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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Slrubenstein (talk | contribs) at 23:48, 3 February 2009 (→Substantial edit of article to reduce length and add breadth). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

	Culture was one of the Social sciences and society good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones Date Process Result July 9, 2006 Good article nominee Listed July 16, 2008 Good article reassessment Kept January 24, 2009 Good article reassessment Delisted
Current status: Delisted good article

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GA Sweeps Review: On Hold

As part of the WikiProject Good Articles, we're doing sweeps to go over all of the current GAs and see if they still meet the GA criteria. I'm specifically going over all of the "Culture and Society" articles. I believe the article currently meets the majority of the criteria and should remain listed as a Good article. However, in reviewing the article, I have found there are some issues that need to be addressed. I have made minor corrections and have included several points below that need to be addressed for the article to remain a GA. Please address them within seven days and the article will maintain its GA status. If progress is being made and issues are addressed, the article will remain listed as a Good article. Otherwise, it may be delisted. If improved after it has been delisted, it may be nominated at WP:GAN. If you disagree with any of the issues, leave a comment after the specific issue and I'll be happy to discuss/agree with you. To keep tabs on your progress so far, either strike through the completed tasks or put checks next to them.

Needs inline citations:

1. "Attentive to the theory of evolution, they assumed that all human beings evolved equally, and that the fact that all humans have cultures must in some way result from human evolution."  Done by linking to Franz Boas, who is well known for holding this attitude. --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
2. "According to evolutionary psychologists, the diversity of forms that human cultures take are constrained (indeed, made possible) by innate information processing mechanisms underlying our behavior"  Done removed entirely; replace w appropriate ciations --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
3. "In order to fully understand culture we must understand its biological conditions of possibility."  Done gone --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
4. "In dealing with immigrant groups and their cultures, there are essentially four approaches:"  Done; replaced "essentially four" with "various". Each term below links to an article that is supported with citations, so I left those alone.
5. "In any case, most of Polynesia is now strongly Christian."  Done; though this is undoubtedly the case, this was removed in my earlier round of edits --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
6. "Dominant influences include ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Christianity, although religion has declined in Europe."  Done; rmv in earlier edits --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
7. "The Middle East generally has three dominant and clear cultures, Arabic, Persian and Turkish, which have influenced each other with varying degrees during different times."  Done; rmv in earlier edits --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
8. "Christianity was the dominant feature in shaping European and the New World cultures for at least the last 500 to 1700 years."  Done; replaced w "Christianity has been important to European and New World cultures for at least the last 500 to 1,700 years." --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
9. "Islam's influence has dominated much of the North African, Middle and Far East regions for almost 1500 years, sometimes mixed with other religions."  Done; replaced with "Islam has had influence..." --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
10. "This concept is mirrored in other cultures, such as in the case of the Great Australian Dream, although this refers more closely to home ownership by the same means."  Done deleted --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
11. "Most, however, reject the identification of culture with consumption goods. Furthermore, many now reject the notion of culture as bounded, and consequently reject the notion of subculture. Instead, they see culture as a complex web of shifting patterns that link people in different locales and that link social formations of different scales."  Done deleted, though I think it's generally correct; replace with citations --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:50, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
12. "Currently, a debate is underway regarding whether or not culture can actually change fundamental human cognition. Researchers are divided on the question."  Done gone --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:50, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
13. "For example, the end of the last ice age helped lead to the invention of agriculture, which in its turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics."  Done gone --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:50, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
14. ""Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct Borrowing" on the other hand tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another"  Done, the citation above discusses this as well, so I made that clearer --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:50, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
15. "Sociologists and anthropologists believe that a holistic approach to the study of cultures and their environments is needed to understand all of the various aspects of change. Human existence may best be looked at as a "multifaceted whole.""  Done; deleted--Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 17:50, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Other issues:

1. I usually have to tell editors to expand the lead, but for this article it needs to be condensed down. It's currently at 10 paragraphs and at most it should be four. Merge some together and take out some of the information that doesn't summarize the information within the article itself. If some of the information is only mentioned in the intro, insert it into the text of the article. See WP:LEAD for guidelines. ( Done, assuming no one objects to my attempt at surgery here --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 16:34, 30 June 2008 (UTC))
2. Although it's great that there are all free images being used in the article, is it possible to include some images that aren't paintings? I'm sure for the topic of the article there are some related photographs of culture in progress that can be added.  Done; I don't deal w images much, so I hope I didn't mess this up. Nonetheless, please find some photos in appropriate spots. --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 18:04, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
3. "See Stephen Wolfram's A new kind of science on iterated simple algorithms from genetic unfolding, from which the concept of culture as an operating mechanism in can be developed on Friday," What does developed on Friday mean? ( Done; deleted this--poorly written, seemed tacked on --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 02:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
4. "Many regional cultures have been influenced by contact with others, such as by colonization, trade, migration, mass media and religion." Single sentence shouldn't stand alone. Either expand on the infomration present or incorporate it into another paragraph. Fix any other occurrences within the article. ( Done; this section had no references and a problematic use of the culture concept; unnecessary with subarticle --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 02:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
5. "...and the immigration of Europeans, especially Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, German, Irish, Italian and Dutch." Wikilinks should be provided for these ethnic groups. ( Done --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 15:36, 30 June 2008 (UTC))
6. "Eurocentric custom to some extent divides humanity into Western and non-Western cultures, although this has some flaws." What flaws are being referred to here? Does "Western culture" right below it have flaws also?  Done; not entirely sure what this means; deleting --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 02:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

This article covers the topic well and if the above issues are addressed, I believe the article can remain a GA. I will leave the article on hold for seven days, but if progress is being made and an extension is needed, one may be given. I will leave messages on the talk pages of the main contributors to the article along with the related WikiProjects so that the workload can be shared. If you have any questions, let me know on my talk page and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Happy editing! --Nehrams2020 (talk) 06:07, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Since some of the issues were addressed, I will leave the article on hold for another week for the issues to be addressed. Please let me know if you finish before then, and I'll re-review it sooner. Happy editing! --Nehrams2020 (talk) 02:15, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

GA Sweeps Review: Pass

I believe the article currently meets the criteria and should remain listed as a Good article. Good job on addressing the issues. Continue to improve the article making sure all new information is properly sourced and neutral. It would also be beneficial to go through the article and update all of the access dates of the online inline citations and fix any dead links. If you have any questions, let me know on my talk page and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. I have updated the article history to reflect this review. Happy editing! --Nehrams2020 (talk) 06:52, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

attack of the deletionist!

