"Culture is a distinctive phenomenon of human beings" Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Summary
The humanization process contains a recognition of its identity to the culture, which cannot be alien to it and which obviously transfigure the cognitive imaginary of the individual, guided by specific codes, so that every culture implies a system of values and communication codes, These translate the term culture that is embedded in Cultural anthropology, and within this human culture, frames the differences and similarities of behavior between human groups., The description of the various cultures and the processes that characterize them as a essential condition of human existence.
Summary
The humanization process contains a recognition from its identity to the culture that he cannot be other people's and that evidently they transfigure the individual's imaginary cognitivo, guided by specific codes, so that all culture implies a system of values and communication codes, these they are translated the culture term that you imbrica in the Cultural anthropology, and inside this the human culture, frames the differences and behavior likeness among the human groups., the description of the diverse cultures and of the processes that characterize them like an essential condition of the human existence.
Cultural anthropology, as a branch of anthropology that studies human culture, frames the differences and similarities of behavior between human groups, the description of the diverse cultures and the processes that characterize them as an essential condition of human existence.
it allows culture as a social being to relate within the same space, assuming the nature / culture dichotomy within the society phenomenon.
For his part, Harris states: “Culture refers to the body of socially acquired traditions that appear rudimentary among mammals, especially among primates. When anthropologists speak of a human culture, they are usually referring to the total, socially acquired, lifestyle of a group of people, including patterned and recurring ways of thinking, feeling and acting. ”
The previous judgments have anthropology as a substantive element of culture to specify the human species, taking into account life in society, because precisely the relationship of one with the other in their actions is vital, through this activity ideas are transmitted, feelings and ways of acting; The lifestyle of the individual and the community is also the essence of culture.
In this process of humanization there is a recognition of his identity, of the historical perspective of his culture and of other cultures that cannot be alien to him and that evidently transfigure the cognitive imaginary of the individual, guided by specific codes, in such a way that every culture implies a system of values and communication codes, these are produced in the two fundamental areas of a culture: in the so-called material culture or the production and reproduction of goods and in the area of artistic culture, in the production of spiritual values. Both categories are initially born together and then in cultural development they are differentiated.
Taking into account the analysis carried out by Edward B. Taylor regarding his ideas about culture and the treatment of this social category with more enigmatic dimensions, general positions are adopted as long as for him there are no perfectly definable barriers between culture or civilization, In his text Primitive Culture, he declares that:
Culture or civilization, in a broad ethnographic sense, is that complex whole that includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs, and any other habits and capacities acquired by man as a member of society.
Even when the heterogeneity of scientific platforms that understand the future of culture is recognized and it becomes an object of science, somewhat uncompromising conceptions are appreciated, with a certain objective radicalism in relation to conceptions of culture. In the text quoted above, Tylor states that «a first step in the study of civilization consists in dissecting it in details, and classifying these into the appropriate groups, a premise that reveals the inexorable descriptive character of its analytical behavior.
In his work we find man as the center and reason behind studies and analysis about international culture and cultural practices, which respond to the social needs of the time and which had human studies as a fundamental premise, understood from the social and territorial perspective. of ancient cultures in the western civilization of his time, as well as from the search for the motives that led peoples to behave in this or that way. Taylor's thought was directed towards the search for elements of a social and collective nature that would rethink the maintenance of ancient cultural practices and that evidently constituted nothing more than the journey from the old to the new, that is why the meaning they acquire in their studies interpretive frameworks.
So persistence from the culture requires an instrumental of experiences, milestones, experiences that mark a meaning for those who know how to decipher these real elements and which, of course, will lead to their delimitation of civilization or not, resting on pillars that have their origin in the way of life and behavior of human groups is, therefore, their collective, plural and public nature that allows one to question their own cultural practices and embrace more suitable ones.
It is on this basis that we are building the criterion of culture as a process of anthropogenesis and at the same time as a process of social behavior, man becomes man in society, he is transfigured and conformed at work, he creates values that transcend him and transmit in one way or another, to future generations of men a series of codes of conduct essential for living in the midst of a given society, since the end result of a culture is a social system and at the same time a system of communication codes that They are transmitted through material culture as well as through spiritual culture.
Precisely the guiding principle of semiotics as observed by Umberto Eco in The absent structure is that semiotics is the science that studies the processes of culture as if they were communication processes and thus every artifact, every object besides its usefulness communicates something and working the nonverbal sign system we find that this communication has to do first with the survival of the species and then with the ontogenetic development of the species and this is essential to understand the specific codes in which culture speaks to us and of which we cannot leave because of the huge system of references that every cultural object produces.
