In moving from biblical to 21st Century culture it may be good to get the view of those scientists who study the way human beings live, the anthropologists. Broadly speaking, culture is the full range of patterns of human behavior. The English anthropologist, Edward Tylor, was the first anthropologist to use the term “culture” as a study of humanity in his book Primitive Culture, which was published in 1871. Since then, the term has been used to refer to everything involved in human life on this planet. Every definition of culture one is likely to encounter includes the idea of society or a group of people that share things in common. In other words, one person cannot make a culture. People need people and the way they live together defines their culture. Tylor’s definition of culture is representative of other definitions that have come after it. He said that culture “is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Culture is primarily inherited. You are born into it.
Is there a difference between culture and the artifacts produced within that culture? Many anthropologists say “yes.” They say culture exists only in the mind in the shape of things known or believed, and things imagined. An artist imagines a painting, a composer a song, or an architect a building, based upon previous things that have entered the mind. Once the painting, song, and building are completed, they become an artifact, something created by humans representing their thoughts. Anthropologists agree that culture is learned so, no doubt, the mind is affected by culture and cultural influences bombard our minds continually.
Culture can be divided into three levels based on how broad a cultural element you want to look at. At the outer level are cultural universals. These are categories of human behavioral patterns that exist in every human society. A representative list would include:
Meeting basic human needs of food, clothing, and shelter
Communication with language and signs
Education to pass culture to the next generation
Classification based on age and gender
Government system for community
Tools and technology
Marriage and family structure
Concept of what is good and bad behavior
Concept of privacy and/or private property
Belief in the unknown
Rules regulating sexual behavior
Art, games, and leisure
Trade and economy
Any society, large or small, will have produced some kind of pronouncement upon these areas of human culture.
The next level down in size is our own specific culture. It could be national or regional within a big nation. It is how the broad universal categories of culture are defined in our society.
The smallest level of culture that you could identify with would be a sub-culture. This is where small groups within a larger group share cultural traits that are different from the broader specific culture of your society. We usually find these consisting of people that emigrated from the same country and therefore, share the same primary language, taste for food, etc. These would be like the Mexicans in the U.S. and the Gypsies in Spain. They tend to stick to themselves in other cultures but they do not clash with the host culture.
Another group that needs to be examined is not distinguished by the size of the group but by its relationship to the established culture. It is a counter-culture. A secular counter-culture is a culture, usually of young people, with norms, values, and lifestyles in opposition to the established culture. It is a subculture that clashes with the dominant culture. A counter-culture in the youth usually revolves around a type of music, associated type of clothing, and is characterized by rebellious attitudes of mind. Members of the counter-culture make people of the established culture uncomfortable. This sounds like what Christianity is, or should be, in the world. There will be more said about this later in this series.
In the next post, I will present the culture we inherited from the previous three centuries.