1.

Learned Behaviour:
Not all behaviour is learned, but most of it is learned; combing one’s
hair, standing in line, telling jokes, criticising the President and going
to the movie, all constitute behaviours which had to be learned.

Sometimes the terms conscious learning and unconscious learning are

used to distinguish the learning. For example, the ways in which a
small child learns to handle a tyrannical father or a rejecting mother
often affect the ways in which that child, ten or fifteen years later,
handles his relationships with other people.
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Some behaviour is obvious. People can be seen going to football

games, eating with forks, or driving automobiles. Such behaviour is
called “overt” behaviour. Other behaviour is less visible. Such activities
as planning tomorrow’s work (or) feeling hatred for an enemy, are
behaviours too. This sort of behaviour, which is not openly visible to
other people, is called Covert behaviour. Both may be, of course,
learned.

2. Culture is Abstract:
Culture exists in the minds or habits of the members of society.
Culture is the shared ways of doing and thinking. There are degrees of
visibility of cultural behaviour, ranging from the regularised activities
of persons to their internal reasons for so doing. In other words, we
cannot see culture as such we can only see human behaviour. This
behaviour occurs in regular, patterned fashion and it is called culture.

3. Culture is a Pattern of Learned Behaviour:

The definition of culture indicated that the learned behaviour of
people is patterned. Each person’s behaviour often depends upon
some particular behaviour of someone else. The point is that, as a
general rule, behaviours are somewhat integrated or organized with
related behaviours of other persons.

4. Culture is the Products of Behaviour:

Culture learnings are the products of behaviour. As the person
behaves, there occur changes in him. He acquires the ability to swim,
to feel hatred toward someone, or to sympathize with someone. They
have grown out of his previous behaviours.

In both ways, then, human behaviour is the result of behaviour. The

experience of other people are impressed on one as he grows up, and
also many of his traits and abilities have grown out of his own past
behaviours.

5. Culture includes Attitudes, Values Knowledge:

There is widespread error in the thinking of many people who tend to
regard the ideas, attitudes, and notions which they have as “their
own”. It is easy to overestimate the uniqueness of one’s own attitudes
and ideas. When there is agreement with other people it is largely
unnoticed, but when there is a disagreement or difference one is
usually conscious of it. Your differences however, may also be cultural.
For example, suppose you are a Catholic and the other person a
Protestant.

6. Culture also includes Material Objects:

Man’s behaviour results in creating objects. Men were behaving when
they made these things. To make these objects required numerous and
various skills which human beings gradually built up through the ages.
Man has invented something else and so on. Occasionally one
encounters the view that man does not really “make” steel or a
battleship. All these things first existed in a “state nature”.

Man merely modified their form, changed them from a state in which
they were to the state in which he now uses them. The chair was first a
tree which man surely did not make. But the chair is more than trees
and the jet airplane is more than iron ore and so forth.

7. Culture is shared by the Members of Society:

The patterns of learned behaviour and the results of behaviour are
possessed not by one or a few person, but usually by a large
proportion. Thus, many millions of persons share such behaviour
patterns as Christianity, the use of automobiles, or the English
language.

Persons may share some part of a culture unequally. For example, as

Americans do the Christian religion. To some persons Christianity is
the all important, predominating idea in life. To others it is less
preoccupying/important, and to still others it is of marginal
significance only.

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Sometimes the people share different aspects of culture. For example,

among the Christians, there are – Catholic and Protestant, liberal or
conservation, as clergymen or as laymen. The point to our discussion
is not that culture or any part of it is shred identically, but that it is
shared by the members of society to a sufficient extent.

8. Culture is Super-organic:
Culture is sometimes called super organic. It implies that “culture” is
somehow superior to “nature”. The word super-organic is useful when
it implies that what may be quite a different phenomenon from a
cultural point of view.
For example, a tree means different things to the botanist who studies
it, the old woman who uses it for shade in the late summer afternoon,
the farmer who picks its fruit, the motorist who collides with it and the
young lovers who carve their initials in its trunk. The same physical
objects and physical characteristics, in other words, may constitute a
variety of quite different cultural objects and cultural characteristics.

