ABSTRACT
Culture, according to Edward Tylor, the anthropologist who is credited with providing its first explicit definition, “… is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired byman as amember of society” [13, p. 1]. To this list might be added such things as behavior, language, ideas, taboos, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, rituals, and ceremonies. Culture may therefore be seen, in part, as a complex of ideas, thought-forms, behavior patterns, and judgmental criteria that determine a community’s way of life. Culture shapes the manner in which each person satisfies his needs by providing rules that determine what those needs are, and when and how they are to be satisfied. Thus it not only specifies, for example, what needssatisfying tools are to be employed inwhat circumstances, but it also indicateswhen and how those tools are to be used and, to some extent, it influences the formation of the tools themselves. Culture furnishes a system of meaning for understanding reality along with standards for interpretation, judgment, and action. It helps to control the behavior of individuals (i) by supplying norms or guidelines directing that behavior and (ii) through institutions such as the family, the instruments of government, the organization of production, and economic exchange. Culture is a learned phenomenon; it is not passed on via genetic inheritance.2 In particular, children acquire knowledge of culture by observation, bywhat they are told, and by what they are told to do or prevented from doing. And it is communicated through the use of symbols, mostly, though hardly exclusively, by language. The individual elements or properties of culture are called cultural traits and collections of related traits are referred to as cultural patterns.
