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130 Culture Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Culture is a rich and diverse concept that encompasses various aspects of human society. When writing an essay on culture, it is essential to choose a topic that is not only interesting but also allows for in-depth exploration and analysis. To help you get started, here are 130 culture essay topic ideas and examples:

• The impact of globalization on traditional cultures.
• Cultural appropriation: the line between appreciation and exploitation.
• The role of social media in shaping modern culture.
• The influence of pop culture on youth identity.
• The impact of immigration on cultural diversity.
• The significance of language in preserving cultural heritage.
• Cultural stereotypes: their origins and consequences.
• The impact of colonialism on indigenous cultures.
• The portrayal of gender roles in different cultures.
• The role of food in cultural identity.
• The impact of technology on cultural practices.
• The influence of religion on cultural values.
• Cultural assimilation versus cultural preservation.
• The role of museums in preserving cultural artifacts.
• The impact of music on cultural expression.
• The significance of traditional clothing in different cultures.
• The role of education in promoting cultural understanding.
• The impact of cultural tourism on local communities.
• Cultural differences in communication styles.
• The role of art in reflecting and shaping culture.
• The impact of globalization on indigenous art forms.
• Cultural practices surrounding birth and death.
• The influence of media on cultural perceptions.
• Cultural taboos: understanding and respecting diverse norms.
• The role of folklore in preserving cultural traditions.
• Cultural rituals and their significance in different societies.
• The impact of cultural diversity on teamwork and collaboration.
• Cultural expressions of love and romance.
• The role of family in transmitting cultural values.
• The influence of culture on healthcare practices.
• Cultural appropriation in the fashion industry.
• The significance of cultural festivals and celebrations.
• Cultural differences in parenting styles.
• The impact of colonialism on language extinction.
• The role of sports in promoting cultural unity.
• Cultural perceptions of beauty and body image.
• The influence of technology on traditional storytelling.
• Cultural differences in concepts of time and punctuality.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on self-identity.
• Cultural expressions of grief and mourning.
• The role of cultural heritage in sustainable development.
• Cultural differences in attitudes towards aging.
• The influence of culture on political ideologies.
• Cultural practices surrounding marriage and weddings.
• The significance of cultural symbols and their meanings.
• The impact of cultural diversity on workplace dynamics.
• Cultural differences in educational systems.
• The role of culture in shaping personal values.
• Cultural expressions of power and authority.
• The influence of culture on decision-making processes.
• Cultural differences in attitudes towards mental health.
• The impact of colonialism on cultural appropriation.
• Cultural expressions of hospitality and etiquette.
• The role of culture in shaping environmental attitudes.
• Cultural differences in approaches to conflict resolution.
• The significance of cultural heritage in post-conflict reconciliation.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards gender equality.
• Cultural expressions of spirituality and religion.
• The impact of cultural diversity on economic development.
• Cultural differences in concepts of privacy and personal space.
• The role of culture in shaping political systems.
• Cultural practices surrounding food and eating habits.
• The significance of cultural heritage in urban planning.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on intercultural communication.
• Cultural expressions of humor and satire.
• The influence of culture on consumer behavior.
• Cultural differences in concepts of success and achievement.
• The role of culture in shaping environmental conservation efforts.
• The significance of cultural heritage in disaster resilience.
• The impact of cultural diversity on healthcare access and outcomes.
• Cultural expressions of social justice and activism.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards disability.
• Cultural differences in concepts of leadership and authority.
• The role of culture in shaping peacebuilding efforts.
• Cultural practices surrounding gender and sexuality.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting social cohesion.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on media representation.
• Cultural expressions of protest and resistance.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards technology.
• Cultural differences in concepts of beauty and aesthetics.
• The role of culture in shaping educational policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting intergenerational dialogue.
• The impact of cultural diversity on cultural diplomacy.
• Cultural expressions of identity and belonging.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards immigration.
• Cultural differences in concepts of justice and fairness.
• The role of culture in shaping urban design and architecture.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting peace and reconciliation.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on employment opportunities.
• Cultural expressions of resistance and resilience.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards climate change.
• Cultural differences in concepts of morality and ethics.
• The role of culture in shaping public policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting social inclusion.
• The impact of cultural diversity on intercultural relationships.
• Cultural expressions of cultural hybridity and fusion.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards animal rights.
• Cultural differences in concepts of health and well-being.
• The role of culture in shaping immigration policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting sustainable tourism.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on educational opportunities.
• Cultural expressions of resilience and post-traumatic growth.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards artificial intelligence.
• Cultural differences in concepts of democracy and governance.
• The role of culture in shaping social welfare policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting human rights.
• The impact of cultural diversity on intercultural friendships.
• Cultural expressions of cultural preservation and revitalization.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards genetic engineering.
• Cultural differences in concepts of peace and conflict.
• The role of culture in shaping criminal justice systems.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting gender equality.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on access to financial resources.
• Cultural expressions of cultural resistance and decolonization.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards space exploration.
• Cultural differences in concepts of identity and belonging.
• The role of culture in shaping educational curricula.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting intercultural dialogue.
• The impact of cultural diversity on artistic collaborations.
• Cultural expressions of cultural exchange and cross-pollination.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards nuclear energy.
• Cultural differences in concepts of citizenship and belonging.
• The role of culture in shaping healthcare policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting environmental sustainability.
• The impact of cultural stereotypes on access to housing.
• Cultural expressions of cultural resilience and adaptation.
• The influence of culture on attitudes towards space ethics.
• Cultural differences in concepts of social justice and equity.
• The role of culture in shaping social media policies.
• The significance of cultural heritage in promoting cultural diplomacy.

Remember, these topics are just a starting point. Feel free to modify or combine them to suit your interests and research goals. Good luck with your essay on culture!

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Essay on My Culture

Students are often asked to write an essay on My Culture in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on My Culture

Introduction.

My culture is an integral part of who I am. It’s like a colorful tapestry, woven with traditions, customs, and values that have been passed down from generation to generation.

Family Traditions

Family traditions are a significant part of my culture. They include celebrating festivals, preparing and sharing traditional meals, and storytelling sessions that keep our heritage alive.

Language and Values

The language we speak at home is another cultural aspect. It connects me to my roots. Additionally, values like respect for elders, kindness, and honesty are cultural teachings I hold dear.

In conclusion, my culture shapes my identity, guiding my actions and thoughts. It’s a treasure I cherish and will continue to uphold.

250 Words Essay on My Culture

Culture is an intricate tapestry, woven with threads of traditions, values, and experiences. It shapes our identity, influencing our beliefs and behaviors. My culture, a blend of South Asian heritage and modern Western influences, plays a significant role in defining who I am.

Traditional Roots

My culture is steeped in ancient traditions, each carrying profound meanings. From the vibrant festivals like Diwali, symbolizing the victory of light over darkness, to the daily rituals such as meditation, promoting inner peace, these customs provide a sense of belonging and continuity. They serve as a bridge, connecting me to my ancestors and their wisdom.

Western Influences

Growing up in a multicultural society, my culture has also been shaped by Western influences. The emphasis on individualism and freedom of expression has encouraged me to question, explore, and form my own beliefs. This fusion of cultures has led to a unique blend of values – respect for diversity, emphasis on education, and the pursuit of personal growth.

Impact on Personal Identity

My culture, a blend of tradition and modernity, has shaped my worldview and personal identity. It has taught me to appreciate diversity, strive for knowledge, and maintain balance in life. It has also instilled a sense of responsibility to uphold these values and pass them on to future generations.