I am shocked to see that a deletionist swept through and removed EVERYTHING that was lacking citations. Obviously the deletionist is not familiar with the content, and therefore could not help improve the article, but was arrogant enough to say "I'm sure this is correct, but it is not cited and therefore must go." It truly makes me angry...how can Misplaced Pages be improved if the lacking parts are simply removed instead of improved upon? To me, to remove enormous parts simply to keep it from being unsourced is a gross misinterpretation of Misplaced Pages's intent. This is the ever-growing encyclopedia that is supposed to be held up to standards; deleting huge parts of articles does not make the article better, it makes it worse! The citations request tag is for this very purpose. Somebody would have come along and added them. I restored the bit I wrote. Quickly, everybody restore what you wrote and grab what resources you can before this jerk comes back and ruins the article more. This was a good article...let's put it back that way.Elle (talk) 07:04, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, first of all, I was trimming a LOT of assertions that were unsourced, unclear or just wrong in order to keep this article listed as a good article. You may wish to refer to the discussion directly above that has been going on for the better part of a month. Secondly, you have to source your contributions if you don't want them deleted. That is your job, not anyone else's. Finally, WP:CIVIL. --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 14:31, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

First of all, I'm a long-time contributor to Misplaced Pages and I know the rules. I have made many valuable contributions to articles and they ARE sourced. Note what I wrote above: "everybody restore what you wrote and grab what resources you can." I thought it was pretty clear I was suggesting that everybody throw in with sourced contributions. Do not accuse me of asking anyone else to add sources for me. Secondly, I admit my tone may have been confrontational, but WP:CIVIL does not prevent one from being angry. I don't like the way the "sweeps" are conducted; that is my opinion. But clearly we are all interested in improving the article: assume good faith on my part and don't accuse me of asking others to do my dirty work. Note the changes I made to the article; I didn't just leave a comment here and do nothing to help. For the record, that unsourced sentence I restored, which you removed, as mentioned in the discussion above (see, I did read it) due to being unsourced, was not one I added. You removed all of my content around it, but I added it all back and even found a source. In other words, I did someone else's job for them. No thanks are necessary.Elle (talk) 15:31, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

You both seem to have the best interests of this article in mind. Newsroom hierarchies has done yeoman work in responding to the observations of the GA reviewer. Many of those sections he removed had had "citation needed" tags on them for some time. Given the GA review, we needed to either source them or get off the pot (so to speak). In any case, the article passed the GA Sweeps Review, in no small measure due to the work of Nh. Many thanks! Sunray (talk) 15:58, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

And, of course, the "deleted" material still resides intact in the article's page history, where it can be replaced at editors' leisure with the proper sources. --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 16:24, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

@Elle--as far as rules go, you can't stroll in after all of the sweeps work was done by someone other than you, call the person who did that work a "deletionist" and a "jerk" and then play the WP:AGF card. I mean, you can, but it runs afoul of some pretty basic norms in Misplaced Pages-culture (or any culture, really). I'll probably leave our exchange at that, but I'm a little disappointed at being spoken to in this way. --Newsroom hierarchies (talk) 16:24, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Deletion of sentence from subtopic Abrahamic religions

I have deleted the following sentence which appeared right at the e3nd of the subtopic Abrahamic religions, because it is nothing to do with that subtopic. I have not moved it to another location in the article because I am not exactly sure what the writer was trying to say.

"The mainstream anthropological view of ‘culture’ implies that most people experience a strong resistance when reminded that there is an animal as well as a spiritual aspect to human nature." --AlotToLearn (talk) 06:36, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

GA Reassessment

This discussion is transcluded from Talk:Culture/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the reassessment.

Reason why article does not meet the good article criteria

I am challenging the rating because:

• the article is not well-written - the prose is not clear

The article is a hopeless mix-up of sentences and paragraphs which are refering to one or other of several different dictionary meanings of the word culture. The trouble is that adjacent sentences or paragraphs may be referring to different uses of the one word, see http://www.thefreedictionary.com/culture and scroll through listings of the word culture in several different dictionaries. It has as many as seven distinct meanings, and at least three of them are being referred to by contributoers to this article.

• Although the article is "Broad in its coverage:" it is too broad, because it covers several different meanings of the word without distinguishing between them, but it fails to meet the "it stays focused on the topic" because there are at least three different topics and it mixes them up.

There probably needs to be a disambiguation page because these three meanings are each quite big topics --AlotToLearn (talk) 07:45, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Philcha's comments

I haven't even thought about the prose, because a larger-scale problem is more urgent - the article does not differentiate clearly between the various meanings of "culture" and does not signal clearly which it's talking about at particular points. For example:

• Section "Culture and anthropology" begins, "Culture is manifested in human artifacts and activities such as music, literature, lifestyle, food, painting and sculpture, theater and film". From an anthropological point of view I suspect these would be rolled up into e.g. "patterns of consumption", and anthropologist would also be interested in allocation of status and authority, economic management (communal property rights, individual property rights, no concept of property in some areas), reproductive and child-rearing behaviour, belief systems, ethics, etc. In fact the 2nd para says something similar.
• "These definitions, and many others, provide a catalog of the elements of culture. The items catalogued (e.g., a law, a stone tool, a marriage) each have an existence and life-line of their own. They come into space-time at one set of coordinates and go out of it another. While here, they change, so that one may speak of the evolution of the law or the tool" (and anthropology Section "Culture_and_anthropology") is unreferenced. It's also pseudo-philosophical twaddle, confusing class (category of idea / thing) and instance, e.g. in " evolution of the law", "the law" appears to refer to a class but only instances can have space-time coordinates.
• I think section "Culture as civilization" confuses two ideas that may be causally linked but are conceptually distinct. The "inequalities between European powers and their colonies around the world" were often pure racism but were regarded by some as temporary phenomemena which should be removed as fast as possible by education and training. Any educated European would have been aware that within both advanced and less advanced civilisations there were "high" and "low" / "popular" cultures in the intellectual / artistic sense.
• Section "Culture as worldview" has no refs and does not convince me. I think most of it describes ideologies adapted from certain philosophers and imposed by authoritarian governments. Of course if you can prove me wrong by finding good refs, that would be an improvement.

A good start would be to list all the relevant meanings of "culture". The ones that occur to me right now are (? out of the 164 definitions referred to?):

• culture vs instinct (3rd para of lead). For example chimps and some cetaceans have cultures in this sense.
• patterns of (approved) behaviour - the social anthropology concept (1st 2 paras of lead). Complex, because of divisions within a society that are based on social class, ethnic origin, etc.
• a group of people who follow an identifiable pattern of behaviour, e.g. the Amish. Similarly complex, e.g. one can talk about both "Western culture" (? actual rule of law, actual equality before the law, actual respect for property rights, etc.) and "British culture" (no comment, I'm a Brit)
• "the arts" - which gets into discussions about "high culture" vs "popular culture", and often has some links to ethnic / social class divisions.
• organisational culture. This has its own article but is clearly a sub-class of the "behaviour patterns" meaning.
• the history of the concept of "culture". Probably most relevant to the social anthropology sense, but the article notes the origin of "organisational culture", and the "high culture" / "low culture" distinction goes back a long way in at least some countries, see e.g Noh vs Kabuki in Japan.

