Culture: Bushmen vs. American

Throughout the years, humans have shaped the world and many societies have developed different cultural patterns. Culture is the way of life of a society. Through culture, we learn how to collaborate with groups of people and we learn how to survive and adapt to changes. It is composed of values and beliefs that are shared by other members of society, as well as species survival. Every culture has different cultural elements that are vital to one’s survival in a certain place.

The Bushmen are known to be one of the oldest inhabitants of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. In the Bushmen culture, generosity and modesty is valued immensely. There are many more cultural elements of the Bushman tribe that include language, attire, animal and dance rituals, equality, music, and their amount of knowledge. They spoke San and dressed in either a small piece of animal skin tied in the front, or old and dusty western attire. Being a hunter-gatherer society, the nomadic Bushmen traveled often. They traveled light, in small bands consisting of family members. Because they traveled often and had no permanent residence, they set up camps and made their homes out of grasses and branches. Rites of passage rituals for the Bushmen people include first buck ceremony, choma, marriage, and girls’ first menstruation. The Bushmen had a small population. This is because population control was a way of life for the members of the Bushmen tribe. Women would have one child at a time and they would nurse the child until the age of 4. They would wait approximately four years to have another child, but the Bushmen people practiced infanticide. Almost twenty percent of babies would die before they reached their first birthday.

The Bushmen had a substantia...

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...eded, when school work needs to be done, and when people need someone to talk to. Despite all the positive qualities of technology and modernization, there are also dysfunctions. Automobiles break down, cause pollution, and also cause deaths by accidents, while technology isn’t dependable because of frequent crashes. It seems that people have developed a commodity fetish for technology and depend on it more than they should.

Throughout the years, humans have shaped the world and many societies have developed different cultural patterns. By studying different cultures, we learn how to collaborate with different societies and we learn how to survive and adapt to environmental changes. Culture is the way of life of a society and is composed of shared values and beliefs. Every culture has different cultural elements that are vital to one’s survival in a certain place.