Cultures

A culture is said to be the pattern of activities of a social group of people living in a particular location. Usually to give significance to one’s culture symbolic structures are created. Traditions, creation of laws, ceremonies, social living standards, customs, etc are all the boon of various cultures. There are infinite cultures in the world. The origination of different types of cultures can be due several reasons.

According to American Anthropology cultures are a symbolic way chosen by human being to categorize their experiences and to symbolically communicate these experiences socially. American Anthropologies can be divided into four fields namely biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistics and archeology.

Biological Anthropology orbits around two questions. One is that can cultures be attributed only to human beings or also to other species. This doubt rises from the theory of evolution which states that human being evolved from non-human primates. Second is what led to the evolution of cultures among humans?

Archeology approaches cultures with the matter and meaning under consideration. It is very apparent that culture is tenaciously connected to language used by the people. For e.g., the ancient Greeks differentiated among civilized people and those people who spoke unintelligible languages. It is thus evident that those who shared a common language belonged to the same culture. Thus understanding a culture’s language enables us to understand the same culture in a better manner but it must also be noted that language and culture don't depend on each other directly. However human beings use language to identify themselves with a particular culture. There are several ways in which one language is used by different groups of people which bring to light the existence of sub-groups that pertain to larger communities. For e.g. there is a difference in the English spoken in USA, UK and Australia and it has several dialects based on the region it is used in. 

Cultural Anthropology focuses on the research of influence of cultures on individuals, how cultures spread among communities and how over time there came a change in their meaning. Comparative studies on cultures help better analysis of cultural influence on human behavior.

As analysis of the huge variety of cultures gave lot of information about various aspects cultural studies were developed. In the United States of America, “Cultural Studies” focus mainly on popular culture.

Questions:

• Name the four fields of American Anthropology.
• How does language link with culture?