Categories of culture

Anthropologists have described a number of different categories of culture. For example, a simple distinction can be made between cultural objects, such as types of clothing, and cultural beliefs, such as forms of religion. Many early anthropological definitions of culture are essentially descriptions of categories of culture or cultural items.

British anthropologist Edward B. Tylor gave one of the first complete definitions of culture in his book Primitive Culture (1871). His definition stated that culture includes socially acquired knowledge, beliefs, art, law, morals, customs, and habits. In 1930 American anthropologist George P. Murdock went much further, listing 637 major subdivisions of culture. Murdock developed an elaborate coding system, known as the Human Relation Area Files. He used this system to identify and sort hundreds of distinctive cultural variations that could be used to compare different cultures.

Later anthropologists came up with simpler categorizations of culture. A common practice is to divide all of culture into three broad categories: material, social, and ideological. A fourth category, the arts, has characteristics of both material and ideological culture.

Material culture includes products of human manufacture, such as technology. Social culture pertains to people’s forms of social organization—how people interact and organize themselves in groups. Ideological culture relates to what people think, value, believe, and hold as ideals. The arts include such activities and areas of interest as music, sculpture, painting, pottery, theater, cooking, writing, and fashion. Anthropologists often study how these categories of culture differ across different types of societies that vary in scale (size and complexity).

Anthropologists have identified several distinct types of societies by scale. The smallest societies are known as bands. Bands consist of nomadic (not settled) groups of fewer than a hundred, mostly related people. A tribe, the next largest type of society, generally consists of a few hundred people living in settled villages. A larger form of society, called a chiefdom, binds together two or more villages or tribes under a leader who is born into the position of rule. The largest societies, known as civilizations, contain from several thousand to millions of mostly unrelated people, many of whom live in large cities. Some anthropologists characterize the world today as a single global-scale culture, in which people are linked together by industrial technology and markets of commercial exchange.

A. Material Culture

All societies produce and exchange material goods so that people can feed, clothe, shelter, and otherwise provide for themselves. This system is commonly known as an economy. Anthropologists look at several aspects of people’s material culture. These aspects include (1) the methods by which people obtain or produce food, known as a pattern of subsistence; (2) the ways in which people exchange goods and services; (3) the kinds of technologies and other objects people make and use; and (4) the effects of people’s economy on the natural environment.

1. Patterns of Subsistence

People in band societies live as hunter-gatherers (also known as foragers), collecting plants and taking animals from their environment. People living in tribes or chiefdoms commonly practice horticulture (gardening) or pastoralism (animal herding). Many horticultural societies, such as the Hanunóo of the Philippines, practice what is known as swidden or the slash-and-burn method of gardening. This involves cutting down a patch of forest, burning the plant matter to release nutrients into the soil, and planting gardens. After about three years, the swidden gardeners move to another patch of forest, allowing their old gardens to return to forest. Pastoralists, such as the Masai of east Africa, may also grow food in small gardens to supplement their diets of milk, meat, and blood.

Many peoples living in larger societies, such the Han of northern China, practice manual (sometimes called extensive) agriculture and produce surpluses of food and other goods. Some surpluses create wealth, while surplus foods are commonly stored for use in times of need. Because of this surplus production, some people work in nonsubsistence (not food-producing) activities. People not involved in food production may work, for example, as craftspeople, religious practitioners, or political administrators. Manual agriculture also supported early civilizations such as Sumer, which existed from about 3000 to about 1800 bc in what is now Iraq.

Agriculture in nonindustrialized societies relies on systems of irrigation run from natural waterways, animal-powered plowing, and natural methods of fertilization, such as the use of rotted vegetation to add nutrients to soil. Animal-powered plow agriculture and irrigation involve more time, energy, and material inputs than do swidden gardening, pastoralism, or hunting and gathering.

