What Is Human Culture and How Is It Transmitted?
This paper examines two foundational questions in cultural studies: what human culture is and how it is transmitted across generations. Drawing on the work of James Banks and Monica McGoldrick, the paper defines culture not by its tangible artifacts but by how people within a group interpret and employ symbols, values, and behaviors. It illustrates cultural difference through examples from African-American, Asian Indian, Italian, Polish, and Jewish communities. The paper then turns to a debate in evolutionary biology, engaging Mouden et al. (2014) to argue that cultural transmission is best understood through social learning rather than Darwinian genetic processes.
- Defining Human Culture: Culture as symbols, values, and shared meaning
- Cultural Differences Across Groups: Life-cycle traditions across ethnic communities
- How Human Culture Is Transmitted: Challenging Darwinian models of cultural transmission
- The Genetics vs. Social Learning Debate: Altruism, genes, and cultural experience compared
- Conclusion: Social learning drives culture forward, not genetics
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What makes this paper effective
- It moves efficiently from definition to application, grounding abstract concepts in concrete cross-cultural examples before pivoting to a theoretical debate.
- The paper draws on disciplinarily distinct sources — multicultural education scholarship and evolutionary biology — giving the argument breadth for its length.
- It clearly distinguishes between competing scholarly positions (Darwinian vs. social-learning models) without caricaturing either side.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses a compare-and-contrast framework at two levels simultaneously: it contrasts cultural groups to illustrate what culture is, then contrasts theoretical models to explain how culture spreads. This layered comparison allows a short paper to cover both descriptive and explanatory territory without losing focus.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a working definition of culture, immediately complicated by Banks's distinction between tangible artifacts and the meanings people attach to them. A middle section provides brief ethnographic examples from McGoldrick to make the definition concrete. The final and longest section introduces Mouden et al. (2014) and walks through their Price-equation argument against genetic models of cultural transmission, concluding that social learning — not biology — drives cultural change.
Defining Human Culture
According to the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at the University of Minnesota, many social scientists see culture as "consisting primarily of the symbolic, ideational, and intangible aspects of human societies" (Banks, 1989). However, that is a limited approach, according to Banks, Professor of Diversity Studies. The true reality of culture — any culture — is not its "artifacts, tools, or other tangible cultural elements," but rather how people within the group employ and embrace those tools, artifacts, and other cultural elements (Banks). In other words, what defines culture is how people interact with their surroundings.
What human culture ultimately comes down to are the symbols, perspectives, and values "that distinguish one people from another" (Banks). People in different cultures interpret the importance of behaviors, symbols, and artifacts differently, and it is precisely this variation in interpretation that gives each culture its distinct identity.
Cultural Differences Across Groups
One illustration of human cultural difference is the culture of African Americans. Professor McGoldrick (2006) writes that the values of European groups have tended to be seen as "normal," while the values of cultures such as African-American culture are labeled "ethnic." The term "ethnic," McGoldrick explains, has come to imply a culture that has been marginalized. African Americans view death as "the most important life cycle transition," while Asian Indians, Italians, and Poles "tend to emphasize weddings" as the most significant life cycle transition (McGoldrick). Jews, by contrast, celebrate the bar mitzvah as a key life cycle transition. These examples illustrate how deeply a culture's values shape what it considers worthy of collective commemoration.
How Human Culture Is Transmitted
In the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Mouden et al. (2014) take issue with scholars who characterize cultural transmission as "a Darwinian process." The article asserts that there is no "generally agreed formal framework" to sort out and define natural selection and other important related concepts. The authors therefore present the argument that "cultural natural selection maximizes cultural fitness," which is fundamentally different from "genetic fitness" — the concept favored by those who apply Darwinian logic to cultural transmission (Mouden, 231). The authors conclude that cultural transmission cannot be modeled as an evolutionary process in the biological sense.
Rather than inheriting only a genotype, each individual within a culture also inherits "socially learned information" (Mouden, 231). This distinction is central to understanding how cultural transmission actually operates — not through DNA, but through shared knowledge passed from person to person within a community.
Conclusion
Cultural generations are defined not by genetic evolution but rather by social learning, which allows the transmission of cultures to evolve much more quickly than biological generation permits (Mouden, 233). Cultural changes carry complexities that genetic changes and transmission do not. In conclusion, the argument advanced by Mouden et al. is that cultures are moved forward — transmitted — by human social processes and not by genetic forces.
Works Cited
Banks, J. A., McGee, C. A., and Banks, M. (2009). Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. (2013). What is Culture? Retrieved July 8, 2016, from http://carla.umn.edu.
Kroeber, A. L., and Kluckhohn, C. (1978). Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. New York: Kraus Reprint Company.
McGoldrick, M., Giordano, J., and Garcia-Preto, N. (2005). Ethnicity and Family Therapy, Third Edition. New York: Guilford Press.
Mouden, C. E., Andre, J. B., Morin, O., and Nettle, D. (2014). Cultural transmission and the evolution of human behavior: A general approach based on the Price equation. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Volume 27, 231–241.
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