Culture is not static; it evolves, influenced by time, place, and people. My culture is a testament to this dynamic nature – a harmonious blend of old and new, East and West. It is an integral part of my identity, shaping my thoughts, actions, and aspirations.

500 Words Essay on My Culture

Defining my culture.

My culture is a beautiful amalgamation of shared beliefs, practices, and traditions that have been passed down through generations. It is a social construct, born out of the need for a collective identity, yet it is also deeply personal, shaping my individuality. It is a complex interplay of history, geography, religion, language, and art.

Language and Communication

Language, an essential component of my culture, is more than just a tool for communication. It encapsulates the essence of my cultural heritage, carrying with it the stories, wisdom, and ethos of my ancestors. Each idiom, each proverb, each dialect is a window into the collective experiences and values of my community.

Traditions and Rituals

Values and norms.

At the heart of my culture lie the values and norms that guide my behavior and interactions with others. They instill in me a sense of responsibility, respect, and empathy, molding my character and influencing my worldview. These values, embedded in the fabric of my culture, serve as a moral compass, guiding me through life’s challenges and dilemmas.

Art and Expression

Art, in its many forms, is a powerful expression of my culture. It is a mirror reflecting society, a canvas depicting our dreams, fears, joys, and sorrows. Be it music, literature, dance, or visual arts, each piece is a thread in the intricate tapestry of my culture, adding depth, color, and texture to the narrative.

While cultures may vary enormously across the globe, they all share one thing in common: they are the lifeblood of human societies. They provide us with a sense of belonging and identity, and help us understand our place in the world. By cherishing and preserving our individual cultures, we contribute to the beautiful diversity of the human race.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Asian Customs and Values

Preservation within american communities.

by Peter Klang

This essay discusses Asian American bicultural identity, traditional values and customs from root cultures, and how they are still practiced and celebrated by Asian American families and in communities. It also addresses the ways in which ethnic community influence the lives of the people it serves including residents, as well as how individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds can contribute to the lives of those around them .

Within a year of their arrival in 1850, Chinese immigrants in San Francisco established a Chinatown. Others soon followed. Boston’s Chinatown was established by 1875. Chinatown was then, as it still is now, a place of support and security where one could find a bed, job, and social services; a place of cultural familiarity where one could share common food, language, and customs. Excluded from the larger society, Chinatown was home.

Parallel patterns of community development occurred with Japanese immigrants who quickly established Japantown’s and Little Tokyo’s in the 1890’s and with Filipino immigrants who settled in Manilatown’s in the 1920’s up and down the West Coast. Immigrant communities erected villages and family associations which reproduced the social structure of their home villages. Temples and churches were built to preserve traditional religious practices while language schools were founded to maintain the language and cultural integrity of the younger generation. Asian language newspapers and periodicals reported on news in the homeland as well as relevant local affairs in the community.

Early Asian communities were predominantly male because young men had been recruited as laborers. Women could not join them because of U.S. Congressional exclusion acts. Without many women, children, or families, these “bachelor societies” were often lonely. In 1900, for example, Chinese men in the United States numbered about 85,000 while the number of Chinese women was less than 2,000. Social organizations and recreational activities played critical roles in building a sense of support and belonging. Nevertheless, with all new immigrants excluded and no women to produce a second generation, the communities were condemned to extinction.

Through a combination of ingenuity and serendipity, however, Chinese devised an “extra-legal” way to sustain their community’s future. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which destroyed all birth and immigration records, many Chinese immigrants declared themselves to be U.S. citizens with children, usually sons, who were still in China. Since children of U.S. citizens were, by definition, also U.S. citizens, this process created openings on paper for Chinese children to enter the U.S. legally as citizens in spite of the exclusion acts if they could prove their identities.

For some, a Chinese American’s real son successfully joined him in this way. In a few cases, an immigrant’s wife joined him by pretending to be his daughter. Many others, however, purchased papers and assumed new identities as the only way to come to America. One reason for the harsh interrogations at Angel Island was government suspicion of “paper sons” who accounted for the most Chinese immigration between 1910 and 1940. Although technically “illegal,” the paper-son process was the only way to develop a second generation in the Chinese community during the exclusion years.

Like the Chinese, Japanese in America, and later Koreans, faced the irony of being recruited for labor, then left without the means to develop as community. To strengthen their communities before exclusion in 1924, many Japanese immigrant men wrote letters to their families in Japan to arrange marriages and have their brides come to America. Since the men could not afford the cost of going back to Japan to arrange the marriage directly, they sent pictures of them for their families to show around the village. Sometimes they used an earlier photo from when they were younger and better-looking or even the picture of a handsome friend in order to maximize their chance of being matched with an attractive bride. After a suitable mate was found, her picture was sent to the man in America. The family then held a formal wedding ceremony with the bride in Japan, and filed the marriage documents with both the Japanese and U.S. governments which cleared the way for the woman to join her new husband in America.

When the ships arrived from Japan, the women walked down the plank holding pictures of their husbands while the men waited on the dock holding pictures of their brides. As the picture brides and picture husbands met for the first time, many disappointedly discovered that the photographs did not match with reality! Nevertheless, most marriages lasted as this was the only way to establish Japanese family life and build healthy Japanese communities in America before this practice was outlawed in 1921 by the Ladies’ Agreement and before the Immigration Act of 1924 prevented further Japanese immigration to the United States.

The experiences of these Japanese or Korean picture brides as well as Chinese paper sons reflect the importance of community development as a way to survive in spite of exclusion.

A more recent example of the theme of community-building is the secondary migration of Southeast Asian refugees after their initial resettlement in the United States. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, federal policy mandated the dispersal of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos across all fifty states in order to promote rapid assimilation and to discourage the formation of ethnic concentrations.

Not surprisingly, after their initial resettlement, Southeast Asians moved to areas like Texas and Southern California where they found the warmer climates, to which they were accustomed, and longstanding Asian communities. Many Cambodians settled in Lowell, Massachusetts during the 1980s, for example, because of job opportunities, availability of human services, and the presence of a Cambodian Buddhist temple. Despite the federal policy of dispersal, Southeast Asian refugees moved on their own to create new communities which enhanced their survival, security, and adjustment to American society.

By focusing on the theme of building community in the curriculum, students can see beyond the often distorted, stereotypic images of Asian communities as evil, mysterious, exotic places filled with gangsters, warlords and prostitutes, which Hollywood movies and network television so often portray. Furthermore, students learn to appreciate the value of ethnic communities because of the important roles they play in enabling people to survive. In contrast, dispersal and forced assimilation lead to isolation and failure.

As extensions, students can form their own Asian American or other community clubs in school and/or develop relationships with existing community organizations. Lessons on the community theme can also be easily developed in terms of immigrant history and literature using such historical novels as Yoshiko Ushida’s Picture Bride and videos such as The New Puritans: The Sikhs of Yuba City .

Geography and mathematics lessons can be developed using population figures for various locations to show changes over time, involving students as neighborhood and community researchers.

Additional Background Reading on Immigration

Immigration and Migration

Understanding Our Perceptions of Asian Americans

Asian Americans Then and Now

Asian Americans and US-Asia Relations

Related content, the indian identity is absorptive.

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Culture And Tradition Essay

Crafting an essay on the subject of "Culture and Tradition" can be both challenging and rewarding. The complexity arises from the vastness and diversity inherent in these topics. Culture encompasses a broad spectrum of elements, including language, customs, beliefs, art, and social norms. Similarly, traditions are deeply rooted in historical practices, passed down through generations, and can vary significantly across different societies.

