What is Culture and How is it Socially Transmitted? (Coursework Sample)

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What is Culture, and How is it Socially Transmitted?
When most people think of culture, they automatically think of Africa, Asia and the Amazon. Although numerous communities in these regions still hold onto their traditional practices, beliefs, and value systems, culture is everywhere. Culture is a way of life that is evident in how people socialize, what they eat, wear, believe in and how they speak. It keeps communities and societies in touch with their identity, origin, and traditional values. Therefore, it can be defined as a set of practices and belief systems unique to a community or a society that are transferred from generation to generation through art, literature, social practices, or other media forms. This transmission occurs through enculturation and acculturation, transferring from one group, generation, or community to another. This paper discusses culture as a system of beliefs, practices and behaviors that people transmit within themselves or to other communities through generations.
Clture is transmitted when people socialize within their society or with other societies from other regions. Therefore, cultural transmission occurs when people from a single society socialize amongst themselves and exchange ideas, beliefs, and vocabulary. This process of socialization within a confined society and transmission of behaviors, beliefs, and practices is referred to as enculturation (Taylor and Thoth 448). Enculturation occurs when people from different ages, social classes, and genders socialize and teach one another what, how, when and where to eat, dress, pray, behave, speak or do something else that defines that society. The transmission might be vertical between parents and children, horizontal between people from the same age group, or obliquely between different generations (Spencer-Oatey and Franklin 2). Primarily, this localized transmission passes on knowledge, morals, principles, custom laws, and values. For instance, such African societies as the Maasai and the Kikuyu that practice circumcision as a rite of passage, the community tasks uncles to look after their nephews once they go through the physical process of circumcision. They teach them how to bhave, what to believe in, how to dress, whom to socialize with and how to address women and people of all agaes. Therefore, a society transmits culture within itself when members socialize and assimilate new behaviors, forms of dressing, cuisine and belief systems as parents teach their children, peers teach each other and the elderly pass on generational knowledge to the young.
Often, people from different societies interact in diverse social settings, immigrate to new localities or outright mimic or copy from other societies. Such people exchange, copy, mimic or assimilate new behaviors, ideas, dress codes, behaviors or belef systems previously alien to them. This process is known as acculturation and leads to the integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization of artifacts, literature, folklore, or other media forms to form a new culture unique to the person (Taylor and Thoth 450). In the process, people record and interpret cultural elements differently due to their different backgrounds. As a result, they assimilate already existing culture or create a new one, retrofitted to their beliefs, principles, and worldviews (Hallowell 35). For example, African immigrants into America adopt new dresscodes that align with the nation’s cold weather. They also learn new ways of behaving in suc