Morphology of culture. Language of culture. Lecture 1

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Lecture 1
MORPHOLOGY OF CULTURE.
LANGUAGE OF CULTURE

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Plan
What is culture? Basic Theoretical approaches
Culture and civilization
Culturology definitions

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Morphology of culture – structure, forms and typology of
culture
The language of culture - signs, forms, symbols, texts
that allow people to enter into communication with
each other

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What is culture?
Basic Theoretical approaches
Culture - from the Latin root colere means to inhabit, to
cultivate, or to honor
"cultura animi," Cicero Tusculanae Disputationes
Culture is "the way of life for an entire society“? (The HarperCollins
Dictionary of Sociology )
E.B.Tylor "culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic
sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief,
art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society" (Primitive Culture)

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"set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual, and emotional
features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in
addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together,
value systems, traditions and beliefs." (UNESCO, Universal
Declaration on Cultural Diversity, 2007).

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Values, norms, and artifacts
Values
comprise ideas about what in life seems
important.
Norms
consist of expectations of how people will
behave in different situations.
Artifacts—things,
or material culture—derive from the
culture's values and norms.

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The symbolic view of culture, the legacy of Clifford Geertz and
Victor Turner, holds symbols to be both the practices of social
actors and the context that gives such practices meaning.
"symbolic gloss" allows social actors to use common symbols to
communicate and understand each other while still imbuing
these symbols with personal significance and meanings (Anthony
P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community)
"give
regularity, unity and systematicity to the practices of a
group." (Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice)

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Sociobiological theory
Richard Dawkins has suggested the existence of units of
culture—memes—roughly analogous to genes in
evolutionary biology (The Selfish Gene)
the meme is a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of
imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary

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Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn Culture: A Critical
Review of Concepts and Definitions.
Topical: A list of topics such as social structure, religion,
economic system, and so forth
Historical: Social heritage, or tradition, passed from generation
to generation
Behavioral: Shared, learned human behavior, a way of life….

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Culture and civilization
Civilization and culture are different aspects of a single entity
Civilization can be viewed as the external manifestation, and
culture as the internal character of a society
Civilization is expressed in physical attributes
Culture refers to the social standards and norms of behavior,
the traditions, values, ethics, morality, and religious beliefs and
practices that are held in common by members of the society.

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Culturology definition
The
term "cultural studies" to denote the science of
culture was introduced by an american anthropologist
Leslie Alvin White
group
of disciplines including theories of literature,
sociology of culture, religion or philosophy, philosophies
of history, political science, aesthetics, semiotics, etc.
more ideologically committed

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Next
Semiotics of culture
Anatomy of culture