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The term of ‘culture’ is probably noticeable by a large amount of society. If you are a graduated person—have taken the series of educational level, at least elementary school in common, hearing this word is quite a usual thing. Even though it seems like almost all of you are already familiar with the term of ‘culture’, can you give your own interpretation of what culture really is? Do you recognize the culture’s existence within your community? How much does culture influence your way of thinking or doing something? Which culture does occur in you environment? Why should you understand and learn about this matter?

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The belief that the animals exist because God created them-and that he created them so we can better meet our needs-is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all. Peter Singer Read more at There is a road in the hearts of all of us, hidden and seldom traveled, which leads to an unkown, secret place. The old people came literally to love the soil, and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. Their teepees were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly. He can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. ~ Chief Luther Standing Bear ~ Man's heart away from nature becomes hard. ~Standing Bear ~ You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. ~ Unknown ~. As some in the Northwest say, Without the salmon, we are no longer a people. As the Caribou People say, Without caribou, we will cease to exist. In the far north, the hunters await their dreams of the location of the prey. Cultural factors influence how we perceive other lives. In past, even other than European lives The animals, the land, its inhabitants are part of cultural history and of the necessity of our lives.

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In this theoretical essay, we examine four conceptual gestalt approaches to culture and education: “culture as pattern,” “culture as boundary,” “culture as authorship,” and “culture as critical dialog.” In the “culture as pattern,” education aims at socializing people into a given cultural practice. Any decline from culturally valued patterns becomes a deficit for education to eliminate. In the “culture as boundary,” encounter with other cultures highlights their arbitrariness and equality. Education focuses on celebration of diversity, tolerance, pluralism, social justice, and equal rights. The “culture as authorship” is about authorial transcendence of the given recognized by others. Education promotes dialogic creativity and authorship. Student/author is the final authority of his/her own education. “Culture as critical dialog” promotes testing ideas, opinions, beliefs, desires, and values. Critical dialog is inherently deconstructive, promoting never-ending search for truth. Edu...

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How to Write an Essay about Your Culture

Do you need to write an essay about your culture but don’t know where to start? You’ve come to the right place! I’m Constance, and I’ll show you how to write an essay about your culture. I’ll guide you step by step, and we’ll write a sample essay together. Let’s dive in. 

Writing an essay about your culture includes 5 steps:

Step 1. Plan how many words you want in each paragraph.

When you know the exact number of words you need for an essay, planning the word count for each paragraph will be much easier. 

For example, a 300-word essay typically consists of five paragraphs and three key elements:

• The introductory paragraph.
• Three body paragraphs.
• The conclusion, or the concluding paragraph.

Here’s a simple way to distribute 300 words across the five paragraphs in your essay:

You’ll get 300 when you add up these numbers. 

Step 2. Decide on what your main and supporting points will be.

First, you must take a stand, meaning you must decide on your main point. What do you really want to say about your culture? Whatever you want to say, that becomes your thesis. 

For example, “My culture is very rich.” That is enough to get started. You’ll get a better idea of how to expand or tweak your thesis after the next step.

Next, divide your topic using the Power of Three to prove the point that your culture is rich using three supporting ideas.

The Power of Three effectively divides an essay’s main idea into its supporting points. It means your main idea is true because of the three reasons you will provide in the body. So, it is a three-part structure that helps produce your body paragraphs .

Let’s try it for an essay about Filipino culture!

For example, here are three supporting ideas explaining the richness of Filipino culture:

• The Philippines has incredible food .
• Traditional Filipino clothing reflects the country’s heritage.
• Family values in the Philippines are essential.

Great! Now we have everything we need to write an essay about Filipino culture. We’re all set for the next step!

Step 3. Write your introductory paragraph.

Here are the key components of an introductory paragraph you need to remember in writing your essay:

Our first sentence is the introduction, which should pull our reader into the world we want to portray in our essay.

And the rest of the introductory paragraph is our thesis statement. It includes our main idea and three supporting points.

Example of an introductory paragraph about culture

“Having been colonized for centuries, the Philippines boasts a vast heritage. It has a rich culture characterized by food, clothing, and family values. Filipino culture has delicious food inherited from diverse parts of the world and periods of conquest. Traditional Filipino clothing reflects the country’s history, as well. And Filipinos prize their family values probably above all else.”

Look at how the introductory paragraph goes from a general statement to specific ideas that support our main idea.

Our introductory sentence is a general statement that serves as the opening in our essay. It briefly sets the essay’s context. Next comes the thesis statement — our main idea. Finally, we have three supporting ideas for our thesis.

Step 4. Write your essay’s body paragraphs.

Again, a 300-word essay typically has three body paragraphs containing your three supporting ideas. Here’s how to structure a body paragraph:

Looking back at our word count plan, we know that our body paragraphs should have roughly 70 words each. Remember your word plan as you write.

Body Paragraph 1

“The Philippines boasts a diverse food culture. It reflects indigenous flavors and foreign influences, such as American, Spanish, Indian, and Chinese. Whether it’s a typical or special day, Filipinos love eating these various dishes with rice, a staple. For example, rice goes well with curry, noodles, and adobo. It is also common to see various foods like pizza, pancit, lumpia, paella, (Filipino-style) sweet spaghetti, cakes, and ice cream at parties.”

As you can see, the first sentence in this body paragraph is a topic sentence . It gives context to the paragraph and briefly summarizes it.

The second sentence explains why the Philippine food culture is considered diverse. 

The remaining sentences illustrate your main point (topic sentence) by providing examples, starting with rice in sentence 3.

Body Paragraph 2

“Traditional Filipino clothing reflects Philippine cultural heritage. Although Filipinos now conform to current fashion trends in their everyday lives, the traditional clothing style is often used during celebrations. The traditional fashion sense exhibits influences from indigenous tribes, Chinese immigration waves, the Spaniards, and Americans, portraying the chronology of Philippine historical events. For example, the Philippines’ national costume, the baro’t saya, is an elegant blend of Spanish and Filipino clothing styles. Even some modernized forms of clothing also display other global influences.”

Just like Body Paragraph 1, this paragraph follows the same structure outlined in the diagram. It proceeds from a general statement to more specific points :

• The topic sentence.
• An explanation.

Body Paragraph 3

“Family values are vital in the Philippines. The daily lives of most Filipinos revolve around close and extended family, making them known for their family-oriented lifestyle even when they’re overseas. It’s common for children to live with their parents after reaching legal age; some even stay after getting married or obtaining a job. Filipinos also cherish their extended families (aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins) and hanging out or celebrating significant events together.”

Once again, this paragraph follows the body paragraph structure. Now, we’re all set for the final step — the conclusion.

Step 5. Write the conclusion.

The easiest way to write a concluding paragraph for your essay on your culture is to restate your main idea and its supporting points using different words. You can even paraphrase your introduction — a time-proven method!

Let’s write the conclusion for our essay.

“Because of its history, the Philippines has a rich, diverse culture rooted in a vast heritage. Filipino cuisine is a blend of indigenous and foreign flavors. The nation’s history is reflected in its traditional clothing. And family values display a distinct Filipino trait.”

Note that this conclusion uses different words to restate the points we’ve already made, including those in the body paragraphs. 

Hope this was helpful. Now go ahead and write an essay about your culture!

Tutor Phil is an e-learning professional who helps adult learners finish their degrees by teaching them academic writing skills.

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Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — What is Culture — What is Culture: An Exploration of its Elements and Significance

What is Culture: an Exploration of Its Elements and Significance

• Categories: Cultural Competence What is Culture

About this sample

Words: 713 |

Published: Sep 7, 2023

Words: 713 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Factors shaping culture, major elements of culture, the impact of cultural elements.