Like AlotToLearn, I think this article may have to be split. I don't this is going to be a quick job. I'd start by opening 2 threads on the Talk page, one to hammer out structure and the other to catalogue sources. --Philcha (talk) 10:34, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Recent revisions

I could not agree more with the various criticisms, above. This article has become a mess - too many cooks. I think some of the suggestions are well-intentioned but unconstructive, but they all highlight real problems. I have made some changes. The most major was simply deleting the material on different religions and countries - for one thing, very few social scientists and practically no anthropologist uses the word "culture" so crudely to conform to political boundaries. And most of that material just belongs in other articles, indeed, is already in other articles. I tried to keep the focus on what the word culture means and how it is used. This is hard because it means many things and the meaning has changed over time, so i have tried to highlight the major people/groups/academic disciplines that make "culture" a central concept for themselves, I hope people consider this reasonable! I have done what I could to eliminate redundancies and sort out contradictions. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:41, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

I see that you have done a substantial re-write of the whole Culture article. I am worried that, with so many changes at once, and so little discussion of best approach to resolving the problems there were with the article: (1) some worthwhile material may have been lost; and (2) the article now seems to cover the subject as a history of development of US/UK (and a bit of other Western) academic thought. It does not seem a very worldwide approach, even historically. Surely the topic must have been thought about and studied in other parts of the world! It seems a bit radical to add so much material and delete so much material from an important article in one run. Would it not be best if solutions to the pre-existing problems are arrived at by discussion and tackled bit by bit? Under the verswion you have put up, many items are not referenced and there are several important aspects of the topic, to my way of thinking as a non-academic - which are not covered. In my view, your changes should be undone as they are too radical, but the contents of your new version of the article should be preserved as a communal resource in fixing the previous problems. Would that be OK with you? --AlotToLearn (talk) 00:10, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

I responded on the talk page to the article, as my revisions were not part of the GA process. I also explain why my personal opinion is that the previous version should not be restored. The changes I made today can be improved on, but at least a student can read it without being unduly confused, and a scholar can read it without laughing. The previous version was so full of fringe views, needless repetitions, and mixed up notable views, that no article at all would have been better. Slrubenstein | Talk 00:26, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Philcha's comments on the revision of 22:37, 19 January 2009

When I looked at the changes made by this edit I did not recognise the article. The result appears to be more like a potted history of the word "culture". When I looked through the diff I also thought that quite alot of baby had been thrown out with the bathwater. However "culture" is a very broad term, so I had a look at the Merriam-Webster Disctionary and found:

1. cultivation, tillage
2. the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education
3. expert care and training (beauty culture)
4. 1. enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training
   2. acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills
5. 1. the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations
   2. the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group  ; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life} shared by people in a place or time (popular culture) (southern culture)
   3. the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization (a corporate culture focused on the bottom line
   4. the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic (studying the effect of computers on print culture) (changing the culture of materialism will take time — Peggy O'Mara)
6. the act or process of cultivating living material (as bacteria or viruses) in prepared nutrient media ; also : a product of such cultivation

Of these only 5.1 even touches on the first meaning that struck me, as I am rather interested in evolution - behaviour patterns that are learned and transmitted rather than instinctive (genetically determined). So I asked Google Scholar and got on the first page alone:

• Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson; University of Chicago Press, 1985; ISBN 0226069338) - which is about the evolutionary significance of behaviour patterns that are learned and transmitted
• Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron; Sage Publications Ltd, 1990; ISBN 0803983204) - mainly about the sociology of education
• Behavioral Norms and Expectations ( Robert A. Cooke and Denise M. Rousseau; Group & Organization Management; Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 245-273; 1988; DOI: 10.1177/105960118801300302) - about organizational culture
• The Study of Culture, Ethnicity, and Race in American Psychology (Betancourt, H., Lopez, S. R.; American Psychologist; vol 48, no. 6, page 629; 1993; ISSN 0003-066X)
• People and Organizational Culture: A Profile Comparison Approach to Assessing Person-Organization Fit (J Chatman, DF Caldwell; Academy of Management Journal, vol 34 issue 3; pages 487-516;1991) - organisational sociology
• [http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=GVS-zVUa6KAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=culture+definition&ots=jPEMjKltfP&sig=xMBFg1D8b2hNveUYvp9ot8q_YVk

Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain] (Joanne Martin; Sage, 2001; ISBN 0803972954)

• Theorizing Masculinities (Harry Brod, Michael Kaufman; Sage, 1994) - what it means to be a man (as opposed to woman or child)
• a couple of items about e.g. microbial cultures.

For all its faults, the previous version of this article did a better job of outlining the scope of the term "culture". That scope is so huge that this "top-level" article needs to be part of a package of articles that deals with "culture" in all the relevant fields, and the article for each field will need a few supporting articles per WP:SUMMARY. --Philcha (talk) 00:32, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

PS That list does not even touch the issue of cultures in non-human animals, for which this search an dThe Question of Animal Culture may be useful starting points. --Philcha (talk) 00:37, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Definition 1 is archaic and mentioned in the first sentence; the last definition is handled by the disambiguation page. Definitions 2 and 4 are related and emerged and had greatest currency in the 19th century, and are covered in the latest revision - in fact, i added some new material on these meanings of culture (I cut only repetitions of the same material).

Beyond that, I think that the dictionary and google scholar are poor tools for developing this article. We wouldn't use this method for the articles on evolution or the theory of relativity. There is indeed a good deal of scholarship on and using the concept of culture but most of it is not represented at Google Scholar; GS does not distinguish between highly significant, less significant, and minor research; moreover, GS presents articles out of context. What we need is what we have at the evolution and theory of relativity articles: some editors who really know the research on the topic and can distinguish between distinct points of view, and also between more and less significant views. All I did in my revision was to delete redundancies and fringe material, and to organize what was left into identifiable points of view. In a few cases I added substance. I did not delete any significant substance. I agree that there is much more to add, but whatever is added, we need to distinguish between major points of view and approaches, and also distinguish between mainstream, majority, minority, and fringe views. I think the current revision provides a foundation for that. Slrubenstein | Talk 18:31, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

One of the Misplaced Pages:Good article criteria is "broad in its coverage". While that is less than the Misplaced Pages:Featured article criteria's " comprehensive: it neglects no major facts or details and places the subject in context", I don't think Culture can pass GA if it has significant gaps. Etymologically it's easy to see the connection from "tillage" to microbial cultures and from "tillage" to the "training and development" senses, which include physical culture as well as the intellectual sense. The article should explain why social anthropology uses the term "culture" to refer to behaviour patterns.

It also needs to explain how to identify types of behaviour as regarded as cultural, as opposed to both idiosyncraties and genetically determined behaviours that are often labelled reflexive or instinctive. The border between culturally and genetically determined behaviours is not clear-cut, and I suspect the article will have to touch on sociobiology while decribing that fuzzy border. From a sociobiological point of view the capacity for culture is an evolutionary "tool" that has enabled us flimsy humans to survive in a world where there are much tougher, faster animals. The evolutionary aspect raises the question of whether some sort of capacity for culture has arisen in other animals.

Returning to humans, the article needs to describe how different cultures are identified. In the present, observation is possible, and in the recent past there are written accounts of others' obersvations. Further back in the past, archeology distinguishes cultures mainly on the basis of their tools. Evidence of different toolsets among different chimp troops again raises the question of whether any non-human species have culture(s).

Back to the present agian , few humans are members of just one culture, and in Western culture there are several types of sub-culture, e.g. ethnic and / or class-based, youth, criminal, and organisational sub-cultures. The division between "high" and "low" / popular culture in the arts and entertainment sense seems historically to have been class-based, with a tendency for the "elite" to co-opt some aspects of popular culture and turn them into shibboleths.

