How do you view yourself? How do others view you? Do you really care? The answers to all these questions are shaped by the culture you were raised in. for the most part, scientists agree that culture plays a very important role in how a person develops. A woman raised in India might grow up to be a traditional woman who marries young, works part time, and who devotes the majority of her life to her family. The same person, if raised in a more Western-thinking country, might attend college, pursue a career, and not get married until after she's thirty. All cultures have certain things in common, but still have differences that make them very distinct. There are four main criteria anthropologists use when examining cultures. I hope to show these criteria, explain them in a way that is easy to make sense of, and also show how cultures can evolve.
Culture shows up in the social norms, customs, symbols, humor, expectations, beliefs and communications practices. Culture plays a large role in shaping a person's personality. As humans we are born with little or no specific instincts. A person's culture will shape those instincts and train the person on how to survive traditionally. One of the most astonishing things about vulture is the fact that it can be changed in one generation but then keep those changes intact through many hundreds of generation after that.
In the Merit Student's Encyclopedia (page 375), culture is defined as "the patterns of behavior acquired by man though social learning." Nearly all recent studies preformed to find out how culture affects people seem to infer that culture is a learned trait, rather than one passed down through genes (sometimes called "genetic memory") as some anthropologists previous ...