• Geography: Geography plays a crucial role in shaping culture. The physical environment, such as climate, terrain, and available resources, affects the way people live and adapt to their surroundings. For example, societies in arid regions may develop nomadic lifestyles, while those in fertile areas may engage in agriculture and settlement.
• History: Historical events, such as wars, conquests, colonization , and revolutions, have a profound impact on culture. They shape collective memories, traditions, and identities. Historical narratives and commemorations often serve as cultural touchstones, influencing the way societies perceive themselves and others.
• Religion: Religion plays a central role in culture by providing belief systems , moral frameworks, and rituals that guide individual and collective behavior. Different religious traditions can lead to distinct cultural practices , values, and norms.
• Language: Language is a fundamental element of culture. It not only serves as a means of communication but also reflects the worldview and values of a culture. Language shapes thought processes and influences the way people perceive and interpret the world around them.
• Symbols: Symbols are representations that convey meaning within a culture. They can take the form of words, gestures, images, or objects. Symbols are imbued with cultural significance and are used to communicate complex ideas, values, and beliefs.
• Language: Language is the primary vehicle through which culture is transmitted. It is not merely a tool for communication but a repository of cultural knowledge , stories, and traditions. Language shapes the way people perceive and interact with the world and serves as a key marker of cultural identity.
• Norms: Norms are social rules and expectations that guide behavior within a culture. They encompass a wide range of behaviors, from etiquette and manners to more profound cultural practices. Norms are crucial for maintaining social order and cohesion.
• Values: Values are the core beliefs and principles that underpin a culture. They dictate what is considered desirable, acceptable, and important within a society. Values influence decision-making, ethics, and the formation of individual and collective identity.
• Artifacts: Artifacts are tangible objects created by a culture. They include tools, clothing, art, architecture, and everyday items. Artifacts not only serve practical functions but also convey cultural aesthetics, craftsmanship, and innovation.
• Communication: Language and symbols shape the way people communicate. They enable individuals to convey ideas, emotions, and information within the cultural framework. The choice of language and the use of specific symbols reflect cultural norms and values.
• Behavior: Norms and values guide behavior by setting expectations for individuals and society. They determine what is considered appropriate, moral, and socially acceptable. Deviation from cultural norms may lead to social sanctions or conflicts.
• Identity: Cultural elements contribute significantly to the formation of cultural identity. Individuals identify with their cultural heritage through language, traditions, and shared values. Cultural identity shapes self-perception and influences how individuals relate to others.

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culture , behaviour peculiar to Homo sapiens , together with material objects used as an integral part of this behaviour. Thus, culture includes language , ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements.

The existence and use of culture depends upon an ability possessed by humans alone. This ability has been called variously the capacity for rational or abstract thought, but a good case has been made for rational behaviour among subhuman animals, and the meaning of abstract is not sufficiently explicit or precise. The term symboling has been proposed as a more suitable name for the unique mental ability of humans, consisting of assigning to things and events certain meanings that cannot be grasped with the senses alone. Articulate speech—language—is a good example. The meaning of the word dog is not inherent in the sounds themselves; it is assigned, freely and arbitrarily, to the sounds by human beings. Holy water, “biting one’s thumb” at someone ( Romeo and Juliet , Act I, scene 1), or fetishes are other examples. Symboling is a kind of behaviour objectively definable and should not be confused with symbolizing, which has an entirely different meaning.

The concept of culture

Various definitions of culture.

What has been termed the classic definition of culture was provided by the 19th-century English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in the first paragraph of his Primitive Culture (1871):

Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief , art, morals , law , custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

In Anthropology (1881) Tylor made it clear that culture, so defined, is possessed by man alone. This conception of culture served anthropologists well for some 50 years. With the increasing maturity of anthropological science, further reflections upon the nature of their subject matter and concepts led to a multiplication and diversification of definitions of culture. In Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952), U.S. anthropologists A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn cited 164 definitions of culture, ranging from “learned behaviour” to “ideas in the mind,” “a logical construct,” “a statistical fiction,” “a psychic defense mechanism,” and so on. The definition—or the conception—of culture that is preferred by Kroeber and Kluckhohn and also by a great many other anthropologists is that culture is an abstraction or, more specifically, “an abstraction from behaviour.”

These conceptions have defects or shortcomings. The existence of behavioral traditions—that is, patterns of behaviour transmitted by social rather than by biologic hereditary means—has definitely been established for nonhuman animals. “Ideas in the mind” become significant in society only as expressed in language, acts, and objects. “A logical construct” or “a statistical fiction” is not specific enough to be useful. The conception of culture as an abstraction led, first, to a questioning of the reality of culture (inasmuch as abstractions were regarded as imperceptible) and, second, to a denial of its existence; thus, the subject matter of nonbiological anthropology, “culture,” was defined out of existence, and without real, objective things and events in the external world there can be no science.

Kroeber and Kluckhohn were led to their conclusion that culture is an abstraction by reasoning that if culture is behaviour it, ipso facto, becomes the subject matter of psychology; therefore, they concluded that culture “is an abstraction from concrete behavior but is not itself behavior.” But what, one might ask, is an abstraction of a marriage ceremony or a pottery bowl, to use Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s examples? This question poses difficulties that were not adequately met by these authors. A solution was perhaps provided by Leslie A. White in the essay “The Concept of Culture” (1959). The issue is not really whether culture is real or an abstraction, he reasoned; the issue is the context of the scientific interpretation.

When things and events are considered in the context of their relation to the human organism, they constitute behaviour; when they are considered not in terms of their relation to the human organism but in their relationship to one another, they become culture by definition. The mother-in-law taboo is a complex of concepts, attitudes, and acts. When one considers them in their relationship to the human organism—that is, as things that the organism does—they become behaviour by definition. When, however, one considers the mother-in-law taboo in its relationship to the place of residence of a newly married couple, to the customary division of labour between the sexes, to their respective roles in the society’s mode of subsistence and offense and defense, and these in turn to the technology of the society, the mother-in-law taboo becomes, again by definition, culture. This distinction is precisely the one that students of words have made for many years. When words are considered in their relationship to the human organism—that is, as acts—they become behaviour. But when they are considered in terms of their relationship to one another—producing lexicon, grammar, syntax , and so forth—they become language, the subject matter not of psychology but of the science of linguistics. Culture, therefore, is the name given to a class of things and events dependent upon symboling ( i.e., articulate speech) that are considered in a kind of extra-human context.

Universalist approaches to culture and the human mind

Culture, as noted above, is due to an ability possessed by man alone. The question of whether the difference between the mind of man and that of the lower animals is one of kind or of degree has been debated for many years, and even today reputable scientists can be found on both sides of this issue. But no one who holds the view that the difference is one of degree has adduced any evidence to show that nonhuman animals are capable, to any degree whatever, of a kind of behaviour that all human beings exhibit. This kind of behaviour may be illustrated by the following examples: remembering the sabbath to keep it holy, classifying one’s relatives and distinguishing one class from another (such as uncles from cousins), defining and prohibiting incest, and so on. There is no reason or evidence that leads one to believe that any animal other than man can have or be brought to any appreciation or comprehension whatever of such meanings and acts. There is, as Tylor argued long ago, a “mental gulf that divides the lowest savage from the highest ape” ( Anthropology ).

In line with the foregoing distinction, human behaviour is to be defined as behaviour consisting of, or dependent upon, symboling rather than upon anything else that Homo sapiens does; coughing, yawning, stretching, and the like are not human.