The food production in large, industrial and commerce-based societies—such as the United States and Western Europe—depends on expensive machinery, vast supplies of fossil fuels to power that machinery, automated irrigation systems, and great quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This form of production, known as intensive agriculture, is more costly than any other, but produces quantities of food vast enough to allow most people to work in nonsubsistence activities.

2. People exchange goods and services

People in small societies commonly exchange goods with each other and with people in other small societies through systems of barter, ceremonies, and gifts. For example, the people of the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea, practice an elaborate form of inter-island exchange known as the kula. Through the kula, people living on different islands continually exchange prestige goods, such as beautiful shell necklaces, as well as food, clothing, weapons, and other items. Such systems of ongoing exchange of goods, common to all societies, create long-lasting bonds between people.

Contemporary industrial societies have organized markets for land, labor, and money, and virtually everything is a commodity. People buy and sell goods and services using money. This form of economy, known as capitalism, disconnects the value of goods and services from the goods and services themselves and the people who produce or provide them. Thus, the exchange of goods and services for currency is not particularly important for creating social bonds. In industrialized and commerce-based societies, people also exchange securities (such as the stocks of corporations), which have value based on their representation of ownership, and derivatives, whose value is based on that of underlying securities.

3. Technology and Manufacture

In small societies people usually build shelters and make clothing out of readily available plant and animal materials. For example, in forest horticultural societies in the Amazon region of South America, people make houses of wooden branches covered with layers of palm leaves.

Band and tribal peoples also use fairly simple technologies for work. People commonly use sticks to dig the ground for planting or for getting at edible roots. They may use animal hides or plant materials such as tree bark to make clothing and sacs or baskets for carrying items. Hunters take their prey either with sharpened sticks or with arrowheads of stone or bone attached to wooden shafts. Some coat the tips of their arrows with poisons gathered from plants or animals. Poisoned weapons can quickly disable prey. People who live by water commonly make boats of wood and animal skins for travel, fishing, and the hunting of sea mammals such as seals and whales. Most hunter-gatherers, horticulturists, and pastoralists cook over open fires.

In primarily agricultural societies, many of which still exist today in countries throughout Africa and Asia, the people build sturdy houses of sun-dried mud brick and thatch, wooden beams, or quarried stone. These people commonly produce beautiful and functional ceramic storage containers and other pottery, finely woven textiles, and tools of forged metal. People in agricultural societies also have many methods of cooking using pots and ovens of mud brick or stone.

In large industrial and commerce-based societies, most people live in wood-frame or brick houses and apartment buildings with plumbing, supplies of electricity and natural gas, and telephone service. Much of the material culture in these societies consists of mass-produced goods created through industrial production. A great deal of food and clothing are produced in this way. The variety of common household technologies includes televisions, stereos, microwave ovens, and computers. Many people work in giant skyscrapers built from metal girders and beams, concrete, and high-strength glass. People and goods can travel great distances by automobile, train, plane, and ship. Other significant technologies include artificial satellites, enormously potent and complex weaponry systems, and reactors for producing nuclear energy.

4. Effects on the Environment

Hunting and gathering, horticultural, and pastoral ways of life generally make small demands on the natural environment, because people tend to gather or grow only enough food and other materials for their basic needs. These nomadic or seminomadic societies can also move away from depleted areas, allowing plants to regrow and animals to repopulate.

Agricultural societies can heavily burden the environment, sometimes endangering their own survival. For example, early Mediterranean civilizations deforested and overgrazed large areas of land. These damages to the land prompted soil erosion, which made food production increasingly costly over time.

Industrial societies put even larger demands on the environment, and they may someday exhaust important supplies of natural resources. The mass production of goods is often wasteful and polluting. Thus, large societies must also put great effort into disposing of their wastes and developing new sources of energy and material resources.

B. Social Culture

People in all types of societies organize themselves in relation to each other for work and other duties, and to structure their interactions. People commonly organize themselves according to (1) bonds by kinship and marriage, (2) work duties and economic position, and (3) political position. Important factors in family, work, and political relations include age and gender (behaviors and roles associated with men and women).

