Who said that culture is the way of life which is transmitted from generation to generation?

This video from BBC News examines cultural appropriation and can be used as part of a wider discussion on the somewhat blurred line for many between ‘cultural appreciation’ and ‘cultural appropriation’:

Discover More Whose problem is Cultural Appropriation

This particular resource focusses on festivals which may be timely for students over the summer. Another timely piece was featured in ‘The Week’

Discover More Cultural Appropriation

and looks at Kim Kardashian’s initial plans to name her new fashion line ‘Kimono’ with critics arguing that it was disrespectful to Japanese culture and ignored the cultural significance of the item.

As an activity from this work, students could be asked to create a montage of images which represent the question or ‘Cultural appreciation or cultural appropriation?’

From this, introduce the nature versus nurture debate – what is it that makes us human. The following articles are a useful source of wider reading beyond the lesson:

Discover More Nature vs nurture: outcome depends on where you live

Discover More It's nature, not nurture: personality lies in genes, twins study shows

These two articles are useful as they illustrate both sides of the debate (and are written by the same Science correspondent). Using this information and their own research, students could be asked to write a response to the question ‘What makes us human’? Clearly this is potentially an extremely wide-ranging question but it is one which will afford teachers the opportunity to see how much reading students have done and what level their essay writing skills are currently at.

Another source of data for researchers interested in the nature versus nurture debate is twin studies. Here, twins who have been separated at birth but reunited later in life are examined to see what similarities and differences exist. Similarities may then be attributed to nature with differences being attributed to nurture.

Reading through the following Live Science article, students could be asked to identify what characteristics were found to have a genetic link in the study outlined. After making a note of each of these, working in pairs, students can they try to evaluate each suggested link. Are there any other possible explanations for the suggested relationship?

Discover More Twins Separated at Birth Reveal Staggering Influence of Genetics

The Jim Twins are briefly mentioned in the above article and within this video clip, Robert Winston talks about their similarities and the statistical chances of those similarities occurring:

The following video on twin studies is particularly useful for its findings on intelligence and can provide a good basis for class discussion into intelligence

"Culture is the acquired knowledge people use to interpret experience and generate behavior."

- James Spradley, Anthropologist

An understanding of culture requires an understanding not only of language differences, but also differences in knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance. Cultures can be "understood as systems of symbols and meanings that even their creators contest, that lack fixed boundaries, that are constantly in flux, and that interact and compete with one another."

Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, art. norms of behavior, such as law and morality, and systems of belief.

Let's listen to the thoughts of our panelists.

This Web Page is Culture Defined

Culture: Everything, we as people, are.

culture

According to Samovar and Porter (1994), culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Gudykunst and Kim (1992) see culture as the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.

Other definitions:

Culture is communication, communication is culture. (Edward T. Hall)
Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.
Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.

Multicultural Middle School Students Responded:

What we study and what we as people leave behind

Love, belonging to something, a community

Life and children, how we treat children and our communities

Our lives

Our life and times, our beliefs, religions and our values

People in general, they just can’t help it, culture just is