Next to nothing is yet known about the neuroanatomy of symboling. Man is characterized by a very large brain, considered both absolutely and relatively, and it is reasonable—and even obligatory—to believe that the central nervous system , especially the forebrain, is the locus of the ability to symbol . But how it does this and with what specific mechanisms remain to be discovered. One is thus led to the conclusion that at some point in the evolution of primates a threshold was reached in some line, or lines, when the ability to symbol was realized and made explicit in overt behaviour. There is no intermediate stage, logical or neurological, between symboling and nonsymboling; an individual or a species is capable of symboling, or he or it is not. The life of Helen Keller makes this clear: when, through the aid of her teacher, Anne Sullivan , Keller was enabled to escape from the isolation to which her blindness and deafness had consigned her and to effect contact with the world of human meanings and values, the transformation was instantaneous.

But even if almost nothing is known about the neuroanatomy of symboling, a great deal is known about the evolution of mind (or “ minding ,” if mind is considered as a process rather than a thing), in which one finds symboling as the characteristic of a particular stage of development. The evolution of minding can be traced in the following sequence of stages. First is the simple reflexive stage, in which behaviour is determined by the intrinsic properties of both the organism and the thing reacted to—for example, the contraction of the pupil of the eye under increased stimulation by light. Second is the conditioned reflex stage, in which the response is elicited not by properties intrinsic in the stimulus but by meanings that the stimulus has acquired for the responding organism through experience—for example, Pavlov’s dog’s salivary glands responding to the sound of a bell. Third is the instrumental stage, as exemplified by a chimpanzee knocking down a banana with a stick. Here the response is determined by the intrinsic properties of the things involved (banana, stick, chimpanzee’s neurosensory-muscular system); but a new element has been introduced into behaviour, namely, the exercise of control by the reacting organism over things in the external world. And, finally, there is the symbol stage, in which the configuration of behaviour involves nonintrinsic meanings, as has already been suggested.

These four stages exhibit a characteristic of the evolution of all living things: a movement in the direction of making life more secure and enduring. In the first stage the organism distinguishes between the beneficial , the injurious, and the neutral, but it must come into direct contact with the object or event in question to do so. In the second stage the organism may react at a distance, as it were—that is, through an intermediate stimulus. The conditioned reflex brings signs into the life process; one thing or event may serve as an indication of something else—food, danger, and so forth. And, since anything can serve as a sign of anything else (a green triangle can mean food, sex, or an electric shock to the laboratory rat), the reactions of the organism are emancipated from the limitations that stage one imposes upon living things, namely, the intrinsic properties of things. The possibility of obtaining life-sustaining things and of avoiding life-destroying things is thus much enhanced , and the security and continuity of life are correspondingly increased. But in stage two the organism still plays a subordinate role to the external world; it does not and cannot determine the significance of the intermediary stimulus: the bark of a distant dog to the rabbit or the sound of the bell to Pavlov’s dog. This meaning is determined by things and events in the external world (or in the laboratory by the experimenter). In stages one and two, therefore, the organism is at the mercy of the external world in this respect.

In the third stage the element of control over environment is introduced. The ape who obtains food by means of a stick (tool) is not subordinate to his situation. He does not merely undergo a situation; he dominates it. His behaviour is not determined by the juxtaposition of things and events; on the contrary, the juxtaposition is determined by the ape. He is confronted with alternatives , and he makes choices. The configuration of behaviour in stage three is constructed within the dynamic organism of the ape and then imposed upon the external world.

The evolution of minding is a cumulative process; the achievements of each stage are carried on into the succeeding one or ones. The fourth stage reintroduces the factor of nonintrinsic meanings to the advances made in stages two and three. Stage four is the stage of symboling, of articulate speech. Thus, one observes two aspects of the evolution of minding, both of which contribute to the security and survivability of life: the emancipation of behaviour from limitations imposed upon it by the external world and increased control over the environment. To be sure, neither emancipation nor control becomes complete, but quantitative increase is significant.

The direction of biologic evolution toward greater expansion and security of life can be seen from another point of view: the advance from instinctive behaviour ( i.e., responses determined by intrinsic properties of the organism) to learned and freely variable behaviour, patterns of which may be acquired and transmitted from one individual and generation to another, and finally to a system of things and events, the essence of which is meanings that cannot be comprehended by the senses alone. This system is, of course, culture, and the species is the human species. Culture is a man-made environment, brought into existence by the ability to symbol.

Once established, culture has a life of its own, so to speak; that is, it is a continuum of things and events in a cause and effect relationship; it flows down through time from one generation to another. Since its inception 1,000,000 or more years ago, this culture—with its language, beliefs, tools, codes, and so on—has had an existence external to each individual born into it. The function of this external, man-made environment is to make life secure and enduring for the society of human beings living within the cultural system. Thus, culture may be seen as the most recent, the most highly developed means of promoting the security and continuity of life, in a series that began with the simple reflex.

Society preceded culture; society, conceived as the interaction of living beings, is coextensive with life itself. Man’s immediate prehuman ancestors had societies, but they did not have culture. Studies of monkeys and apes have greatly enlarged scientific knowledge of their social life—and, by inference , the scientific conception of the earliest human societies. Data derived from paleontological sources and from accumulating studies of living, nonhuman primates are now fairly abundant, and hypotheses derived from these are numerous and varied in detail. A fair summary of them may be made as follows: The growth of the primate brain was stimulated by life in the trees, specifically, by eye-hand coordinations involved in swinging from limb to limb and by manipulating food with the hands (as among the insectivorous lemurs). Descent to the ground, as a consequence of deforestation or increase in body size (which would tend to restrict arboreal locomotion and increase the difficulty of obtaining enough food to supply increased need), and the assumption of erect posture were other significant steps in biologic evolution and the eventual emergence of culture. Some theories reject the arboreal stage in man’s evolutionary past, but this does not seriously affect the overall conception of his development.

The Australopithecines of Africa, extinct manlike higher primates about which reliable knowledge is very considerable today, exemplify the stage of erect posture in primate evolution. Erect posture freed the arms and hands from their earlier function of locomotion and made possible an extensive and versatile use of tools. Again, the eye-hand-object coordinations involved in tool using stimulated the growth of the brain, especially the forebrain. It is not possible to determine on the basis of paleontological evidence the precise point at which the ability to symbol (specifically, articulate speech) was realized, as expressed in overt behaviour. It is believed by some that man’s prehuman ancestors used tools habitually and that habit became custom through the transmission of tool using from one generation to another long before articulate speech came into being. In fact, some theorists hold, the customary use of tools became a powerful stimulus in the development of a brain that was capable of symboling or articulate speech.

The introjection of symboling into primate social life was revolutionary. Everything was transformed, everything acquired new meaning; the symbol added a new dimension to primate—now human—existence. An ax was no longer merely a tool with which to chop; it could become a symbol of authority. Mating became marriage, and all social relationships between parents and children and brothers and sisters became moral obligations, duties, rights, and privileges. The world of nature, from the stones beside the path to the stars in their courses, became alive and conscious spirits. “And all that I beheld respired with inward meaning” (Wordsworth). The anthropoid had at last become a man.