Although an attempt to resist towards subjectivist positions is perceived on the one hand, in another sense Cliffor Geertz assumes a semiotic position before the convoluted phenomenon of culture in his article Dense Description: towards an interpretative theory of culture when it presupposes that:
… Man is an animal suspended from a web of meanings that he himself has woven; consequently, I understand culture as that network (…) Although it is “ideational” we do not find it in anyone's head, despite not being material, it is not a hidden entity (…) culture is a context, something within which all this can be intelligibly –that is, widely described-.
Hence, for Geertz, assuming an objective conception of culture necessarily requires a foundation that rests on interpretive patterns and that involves man in the symbolic and symbolic purification of that reality that is presented to him as another in the semi-unconscious search for meanings.. An axiological framework of positions, discourses, analyzes, axioms and readings is imposed that cannot be lacerated by the experiences and knowledge of men as they order their behavior in relation to their customs, traditions, set of habits, guided by a system of significant symbols as an essential condition of culture. There is no human nature apart from culture, man is a product of the culture that formed him and which is influenced by natural, biological, psychological conditions,and social that provide specific and individual symbologies of a phenomenon according to the cultural environment where it is formed.
For an effective and real understanding of culture, it is necessary to break pre-established analysis codes and positions, Geertz proposes to assume such a phenomenon divorced from all schematics, since it is totally naive and meaningless, to formulate resting human behaviors and behaviors on an illusory and individual platform of reality. Despite the generality that an understanding of it can sometimes offer, the repercussion reached by the dimensions of human thought and action, on which the basis and foundation of Geertz's cultural discourse rests, is undeniable.
Taking into account human culture as a system of knowledge, beliefs, values, norms, symbols, Cliffor Geertz proposes in a special way to stop at the set of signs and elements with which culture is socialized at the same time that these symbologies imply the other subsystems that compose it. This author takes up essential ideas already expounded by other theorists such as habits and customs, but includes other fundamental ideas, among them traditions and control mechanisms, which undeniably are essential to keep in mind at the moment if it is analyzed that culture is working starting from the realization of programs and projects as well as their evaluation.
In a way, the process of anthropogenesis is consolidated as a cultural process, as it constitutes a practice and a meaning. In this sense, the production of goods and work take advantage, since these elements attribute to culture the condition of continuity and transcendence, isolating it from all static and banal value and hinting at its potentialities to exalt the spiritual values that are they impose before the passage of time and remain beyond the utilitarian value that is attributed to artistic objects. This is how the cave complexes of Altamira and Lascaux can be seen today,as true examples of human practices that have seized spiritual and aesthetic horizons that are above their former or possible usefulness and this is what makes an identity value permanent that man recognizes in his communal life and that man transmits to through orality or through the arts.
Analyzing other conceptions such as those of Marvin Harris, the researcher realizes that the treatment of the phenomenon of culture is carried out from more uncompromised perspectives with man per se and concerns a more structured level of society, although, of course, they clearly require of this. If in the previously analyzed authors there is a marked interest in carrying out evolutionary studies, Taylor with his theories of the transition between barbarism and civilization and the readaptation of cultural practices regardless of the place where they are carried out, Geertz who appeals to individual interpretation and to the subjectivity of each individual through symbolic decoding, Harris's work differs from these in that it is non-evolutionary, his interest lies in understanding,explanation and interpretation of the development of the most distinctive cultural features in a society through the ethic approach and the application of cultural materialism than in treating the development of different cultures as a central objective.
His views on the distinctions between two different perspectives, aspects of an emic and etic character in research, as a need to understand man, say he is the carrier of culture and as a product of his culture, evidently constitute contributions to cultural thought from an anthropological vision to the pose:
For cultural materialists, the starting point of all cultural analysis is simply the existence of an ethic human population situated in an ethic-type time and space. For us, a society is a maximum social group made up of both sexes and all ages and that manifests a wide range of interactive cultures.
