Unity In Cultural Diversity

Written By Huzaima Bukhari

When asked to define ‘culture,’ there is a tendency to ponder for a moment before attempting to find words that would do justice to the term. The nineteenth century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor lays down what has understood to be the classic definition of ‘culture’ in the first paragraph of his Primitive Culture?(1871). He writes: “Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

While a good many theorists consider social norms as bases for culture, some like A.L. Kroeber and Clyde K. M. Kluckhohn opined that culture is an abstraction by reasoning that if culture is behavior it, ipso facto, becomes the subject matter of psychology; therefore they concluded that culture “is an abstraction from concrete behavior but is not itself behavior.”

Even this was not considered satisfactory as there were complications that led to further divisions in the idea of concrete and abstract and interchangeable elements of human behavior and culture. Leslie A. White tried to resolve this in his essay The Concept of Culture by stating that the issue is not really whether culture is real or abstract. He reasoned that the issue is the context of the scientific interpretation.

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