Thus far in this article, culture has been considered in general, as the possession of all mankind. Now it is appropriate to turn to particular cultures , or sociocultural systems. Human beings, like other animal species, live in societies, and each society possesses culture. It has long been customary for ethnologists to speak of Seneca culture, Eskimo culture, North American Plains culture, and so on—that is, the culture of a particular society (Seneca) or an indefinite number of societies (Eskimo) or the cultures found in or characteristic of a topographic area (the North American Plains). There is no objection to this usage as a convenient means of reference: “Seneca culture” is the culture that the Seneca tribe possesses at a particular time. Similarly, Eskimo culture refers to a class of cultures, and Plains culture refers to a type of culture. What is needed is a term that defines culture precisely in its particular manifestations for the purpose of scientific study, and for this the term sociocultural system has been proposed. It is defined as the culture possessed by a distinguishable and autonomous group (society) of human beings, such as a tribe or a modern nation. Cultural elements may pass freely from one system to another (cultural diffusion), but the boundary provided by the distinction between one system and another (Seneca, Cayuga; United States , Japan) makes it possible to study the system at any given time or over a period of time.

Every human society, therefore, has its own sociocultural system: a particular and unique expression of human culture as a whole. Every sociocultural system possesses the components of human culture as a whole—namely, technological, sociological, and ideological elements. But sociocultural systems vary widely in their structure and organization. These variations are attributable to differences among physical habitats and the resources that they offer or withhold for human use; to the range of possibilities inherent in various areas of activity, such as language or the manufacture and use of tools; and to the degree of development. The biologic factor of man may, for purposes of analysis and comparison of sociocultural systems, be considered as a constant. Although the equality or inequality of races, or physical types, of mankind has not been established by science, all evidence and reason lead to the conclusion that, whatever differences of native endowment may exist, they are insignificant as compared with the overriding influence of the external tradition that is culture.

Since the infant of the human species enters the world cultureless, his behaviour—his attitudes, values , ideals, and beliefs, as well as his overt motor activity—is powerfully influenced by the culture that surrounds him on all sides. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the power and influence of culture upon the human animal. It is powerful enough to hold the sex urge in check and achieve premarital chastity and even voluntary vows of celibacy for life. It can cause a person to die of hunger, though nourishment is available, because some foods are branded unclean by the culture. And it can cause a person to disembowel or shoot himself to wipe out a stain of dishonour. Culture is stronger than life and stronger than death. Among subhuman animals, death is merely the cessation of the vital processes of metabolism, respiration, and so on. In the human species, however, death is also a concept; only man knows death. But culture triumphs over death and offers man eternal life. Thus, culture may deny satisfactions on the one hand while it fulfills desires on the other.

The predominant emphasis, perhaps, in studies of culture and personality has been the inquiry into the process by which the individual personality is formed as it develops under the influence of its cultural milieu . But the individual biologic organism is itself a significant determinant in the development of personality. The mature personality is, therefore, a function of both biologic and cultural factors, and it is virtually impossible to distinguish these factors from each other and to evaluate the magnitude of each in particular cases. If the cultural factor were a constant, personality would vary with the variations of the neurosensory-glandular-muscular structure of the individual. But there are no tests that can indicate, for example, precisely how much of the taxicab driver’s ability to make change is due to innate endowment and how much to cultural experience. Therefore, the student of culture and personality is driven to work with “modal personalities,” that is, the personality of the typical Crow Indian or the typical Frenchman insofar as this can be determined. But it is of interest, theoretically at least, to note that even if both factors, the biologic and the cultural, were constant—which they never are in actuality—variations of personality would still be possible. Within the confines of these two constants, individuals might undergo a number of profound experiences in different chronological permutations. For example, two young women might have the same experiences of (1) having a baby, (2) graduating from college, and (3) getting married. But the effect of sequence (1), (2), (3) upon personality development would be quite different than that of sequence (2), (3), (1).

Cultural comparisons

Ethnocentrism is the name given to a tendency to interpret or evaluate other cultures in terms of one’s own. This tendency has been, perhaps, more prevalent in modern nations than among preliterate tribes. The citizens of a large nation, especially in the past, have been less likely to observe people in another nation or culture than have been members of small tribes who are well acquainted with the ways of their culturally diverse neighbours. Thus, the American tourist could report that Londoners drive “on the wrong side of the street” or an Englishman might find some customs on the Continent “queer” or “boorish,” merely because they are different. Members of a Pueblo tribe in the American Southwest, on the other hand, might be well acquainted with cultural differences not only among other Pueblos but also in non-Pueblo tribes such as the Navajo and Apache.

Ethnocentrism became prominent among many Europeans after the discovery of the Americas, the islands of the Pacific, and the Far East. Even anthropologists might characterize all preliterate peoples as being without religion (as did Sir John Lubbock) or as having a “prelogical mentality” (as did Lucien Lévy-Bruhl) merely because their ways of thinking did not correspond with those of the culture of western Europe. Thus, inhabitants of non-Western cultures, particularly those lacking the art of writing, were widely described as being immoral, illogical, queer, or just perverse (“Ye Beastly Devices of ye Heathen”).

Increased knowledge led to or facilitated a deeper understanding and, with it, a finer appreciation of cultures quite different from one’s own. When it was understood that universal needs could be served with culturally diverse means, that worship might assume a variety of forms, that morality consists in conforming to ethical rules of conduct but does not inhere in the rules themselves, a new view emerged that each culture should be understood and appreciated in terms of itself. What is moral in one culture might be immoral or ethically neutral in another. For example, it was not immoral to kill a baby girl at birth or an aged grandparent who was nonproductive when it was impossible to obtain enough food for all; or wife lending among the Eskimo might be practiced as a gesture of hospitality, a way of cementing a friendship and promoting mutual aid in a harsh and dangerous environment, and thus may acquire the status of a high moral value.

The view that elements of a culture are to be understood and judged in terms of their relationship to the culture as a whole—a doctrine known as cultural relativism—led to the conclusion that the cultures themselves could not be evaluated or graded as higher and lower, superior or inferior. If it was unwarranted to say that patriliny (descent through the male line) was superior or inferior to matriliny (descent through the female line), if it was unjustified or meaningless to say that monogamy was better or worse than polygamy, then it was equally unsound or meaningless to say that one culture was higher or superior to another. A large number of anthropologists subscribed to this view; they argued that such judgments were subjective and therefore unscientific.

It is, of course, true that some values are imponderable and some criteria are subjective. Are people in modern Western culture happier than the Aborigines of Australia? Is it better to be a child than an adult, alive than dead? These certainly are not questions for science. But to say that the culture of the ancient Mayas was not superior to or more highly developed than the crude and simple culture of the Tasmanians or to say that the culture of England in 1966 was not higher than England’s culture in 1066 is to fly in the face of science as well as of common sense.

Cultures have ponderable values as well as imponderable, and the imponderable ones can be measured with objective, meaningful yardsticks. A culture is a means to an end: the security and continuity of life. Some kinds of culture are better means of making life secure than others. Agriculture is a better means of providing food than hunting and gathering. The productivity of human labour has been increased by machinery and by the utilization of the energy of nonhuman animals, water and wind power , and fossil fuels. Some cultures have more effective means of coping with disease than others, and this superiority is expressed mathematically in death rates. And there are many other ways in which meaningful differences can be measured and evaluations made. Thus, the proposition that cultures have ponderable values that can be measured meaningfully by objective yardsticks and arranged in a series of stages, higher and lower, is substantiated . But, it should be noted, this is not equivalent to saying that man is happier or that the dignity of the individual (an imponderable) is greater in an industrialized or agricultural sociocultural system than in one supported by human labour alone and sustained wholly by wild foods.

Actually, however, there is no necessary conflict between the doctrine of cultural relativism and the thesis that cultures can be objectively graded in a scientific manner. It is one thing to reject the statement that monogamy is better than polygamy and quite another to deny that one kind of sociocultural system contains a better means of providing food or combating disease than another.