Although the denial to the evolutionary needs of the study and treatment of culture may seem constrained, the materialistic ideology that Harvis developed had as its primary element social, sexual, and of course cultural heterogeneity, which gives the study greater possibilities of truthfulness and testability, taking as a reference that its theoretical principles are interested in the problem of the relationship between each of the levels of said social structure and the evolution that such relationships achieve among themselves. His proposal to consider a universal pattern as the global structure of any culture, systematically applicable to each particular case, distinguishes the different strata existing within cultural materialism:
- Infrastructure. The basic structures (etic) that ensure the biological subsistence of the individuals of the group (mode of production) and the subsistence of the group in time and space (mode of reproduction or demographic behavior). Structure. The distribution, regulation and exchange of goods and labor (domestic and socio-political economies). Superstructure. Structured activities of an artistic, recreational, religious, intellectual type, together with the emic factors of the corresponding infrastructure and structure.
Taking up the previous precept that raises the possibility of a universal theoretical pattern to analyze culture, the main task of anthropology according to Harrris is to give causal explanations about the differences and similarities of the thoughts and behaviors of human groups and it is where it fundamentally rests its starting point in terms of confronting cultural problems.
That is why, as a logical achievement of a discourse, it is necessary for us to address the structuralist postulate of Claude Lévi-Strauss, while understanding multifaceted and complex positions within the anthropological and cultural panorama are understood when recognized in the author's structuralist discourse. that the origins of customs and social rules are lost and that we must take the latter for what they are: myths, already formed structures, a solid block on which we must focus our studies. He bases his position on the idea that the previous history of one myth leads us to another, and then to another, in an endless succession. This conception that legalizes the myth, is presented by Lévi-Strauss as an epistemological finding,that leads him to not admit differences between mythical thought and scientific thought, which he considers the myth of the modern era.
Given these ideas, Levi Struass's speech in his text The social structure, rests on the idea of several aspects of interest and that we will address the most significant in our opinion and for this we start from the author's criteria when proposing the importance of the structure social within its conceptions and analysis, so that "group does not mean the social group, but, in a more general sense, the way in which the phenomena under study are grouped" and we warn, since for Levi Strauss the phenomena are to star in the entire object of study, man occupying a secondary plane on which these phenomena will affect and analyzed from a group perspective will facilitate the exploration of this from that macro level,But we do recognize it valid to emphasize that it is impossible to conceive of such relations alien to the normal structure, which have specificities such as those of a social space and a social time that distinguishes them from the rest of the sciences.
In this line, social events could be understood as communication processes defined by rules, some of these conscious (although only superficially since they may be hiding aspects of reality) and others at a deep level, at an unconscious level. Ultimately, this means that there is a significant order behind the apparent disorder and that the structures operate on an unconscious and at the same time universal level common to all human "molds" of the unconscious.
This space is also reached by studies on blood exchanges and related personal relationships, even though sometimes somewhat strict and schematic links are established for ways of appearance and realization before the object of study, despite the fact that through these interpersonal relationships the study of behavioral patterns of the human being that evidently rest on Freudian postulates has been facilitated, recognizing in the structuralist aspect an ambiguous position at times, which does not leave stated the position to which they will be coupled despite theories such as those expressed. of communication that use language, the sign system, specific methods that likewise make up a theoretical and conceptual apparatus on the cultural vision from structuralist positions.
We consider that Levi Strauss's contribution, more than in genetic crossings, morphological and linguistic studies, rests on the offer that makes a different vision from the analysis of social structure and that evidently demonstrates that (although perhaps not fully assumed) the Structural anthropology declared a more specific and concrete path, although not reductionist and naive for cultural and anthropological studies in some of its modalities.
From a less radical analysis than that of Levi Strauss, Franz Boas states that “Culture includes all the manifestations of the social habits of a community, the reactions of the individual as they are affected by the customs of the group in which they live., and the products of human activities insofar as they are determined by these customs »this analysis of Boas evidently responds to his position before studies on race and heterogeneous cultures in their mutual and complex relationship. Even though many theorists disagree with Boas' position, we assume what is related to the undifferentiation of the cultural ones, as long as the criterion that what makes us different is respected, to some extent also makes us similar.
Obviously an attitude of comparison and ordering would be in vain and would be opposed to the thought of Taylor, who did consider the supremacy of one society over another, evolution of cultural phenomena and events that would not necessarily correspond to an evolution of culture, despite this An evolutionary scheme that does not demand the superiority of one or the other culture, linearly analyzed, is perfectible, but we consider that there are elements that make one derive from the other, or have arisen from it, although undoubtedly when detached it develops fully and independently of it and which of course may or may not make it superior from this point of view. Each culture, for Boas, was a coherent set of behavioral and ideational traits. These traits basically had two possible origins:by the diffusion of certain cultural patterns from one group to another (mediating an adaptation of the same to the whole), or by a process of independent creation.
