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Chapter 18 Getting an Idea of Culture w UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI GRAMMAR SYSTEMS: A FORMAL-LANGUAGE-THEORETIC FRAMEWORK FOR LINGUISTICS AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION Maria Dolores Jiménez López ISBN: 978-84-691-1893-1/DL: T-351-2008 Chapter 18 Getting an Idea of Culture If we want to develop something called Gutural Grammar Systems, it is nec- essary, of course, to start by making clear what culture is. To do so, it would be helpful to define culture, to establish which its properties are and what kind of units can be considered as basic of it. But, in the introduction we have emphasized the idea that human evo- lution is the product of genes and culture, and that our Cultural Grammar System intends to put in evidence this relationship between biology and cul- ture. So, it is not enough to present just what culture is. It is important to put in relation cultural and biological evolution. The relationship between genes and culture is not a new issue in the scientific community. It has origi- nated several debates in very different fields and constitutes one of the major challenges that behavioral sciences face nowadays. So, we retain important to mention some works that have explicitly referred to the relationship of these two major information systems, before entering in the presentation of our grammatical model of cultural evolution. 367 UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI GRAMMAR SYSTEMS: A FORMAL-LANGUAGE-THEORETIC FRAMEWORK FOR LINGUISTICS AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION Maria Dolores Jiménez López ISBN: 978-84-691-1893-1/DL: T-351-2008 368 CHAPTER 18. GETTING AN IDEA OF CULTURE 18.1 What is Culture? 18.1.1 Definitions If there is something really difficult, this is, sure, to define 'culture.' Since the definition of culture by E.B Tylor, in his book Primitive Culture (1871), as 'that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, cus- tom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society, ' many are the definitions we can find out in the literature. Kroe- ber and Kluchholm have made a comprehensive survey of a great number of remarkable definitions of the term culture coined before 1950, collecting 164 definitions of culture proposed by historians and social scientists. Those definitions (cited by [Vermeersch, 1977]) are divided into three categories: 1. enumerative definitions, . 2. definitions by criterion, 3. definitions using a combination of both methods. The first type -the so-called enumerative definitions- presents an obvious problem: they are always inevitably incomplete, and consequently, inade- quate. Those definitions indicate sets of cultural objects. They refer to mental states and processes such as 'knowledge,' 'ideas,' 'beliefs,' 'attitudes,' etc.; or to patterns of behavior using notions such as 'habits,' 'customs;' some of them speak about methods of communication or skills; others allude to the products of human activity; and even there are some which include every- thing related to the concept of Institution. Anyway, independently of which kind of components are stressed in these definitions, the obvious fact is that a complete enumerative definition of culture is almost impossible to get. In what refers to the second type of definitions -definitions by criterion- there are some that emphasize the fact that cultural objects belong to more UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI GRAMMAR SYSTEMS: A FORMAL-LANGUAGE-THEORETIC FRAMEWORK FOR LINGUISTICS AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION Maria Dolores Jiménez López ISBN: 978-84-691-1893-1/DL: T-351-2008 18.1. WHAT IS CULTURE? 369 than one individual at the same time and to individuals of successive gen- erations, they stress, therefore, the social and historical dimension; others point out some theoretical characteristics as can be the idea of adaptation - defining cultural objects as ways of adjusting, as adaptive useful behavior- or the dynamic aspects of culture; and we can find, also, those definitions that center themselves of the creation and the survival of cultural objects empha- sizing the idea of man-made and artificiality of cultural objects and pointing out the independency of genetic inheritance in the transmission of culture. And finally, the third type of definitions is just a combination of those two other kinds, this is, definitions that combine enumeration and criterion. Many other classifications of culture definitions have been established. In 1974, for example, Keesing (cited by [Boyd & Richerson, 1985, p. 33]) argues that conceptions of culture fall into four distinct categories which differ in several fundamental ways. Members of one group define culture in terms of observable, socially transmitted patterns of behavior. The other three categories of theories define culture exclusively in terms of ideas. It seems that there are infinite many classifications of types of definitions about culture. But, what is culture? It seems that it is no so trivial to define it. Every definition has advantages and disadvantages, so, how to decide what is the 'good' definition? [Vermeersch, 