1. Kinship and Family

In smaller societies people organize themselves primarily according to ties of kinship (blood relation) and marriage. Kin generally give each other preferential treatment over nonkin. People who share ties by blood and marriage commonly live together in families. See also Kinship and Descent.

Small societies categorize kin in many different ways and define appropriate types of behavior between kin, including who can marry. In band societies, people know their relationships to others in their band, which usually includes only a few families. People do not marry within their immediate family, but often take spouses from other bands to create ties that bond them together in times of need.

All people in bands generally respect each other as equals, though children must show increased respect for their elders. The eldest group members often earn special recognition for their knowledge. Men and women in bands also commonly regard each other as equals.

People living in tribes belong to lineages or clans, which are large kin groups that trace their descent to a common ancestor. Clans are somewhat larger than lineages and usually cover more generations. Clans trace their descent to a fictitious ancestor (ancestor whose true identity is not known), often identified as an animal spirit or clan totem (see Totemism).

For instance, many Native American societies (see Native Americans of North America: Social and Political Organization), in both North and South America, live or once lived in tribes. One Native American group, the Navajo, who have long lived primarily in what is now Arizona, organized themselves in the past as matrilineal (descent traced through women) clan-based tribes. Status and property passed to people through their mother’s line.

Kinship and family relations are both important in agricultural societies, as well as for many people in industrial and commerce-based societies. But for many people today living in large societies, kinship and family relations have become less important. Many people live alone or in small families and also depend on organizations, workplaces, and government institutions to provide support available in smaller societies from family and kin.

2. Work Life  

Anthropologists call the smallest unit of economic production in any society a household. A household consists of a group of people, usually a family, who work collectively to support each other and often to raise children.

In small, independent band and tribal societies, individual households produce their own food, clothing, and shelter. Men and women commonly divide work duties; men hunting and building shelters and women gardening, cooking, and caring for children. People in small societies often live in extended families, in which several generations of kin and relatives by marriage live in the same household. Sometimes, however, men and women live in separate places, especially if they also often work and participate in ceremonies apart from members of the opposite sex.

In chiefdoms and civilizations, households have to produce enough to support themselves and their leaders. All households do not always have equal access to needed materials, such as tools or draft animals, or land. Thus, some families have higher status than others do. On the whole, men in these societies have higher status than women and perform fewer menial tasks.

In civilizations, many people specialize in offering a variety of services and producing a variety of goods. Each occupation is commonly associated with a different level of status, usually referred to as an economic class. Hindus in India, by comparison, live according to the caste system, in which a person’s status is fixed at birth and closely tied to his or her occupation.

In industrial societies, few households are self-sufficient. For instance, most people could not build their own houses, grow and cook all of their own food, and make all of their clothes. Most people also depend on technologies that no one could produce alone from raw materials, such as cars, refrigerators, and computers.

In addition, most households in industrial societies consist of nuclear families, which contain only parents and their children. Nuclear families lack the support network and productive capabilities of extended families. Fathers in nuclear families commonly work to earn income, while mothers manage the household and care for children—often in addition to working for income. These gender role patterns have changed somewhat since the 1960s to more equal roles for men and women. People in most modern industrial and commerce-based societies also identify strongly with groups of people united by work, such as professional organizations and labor unions. These groups are entirely separate from family and kinship ties.

3. Leadership and Political Power

Groups of people living in bands have no formal leadership, and all people have input in making group decisions. Most decision-making in tribes occurs within households. Occasionally, most or all members of lineages or clans convene to make important village decisions, such as about dealing with neighboring tribes. Descent groups may also regulate access to crucial resources, such as favored hunting areas, and choose where people will live.

Within most tribes, all groups commonly have about equal status. Since every person belongs to a descent group, no one person ranks too far above or below another. In some tribes, however, people known as big men might earn a degree of higher status and respect than others by demonstrating bravery or bravado.

