Approaches

to the
Study of
Culture
 Evolutionary Concept of
Culture
The earliest theory about culture is
evolutionism. Evolutionism is the notion that there
exists one dominant line of evolution or stages for
the development of culture. In other words, all
societies pass through the same specified stages.
In this theory, popularized by Frazer, Tylor, Morgan
and Bachofen, culture was seen as evolving from
primitive to civiled form, from simple to complex.
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
(1832-1917)
was a British
anthropologist, who
defined culture as “that
complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief,
art, morals, law, custom,
and any other capabilities
and habits acquired by
 Functionalist Analysis of
Culture
Functionalism as a perspective in
understanding culture takes its origin from the
anthropological studies of Bronislaw Malinowski
and Emile Durkheim. Borrowing from biology,
functionalism employs organicismic analogy. This
means that society is like a living organ or
organic whole, the parts of which contribute to
the overall maintenance of the organism. In this
view, society is like a living cell with many parts,
and each part plays specific functions for the
Functionalism defines culture as a whole
that provides an overarching system of
meanings to what people do.
Functionalism focuses on the social roles
that cultural items play within the social
system as a whole. Malinowski, in
particular suggested that individuals have
universal physiological needs (for
example, reproduction, food and shelter)
and that culture is created by people to
Marvin Harris’ (1974) study of sacred
cows of India, while falling into cultural
materialist paradigm, provides a good
example of functionalist analysis. For
Harris, the reverence for the cows
among Indians has more to do with
economic adaptation than religious
doctrine.
 Structural Analysis of
Culture
In the 20th century, the study of culture
was dominated by structuralist paradigm.
Structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss
(1908-2009) emphasized the synchronic
character of culture (the similarities of
cultures across time and space). Levi-
Strauss (1969) defines culture in the
following way:
Man is a biological being as well as social
individual. Among the responses which he
gives to external stimuli, some are the full
product of his nature, and others of his
condition….. But it is not always easy to
distinguish between the two….. Culture is
neither simply juxtaposed to nor simply
superposed over life. In a way, culture
substitutes itself to life, in another way
culture uses and transforms life to realize a
synthesis of a higher order.
This “higher order” refers to cultural
universals or those cultural traits and
patterns common across cultures, the
structuralists rely on linguistic theory. They
define culture as a set of narrative of
linguistic system that has underlying
structures or codes. And these codes or
structures are supposed to be common to
all cultural elements like kinship, fairy
tales and myths, just to name a few.
 Feminist View of
Culture
The feminist analysis of culture is a recent
development in the study of culture. This
has to do with the rise of professional
women in anthropology and other social
sciences. Famous women anthropologists
include Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Mary
Douglas, Laura Bohannon, Sherry Ortner,
Michelle Rosaldo, Peggy Reeves, Sanday,
Louise Lamphere, Lila Abu-Lughod, and
Marilyn Strathern.
Margaret Mead (1901-1978)
was a famous American woman cultural
anthropologist, who popularized
anthropology through public lectures and
best-selling books. She defined culture as
“the whole complex of traditional
behaviour which has been developed by
the human race and is successively
learned by each generation. A culture is
less precise. It can mean the forms of
traditional behaviour which are
characteristics of a given society, or of a
group of societies, or of a certain race, or
of a certain area, or of a certain period of
 Marxist Analysis of
Whereas Culture
feminists emphasize the role of
male-bias in the study of culture, classic
Marxist analysis emphasizes the role of
economic class and economic life of
society. The classic Marxist analysis of
culture can be found in Marx’s (1977,
originally published 1869) famous ‘Preface
to the Critique of Political Economy’ in
which he argued:
 The mode of production of material life
conditions the general process of social,
political and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines
their existence, but their social
existence that determines their
consciousness.
Marx of course is not saying that culture is
completely determined and shaped by the mode of
production or the economic base. Culture, once it is
established, is also active in shaping the
development of the economic system of society. The
Marxist analysis of culture is powerful in explaining
the differences in life styles among various classes
especially between the working class families and
middle classes. For example, whereas middle class
families can aford private schooling because they
have relatively high income, the working class has
difficulty sending their children to good quality
As a result, middle class children tend to get
better jobs than their working class counter-parts.