Cultural adaptation and change

Every sociocultural system exists in a natural habitat, and, of course, this environment exerts an influence upon the cultural system. The cultures of some Eskimo groups present remarkable instances of adaptation to environmental conditions: tailored fur clothing, snow goggles, boats and harpoons for hunting sea mammals, and, in some instances, hemispherical snow houses, or igloos. Some sedentary, horticultural tribes of the upper Missouri River went out into the Great Plains and became nomadic hunters after the introduction of the horse. The culture of the Navajos underwent profound change after they acquired herds of sheep and a market for their rugs was developed. The older theories of simple environmentalism, some of which maintained that even styles of myths and tales were determined by topography , climate, flora, and other factors, are no longer in vogue. The present view is that the environment permits, at times encourages, and also prohibits the acquisition or use of certain cultural traits but otherwise does not determine culture change. The Fuegians living at the southern tip of South America , as viewed by Charles Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle , lived in a very cold, harsh environment but were virtually without both clothing and dwellings.

“Culture is contagious,” as a prominent anthropologist once remarked, meaning that customs, beliefs, tools, techniques, folktales, ornaments, and so on may diffuse from one people or region to another. To be sure, a culture trait must offer some advantage, some utility or pleasure, to be sought and accepted by a people. (Some anthropologists have assumed that basic features of social structure, such as clan organization, may diffuse, but a sounder view holds that these features involving the organic structure of the society must be developed within societies themselves.) The degree of isolation of a sociocultural system—brought about by physical barriers such as deserts, mountain ranges, and bodies of water—has, of course, an important bearing upon the ease or difficulty of diffusion . Within the limits of desirability on the one hand and the possibility of communication on the other, diffusion of culture has taken place everywhere and in all times. Archaeological evidence shows that amber from the Baltic region diffused to the Mediterranean coast; and, conversely, early coins from the Middle East found their way to northern Europe. In aboriginal North America , copper objects from northern Michigan have been found in mounds in Georgia; macaw feathers from Central America turn up in archaeological sites in northern Arizona. Some Indian tribes in northwestern regions of the United States had possessed horses, originally brought into the Southwest by Spanish explorers, years before they had ever even seen white men. The wide dispersion of tobacco, corn (maize), coffee, the sweet potato , and many other traits are conspicuous examples of cultural diffusion.

Diffusion may take place between tribes or nations that are approximately equal in political and military power and of equivalent stages of cultural development, such as the spread of the sun dance among the Plains tribes of North America. But in other instances, it takes place between sociocultural systems differing widely in this respect. Conspicuous examples of this have been instances of conquest and colonization of various regions by the nations of modern Europe. In these cases it is often said that the culture of the more highly developed nation is “imposed” upon the less developed peoples and cultures, and there is, of course, much truth in this; the acquisition of foreign culture by the subject people is called acculturation and is manifested by the indigenous populations of Latin America as well as of other regions. But even in cases of conquest, traits from the conquered peoples may diffuse to those of the more advanced cultures; examples might include, in addition to the cultivated plants cited above, individual words ( coyote ), musical themes, games, and art motifs.

One of the major problems of ethnology during the latter half of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th centuries was the question “How are cultural similarities in noncontiguous regions to be explained?” Did the concepts of pyramid building, mummification, and sun worship originate independently in ancient Egypt and in the Andean highlands and in Yucatán or did these traits originate in Egypt and diffuse from there to the Americas, as some anthropologists have believed? Some schools of ethnological theory have held to one view, some, to another. The 19th-century classical evolutionists (which included Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H. Morgan , among others) held that the mind of man is so constituted or endowed that he will develop cultures everywhere along the same lines. “Diffusionists”—those, such as Fritz Graebner and Elliot Smith , who offered grand theories about the diffusion of traits all over the world—maintained that man was inherently uninventive and that culture, once created, tended to spread everywhere. Each school tended to insist that its view was the correct one, and it would continue to hold that view unless definite proof of the contrary could be adduced.

The tendency nowadays is not to side categorically with one school as against another but to decide each case on its own merits. The consensus with regard to pyramids is that they were developed independently in Egypt and the Americas because they differ markedly in structure and function: the Egyptian pyramids were built of stone blocks and contained tombs within their interiors. The American pyramids were constructed of earth, then faced with stone, and they served as the bases of temples. The verdict with regard to the bow and arrow is that it was invented only once and subsequently diffused to all regions where it has been found. The probable antiquity of the origin of fire making, however, and the various ways of generating it—by percussion, friction, compression (fire pistons)—indicate multiple origins.

Evolution of culture—that is, the development of forms through time—has taken place. No amount of diffusion of picture writing could of itself, for instance, produce the alphabetic system of writing; as Tylor demonstrated so well, the art of writing has developed through a series of stages, which began with picture writing, progressed to hieroglyphic writing , and culminated in alphabetic writing. In the realm of social organization there was a development from territorial groups composed of families to segmented societies (clans and larger groupings). Sociocultural evolution, like biologic evolution, exhibits a progressive differentiation of structure and specialization of function.

A misunderstanding has arisen with regard to the relationship between evolution and diffusion. It has been argued, for example, that the theory of cultural evolution was unsound because some peoples skipped a stage in a supposedly determined sequence; for example, some African tribes, as a consequence of diffusion, went from the Stone Age to the Iron Age without an intermediate age of copper and bronze. But the classical evolutionists did not maintain that peoples, or societies, had to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development, but that tools, techniques, institutions—in short, culture—had to pass through the stages. The sequence of stages of writing did not mean that a society could not acquire the alphabet without working its way through hieroglyphic writing; it was obvious that many peoples did skip directly to the alphabet.

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The Borders Between My Mexican and American Identities

I went searching for documents to validate my binationalism. i found something more complicated.

Born in Mexico with an American citizen father, writer Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul always felt she belonged in both countries. A years-long effort to become a U.S. citizen forced her to rethink her identity. Courtesy of author.

by Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul | September 16, 2024

This essay publishes alongside this week’s Zócalo and Universidad de Guadalajara event, “ Are the U.S. and Mexico Becoming One Country? ” Register here to join the program in person at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes or live online at 11 a.m. PDT on Saturday, September 21.

My favorite pecan pie recipe is from a Methodist cookbook sold at a church not far from the Virginia farm where my grandmother grew up. The pie’s perfectly gooey consistency comes from an obscene amount of Karo corn syrup; its slightly salty crust accentuates the toasty flavor of baked pecans. I make it every year for Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday I celebrate despite not living in the U.S. and not being American.

I was born in the ’90s in Mexico and grew up with the tantalizing promise of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. This landmark trade deal was heralded as a beacon of regional interconnectedness and economic progress. But for us kids, it symbolized more immediate delights: the chance to enjoy a Hershey’s chocolate bar or to buy the clothes Joey Potter wore in Dawson’s Creek , which we also now watched on TV. The promise of belonging to a shared, integrated region defined our childhoods, and with them, our identities.

I attended a private bilingual school, one of many that catered to Mexico’s expanding middle class and took pride in molding us into the most American versions of ourselves. Instead of a soccer team, we had basketball; we read coming-of-age novels like Holes and took SAT prep courses in case we wanted to apply to college in the U.S. But even among my classmates, I felt different. I thought of myself as not only bicultural but binational too.

My grandmother was an American nurse. In the ’40s, she met a visiting doctor from Sinaloa, Mexico inside the elevator of the Virginia hospital where she worked. As he held the doors open, he told himself that he would marry her one day. Eventually, he did. They had five children. The last of them, my dad, was born in the Mexican state of Sonora but was eligible for U.S. citizenship through his mom.

