Four Characteristics of CultureI. Culture is shared— Region, climate and【T1】__

Four Characteristics of Culture
Good morning, everyone. Today, I would like to discuss with you about the characteristics of culture. As we all know, culture refers to the pattern of human activity and the symbols that give significance to these activities. Culture manifests itself in terms of the art, literature, costumes, customs, language, religion and religious rituals. The people and their pattern of life make up the culture of a region. Cultures vary in different parts of the world. They are different across the land boundaries and the diversity in cultures results in the diversity in people around the world. Culture also consists of the system of beliefs held by the people of the region, their principles of life and their moral values. The patterns of behavior of the people of a particular region also form a part of the region’s culture. Now, let me share with you four characteristics of culture.
First of all, culture is shared, by which we mean that every culture is shared by a group of people.[1]Depending on the region they live in, the climatic conditions they thrive in and their historical heritage, they form a set of values and beliefs. This set of their principles of life shapes their culture. No culture belongs to an individuaL It is rather shared among many people of a certain part of the world. It belongs to a single community and not to any single human being.
Secondly, culture is learned. Human infants come into the world with basic drives such as hunger and thirst, but they do not possess instinctive patterns of behavior to satisfy them. Likewise, they are without any cultural knowledge. However, they are genetically predisposed to rapidly learn language and other cultural traits. New born humans are amazing learning machines. Any normal baby can be placed into any family on earth and grow up to learn their culture and accept it as his or her own.[2]Since culture is non-instinctive, we are not genetically programmed to learn a particular one.[4]Every human generation potentially can discover new things and invent better technologies. The new cultural skills and knowledge are added onto what was learned in previous generations.[3]As a result, culture is cumulative. Due to this cumulative effect, most high school students today are now familiar with mathematical insights and solutions that ancient Greeks such as Archimedes and Pythagoras struggled their lives to discover.
Next in order, cultures change. All cultural knowledge does not perpetually accumulate. At the same time that new cultural traits are added, some old ones are lost because they are no longer useful.[5]For example, most city dwellers today do not have or need the skills required for survival in a wilderness. Most would very likely starve to death because they do not know how to acquire wild foods and survive the extremes of weather outdoors. What is more important, in modern urban life are such things as the ability to drive a car, use a computer, and understand how to obtain food in a supermarket or restaurant.[6]The regular addition and subtraction of cultural traits results in culture change. All cultures change over time—none is static. However, the rate of change and the aspects of culture that change vary from society to society.[7]For instance, people in Germany today generally seem happy to adopt new words from other languages, especially from American English, while many French people are resistant to it because of the threat of "corrupting" their own language. However, the French are just as eager as the Ger mans to adopt new technology.[8]Change can occur as a result of both inventions within a society as well as the diffusion of cultural traits from one society to another. Predicting whether a society will adopt new cultural traits or abandon others is complicated by the fact that the various aspects of a culture are closely interwoven into a complex pattern.[9]Changing one trait will have an impact on other traits because they are functionally interconnected. As a result, there commonly is a resistance to major changes.[10]For example, many men in North America and Europe resisted the increase in economic and political opportunities for women over the last century because of the far ranging consequences. It inevitably changed the nature of marriage, the family, and the lives of all men. It also significantly altered the workplace as well as the legal system and the decisions made by governments.
[11]Last but not least, cultures no longer exist in isolation. It is highly unlikely that there are any societies still existing in total isolation from the outside world. Even small, out of the way tribal societies are now being integrated to some extent into the global economy. That was not the case a few short generations ago. Some of the societies in the Highlands of New Guinea were unaware of anyone beyond their homeland until the arrival of European Australian miners in the 1930s.[12]A few of the Indian tribes in the Upper Amazon Basin of South America remained unaware of the outside world until explorers entered their territories in the 1950s and 1960s. Members of these same[13]New Guinean and Amazonian societies today buy clothes and household items produced by multinational corporations. They are developing a growing knowledge of other cultures through schools, radios, and even televisions and the Internet. As a result of this inevitable process, their languages and indigenous cultural patterns are being rapidly replaced.[14]Virtually all societies are now acquiring cultural traits from the economically dominant societies of the world. The most influential of these dominant societies today are predominantly in North America and Western Europe. However, even these societies are rapidly adopting words, foods, and other cultural traits from all over the world. The e-mergence of what is essentially a shared global culture is not likely to result in the current major cultures disappearing in the immediate future the same way many of the small indigenous ones have.[15]Language differences and ethnocentrism will very likely prevent that from happening. There are powerful conflicting trends in the world today. For example, some of the nations in Africa whose boundaries were arbitrarily created by Europeans during the colonial era are now experiencing periodic tribal wars that may result in the creation of more ethnically based countries.
OK I have outlined four characteristics of culture for you. I am sure you have a better understanding of what traits culture presents and how we can perceive culture with an open mind.