9. Culture is Pervasive:
Culture is pervasive it touches every aspect of life. The pervasiveness
of culture is manifest in two ways. First, culture provides an
unquestioned context within which individual action and response
take place. Not only emotional action but relational actions are
governed by cultural norms. Second, culture pervades social activities
and institutions.

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According to Ruth Benedict, “A culture, like an individual is a more or

less consistent pattern of thought and action. With each culture there
come into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by
other types of society. In obedience to these purposes, each person
further consolidates its experience and in proportion to the urgency of
these drives the heterogeneous items of behaviour; take more and
more congruous shape”.

10. Culture is a way of Life:

Culture means simply the “way of life” of a people or their “design for
living.” Kluckhohn and Kelly define it in his sense, ” A culture is a
historically derived system of explicit and implicit designs for living,
which tends to be shared by all or specially designed members of a
group.”

Explicit culture refers to similarities in word and action which can be

directly observed. For example, the adolescent cultural behaviour can
be generalized from regularities in dress, mannerism and
conversation. Implicit culture exists in abstract forms which are not
quite obvious.

11. Culture is a human Product:

Culture is not a force, operating by itself and independent of the
human actors. There is an unconscious tendency to defy culture, to
endow it with life and treat it as a thing. Culture is a creation of society
in interaction and depends for its existence upon the continuance of
society.

In a strict sense, therefore, culture does not ‘do’ anything on its own. It
does not cause the individual to act in a particular way, nor does it
‘make’ the normal individual into a maladjusted one. Culture, in short,
is a human product; it is not independently endowed with life.

12. Culture is Idealistic:

Culture embodies the ideas and norms of a group. It is sum-total of the
ideal patterns and norms of behaviour of a group. Culture consists of
the intellectual, artistic and social ideals and institutions which the
members of the society profess and to which they strive to confirm.

13. Culture is transmitted among members of Society:

The cultural ways are learned by persons from persons. Many of them
are “handed down” by one’s elders, by parents, teachers, and others
[of a somewhat older generation]. Other cultural behaviours are
“handed up” to elders. Some of the transmission of culture is among
contemporaries.

For example, the styles of dress, political views, and the use of recent
labour saving devices. One does not acquire a behaviour pattern
spontaneously. He learns it. That means that someone teaches him
and he learns. Much of the learning process both for the teacher and
the learner is quite unconscious, unintentional, or accidental.

14. Culture is Continually Changing:

There is one fundamental and inescapable attribute (special quality) of
culture, the fact of unending change. Some societies at sometimes
change slowly, and hence in comparison to other societies seem not to
be changing at all. But they are changing, even though not obviously
so.

15. Culture is Variable:

Culture varies from society to society, group to group. Hence, we say
culture of India or England. Further culture varies from group to
group within the same society. There are subcultures within a culture.
Cluster of patterns which are both related to general culture of the
society and yet distinguishable from it are called subcultures.

16. Culture is an integrated system:

Culture possesses an order and system. Its various parts are integrated
with each other and any new element which is introduced is also
integrated.

17. Language is the Chief Vehicle of Culture:

Man lives not only in the present but also in the past and future. He is
able to do this because he possesses language which transmits to him
what was learned in the past and enables him to transmit the
accumulated wisdom to the next generation. A specialized language
pattern serves as a common bond to the members of a particular
group or subculture. Although culture is transmitted in a variety of
ways, language is one of the most important vehicles for perpetuating
cultural patterns.

To conclude culture is everything which is socially learned and shared

by the members of a society. It is culture that, in the wide focus of the
world, distinguishes individual from individual, group from group and
society.

