miércoles, 28 de marzo de 2012

Culture

As in language, there are many people that have thought and answered the following question: what is culture? Some of them say that culture is something we aspire to, as he says, "the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it" (Arnold, Matthew; "Culture and Anarchy"). As usual, many different points of view are seen in this type of answer that wants to define such a wide word. Other theorist says that culture is something outside of us, in which where we are born and have to learn it.  This is the case of Claude Levi-Strauss, in his text "Structural Anthropology", 1983.
The one that says that culture was developed by humans, is Clifford Geertz, in "The Interpretation of Cultures", 1973. There he compares culture with a spider web. "Man is an animal suspended in webs (...) he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs" he proposed.
According to my point of view, I agree with Mr. Geertz, because every single human that lives in a social group has culture, but it wasn't something that just appeared; it was a product developed by our ancestors.

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