I think culture needs to be a WP:SUMMARY article that covers all this ground. I appreciate that the outline above does not adequately distiguish between specific cultures, culture as a class of behaviour patterns and the capacity for culture. The article would have to do that in orde rto provide coverage that is both broad and focussed, per the Misplaced Pages:Good article criteria. --Philcha (talk) 20:33, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree in principle with virtually everything you wrote (you are mistaken only in your minor comment about sociobiology - the substance of your point, that culture was an evolutionary adaptation, is probably correct, I mean only that this point was made by anthropologists long before sociobiology was proposed as a theory, for example Ralph Holloway's Culture: A human domain," in Current Anthropology, 10:395–412 is a good example but this is not by any means the first such claim, Malinowski made this argument in the 1920s although I do not have the specific reference). Of all the points you raise, most of them were not in the previous version. I did remove one mention of chimpanzee culture only because this is a controversial topic and the article cited and accompanying text did not provide an adequate account of the controversy. We may differ only in approach (but I would still like to convince you of my approach!) I just believe that we need to lay out the mainstream points of view, and also lay them out in context, first. Once this is done adequately (and I think my revision was a first step, I acknowledge there is still some more work to be done even to accomplish this), we can then go for breadth in the manner you describe. But I feel strongly that is premature. My concern is that the result will be lose to what we had a few days ago - a jumble of information with inadequate context, inadequate distinction of mainstream and minority views, and no discussion of what is controversial and what is not. I feel that the breadth you want can be accomplished in a very effective way if we first focus on laying out a framework for mainstream points of view. I am not at all arguing against your intentions or aspirations for the article, but i am asking to take things one step at a time. Slrubenstein | Talk 23:13, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

I suggest you start with 2 sections in the Talk page:(a) structure outline (bullet list works well); (b) categorised list of potential refs, with 1-line commments on what they're good for. That's what I did at Talk:Evolutionary history of life], and I already suspect Culture is an even bigger topic! --Philcha (talk) 23:42, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't think you afford to ignore animal cultures. In addition to chimp tribes with different toolsets, Japanese macaques are a strong contender, and IIRC bottlenose dolphins have different "dialects" and killer whale pods have favoured techniques and hunting grounds, although cetaceans are a more difficult case becuase they can't use tools. --Philcha (talk) 23:50, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

I do not think I am ignoring animal cultures. I do not think what I wrote suggested in any way that the article ignore animal cultures. Or did you mean to say something else? Slrubenstein | Talk 00:10, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry if I read too much into your "I did remove one mention of chimpanzee culture only because this is a controversial topic .." --Philcha (talk) 00:26, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Okay, here is what I think: you have some good ideas and I can easily envision a set of sections or subsections: "the evolution of culture" (using mainstream sources like Holloway and Deacon, but to make the point you suggested); followed by "Culture and tools" (which would include a discussion of processual archeology, introducing the concepts of "assemblage" and "matrix" and "material culture, and including a discussion of tool-use among other primates, such as the cases you describe; followed by a section on "Culture and language" going into the current theories in ethnolinguistics and sociolinguistics. All of these could precede or follow parts of what is currently in the section "American Anthropology" (which could be changed to "cultural anthropology." Allow me to point out that none of this was in the version of early yesterday. But I would be all for adding these sections as long as different views were properly identified and contextualized. I deleted the one reference to chimpanzees because it was not adequately contextualized, and the controversy - there is a real debate about the interpretation of these findings - was neglected, so there were serious NPOV problems. We would need someone competent in linguistics, and someone knowledgable about archeology, to work on much of this. However, you express a strong interest and desire to work on it. I have proposed a number of ways to expand the article (and I reiterate that I refer not only to my recent revision but to the previous version). If you think this makes sense, I would like to propose that you work on th section, or subsection, you are most interested in in your sandbox and I will help as much as I can by suggesting some citations, and when you are ready we can just cut and paste it into the article. I do believe you would have to do much more than was in the previous version ... but I am not expecting that you would have to do a lot. Just in this GA1 section you have sketched out more ideas than was in the article I revised. I just think that whatever we add in has to comply with NPOV by clearly identifying different points of views, providing their context, and addressing any controversies, at least briefly. How does this sound to you? Slrubenstein | Talk 00:50, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Actually, looking back over my revision, I see that I kept the reference to research by primatologists. I never deprecated this line of research. But I still maintain that it should be developed in a way that provides context, acknowledges any controversies, and clearly distinguishes between mainstream and minority views. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:15, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Result of GAR - why article has been delisted

It is now a week since the Good Article Reassessment procedure was initiated. During that review several other editors have agreed that the article was unsatisfactory, because it dealt with many meanings of the word "culture" without distinguishing between them, and one editor has rewritten a substantial portion of the article, removed much of the old the material, and removing material that related to religion and culture. In my view, the quality of the article as it now stands is far from Good, and is only C-Class (see Misplaced Pages:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Grades). Currently, the article addresses the history of the meaning of Culture for the purposes of some academic disciplines for which Culture has relevance, for example, Cultural Studies. I believe that the article on Culture needs firstly to follow the usual (dictionary/ordinary) meanings of the word Culture, distinguishing between them and illustrating those meanings with examples and links to the many other topics in Misplaced Pages. Those many examples and links in the text might range from (Australian) "Aboriginal culture" or other cultures which have been facing extinction, to "Sculpture", to rap culture, and so on. After the article has dealt with ordinary concepts of culture, it may deal with culture as seen in many research or academic disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, etc. I would happily assist with the improvement of the article, but am at present engaged in other articles which also require improvement. I will come back to the article to assist whenever I get a chance.--AlotToLearn (talk) 09:35, 24 January 2009 (UTC) I also mention my belief that religion, philosophy or cosmology often does play a significant part in defining a culture. For example, Confusianism has had a profound effect on Chinese (and Japanese) cultures for two thousand years, Judaism has a profound effect on Jewish culture, and the Dreamtime spirits and stories of Aboriginal Australians play an important part in their culture, possible over a much greater period of time.--AlotToLearn (talk) 09:42, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, Misplaced Pages is not a dictionary. Anyone can go to Wiktionary or Answers.com for a dictionary definition - but where will people go for an account of the tremendous body of scholarly literature on "culture?" I think we need to start with mainstream scholarship. The article on "gravity" does not start with popular beliefs about gravity, it begins with mainstream scholarship. That is how it should be in a great encylopedia.

Also, most people who study culture consider statements like "Chinese culture" to be misleading, problematic, or at least of limited use. "Culture" consists of diverse traits that are distributed unevenly. One part of China and another part of China may be very different, culturally. Moreover, parts of Vietnam and parts of China may be very similar culturally. The bottom line is: culture is not the same thing as nation, and is not bounded by state borders. To suggest otherwise is to promote a fringe view.

That said, Confucianism does not "influence" Chinese culture, it is part of Chinese culture.

Finally: it is true that many nation-states make claims of cultural distinction. However, there are tens of thousands of distinct societies today on earth. This article cannot have separate sections on the cultures of every society. It would be wrong to single out Han culture, Ashkenazi culture, or Gabi Gabi culture, without discussing the cultures of the 100,000 plus other societies. Even if we devoted only one sentence per society, this article would be too long. It makes much more sense to have separate articles on different nations, ethnic groups, and societies, with sections on their culture. In short, this is an article on "culture," "not "every culture of the world" and it cannot and should not be the latter. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:19, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

The article needs to focus on the subject(s), not the literature about the subject. Yes, we need the literature for refs, but that's its main role. The article has enough to do in explaining the relevant meanings of "culture", including the complex relationship between cultures and nation-states, and summarising current thinking about each of these.