1977], citing Anderson and Moore, proposed several 'conditions of adequacy' that must be respected by every definition in order to be acceptable as a basic concept of culture: 1. we must be able to speak of cultural change: cultural objects must be of such a kind that they can be said to change in the course of time; 2. some cultural phenomena do not change in the course of time, so we should be able to discuss the persistence of cultural objects; 3. cultural objects can move from one society to another, so it must be possible to deal with cultural diffusion', UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI GRAMMAR SYSTEMS: A FORMAL-LANGUAGE-THEORETIC FRAMEWORK FOR LINGUISTICS AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION Maria Dolores Jiménez López ISBN: 978-84-691-1893-1/DL: T-351-2008 370 CHAPTER 18. GETTING AN IDEA OF CULTURE 4. since cultural objects may be created in a particular society or may disappear and be rediscovered, we should be able to study cultural in- novation, disappearance, and reappearance. Anyway, even following these guidelines, it is not trivial to give a complete and perfect definition of culture. Therefore the only think we can do, by now, is to collect different definitions proposed by authors included in our bibliography, organizing them in our own classification and expecting to have after that survey, if not more, some blurred idea of what culture is. Our classification of culture definitions include the following three different types: 1. culture as a transmission system, 2. culture as standards of behavior, 3. culture as shared ideas. Within the first group -culture as a transmission system- we find defini- tions as 'By culture we mean the transmission from one generation to the next, via teaching and imitation, of knowledge, values, and other factors that influence behavior.' [Boyd & Richerson, 1985, p. 2]. given by Boyd and Richerson. In the same line can be seen what -according to [Durham, 1991]- is the currently view of Anthropology, which regards cultures as systems of sym- bolically encoded conceptual phenomena that are socially and historically transmitted within and between populations. And also Hutchins and 'Hazlehurst view of culture as a process can be included in this type of definitions. The authors assert that UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI GRAMMAR SYSTEMS: A FORMAL-LANGUAGE-THEORETIC FRAMEWORK FOR LINGUISTICS AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION Maria Dolores Jiménez López ISBN: 978-84-691-1893-1/DL: T-351-2008 18.1. WHAT IS CULTURE? 371 'Culture is not a thing or any collection of things, it is a process. In the human sphere, myths, tools, understandings, be- liefs, practices, artifacts, architectures, classification schemes, etc. alone or in combination do not in themselves constitute culture. Each of these, structures, whether internal or external, is a residue of the cultural process. The residues are, of course, indispensable to the process, but taking them to be culture itself diverts our at- tention from the nature of the cultural process, ' [Hutchins & Hazlehurst, 1992, p. 692]. Many definitions fall under the second heading -culttire as standards of behavior. According to Ward Goodenough, the term culture must be reserved for 'what is learned, for the things one needs to know in order to meet the stan- dards of others.' [Goodenough, 1981, p. 50]. Culture, according to this author, can be reduced to a set of standards: 'Stantards for deciding what is, standards for deciding what can be, standards for deciding how one feels about it, standards for deciding what to do about it, and standards for deciding how to go about doing it.' [Goodenough, 1981, p. 62]. 'The expectations one has of one's fellows may be regarded as a set of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, commu- nicating, acting. These standards constitute the culture that one -> attributes to one's fellows; and it is in this sense of standards that I use the term culture here.' [Goodenough, 1970, p. 99]. So, a society's culture is defined as 'whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and do so UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI GRAMMAR SYSTEMS: A FORMAL-LANGUAGE-THEORETIC FRAMEWORK FOR LINGUISTICS AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION Maria Dolores Jiménez López ISBN: 978-84-691-1893-1/DL: T-351-2008 372 CHAPTER 18. GETTING AN IDEA OF CULTURE in any role that they accept for any one of themselves.' [Goodenough, 1981, p. 109]. In the same line are Cavalli-Sforza and Felclman who, following the Web- ster's Dictionary, define culture as: '...the total patttern of human behavior and its products embod- ied in thought, speech, action, and dependent upon man's capac- ity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding genera- tions through the use of tools, language, and systems of abstract thought.' [Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981, p. 3]. For Marvin Harris culture can be regarded as: '...patterns of behavior, thought and feeling that are acquired or influenced through learning and that are characteristic of groups of people rather than of individuals.
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