conveying a message. “… Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs…”.The search is not for a causal explanation, but for an interpretative one, that is in search for meaning (Geertz : ). Likewise Leslie White had placed a comparable emphasis on culture as a means of adding meaning to objective reality, using the example of people regarding water from a particular source as holy.
participate. Every social organisation develops a culture of its own. One early anthropological definition of culture comes from the British scholar Edward Tylor: “Culture or civilisation taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and Activity Find out from at least one region other than your own how natural environment affects food habits, patterns of dwelling, clothing and the ways in which God or gods are worshipped. Activity Identify equivalents in Indian languages for the word culture.
What associations do these carry? Do you notice anything in Malinowski’s definition that is missing in Tylor’s? Apart from his mention of art, all the things listed by Tylor are non-material. This is not because Tylor himself never looked at material culture.
He was in fact a museum curator, and most of his anthropological writing was based on the examination of artifacts and tools from societies across the world, which he had never visited. We can now see his definition of culture as an attempt to take into account its intangible and abstract dimensions, so as to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the societies he was studying. Malinowski happened to be stranded on an island in the Western Pacific during the First World War, and discovered thereby the value of remaining for an extended period with the society one was studying. This led to the establishment of the tradition of “field work” you will read about it in Chapter .
The multiple definitions of culture in anthropological studies led Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (anthropologists from the United States) to