Re national cultures, in principle I agree that "the article cannot have separate sections on the cultures of every society". However a few well-chosen examples are needed, for the benefit of the average reader who is less familiar with the concepts than you are. --Philcha (talk) 15:53, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

My changes

I could not agree more with the various criticisms, above. This article has become a mess - too many cooks. I think some of the suggestions are well-intentioned but unconstructive, but they all highlight real problems. I have made some changes. The most major was simply deleting the material on different religions and countries - for one thing, very few social scientists and practically no anthropologist uses the word "culture" so crudely to conform to political boundaries. And most of that material just belongs in other articles, indeed, is already in other articles. I tried to keep the focus on what the word culture means and how it is used. This is hard because it means many things and the meaning has changed over time, so i have tried to highlight the major people/groups/academic disciplines that make "culture" a central concept for themselves, I hope people consider this reasonable! I have done what I could to eliminate redundancies and sort out contradictions. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:41, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

I can add references in the next few weeks. As for the concept of culture, I did not cut anything about the concept of culture, or theories of culture, from other countries. They were not there before I made cuts. What I did do was add more information to what was already there about the concept of culture. There was inadequate coverage of Germany and I added, there. The article pre-revision also had a lot of material drawing on UK and US sources, but without attribution or explanation and jumbled up - I sorted it out, so the differences and relationship between US and UK anthropology is clearer ... but that information was in the earlier version, it just was not explained clearly. You say "surely the topic must have been thought about and studied in other parts of the world" ... well, the version as of earlier today did not provide any information about that, and I have no information about that. One may argue that Ibn Khaldoun anticipated some issues that would later become part of th modern conception of culture. The earlier version didn't say that, and I don't know of any reliable secondary sources on it, so I didn't add that new information; if you have good reliable sources on this let us know! Please tell me what aspects of culture are not covered? I am sure we can add them in if they come from significant views from reliable sources, but can you explain what they are? As for restoring the older version, well, let's see what others think. I am sure that what I just did can be improved upon (I didn't change the section on culture change and it is still a mess) but the version as of earlier today was a disaster. It repeated many things over and over; it had contradictory statements; it had a great deal of material that is and ought to be covered in other articles; it made no distinction between different points of view at all, and mixed up mainstream and minority views. I think that the previous version was a real embarrassment to Misplaced Pages. I consider my revision a minimal salvage attempt by (1) deleting fringe views and original research and (2) deleting repetitions and (3) distinguishing between different points of view in what remained. Slrubenstein | Talk 00:21, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

General To Do List

There are a few things I did not have time to do that definitely need work (this was true pre-revision as well);

• bring the material on anthropological views of culture up-to-date, specifically culture as performance, and culture as a field of conflict and contestation. (e.g. starting with Sherry Ortner's Comparative Studies in Society and History essay from the 1980s, and more recent debates among anthropologists about "culture." Ira Bashkow's 2004 "A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries" in American Anthropologist 106(3): 443-458 is another important resource.
• "culture" is a key concept in anthropology and cultural studies, but more can be said about its changing meanings in cultural studies
• the difference between "society" and "culture" - as concepts and as research agendas/sets of questions - needs to be spelled out. Among other things, while societies are usually bounded, cultures are not
• ditto "culture" and "ethnic identity?"
• I didn't make any changes to the section on "culture change" yet "culture" was classically conceived of as something dynamic and changing. I am not even sure it deserves its own section. And "acculturation" was considered an out-of-date and really refuted concept by the 1950s.
• sections on how cultural historians and cultural geographers look at culture. How are their definitions, approaches, and questions different from anthropology and cultural studies? Are there overarching threads?

I know there are many other ways this can be improved on, these are just a few obvious to me i didn't have time to get to. Slrubenstein | Talk 17:32, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

To Do: Cultural Geography

Just received a message re: the inclusion of Cultural geography within this article (which itself could do with some work). To be honest, cultural geography is as ill-defined as cultural studies, and can range from the marxist work on cultural production, exchange, cultural captial etc. to how various spaces are represented in cultural works (e.g: Bladerunner and the representation of LA seems to be a favourite) to studies of local, regional and global variation and cultural change. Bear in mind that cultural geography has only really existed since the late 80s, and so invariably draws mostly from anthropological, sociological and cultural studies approaches that came before - so there's not much to add, as many of the major trends noted in the piece here are relevant for cultural geography.

If there's one thing which the piece could do with is the spatial side of things that cultural geography deals with. For example, the last section on cultural exchange would be a very good place to add the examples of globalization and related cultural homogenization or imperialism (c.f.McDonaldization) as well the flip side of the possibility of the internet providing for cultural deviation. There are two of the main 'spatial' issues for cultural studies at present which link well to other good wiki pages.

So; either I can add a short blurb about cultural geography if that's needed - though maybe just a brief mention and a link near the end of the cultural studies section would be better, given its marginal status. And I'll work on the globalisation/cultural issue if I have time - but if there's anyone reading this with a better grasp of that, please go ahead. It's not quite my main field. --Cooper-42 (talk) 17:09, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

I think all of these are good suggestions and hope you will make a start of a new section on the theme. Hopefully you can draw in others who know more about cultural geography then to develop it.

For what it is worth, anthropologists have also been concerned with culture's spatial dimension. Franz Boas and many of his students were interested in the "diffusion" of culture i.e. the movement of cultural traits, and archeologists have studied the spatial distribution of traits. More recently, a few works focus on the spatial dimensions of culture:

• Appadurai, Arjun 1986 The Social Life of Things. (Edited) New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Appadurai, Arjun 1996 Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson 1992 "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference," in Cultural Anthropology 1(7).
• Marcus, George E. 1995 “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” In Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117.
• Thomas, Nicholas 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Wolf, Eric 1982 Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: The University of California Press.

Unfortunately, I do not have my library at hand and do not have these works ... I hope someone else who has them handy could build this article incorporating these works - I know they are all considered mainstream and significant within cultural anthropology. Slrubenstein | Talk 17:30, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

To Do: Culture and language

Another editor invited me to contribute a section on Culture and Language. I am afraid I will not have time to do so in the foreseeable future. Instead, I offer a few quotes and references around which others might wish to get started on such a section.

"Of all aspects of culture, it is a fair guess that language was the first to receive a highly developed form and that its essential perfection is a prerequisite to the development of culture as a whole" (Sapir 1995: 43)

"Language is a great force in socialization, probably the greatest that exists. By this is meant not merely the obvious fact that significant social intercourse is hardly possible without language but that the mere fact of a common speech serves as a peculiarly potent symbol of the social solidarity of those who speak the language" (Sapir 1995: 50)

"It does not follow, however, that there is a simple correspondence between the form of a language and the form of the culture of those who speak it. ... There is no general correspondence between cultural type and linguistic structure" (Sapir 1995: 59). Sapir is, I think, responding to deterministic theories in 19th & early 20th century social science. Compare Boas : "If it were true that anatomical form, language, and culture are all closely associated, and that each subdivision of mankind is characterized by a certain bodily form, a certain culture, and a certain language, which can never become separated, we might expect that the results of the various investigations would show better agreement. If, on the other hand, the various phenomena which were made the leading points in the attempt at classification are not closely associated, then we may naturally expect such contradictions and lack of agreement as are actually found" (Boas 1995: 11)

"For the notion of culture as learned patterns of behavior and interpretive practices, language is crucial because it provides the most complex system of classification of experience" (Duranti 1997: 49).

"So much of our social life is conducted, mediated, and evaluated through linguistic communication that it should be no surprise that social scientists such as Levi-Strauss used concepts developed in linguistics as tools for the study of culture. Language also provides a useful link between inner thought and public behavior. Even when we articulate our thoughts in our own mind we are only partly doing something 'private.' We are also relying on a set of cultural resources (including categorizations, theories, and problem-solving strategies) that probably belong not only to us but to a community" (Duranti 1997: 49).

