That people knew what to type for the last three posts is an answer to Katawa's question, isn't it?

Not all culture is "highbrow."

Flatfingers wrote:That people knew what to type for the last three posts is an answer to Katawa's question, isn't it?

Not all culture is "highbrow."

Bingo! You hit the nail on the head! You get a monkey.

It is funny to think about how what many people consider to be 'cultured' is, at a base level, a minority trying to establish feelings of supremacy. Circumstantial, granted, but applicable to many. That's my view anyway, obvious the actual term 'culture' itself is applicable differently, but when referring to people as 'cultured', it gains this strange perspective.

I think in my old philosophical course we distinguished nature from culture.
Culture is everything that is made by men.
Earth has not been made by men : it belong the the natural world.
Societies, arts, (human) civilizations are cultural.

I love this definition because it raises lots of questions:
- what in humans societies come from nature? is love natural or cultural? Hate? Passion? Murder? Empathy? Communication?
- How to qualify the advanced societies of non-human animal species? Should we talk about an equivalent of culture?

What about animal culture?

Basmannen wrote:What about animal culture?

Gooood point, animals have cultural habbits as well. Look at Bees or Ants for example.

Can it qualify it of 'cultural' because they look like human habits?

Diegetisor wrote:Can it qualify it of 'cultural' because they look like human habits?

More to the point, are there any of that species who don't engage in that behavior?

If everybody does it, it's instinctual, not cultural, no?

I know what you try to say and I agree with you, lets not attack one another because he didn't formulate something exactly right with every tiny detail involved. It takes intelect to forge a culture, bees for example do the same ritual exactly the same all arpund the globe so yes it is instinctual. No bee has ever said, hey lets do it this way from now on. And since we're the only species on earth who are intelectual capable of creating stuff and rituals because we chose to do so using our own imagination we call it culture, thanks to biodiversity we all think differently so we don't create the same culture everywhere.

I agree with you but I think this is about something much more general than "rituals" (but rituals are part of it).

Maybe the disctinction comes from the possibility for humans to create its own rules (custom, moral, religious, law...) and to respect them.

Yes, and we used our imagination to create them/it. So it comes down to this, imagination is the only thing that sets appart from other species (Neanderthals had speach too) though speech greatly increases the speed in how culture develops. I think that in order to create something like culture you got to have imagination.

Flatfingers wrote:

Diegetisor wrote:Can it qualify it of 'cultural' because they look like human habits?

More to the point, are there any of that species who don't engage in that behavior?

If everybody does it, it's instinctual, not cultural, no?

Yes, unless culture is instinctual.

Grumblesaur wrote:

Flatfingers wrote:

Diegetisor wrote:Can it qualify it of 'cultural' because they look like human habits?

More to the point, are there any of that species who don't engage in that behavior?

If everybody does it, it's instinctual, not cultural, no?

Yes, unless culture is instinctual.

Well, not to quibble (much), but what I think you're really talking now is about an inborn need to create culture as an instinctual drive -- not any particular expression of culture, which can in humans vary.

The need to create culture may be an instinctual element of the human species, but if specific expressions of culture are different then it wouldn't be right to say "every member of that species does it [expresses the same cultural attributes]."

It's the case of species for which there is a single expression of culture that, to me, suggests that probably isn't a culture at all but an instinctual behavior of the species.

Hair, I have split you!

Flatfingers wrote:
It's the case of species for which there is a single expression of culture that, to me, suggests that probably isn't a culture at all but an instinctual behavior of the species.

Hair, I have split you!

There are some universals among human culture (often linguistic universals). Admittedly some of these are rather broadly-defined, but they are useful for comparing cultural groups on Earth and, if you're a writer, creating a fictitious-yet-believable human society.

And language is probably instinctual, however, like a cultural behavior, it has to be learned. While everyone is born with more or less the same capacity for language, it can be lost if the human fails to learn before their critical period. While not every cultural behavior is instinctual, and not all instincts can be construed as cultural, there certainly is some overlap, and I suspect language is one of them.

There has been, and is, quite a bit of debate about this sort of thing, though.

So again, imagination is key here. I do not think there is an instinctual drive in humans to create culture, it is our imagination the lets us think outside the box, about things that have never been seen before (like the afterlife). Humans have a habbit of constantly want to improve, we see problems and use our imagination to solve the problem. This can be creating pottery to store things or create religion to controll a population, rules to create law and order. The way how we express the answers to our questions also depends on the world around us and how to minipulate it, what resources are nearby and what is key to what I want to make. Do I want a house of limestone or do I want a house that I can replace easily, How you build the house is very much dependant on what resources are nearby. So culture is something that isn't created on purpose in the first place, but just coincidently apeares by doing what you do in a different way than someone else.