Culture science I: anthropology

Many disciplines have faced the "culture issue", many more have used it as explanation to theories. Culture has been use by many disciplines as economics, politics science, art studies, literature and linguistic studies, policy makers, psychology, sociology, human geography, cultural management, history, medicine, biology and so on. Even many entrepreneurs and sport coaches use it. And of course, probably you and me trying to give an explanation of some thing that we don't fully understand.

But the most obsessed discipline with culture concept is, probably, anthropology. Even some define it as culture science. But that is not exact. Anthropology is the behavior science that study human adaptation, evolution and diversity. And that is why culture is so important for anthropologists.

Anthropologists think in culture as the way that humans adapt to their environment. They inscribe their vision of culture on the version that talk about costums, norms, modes of living, a mind set. They say that humans adapt their environment through their biology, but mainly through their culture. Technology, knowledge, costums, everything helps to adapt them to their environment. In that way, culture explain diversity, but also evolution, as that something that change across the time.

Culture as System

In bali, the rice  fields design are determin by religious factors (like do a proper ceremony), environmental factors (amount of rain) and social factors (colective work is organized acording wedding alliances). Here, culture, is a very integrated system.

The concept has been very central for anthropology, so some people think that the discipline started with it. This could be right in USA, where the discipline began with a school called culturalism. Founded by Franz Boas, this school thinks that in order to understand humankind we must learn their lenguage, costums, way of living. We must relate all aspect of social life like human ecology, linguistic, history, social organization, mode of production, mithology, beliefs. All that organized as a system. We call this point of view Holism.

For culturalists, culture is a proper unit of study, different to "psychi" for psychologists, basicly because is colective instead individual. Culture is shared customs, behaviors, mind sets. All related with different and interconected variables. A whole product, a whole system. So culture study is very complicated thing, like the concept itself, but at the same time very interesting. Let see what has to tell us.