"Finally, the view of language as a set of practices emphasizes the need to see linguistic communication as only a part of a complex network of semiotic resources that carry us throughout life and link us to particular social histories and their supporting institutions" (Duranti 1997: 49).

" have seen that the primary concern of caregivers is to ensure that their children are able to display and understand behaviors appropriate to social situations. A major means by which this is accomplished is through language. Therefore, we must examine the language of caregivers primarily for its socializing functions, rather than only its strict grammatical input function. Further, we must examine the prelinguistic and linguistic behaviors of children to determine the ways they are continually and selectively affected by values and beliefs held by those members of society who interact with them" (Ochs & Schieffelin 2001: 263).

" are continuously produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues among their members. Cultural events are not the sum of the actions of their individual participants, each of whom imperfectly expresses a pre-existent pattern, but are the scenes where shared culture emerges from interaction" (Mannheim & Tedlock 1995: 2).

• Boas, Franz. 1995 . "Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages." In B. Blount (ed) Language, Culture, and Society pp. 9-28. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
• Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mannheim, Bruce & Dennis Tedlock. 1995. "Introduction." In D. Tedlock & B. Mannheim (eds) The Dialogic Emergence of Culture pp. 1-32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Ochs, Elinor & Bambi Schieffelin. 2001 . "Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories." In A. Duranti (ed) Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader pp. 263-301. Malden, MA: Blackwell. (from Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, R.A. Shweder & R.A. LeVine eds.)
• Sapir, Edward. 1995 . "Language." In B. Blount (ed) Language, Culture, and Society pp. 43-63. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. (from Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, E. Seligman ed.)

Cnilep (talk) 18:10, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

To Do: Archeology and material culture

I just expanded the sections on structural functionalism and on symbolic anthropology and materialism. I know that at the moment it reads like just more history of anthropology but I hope that the section on mind vs. matter can be expanded by others to make clear how these really do lead to very different understandings of "culture."

I also felt this was important background to understand the clash between "new archeology" (largely American) and "post-processual archeology" (largely British). The article does not yet have a section on how archeologists view and study culture, but we need some such section. I would think that key reliable and notable sources for such a section would be:

• Charles Redman 1991 "Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: In Defense of the Seventies" in American Archeologist 93: 295-307
• Bruce Trigger 1991 "Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Constraint and Freedom - A New Synthesis for Archeological Explanation" American Anthropologist 93: 551-569
• Elizabeth Brumfiel 1992 "Distinguished Lecture on Archeology: Breaking and Entering the Ecosystem - Gender, Class, and Faction Steal the Show" in American Anthropologist 94: 551-567
• George Cowgill 1993 "Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Beyond Criticizing New Archeology" in American Anthropologist 95: 551-573

Archeology, whether located in the sciences or humanities, has long played a crucial role in the study of "culture." What archeologists mean by culture and how thy look at it should have an important place in this article. But I am not an archeologist and not fluent enough in archeology to write the section, I hope other Wikipedians are. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:35, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

To Do: Organizational Culture

I think the article provides a very good summary of the history of the concept. The greatest weakness is that it jumps too quickly onto the historical discourses. I would prefer to see some kind of an expanded summarizing introduction before the article goes into the details.

I think that the uses of the concept in business research like "organizational culture", "safety culture" and so on, should also be mentioned, and also that those and other modern understandings of the word could be linked to their historical origins. Normally it could be regarded as equal to "values and attitudes" in these contexts, and it is often seen as some kind of indepenent factor. Though I think these understandings are trivial, they should be mentioned and their origins discusssed, and also be contrasted to other ways of understanding it. I agree with slrubenstein that one should focus on the scolarly accepted concepts of culture in the core disciplines, but one should also have some kind of discussions of its "simplified" uses in related fields. A good reason for this is that many students from eg organization studies may be likely to go to[REDACTED] to look for different definitions and ways of understanding the concept. I think this could be summarized in a sentence or two in the intro.

Personally I am very fond of Bradd Shores book "Culture in Mind", and I think that the view he presents there represents a quite common understanding of culture today (quite similar to e.g. Ed Hutchins) where the tight interaction between culture (as external symbols) and culture (as cultured cognition) is stressed. I think this is more or less in line with others like Lakoff and Johnson, Bateson as well.

Maybe the historical part of the article should also include something about structuralism, for example Levi-Strauss' view on it.

This is just som thoughts from the top of my head. I'll try to follow up with some more concrete ideas when I have more WP-time. pertn (talk) 12:15, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Pertn. I thought of putting in material on Levi-Strauss, but frankly, I do not think his view of culture as such diverges enough from those in here to warrant it - his main contribution was to the nature of the anthropological project and the value of studying cultural difference, not culture as such ... if we added him, then the article really would be too much like a history of anthropology.

I do not have Lakoff and Johnson's book on hand but would welcome anyone adding content from that book as long as it were properly contextualized. (Ditto Brad Shore's book, which I do not know - it just has to be contextualized)

Ditto "organizational culture" - I know that the term is popular in business schools etc. The thing is, I do not know where they get their concept of culture from. I am all for adding it ... but it has to be properly contextualized. I read Binford and saw that he cited White and Steward so it was not OR to claim that his view of culture was influenced by theirs. I can guess who influenced the organizational people, but so as not to violate NPOV or NOR, and to be "encyclopedic," I think we need to know who first introduced the idea "organizational culture" and how and when the term first entered the study of management or organizational psychology, and where the pioneers of "culture" in management and org. psych. got their ideas of culture from. Does anyone know? Does anyone have citations? If so this could become a strong part of the article.

Finally, the introduction should introduce the article as a whole. My view is that the article as a whole still needs real development - we need an expanded section on cultural studies and perhaps cultural history and cultural geography, academic disciplines I know little about. As you say, a section on the use of the culture concept in organizational psychology and/or management. I am for putting off further work on the introduction until these sections have been developed. In other words, yes I agree the introduction needs work. But since the introduction has to introduce the body, we need to develop the body more first, and then we will know how best to develop the introduction.. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:38, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

The recent changes are a step in the right direction

For what it's worth, I think Slrubenstein's changes are exactly the way to go for this article. Top-level articles like this one tend to become a cluttered pile of unfocused paragraphs and trivia if they are not rigorously edited once in a while by knowledgeable editors. Comparing versions before and after Slrubenstein's editing job, I think we now have an article that's in way better shape than it ever was. — mark ✎ 09:26, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

I pretty much agree, but see my comments below. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 10:09, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

My two cents

Slrubenstein suggested that I take a look at this article, so here I am. I started going through it from the beginning, making edits. But I soon realized that it would be a mammoth task. I really don't feel qualified to judge the article's current quality, since "quality" in this case largely means "comprehensiveness", and I'm not familiar with all the major developments in cultural anthropology, sociology, etc. As far as quality goes, I will simply say that the article looks systematic and organized. By the way, I tend to be a fan of articles with many headings and subheadings: breaking an article up in this way helps a reader keep track of where he is. So I applaud that aspect of this article. Also, I (for the most part) like the way that the article provides a chronological/historical perspective.