The success of middle class children is explained
largely by the cultural background they have
(Bourdie and Passeron, 1978) middle class
children have richer vocabularies and better
linguistic competencies. They are more exposed
to varieties of “cultural items” which are taught in
schools like classical novels, literature, and other
artistic works. Their cultural background enables
them to perform better in schools in which middle
class values serve as the unacknowledged norms.
Postmodern and Postcolonial Theories of
Culture
The analysis of cultures presented so far came
from Western social sciences. Today, many non-
Western scholars, especially those that have
studied in the western institutions of higher
learning, question the validity of classical
theories of culture. While they credit the Marxist
and feminists for raising the issue of culture as
produced by power structures an inequalities, the
postmodern and postcolonial theories of culture
further advance this criticism.
 The postmodern view of culture challenges the notion
that there is a single definition of culture. Postmodern
analyses of culture show that culture is like a narrative
or story. Culture like a story can have a life on its own.
They espouse cultural relativism and reject any search
for cultural universals.

Cultural relativism is simply the belief that all cultures

as equally complex. They also challenge the idea that
there is such thing as “master narrative” that
underlines cultural forms as structuralist believed.
Rather, cultures are equally complex and they should
be interpreted based on their own logic and form.
 Extreme positions even advocate the rejection of the
concept “culture” altogether because it connotes a fxed
entity with definable contents and structure. Some of
postmodern critics prefer the term “discourse” or story
over and against the term “culture.”
Later, postcolonial theorists borrowed the
postmodern criticism of the traditional studies of
culture. the postcolonial critics of culture argue that
there is no such thing as culture with capital “C” but
only “cultures” in plural. They criticized the traditional
theories of culture for assuming that there is a
singlecorrect way to understand cilture.
 In Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969, org.
1949) Levi-Strauss contended that one of the first
and most important distinctions a human makes
is between self and others. This “natural” binary
distinction then leads to the formation of the
incest taboo, wgich necessitates choosing
spouses from outside of one's family. in this
fashion, the binary distinction between kin and
nonkin is resolved in primitive societies by the
reciprocal exchange of women and the formation
of kin networks.
Eurocentrism or Westernism, or its variant,
Americanization, are all subspecies of ethnocentrism.
Ethnocentrism- is as old as culture but it is a modern
word, invented at th opening of the 20th century by
William Graham Summer(1906), an eminent professor
of political and social science at Yale.
-he defines ethnocentrism as the “technical name for
this view of things in which one's own group is center of
everything”.
-It need not necessarily lead to cultural imperialism or
Eurocentrism.
-All people are ethnocentric.
- they used their perspectives to denigrate indigenous
cultures to justify colonialism.
The Biological and Cultural Evolution of Human
Beings
-interconnection between human beings and other
living things had already been noticd in earlier history.
-Roman philoosopher Lucretius believed that the early
human beings were cave-dwellers.02
-after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the
philosophical explanation for the origin of human beings
was replaced by the Biblical account.
-the Book of Genesis was believed to be the literal
account of human creation
- the first parents were Adam and Eve, they were given
by God the power of language to name all the species
The religious-theological view about the origin of
human beings began to be challenged in the
beginning of the modern period with the rise of
science. The Englishman Francis Bacon, the
pioneer in the use of scientific method, advocated
the use of induction to arrive at the truth in his
True Suggestions for the Interpretation of
nature, published in 1620 to explain a
phenomenon. In the field of anatomy, Vesalius
pioneered the careful study of human anatomy in
1543. This opened up the exploration of intricate
system of the human body.
Another field of science that contributed to the
ascendacy of modern account of human origin is
geology. With the birth of Industrial Revolution
(1760-1840), many early geologists and
engineers discovered a lot about Earth's surface
formation. Charles Lyell published The Principle of
Geology in 1830 which explained the changes in
the earth's surface such as flooding and
erosion.These discoveries showed that there is no
need to use Biblical accounts to explain the origin
of the earth.
The rise of taxonomy or the classification of livng
things pioneered by Swidesh naturalist Carolus
Linnaeus in 1758 also contributed to the modern
explanation of the origin o the human beings.
taxonomic classificatin of living things provided the
basis for establishing similarities and differences
among species. Earlier, scholars classified living
things on the basis of morphological similarities.
