The Culture Concept

Anthropology is devoted to the systematic study of human nature, experience, and behaviour in relation to our species' capacity to develop cultural modes of adaptation. The creation and development of cultural systems is unique to homo sapiens among all contemporary forms of life. It has endowed us with a phenomenal capacity to survive in a wide range of environments and to enhance and enrich our social, aesthetic, and intellectual experience.

The anthropological study of culture is undertaken from a scientific perspective and, as all sciences, involves two procedures:

  1. Collection and description of empirical data - Ethnography
  2. Comparison, classification, and explantion - Ethnology
Definition (According to Bates) Emphases
Culture is the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning.
  1. symbolic character
  2. systematic patterning
  3. learned transmission
  4. societal grounding
  5. adaptive