Chiefdoms, larger than most tribes, consist of at least two very large descent groups organized under rulers known as chiefs, who are born into their positions of leadership. Chiefs must prove that they are closest in descent to the founding ancestor of the highest ranked clans within chiefdoms. They live as full-time rulers who may not have to work at productive duties. Chiefs have the power to collect some of the goods people produce, such as food, and redistribute them in times of need or use them in ceremony.

In the past, chiefdoms existed in a great number of Polynesian societies on Pacific Ocean islands, such as those that make up what is now Hawaii. Chiefdoms were the first societies to have positions of defined, permanent leadership. Chiefdoms still exist in some places under national governments. For instance, chiefs of the Kpelle of Liberia are political leaders for the country’s national districts.

Civilizations have powerful autonomous bodies of authority managed by formal bureaucracies. This political structure is formally known as a state. Some of the first major state societies existed in the area known as Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, and in ancient Egypt (see Egypt: History).

A state may claim ownership of all its territory and resources and may wage wars against other nations. Important families may rule states for several generations, though this happened more commonly in the past. But all states have distinct social and economic classes, and higher classes have greater political influence or power than do lower classes.

Families still rule some states, sometimes as royalty and sometimes as elected aristocracies (small groups, often families, deemed by citizens as qualified to rule). But many states today have elected governments not based on family lines. The citizens of these states share a common identity based on language, ideals, shared rituals, and other cultural bonds. This form of state is known as a nation.

Many national governments serve the interests of business and commerce as much as they do individuals and families. In many cases commercial corporations (businesses created through legal means) have a great deal of political influence. Corporations and large economic market exchanges control the production and distribution of goods and services, as well as transfers of money. Access to employment, not family, often determines where people live. People who cannot earn sufficient income may live in poverty, and many of the poor depend on government welfare for economic support.

C. Ideological Culture

In every society, culturally unique ways of thinking about the world unite people in their behavior. Anthropologists often refer to the body of ideas that people share as ideology. Ideology can be broken down into at least three specific categories: beliefs, values, and ideals. People’s beliefs give them an understanding of how the world works and how they should respond to the actions of others and their environments. Particular beliefs often tie in closely with the daily concerns of domestic life, such as making a living, health and sickness, happiness and sadness, interpersonal relationships, and death. People’s values tell them the differences between right and wrong or good and bad. Ideals serve as models for what people hope to achieve in life.

Many people rely on religion, systems of belief in the supernatural (things beyond the natural world), to shape their values and ideals and to influence their behavior. Beliefs, values, and ideals also come from observations of the natural world, a practice anthropologists commonly refer to as secularism.

1. Religion

Religion allows people to know about and communicate with supernatural beings—such as animal spirits, gods, and spirits of the dead. Religion often serves to help people cope with the death of relatives and friends, and it figures prominently in most funeral ceremonies (see Funeral Rites and Customs).

Peoples of many small band and tribal societies believe that plants and animals, as well as people, can have souls or spirits that can take on different forms to help or harm people. Anthropologists refer to this kind of religious belief as animism. In hunting societies, people commonly believe that forest beings control the supply of game animals and may punish people for irresponsible behavior by making animals outwit the hunt.

In many small societies, visionaries and healers known as shamans receive stories from supernatural beings and later recite them to others or act them out in dramatic rituals. As religious specialists, shamans have special access to this spirit world as well as a rich knowledge of medicinal plants. Shamans commonly assign special supernatural roles to spirit animals and beings. For example, shamans in Amazon societies may communicate with a spirit keeper of the game to insure hunting success. They may also be assisted by spirit jaguars.

In larger, agricultural societies, religion has long been a means of asking for bountiful harvests, a source of power for rulers, and an inspiration to go to war. In early civilized societies, religious visionaries became leaders because people believed those leaders could communicate with the supernatural to control the fate of a civilization. This became their greatest source of power, and people often regarded leaders as actual gods.

