RETHINKING THE VIEWS ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN CULTURE

Author:
Fatik Baran Mandal

Doi: 10.26480/ccsj.01.2022.13.16

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Human culture has recently gained unprecedented importance in explaining the uniqueness of our species. Throughout the history of formal education human culture was the topic of interest of subjects like sociology, behavioral biology, and cultural psychology. The present communication critically considers the views of three disciplines about human culture in the light of history and contemporary knowledge. Social norms of a human group govern many aspects of culture. Recently, human culture has elegantly been analyzed utilizing the theory of mind. Collective capacities of minds of the group as repository of social information are important in understanding human culture. Similarly, biology of a cultural group, not the individual biology as well as the genome, not a candidate gene can explain nature of human culture satisfactorily. Size as well as the heterogeneity of the human group, their biological endowment including genetic makeup, capacities of the brain and mind determine the richness of social information in a social repository. However, uniform statement is perhaps not applicable to human culture because of its vast diversity, fragility, and context and thus it may lead to oversimplification.

Pages 13-16
Year 2022
Issue 1
Volume 3