Functions of Culture:
Among all groups of people we find widely shared beliefs, norms,
values and preferences. Since culture seems to be universal human
phenomenon, it occurs naturally to wonder whether culture
corresponds to any universal human needs. This curiosity raises the
question of the functions of culture. Social scientists have discussed
various functions of culture. Culture has certain functions for both
individual and society.
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Following are some of the important functions of culture:

1. Culture Defines Situations:
Each culture has many subtle cues which define each situation. It
reveals whether one should prepare to fight, run, laugh or make love.
For example, suppose someone approaches you with right hand
outstretched at waist level. What does this mean? That he wishes to
shake hands in friendly greeting is perfectly obvious – obvious, that is
to anyone familiar with our culture.

But in another place or time the outstretched hand might mean

hostility or warning. One does not know what to do in a situation until
he has defined the situation. Each society has its insults and fighting
words. The cues (hints) which define situations appear in infinite
variety. A person who moves from one society into another will spend
many years misreading the cues. For example, laughing at the wrong
places.

2. Culture defines Attitudes, Values and Goals:

Each person learns in his culture what is good, true, and beautiful.
Attitudes, values and goals are defined by the culture. While the
individual normally learns them as unconsciously as he learns the
language. Attitude are tendencies to feel and act in certain ways.
Values are measures of goodness or desirability, for example, we value
private property, (representative) Government and many other things
and experience.
Goals are those attainments which our values define as worthy, (e.g.)
winning the race, gaining the affections of a particular girl, or
becoming president of the firm. By approving certain goals and
ridiculing others, the culture channels individual ambitions. In these
ways culture determines the goals of life.

3. Culture defines Myths, Legends, and the Supernatural:

Myths and legends are important part of every culture. They may
inspire, reinforce effort and sacrifice and bring comfort in
bereavement. Whether they are true is sociologically unimportant.
Ghosts are real to people who believe in them and who act upon this
belief. We cannot understand the behaviour of any group without
knowing something of the myths, legends, and supernatural beliefs
they hold. Myths and legends are powerful forces in a group’s
behaviour.

Culture also provides the individual with a ready-made view of the

universe. The nature of divine power and the important moral issues
are defined by the culture. The individual does not have to select, but
is trained in a Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or some other
religious tradition. This tradition gives answers for the major (things
imponderable) of life, and fortuities the individual to meet life’s crises.

4. Culture provides Behavior Patterns:

The individual need not go through painful trial and error learning to
know what foods can be eaten (without poisoning himself), or how to
live among people without fear. He finds a ready-made set of patterns
awaiting him which he needs only to learn and follow. The culture
maps out the path to matrimony. The individual does not have to
wonder how one secures a mate; he knows the procedure defined by
his culture.

If men use culture to advance their purposes, it seems clear also that a
culture imposes limits on human and activities. The need for order
calls forth another function of culture that of so directing behaviour
that disorderly behaviour is restricted and orderly behaviour is
promoted. A society without rules or norms to define right and wrong
behaviour would be very much like a heavily travelled street without
traffic signs or any understood rules for meeting and passing vehicles.
Chaos would be the result in either case.

Social order cannot rest on the assumption that men will

spontaneously behave in ways conducive to social harmony.

Culture and Society:

The relationship between society, culture and personality is stressed
by Ralph Linton: “A society is organised group of individuals. A
culture is an organised group of learned responses. The individual is
living organism capable of independent thought, feeling and action,
but with his independence limited and all his resources profoundly
modified by contact with the society and culture in which he develops.
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A society cannot exist apart from culture. A Society is always made of
persons and their groupings. People carry and transmit culture, but
they are not culture. No culture can exists except as it is embodied in a
society of man; no society can operate without, cultural directives.
Like matter and energy, like mind and body, they are interdependent
and interacting yet express different aspects of the human situation.

One must always keep in mind the interdependence and the reciprocal
relationship between culture and society. Each is distinguishable
concept in which the patterning and organisation of the whole is more
important than any of the component parts