Later, wit tha discovery of the DNA in 1935 by
James watson & Francis Crick, with the help of
Rosalind Franklin, scientists began to discover that
living things have similar DNA structures.
 But this starting findings was already notice by
Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Darwin, the
pioneer of modern theory of evolution, suggested
in 1871 that to find early human fossils, scientists
should look for them in Africa. Fossils are the
preserved remains or traces of animals, plants
and other organism that buried in the earth's
surfaces.
*Archaeologists- scientist who study the past by
excavating the remains burried underneath the
earth's surface. It attempt to reconstruct human
life in the past by studying the artifacts recovered
Paleoanthropologist - combine the
discipline of paleoantology and physical
antropology to study the evolution of
human beings. It is the scientific study of
history, starting withy the Holocene Epoch
roughly 11,700 yers before present.
(Holocene Period- geological epoch which
began at the end of the Pleistocene )
 Charles Darwin
-the first to doubt the fixity
of species and who argued
that the species develop
and evolve in form through
natural selection.
Darwin's The Origin remains on of the most compelling
description of biological evolution in spite the current
development of evolutionary theory. Darwin's basic
idea- that all biological changed can be described in
terms of just three basic preconditions: variation,
competition and inheritance.
Homo sapiens, belong to the species sapein, the
genus Homo and tribed of hominini. The
discovery of Ardipithecus Ramidus(1994) and
Australopithecus anamensis(1995)
simultaneously dislodged afarensis as the earliest
known hominin species and threw doubt on its
status as the ancestor of all later hominins.
Today, the earliest fossil of hominin is the
Sahelanthropus discovered by Micheal Brunet and
his team from 2001 onward. It was found at the
at a site called Toros-Menalla in Chad, in West
Central Africa. This region is part of Sahel and just
Earlier, the A. africanus was considered to be to
earliest hominin. A hominin is label that
anthropologists give to automically modern
human and all the extinct species on, or
connected to, the modern human twig of The Tree
of life (wood 2005, p.24). If human species
evolve, so does their culture.
The concept of cultural evolution- the idea that
cultures evolves and usefull parallel can be drawn
between biological and cultural change- has had
a long and often controversial history of the social
Cultural development closely followed the
physical evolution of human beings. Material
culture- or the tools humans use- is but a small
portion of this cultural complex. The use of tools
facilitates the adaptation of early hominids to the
environment. The early hominids used stones,
woods and bones to make their own tools. Robin
Dunbar has sugested that language that
language may have evolved as a way of
facilitating social interaction in human groups,
the equivalent in grooming in nonhuman
primates.
Some athropologists developed the hypothesis
that prehistoric art was also “hunting magic,”
thet is, in a way of ensuring fruitful hunts and
profitiating the victims. Today anthroologists are
not concerned in the original meaning of
Palaeolithic art. They accept the diversity of the
art expressions. hence they are now investigating
the meanings of the diversity as they reflect the
culture of the community to which they belong.
The date of 12,000 years before present (BP) is
usually given as the begining of what has been
called as Agricultural (or Neolithic) Revolution.
The Agricultural Revolution was heavily
influenced by the shift from the nomadism to
sedentary life and the increasing population.
Hence, it can be concluded that the development
of the human culture and civilizaion is a long
process of gradual development.
 The Museum as the Door to the
Past
The International Council Of Museum (ICOM)
defines a museum as a nonprofit-making,
permanent institution in the service of society
and its development, and open to the public,
which acquires, conserves, researches,
communicates and exhibits, for purposes of
study, education and enjoyment, material
evidence of people and their environment.
According to Mary Boquet(2012),“Museum today
are open, outward-looking instututions: they take
pride in their spectacular architecture, state-of-
the-art exhibitions, public-friendly facilities,
collection research and social conscience. They
project themselves through their websites, public
advertisements and other media, thus positioning
themselves in the world and for their potential
audience(s)”.
As Talbots states, “Through museums, we learn
about material culture and the non-material
culture that gave rise to it, as well as the context
which both culture are embedded. Through
museums, we tap into human experiences of the
past. Education begins with experience. As such,
are quintessentally educational”.
THANK
YOU!!!