This leads to the fact that the individual-society relationship is marked by its notes on race that conditioned all its anthropological production and that racism and ethnocentrism have no scientific justification, insofar as each culture is the result of specific conditions. Individuals would socialize, in her opinion, in the traditions of their group from early childhood and gradually adjusting their way of seeing the world and their behaviors to them. At this level, she considered the role of language fundamental, since each language expresses a particular construction of the world, its learning in the early socialization process is essential for the incorporation of the guidelines and values of its society.
The process of socialization then leads, according to this author, to the automation of cultural patterns, which over time become inscribed in the individual almost unconsciously. Furthermore, such patterns acquire a strong emotional charge in the individual, creating something like a "sentimental bond", a visceral attachment of the individual to the values and guidelines of his culture, which in turn implies a rejection of alien forms of behavior. to the social group itself. In this context, Boas's following approach must be understood: "the individual is practically a slave to tradition."
For Malinowski, culture could be understood as a sui generis reality that had to be studied as such (on its own terms). In the culture category, it included artifacts, goods, technical processes, ideas, habits and inherited values, conceptualizing it as follows:
… culture is also a great conditioning apparatus, which through preparation, teaching tasks, teaching morals and the development of some tastes, synthesizes the raw material of human physiology and anatomy with external elements, and through this it supplies the physical set and conditions the physiological processes.
That is why Malinowski's concept provides relevant elements of analysis, as it provides the plurality and complexity of approaches from culture, so that human behaviors, for their understanding, cannot only be reduced to anatomical or physiological study, but social processes that condition such a position have to intervene, although perhaps its dimension can be truncated insofar as the existence of social groups, of individuals organized for mutual exchange, is required as an indispensable condition and is merely reduced the appearance and permanence of culture under these conditions, despite such considerations, all the elements of culture had a function that gave them meaning and made their existence possible. But this guy,for the author, it is not only the individual who depends on the group, but also the group and its members depend on the development of the material set.
There is an interaction between how the individual meets his needs in society and how society evolves giving satisfaction to all those needs. This causes behavioral changes within the individual. Society is changing the way of giving satisfaction to the individual. The needs are met in a group with collaboration and it is parallel to the technological achievements (inventions, inventions, achievements) and theories that are put into action to satisfy those needs. Malinowski does not focus on the individual, but on the institution since it can be studied as a social fact and on the operation of that institution.
Malinowski's view of culture is also based on fundamental biosocial human needs; considers culture as a tool that responds to the needs of human beings in a way that goes beyond adaptation. But this function was not only given by the social, but by the history of the group and the geographical environment, which in the same way would enrich its platform.
His studies revolve around the proposition that comparative studies of culture, obviously cannot bet on absolute limits, but that at all times there should be room for analogies and coherence in the investigative process, therefore, even when Malinowski focuses his I study in the institution and not in the individual, these levels cannot be understood separately, but rather complement each other, as well as the relationships between them and that through fieldwork they will reach higher levels.
Hence, Radcliffe Brown's postulates are closely related to Malinowski's anthropological position recognizing what function is the contribution that an institution makes to the maintenance of the social structure (it is very close to considering that social structure as a cohesive social structure where solidarity social will make that society work in balance). All social systems are self-supporting, autonomous, and the relationships between their members are characterized by a high degree of cohesion and solidarity. That is why through continuity of operation the continuity of this structure is preserved.
This perspective implies that a social system, understanding "social system" as the total social structure of a society together with the totality of social uses in which that structure appears and that what emerges is continued assistance. Thus, the social system is not only the structure, but it is also the uses, habits, rules, beliefs that this social structure creates, maintains and causes the maintenance of that structure.
The social structure is going to be fundamental for Radcliffe-Brown because the study of the groups, the kinship and the interrelations that are maintained between the different groups, for him will be the nucleus of all the socio-structural phenomena, because his study focuses on the analysis of kinship as the core of socio-structural phenomena.
According to Radcliffe-Brown, in the social system there are 3 adaptive aspects that could be separated:
Social structure: Devices by which an orderly social life is maintained.
Ecological: This would be the way the system adapts to its physical environment.
Cultural: Mechanisms by which an individual mentally acquires the habits and characteristics of thought (language, concepts) that enable him to participate in social life.