Here are a few concerns I have after skimming the article:

• There's a general lack of citations. As always, common sense should trump slavish adherence to the letter of Misplaced Pages policy; but I remind everyone that every substantive statement (e.g. "So-and-so did X") needs an endnote. I tried to add a few citations, but they seem insufficient.
• As I said, I like the way the article currently traces historical developments. However, as the intro notes and the body of the article repeatedly affirms, there are at least 2 distinct meanings of "culture" — (1) personal cultivation and (2) the beliefs, activities, etc. of a societal group. The article traces the historical development of these two different meanings without distinguishing sufficiently between them. For example, the bit about Matthew Arnold relates to the first sense of "culture", whereas the bit about Tylor relates to the second sense. This would be okay if the article were depicting a smooth transition from the first usage to the second. But, on the contrary, the first usage pops up again in the discussion of Kant's notion of "enlightenment". I feel tempted to suggest that someone split the article into two historical accounts — an account of sense (1) and an account of sense (2). However, this may not be feasible, since the two meanings intertwine in the section on German Romanticism.
• Some of the phrasing in this article is needlessly verbose and sophisticated. Granted, the concepts being discussed are sometimes sophisticated. However, there's no need to use more academic language when simpler language will do. For example, consider the following passage from the article: "Culture provided a context that made individual actions understandable; geography and history provided a context for understanding the cultural diversity of humankind." Now, it should be clear to most people what this means: we can understand why an individual behaves as he does by examining his culture, and we can understand why his culture is the way it is by looking at the geographical and historical forces that shaped it. Nonetheless, I tried to rephrase the passage to make it easier to understand.
• I dislike how the article starts discussing structural functionalism without first discussing structuralism and functionalism in detail. As two major (if not the two major) approaches to the study of culture, structuralism and functionalism should be mentioned first. My concern here isn't primarily a chronological one; if we were organizing this article conceptually rather than chronologically, I would still (or, rather, especially) insist that we start out with a section on functionalism and a section on structuralism. I think Malinowski deserves a bigger discussion than he gets here; heck, I would even be happy to give him a separate subsection devoted to unpacking his approach to culture. Claude Levi-Strauss isn't mentioned at all, which is something I can't understand.
• To resolve the above-mentioned tension between a "conceptual" format and a "historical/chronological" format, perhaps the article could have both: it could first lay out the major approaches (not necessarily any specific theories!) to studying culture (structural, functional, cultural-evolutionist, etc.), and then describe the historical processes by which these different approaches and the most important theories of culture developed (e.g. Tylor developed his theory of cultural evolution, seeing "lower" cultures as intellectually immature; but then people like Boas came along and refuted it, paving the way for cultural relativism in modern anthropology; etc.). Along the way, the historical section might also trace the development of the "first" sense of culture (i.e. cultural as personal cultivation). (See the article Mythology, which has sections that lay out different approaches to studying myth and also has a section ("Interpretations of mythology") that traces the historical development of the study of myth.)

I'm basically an outsider here, a philosophy student with an interest in comparative mythology treading on cultural anthropologists' territory, but there are my two cents. Let me know what you think. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 10:09, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

I think your comments and edits are generally constructive and appreciate them. In some cases i can provide references but am waiting for the books I need but am all for adding more sources. On one major point: "structural-functionalism" has nothing to do with "structuralism" or "functionalism." I know that sounds weird but it is just true - structural-functionalism emerged in both the US and UK before Levi-Strauss's "structuralism" was well-known. Levi-Strauss's analysis of kinship did not come out in French until 1949 and did not really reach an English speaking audience until it was translated into English in the 1960s, when structural-functunalism was on the wane. Moreover, his analysis of kinship, which ended with an early formulation of what would come to be known as "structuralism," was still close enough to Durkheim that structural functionalists could assimilate it into British social anthropology - in this context, Levi Strauss had important ideas but was not yet the major theorist he would become. Although he published Structural Anthropology(in French) in 1958 it was really The Savage Mind in 1962 that "structuralism" as a real theory emerged. In short, "structural functionalism" may have eventually had some influence on structuralism, but structuralism did not exist when structural functionalism was formulated. The word "functionalism" means many things; in relation to culture, it is only Malinowski's meaning and Durkheim's meanings that are relevant. And they were not thmselves influenced by some general school of thought called "functionalism." I don't really see I can note this in the article but to go into detail would be too much of an academic detour. I didn't go into Levi-Strauss because his notability does not come from his concept of culture but rather from his vision of how anthropologists should work. But I will add something.

it is true that one can divide up anthropological theories of culture very broadly as "functionalist," "structuralist," and "historicist" but I am not sure that any historian of anthropology has ever argued this so for me to use it as a way of explaining approaches to culture would violate NOR. Also, the problem is that the differences between these approaches are very clear when you look at them from a distance but as soon as you read the actual sources very closely, the boundaries quickly blur. Slrubenstein | Talk 20:20, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Symbolism and symbolic thinking

Hi Slrubenstein,

This article rightly states that culture involves the ability to use symbols. After all, institutions, social norms, etc. all require the ability to represent something as existing. In themselves, coins are just pieces of metal; there's nothing about the coins themselves that makes them money. The coins acquire cultural significance (as money) only because we represent them as money (e.g. by putting certain words and pictures on them).

However, I can't help feeling that there must be a better way to phrase things. First of all, it probably isn't immediately obvious to the ordinary reader why "symbolism" should be particularly important to culture. To most people, the word "symbol" evokes images of flags and museum paintings and sacred texts. "Why," an ordinary person might say, "should those things be particularly central to human culture? Isn't everyday human culture more about money, political structures, laws, etc.?" Such a person might not realize that money symbolizes value, and that laws and political offices exist only because we represent or symbolize them as existing.

Second, I notice that the article repeatedly says that culture relies on the ability to represent experiences symbolically. I think I understand what that means, but I'm not sure. Also, can't it be argued that much of culture involves the symbolic representation of things that haven't been experienced (e.g. gods, afterlife)?

I'm going to try to do some more "editing for clarity" on this article. I'll raise concerns as I come across them. Hope you find this helpful. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 05:05, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

First of all, not all anthropologists agree that culture is primarily symbolic. Many anthropologists (like Harris, Steward, Vayda and Rappaport - these are the significant figures but they have influenced a host of younger scholars) view culture as a set of adaptations and are not especially interested in symbols as such. Second, for many anthropologists symbols are just one aspect of culture, and an aspect that some anthropologists (like Geertz, Schneider, and Turner) focus on. I try to explain both of these points in the section on symbols versus adaptations and if you think it is not clear maybe now you can help clarify. Finally, there are many anthropologists for whom culture is based on symbolic thought. I agree that it is not entirely evident but the strongest evidence to support this view comes from research on human evolution and language. I have only now written the section on evolution, although it is not my specialization I know all the notable sources. I hope that this section clarifies things but the fact is I just wrote it and it definitely will need polishing and work. Finally, I am not a linguist and have invited linguists at Misplaced Pages to work on the language section - this too would help explain the importance of symbols. But there are very few linguists who are active wikipedians and only one left some notes on this talk page but has not worked on the article. I will work on this when I have time, but the fact is the article needs a section on language and culture to fully answer your question. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:35, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

A confusing passage

"Gerald Weiss has pointed out that although Tylor’s classic definition of culture was restricted to humans, many anthropologists have equated culture with any learned behavior. This slippage is a problem because some primatologists were trained in anthropology, and others were not. Notable non-anthropologists, like Robert Yerkes and Jane Goodall thus argued that chimpanzees have culture. Anthropological primatologists are thus divided, several arguing that other primates have culture."

