On the Substance and Uses of Culture’s Elements

Abstract

Culture has two universally accepted defining characteristics: being learned and being shared. Being learned, it is in the mind, and being shared, it is in more than one mind so that no one can observe culture’s units directly, including insiders. Conventionally, culture’s units are exhaustively categorized as either characterizing reality or evaluating it. A second exhaustive, so cross-cutting, division is proposed separating specific and narrowly applicable units from those that are general and broadly applicable. Several hypotheses follow from the foregoing. One is that culture’s behavioral guidance comes not from single units but from hybrids of units characterizing reality and others evaluating what is characterized. These hybrids, procedurals, are what make culture the basis for human adaptation. A specialized procedural of wide and profound importance, status, is culture’s action arm because it distributes culture’s units differentially across situations and provides participants with behavioral guidance tailored for the situation at hand according to their statuses. In addition to providing cultural distribution, status plays a key role in cultural organization, the extremely influential relation among culture’s units.

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