ANTH100 Lecture 8: Characteristics of Culture

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH100
• Professor: Gotz Hoeppe

Document Summary

Cultural adaptation a complex of ideas, activities, and technologies that enables people to survive and even thrive in their environment has enabled humans to survive and expand into a wide variety of environments. Cultures have always changed over time, although rarely as rapidly or massively as many are doing today. Sometimes what is adaptive in one set of circumstances or over the short run is maladaptive over time. Culture is a society"s shared and socially transmitted ideas, values, and perceptions that are used to make sense of experience and generate behavior and are reflected in that behaviour. Although every culture involves a group"s shared values, ideas, and behavior, this does not mean that everything within a culture is uniform. For instance, in all cultures, people"s roles vary according to age and gender. (anthropologists use the term gender to refer to the cultural elaborations and meaning assigned to the biological differences between sexes).