Sorry, but I don't understand the logical structure of the above passage. Specifically, I don't understand why the fact that "some primatologists were trained in anthropology, and others were not" is the reason why the diversity of useages of the word "culture" among anthropologists is a problem. If there's a diversity of uses of the term "culture" among anthropologists, then anthropological primatologists are going to be "divided" on the issue of non-human culture regardless of whether some primatologists weren't trained in anthropology.

Each of the statements in the quoted passage seems perfectly fine. I just don't understand what they're doing in the same paragraph. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 05:16, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

I will try to clarify it now! Slrubenstein | Talk 14:29, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

My recent additions and strategy

I have worked a lot on the sections on archeologists and material culture, and biological anthropologists and the evolution of culture. We still need to work on the section on language and culture, and "cultural studies."

My objective is this: to adequately represent the current scholarship on culture. In academe, there are two disciplines that make "culture" their principal object of study: American anthropology (in Europe, anthropology's principal object of study is usually "society" and not "culture"), and Cultural Studies (which has two very different versions, in the UK and US). I am not an expert in Cultural Studies but have solicited the help of Wikipedians who are, to work on that section. I have been focussing on anthropology.

I think it makes sense to start with the academic disciplines that make culture their primary object of study, because it is these disciplines (anthropology and cultural studies) that have influenced researchers in other fields who use the word "culture" in scholarly research.

I do think it makes sense then to add on coverage of other fields of research.

This will result in a very large article. Indeed, eventually this article will need to be split up into linked articles, with summaries in the main article. However, I think it is wise to let Wikipedians who have expertise on cultural studies, and on linguistics, physical anthropology, cultureal anthropology, and archeology to work on this article in one space until it is stable and coherent. That is the time to spin off articles - because only at that time will we be sure that the linked articles are consistent with one another. Slrubenstein | Talk 15:38, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

I like where you have taken the article, SLR. It is now much more grounded in history and scholarship.

The distinction that "... in Europe, anthropology's principal object of study is usually 'society' and not 'culture'" seems somewhat facile to me. Surely there is considerable interplay between the two (several) anthropologies. Moreover, I believe that there is significant overlap between the curricula of British (Canadian, Australian) social anthropology and American cultural anthropology. And everyone seems to have borrowed freely from French structuralism. As the WP article on anthropology notes: "differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods." I would like to edit the article with this in mind.

Your point about the size of the article seems well taken. As I understand it, you are saying write and expand the article first, then, once it is stable, pare it down and decide what should go into subordinate or related articles. I like that approach. If we get a dedicated group of editors working on this, we might have an featured article in the making. Sunray (talk) 19:04, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

HI Sunray - I responded in detail to your point on your usefrpage. For now let me just say, I question this claim fron another article: "differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods." When I talk to my British colleagues, they tell me the only cultural anthropologists they had to read in university were Geertz, Schneider, and Wagner. At a recent conference, I heard a prominent UK anthropologist say that American cultural anthropologists had tried to colonize the UK and should be resisted. I wish there were more dialogue! That said, please do not think that dialogue leads to homogeneity. People value diversity! If you were to read ethnographies of Amazonian peoples, you would find - today I mean - that the ones written by UK anthropologists mostly cite work by UK anthropologists (or the LA students) and works by US anthropologistss mostly cite US anthropologists (or their LA students). This does not mean that US and UK anthropologists do not talk to one another or read one another's books. It does mean that there are networks with concentrated nodes in different countries that have a huge impact on the production of knowledge. There are individuals in the US and UK who are practically converts to structuralism. There certainly are influences. But when there was a push to merge the articles on cultural anthropology and social anthropology, the few anthropologists here at Misplaced Pages - US and UK based - all opposed it. See this comment by noted British social anthropologist Mdfisher. NB: I believe his interpretation of what is going on in the US is flat out wrong. But the fact that he misunderstands what is going on in US anthropology just reenforces his major claim, which is that social andthropology and cultural anthropolgy are really different, different enough to merit their own articles. Just like Culture and Society merit their own articles. I am not banning social anthropologists from Misplaced Pages! I would not want the article on Barrister to have a lot of content on Solicitor either - not because I am anti-solicitors, just because they merit their own article. Why is it so upsetting to some people to say that these two things are different? It is clarity, not prejudice! Slrubenstein | Talk 19:27, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't argue for any merger or grand synthesis. Just a dialogue, and a basic recognition that when we study culture, we must look at societies and use the medium of language. Sunray (talk) 19:46, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, in order to focus on "culture" I have actuallyu left a lot of history of anthropology out of the article. I agree with you, and hope that links to these other, related articles will help readers who want to know more! Slrubenstein | Talk 20:10, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Substantial edit of article to reduce length and add breadth

A lot of useful information has been added to the article over the past few weeks, however there are substantial problems. The current size of the article is about 102Kb. On length grounds alone, action to shorten and/or divide the article seems warranted. The subject of the article is the concept of culture. This concept is not owned by any one academic field, nor even by academic fields as a group. The concept is widely used in books on a miriad of topics. In that context, the article as it stands contains too littel discussion of the uses of the concept of culture in society at large - for example, in psychiatry, psychology, education of minorities, and so on, and too much material about academic theories of culture, and the history of development of these theories. I have been working offline on a substantial edit of the article to correct these problems. I intend to insert my edits within the next twelve hours. I would appreciate suggestions on the best way of preserving material that I remove for length or off-topic reasons. My current idea is to add a new topic Culture (theories), into which all of the parts of the current article which are about theories of culture would be moved, leaving here only shorter summaries.--AlotToLearn (talk) 23:10, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

I have no problem with your adding material, as long s it complies with our policies: significant views from notable sources. Similarly, I ask you not to delete any material that complies with our policies, significant views from notble sources. I know this article is long but I believe it is very important to work on a coherent omnibus article before spinning off sub-articles. By the way, no one has ever claimed that any one owns the concept of culture. But it is the subject of scholarly research. The word "evolution" is used in a variety of contexts, but the article, Evolution, foregrounds the views of evolutionary scientists. Psychology does not claim to make culture its object of study, for example - if psychologists use the concept of "culture" in their research, shouldn't a well-researched account of that belong in the psychology article? Also, I am confused about your stated intention: are not psychology, psychiatry, and education academic fields? How can you claim to remove academic theories of culture while adding .... more academic theories? What criteria will you use to establish the significance of the material you wish to add? It is unclear to me what you wish to add. Slrubenstein | Talk 23:48, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

1. Jonathan Benthall Animal liberation and rights Anthropology Today Volume 23 Issue 2 Page 1 - April 2007
2. Robert Yerkes 1943 Chimpanzees: A Laboratory Colony. New Haven: Yale University Press. 51-52, 189, 193
3. Jane Goodall 1963 “My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees” National Geographic 124: 308
4. R. J. Andrew 1963 “Comment on The Essential Morphological Basis for Human Culture” Alan Bryan Current Anthropology 4: 301-303, p. 301
5. Alan Bryan 1963 “The Essential Morphological basis for Human Culture” Current Anthropology 4: 297
6. Keleman 1963 “Comment on The Essential Morphological Basis for Human Culture” Alan Bryan Current Anthropology 4: 301-303 p.304
7. W. C. McGrew 1998 “Culture in nonhuman primates?” Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 301-328

• Delisted good articles
• All unassessed articles