Social structure, for Radcliffe-Brown, is a way of uniting science with biology applying that analogy between natural and social science, and that for Radcliffe-Brown biological links are the origin and model of each type of structure of relationship. His approach makes it difficult to distinguish between social relations and social structure because the union that is established between the two as functional units that are at the service of the operation of that system induces him to deconstruct the social structure based on the others (for him what is important is to find those social relationships).
For Levi-Strauss the structure is a model formed by elements, for him a model has the following characteristics:
- It has the characteristics of a system since it is made of several elements of which none can undergo a change without causing changes in the other elements. The social structure, being made up of elements, involves combining and forming groups of models of different types. If we change one of the elements we can predict the transformation that this model can undergo and the structure that can result from that model. The construction of the model must allow it to be understandable when viewed as a whole.
If we start from the fact that social reality is structured (this is one of the premises of Levi-Strauss), what he is looking for is that model, what would explain us of that social structure, what formal properties would it have, and that also the properties of that model make it possible to compare them regardless of their elements. What we are going to abstract are the properties (relationships established between these models), the principles by which these elements are related, and these properties will allow us to compare that model with other societies regardless of whether the elements are different.
He considers, in turn, that ritual symbols are stimuli of emotion because symbols could be referential (symbols such as "sign" that was an analogous expression of a known thing, and could be considered as symbols because the property of referencing something means that they are referring to a known thing); but she also speaks of condensation symbols (from her point of view most of the ritual symbols would be here since they would be condensed forms of direct behavior that allow the easy release of emotional tension in a conscious or unconscious way). She argues that through this symbolic capacity, the obligatory becomes desirable (the ritual symbol makes an exchange of qualities between its two poles of meaning). This means that norms and values are charged with emotion,and the most primary relationships are ennobled through their contact with social values. What the symbol does when it acts in a society is that what is mandatory-norm becomes desirable and all these norms and values are charged with emotion and people assume them as desirable as if they were the only and true ones. It goes from the obligatory in a society, but to what the individual believes to be desirable. Turner carries out a structuralist analysis since he analyzes how that organization is structured, what function each one of those units fulfills within the social system, and what ends the ritual fulfills within the system as a whole and in the particular system of the people who participate directly in the same. In the social sphere, the symbol has great consensus, which is why it acts by standardizing the system. Symbols arise,But it also changes its meaning as that game of the symbolic changes.
Symbols order behavior and regulate society, but they also influence individuals. For Turner, although he recognizes that this is the case, this second aspect is not the most important since he believes that the constant-regular-general is the social and ideological aspect of the symbol. Look at the social meaning of a symbol, how society surrounds structured groups, discrepancy in principles that order certain groups, etc. What matters to him is to analyze what is normative and characteristic as the basic necessity of social existence. From her point of view, symbols should be studied in a temporal sequence (which symbols intervene in a ritual first, if they have undergone changes over time) in relation to other events that can influence social processes.The symbol regulates social and individual life, giving meaning to behaviors and satisfying psychological individualities. Man is a symbolic being since he uses it to communicate, to satisfy many of his needs, to satisfy his primary needs. You have to study the symbol looking at the significant elements (of meaning) in relation to what the symbol does, with what the person does with the symbol, and in front of who uses that symbol.with what the person does with the symbol, and in front of who uses that symbol.with what the person does with the symbol, and in front of who uses that symbol.
The anthropologist must explain the meaning of such elements, rites, coming to understand and make understandable why the natives use these symbols and what content they give to those symbols. It is not just about observing and asking, but Turner asks how we can analyze ritual symbolism (he does not want to stay at the level of description, he wants to go to the level of analysis). They are not only symbols of behavior, but they express something and go far beyond that reality that is presented to them.
A quality that not only remains in the Turnean ideology, but to one extent or another, despite the historical and ideological distances, the authors studied reflect common characteristics regarding the demands of the anthropologist when faced with the object of study. Every cultural fact implies, on the part of the researcher, a series of questions that far from obscuring the act of inquiry, magnify the position of that individual who, stripped of any transforming element, can distance him from his end. Regardless of whether in some cases attention is placed on cultural events, in others it is the individual who occupies and on which all these processes arise transformations and interpretations; or perhaps the structural analysis of societies, or the discourse of symbolic, mythological or religious destructionism,in all cases the thoroughness and restraint in the face of unknown phenomena and transformers of precepts and concepts are fundamental requirements of every anthropologist.
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