what is culture

what is culture?
Johan Gottfried Herder; the culture is the life blood of people, moral energy flow from culture that holds society together. nations may share civilisation, but they will always be different in their culture since culture defines what the are.
Culture develop in two directions.
a) Romantics; understand culture Herder way, as the define core of a nation, a shared spiritual force which is manifest in all the customs, beliefs and practices of a people. Culture people held, shapes language, arts, religion and history, and leaves its stamp on the smallest event. No member of society not matter if educated or not is deprived of culture, since culture and social membership are the same.
b)university cultivated culture; not everyone possesses it, it is since not everyone has leisure, or ability to learn what is needed. Among cultivated people some more cultivated than other. The purpose of cultivated is to preserve and enhanced the cultural inheritance, and to impart it to the next generation. Cultural practices and beliefs form the self-identity of a tribe, Every member of tribe possesses the culture.
anthropologist define culture as common culture and high culture.
Matthew Arnold believe that the high culture of our civilization contains knowledge that can be absorbed from the channels of popular communication.
The common culture of a tribe is a sign of its inner solidarity. But tribes are vanishing from the modern world, as are all forms of traditional society. Custom, practices, festivals, rituals and beliefs have acquired a fluid and half-hearted quality which reflects our nomadic and rootless existence. Cites dwellers are unable to live in peace until furnished with social identity, an outward grab which, by representing them to others, gives them confidence in themselves.
This search for identity pervades modern life.
Culture is a fluid thing, and may change direction several times in lifetime, it has much in common with the tribesman’s attachment to a common culture. The cultivation of identity is a mode of being for others, a way of claming space in a public world.
Popular culture;
Alongside the elite culture of upper classes Raymond William argued, there has always been another by no means lower in standard, culture of the people, through which they affirmed their solidarity in the face of oppression and through which they expressed their social identity and their sense of belonging. Any activity or artefact is considered cultural, if it is an identity-forming product of social interaction. Popular culture is of two kind. Inherited and acquired.
Herder’s idea of culture is particularist. A culture is defined as something separate “we” and “them“. Humboldt’s conception is universalist; the cultivated person, see man kind as a whole, knows the art and literature of other peoples, and sympathises with human life in all its higher forms and aspirations.
Culture and religion;
The core of common culture is religion, tribes survive and flourish because the have gods, who fuse the many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.
community gather together at shrine, undertakes there collective act, religious observance, in the form of ritual and sacrifices.
There are many kinds of observation;
a) there is community- the collective “we” of dwelling and belonging, the organism Prayer is insufficient tribute to a genuine deity, who usually requires which thrives and suffers as one. the whereby the experience of membership is rehearsed and renewed.
b) imposed upon and discovered in the feeling of community is the experience of pollution, separation, the individual’s sense, in the midst of the collective, that he is nevertheless in some way cast out and excluded through some fault for which he must compensate.
c)an act of sacrifices, which is the ingredient in the process of compensation. Something is offered at the change, though not necessarily to any one in particular; and this offering is a custom, regularly repeated, and framed by ceremonial gestures.
d) the ritual transforms the offering from natural object in something holy and therefore supernatural.
With this pattern of behaviour come also a pattern of belief. The ceremony is understanding as an act of worship, and thing worshiped is believed to be both distinct from the worshipers and yet united to them by an intense personal concern.
In religious belief and observance, however, it is not the large differences that count but small ones. The arrogant reserve of the Lebanese Shiite toward his Christian neighbour in no way compares with his hatred for the sunni rival.
Blasphemy are dangerous because they threaten the community; the carefulness of the religious rite is a sign that religion is not merely a system of belief, but a criterion of membership.
Honouring the death recognising obligations towards them, and treating them as part of the community a tribe acquires a sense of its identity and duration across generation. The cult of ancestors is the surest motive for sacrifice, and for the readiness to die on which the future of a society depends. Its goes hand in hand with caring for offspring, and for offspring’s offspring who come into being as a scared pledge to those who have departed. The desecration of a grave is, on this account, a form of blasphemy, as is any comparable disrespect shown toward the dead.
The funeral rite is a salve for the wound of death because it unites the tribe around its core experience of membership. The dead person does not go from the community, but become a permanent, though invisible, part of it. This need not involved a denial of death of belief in personal immortality.
A common culture binds a society together, but it does so in a special way. the unity of great society can be achieved by confronting people with a common dangerous or enemy within, by variously playing with the threat of death, in the manner of modern dictators. A common culture is an altogether more peaceful method, which unites the present member by dictating them to the past and future of the community.
From the internal point of view, the ethical vision of man is a constant and self-renewing motive to action. It prompt us to accord respect and loyalty to other people. It confers important, mystery and holiness on our meanest transaction, and irradiates our actions with a meaningfulness that is not of this world. No anthropologist, observing a community in which the tenets of religion have taken root, would wish to disabuse his tribe of their sacred rites and stories. It is only those brought up in the faith who feel the impulse, on losing it, to ruin the faith of others. For the anthropologist, the religion is the mainstay of the culture, and therefore the guarantee of social knowledge.
M.S