- 1. Culture is learned:
- Human infants learn/internalize cultures through socialization and enculturation processes
- Humans must learn different skills and strategies to survive and be fully functioning
- Culture is transmitted from one generation to the next from parents/other adults to children through the process of enculturation
- 2. Culture is shared:
- Culture is a collective phenomenon
- Religious faiths and practices, rituals, marriage and kinship systems, gender roles and any other collective social actions shaped by traditional beliefs and cultural systems
- People share certain practices and ideas with most people in our society
- 3. Culture is integrated or patterned:
- Individualism as a core cultural value in the west; babies are expected to sleep alone and children are reared with the expectation that they'll be independent at 18 years old
- Economic practices: based on the core value of individualism the adult is to take the responsibility of his/her own economics; an individuals identity is tied to his/ her productive work and ability to earn money
- 4. Culture is transformative and adaptive:
- Cultural traditions are reconstructs and enriched, generation after generation, primarily because human biological survival depends on culture
- Changes to physical environment and stone-tool technological advancement contributes to stable food supply and permanent settlement
- Learning new cultural practices enabled humans to acquire the ability to master appropriate ways of thinking and acting that promote their own survival as biological organisms
- 5. Culture is symbolic:
- language
- objects with meaning
- body gestures and body marks
- clothing
- events with significance
- Enculturation: the gradual acquisition of the characteristics and norms of a culture or group by a person/another culture etc
- Symbol: an object, word, or action with a culturally defined meaning that stands for something else with which it has no necessary or natural relationship