For example, in the great civilization of the Aztec, which flourished in what is now Mexico in the 15th and 16th centuries, rulers claimed privileged association with the powerful god Huitzilopochtli. They said that this god required human blood to ensure that the sun would rise and set each day. Aztec rulers thus inspired great awe by regularly conducting human sacrifices. They also conspicuously displayed their vast power as wealth in luxury goods, such as fine jewels, clothing, and palaces. Rulers obtained their wealth from the great numbers of craftspeople, traders, and warriors under their control.

2. Secularism

Many societies today interpret the natural world and form beliefs based on science and logic. Societies in which many people do not practice any religion, such as the United States, may be known as secular societies. However, no society is entirely secular.

During the period in 17th- and 18th-century Europe known as the Age of Enlightenment, science and logic became new sources of belief for many people living in civilized societies. Scientific studies of the natural world and rational philosophies both led people to believe that they could explain natural and social phenomena without believing in gods or spirits. Religion remained an influential system of belief, however.

Both religion and science drove the development of capitalism, the economic system of commerce-driven market exchange. Capitalism itself influences people’s beliefs, values, and ideals in many present-day, large, civilized societies. In these societies, such as in the United States, many people view the world and shape their behavior based on a belief that they can understand and control their environment and that work, commerce, and the accumulation of wealth serve an ultimate good. The governments of most large societies today also assert that human well-being derives from the growth of economies and the development of technology.

In addition, many people have come to believe in the fundamental nature of human rights and free will. These beliefs grew out of people’s faith in their ability to control the natural world—a faith promoted by science and rationalism. Religious beliefs continue to change to affirm or accommodate these other dominant beliefs, but sometimes the two are at odds with each other. For instance, many religious people have difficulty reconciling their belief in a supreme spiritual force with the theory of natural evolution, which requires no belief in the supernatural.

D. Art

Art is a distinctly human production, and many people consider it the ultimate form of culture because it can have the quality of pure expression, entirely separate from basic human needs. But some anthropologists actually regard artistic expression as a basic human need, as basic as food and water. Some art takes the form of material production, and many utilitarian items have artistic qualities. Other forms of art, such as music or acting, reside in the mind and body and take expression as performance. The material arts include painting, pottery, sculpture, textiles and clothing, and cookery. Nonmaterial arts include music, dance, drama and dramatic arts, storytelling, and written narratives.

People had begun making art by at least 30,000 years ago, painting stylized animal figures and abstract symbols on cave walls (see Paleolithic Art). For thousands of years people have also adorned their bodies with ornamentation, such as jewelry, pigments, and stylized scars.

In most societies people establish their personal and group identity through such forms of artistic expression as patterns of dress and body adornment, ceremonial costumes and dances, or group symbols. For example, many Native American groups in the Pacific Northwest carve massive wooden totem poles as symbols of their group identity and history. The stylized figures carved into totem poles represent important clan ancestors and stories of important historical events.

Smaller societies also use art as a primary form of storing and reproducing their culture. Ceremonial dances and performances, for example, commonly tell legends of creation, stories about ancestors, or moral tales containing instructive lessons.

Many people also use art as a vehicle for spiritual or to ask for help from the spiritual world. For instance, some archaeologists believe that one of the earliest known sculptures—a voluptuously shaped female figure made in Willendorf, Austria, over 24,000 years ago and known as the Venus of Willendorf—might have been used to invoke supernatural powers to bring its makers reproductive fertility.

In large societies, governments may hire artisans to produce works that will support the political structure. For example, in the Inca Empire—which dominated the Andean region of Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina in the 15th and 16th centuries—the elite hired metalworkers and textile makers to make exclusive gold and silver jewelry or create special clothing and adornments for them. These royal items displayed insignia that indicated high status. In contrast, non-elites wore coarse, ordinary clothing, reflecting their low status.

In present-day large societies, many people produce art for commercial and political purposes in addition to social, personal, and spiritual reasons. A great number of artists make a living by working for businesses that use art to advertise commercial products. Most large societies today also have laws that protect the content of artworks such as books, films, songs, dances, and paintings as intellectual property, which people own and can sell.