the most extreme and remote environments on the planet. This is a testament to the remarkable capacity for adaptation possessed by our species. Each habitat places different stressors on human populations, and they must adapt in order to mitigate them. That is, adaptation is the process by which man and other organisms become better suited to their environments. These adaptations include not only physical changes like the larger lung capacities observed in high altitude natives but also cultural and behavioral adjustments such as traditional Inuit clothing styles, which very effectively retain heat but discourage deadly hyperthermia-inducing sweat in Arctic climates. Indeed, it seems this later mechanism of adaptation is often much more responsible for allowing humans to populate such a wide variety of habitats, spanning all seven continents, rather than biological mechanisms. Of course, not all adaptations are entirely beneficial, and in fact may be maladaptive, particularly behavior adaptations and highly specialized physical adaptations in periods of environmental change. Because people rely heavily on social learning, maladaptaptive behaviors such as sedentarization and over-eating – both contributing to obesity – are easily transmitted from person to person and culture to culture, as seen in the Inuit’s adoption of American cultural elements.
Although generally resistant to change, culture is malleable, as a response to environmental changes. The major form of transmission is through communication.
Schultz, Emily A. & Lavenda, Robert H. 2005, Cultural Anthropology, 6th edn, Oxford University Press, New York, Chapter 3: Fieldwork.
Peoples, James, and Garrick Bailey. Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. 9th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2003. Print.
The New Stone Age got more advance when people adapted to a new change. Although they were limited, th...
The term “culture” refers to the complex accumulation of knowledge, folklore, language, rules, rituals, habits, lifestyles, attitudes, beliefs, and customs that link and provide a general identity to a group of people. Cultures take a long time to develop. There are many things that establish identity give meaning to life, define what one becomes, and how one should behave.
The West regularly thinks that indigenous knowledge has vanished; there is no indigenous knowledge that exists in the form of ‘folk' knowledge. Science and technology already are an indigenous knowledge (Ellen and Harris2000:5). Within the confusion discussed above different people define indigenous knowledge as follows:
What is culture? Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving
Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects and behavior. It includes the ideas, value, customs and artifacts of a group of people (Schaefer, 2002). Culture is a pattern of human activities and the symbols that give these activities significance. It is what people eat, how they dress, beliefs they hold and activities they engage in. It is the totality of the way of life evolved by a people in their attempts to meet the challenges of living in their environment, which gives order and meaning to their social, political, economic, aesthetic and religious norms and modes of organization thus distinguishing people from their neighbors.
Boas, F. (1930). Anthropology. In, Seligman, E. R. A. ed., Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences. Macmillan: New York.