The author (left) with her father and older sister during a trip to Oaxaca, around 1997.

My dad was born long before the 1998 law that allowed Mexicans to have dual nationality, so he grew up in Mexico with a U.S. passport and, eventually, a Mexican work permit. In the late ’80s, his work permit expired, and he was deported out of Mexico. He crossed the border by foot, over the Laredo Bridge into Texas, carrying the official notice of his deportation from the country of his birth. He took a bus to Chicago, where he slept on a bench inside O’Hare airport until enough hours had gone by that he could legally return to Mexico, where my mom and 1-year-old sister awaited.

A few years later, I was born in Mexico City. I didn’t grow up with an American passport, but I did grow up with this story. It was proof of what I felt deeply: I was both Mexican and American.

Ever since I can remember, my dad has tried to pass on his U.S. nationality to my sister and me. He understands the financial and professional privileges of a blue passport. But because he’s never lived in the States (outside of the winters and summers he spent at the family farm in Virginia), he always hit a dead end. Still, I remained convinced that getting my U.S. nationality was just a matter of time. If my grandmother had been American and my father was American, why wouldn’t I be?

When I moved to New York for grad school on a temporary student visa, I was determined not to let bureaucracy get in the way of my heritage. So I filled out a “petition for alien relative,” a form that allowed my dad to request that I be given permanent U.S. residency through a green card. I could then, after several years, apply for citizenship. The reply from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services came in the mail a few weeks later: the petition had been accepted, meaning I was eligible for residency.

There was one caveat. I needed to follow-up with the Department of State, which processes the residency applications of U.S. citizen relatives and, eventually, issues the actual green card. Because my case wasn’t eligible for expedited processing, it would have to wait its turn in line. Last time I checked, the Department of State was beginning to process applications submitted in 1994.

The author (left) and her mother celebrating Thanksgiving in California, 2010.

Looking at the waitlist—and knowing I would not have documentation validating my binational identity for decades, at least—shattered something in me. The NAFTA promise that made us middle-class Mexicans think we would be citizens of a culturally intertwined North America felt like a lie. In Mexico, I was half-gringa. In the U.S., I was only Mexican and, as such, not always welcome.

I was reminded of this constantly while living in the States, though always in milder ways than foreigners who don’t pass as white (which I do). “Sorry, no Spanish here,” a woman on the other side of the phone replied when I called a public office asking—in my accented English—for an interview. On Bumble dates, men asked me for the expiration date of my visa; I went out for a few weeks with a guy who ultimately decided he could no longer see me because I didn’t have the paperwork to guarantee a long-term stay in the country. Second aunts posted Confederate flags with BUILD THE WALL captions on Facebook. I was unwanted. I did not belong. I was not who I thought I had been.

Four years after moving to New York, I consulted an immigration attorney who suggested a much easier path to a green card. It turned out I was eligible for an O-1, also known as the exceptional talent visa. I just had to file the paperwork and wait three months. After some years with the O-1, I could apply for a green card and eventually citizenship. I should have been excited, but something felt off.

I knew my privileged education had unlocked a path for immigration that many people are desperate for. I recognized that being able to choose where to build my life was an incredibly rare opportunity. But I also realized that living in the U.S. by any means possible wasn’t what I had truly been looking for. What I yearned for was a document that recognized my deep-rooted bond to my grandmother’s home. I had been searching, desperately, for something to validate my identity —papers I could point to that would say “You are of here, and also of there.” Yet documents alone couldn’t give me that. I headed back to Mexico.

Back in Mexico City, I rented an apartment far from where I grew up. I began buying my produce at the local mercado instead of Costco, which is where my family usually shopped. My poultry and meat came from a carnicería around the block. In some ways, I felt more Mexican than I ever had; in others, I felt like another digital nomad transplanted from the States to my own country.

Time passed. As my lingering doubts about going back to the U.S. dissipated, life took me by surprise. I met the man who would become my partner, the pandemic came and went, and we got married. I am now pregnant with our first child. When considering options for delivering our baby, my husband suggested we look into giving birth in the U.S. It would be our way to give our baby dual nationality, opening up employment and educational opportunities. We talked to friends who had done so and looked up doctors. But I decided against it.

These past few years, I’ve found a certain ease in my singular Mexican identity as I balance both the cultures I love. I enjoy warm tlacoyos for breakfast while listening to The Daily , bake peach pie on rainy Mexico City afternoons, and aloofly navigate the non-immigrant alien line at U.S. airports. While citizenship remains locked behind layers of bureaucracy and circumstance, biculturalism is something I continue to cultivate for myself. And this rich, complex blend of cultures is something I can pass on to my child, just as my dad did to me.

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Personal essay: A writer on the dilemmas of loving the Hindi language in a Sikh Punjab

Rajiv thind traces his personal linguistic journey and explains how it is intertwined with politics and culture..

As a Punjabi, my nostalgia and love for Hindi may contrast sharply with the usual fears and resentment found in non-Hindi-speaking regions of India regarding the imposition of the Hindi language. In this essay, I focus on Hindi as a language of creativity and dissent rather than government bureaucracy . I will trace my personal linguistic journey and how it is intertwined with the surrounding politics and culture.

Saul Bellow once remarked that “a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us,” asserting his right to be an autonomous English-language novelist. As we shall see below, such literary freedom isn’t available in India when regional politics, caste exclusion and cultural hegemony dictate which linguistic mansion, or cubbyhole, Indians can inhabit.

The languages of modern Punjab

I was born and raised in Punjab during the 1980s and ’90s, mostly in Jalandhar, with a few years spent in Bhatinda and a brief period in Ambala, Haryana. I got to experience Punjab and Punjabiyat by residing in different urban centres. While 40 per cent of the Sikh-majority Punjab’s population is Hindu, Jalandhar is a predominantly Hindu city and a hub of Hindi-language print media.

Although Punjabi was my mother tongue, like most urban Punjabis I also grew up speaking Hindi as my native language. Bollywood films and songs, Hindi comics, newspapers, magazines and books (published in Delhi) enriched my childhood. Before the advent of cable TV, most programs on the public broadcaster Doordarshan were in Hindi, including adaptations of the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, never mind how insufferably hacky they appear now. We also watched dramas and shows on Pakistan TV from across the border. Urdu sounded the same as Hindi, with Persian and Arabic words instead of Sanskrit.

At school, in Jalandhar, we followed a three-language model, learning Punjabi, Hindi, and English. Interestingly, children in Pakistan's Punjab province, home to most of the world's Punjabi speakers, weren’t taught Punjabi in schools until 2024. It was challenging for me to master three different scripts, but I pulled through. Also, I developed a deep fascination for Hindi literature and the culture of Hindi-speaking regions of India. My flair for Hindi expressions delighted my teachers and my literary-minded father, who was proficient in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, English and some Sanskrit.

During my early years, in the late 1980s, I developed a passion for listening to radio stations from faraway places. I eagerly tuned in each night to All India Radio's broadcasts from distant cities in the Hindi belt, such as Shimla, Delhi, Jaipur, and Bhopal. Later, I began to enjoy Hindi shortwave radio broadcasts from the BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Moscow, eventually switching to English services.

Hindi became for me what English later would: the language of my intellect, a gateway to the wider world. Hindi allowed me to communicate with working-class immigrants and their children from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Nepal who flocked to Punjab during its now-lost economic boom. As a teenager, I fondly remember writing a letter in Hindi to a pen pal in Bihar and receiving his reply on a yellow postcard.

Hindi-Punjabi conflict at school

The gorgeous couplets of Kabir, which often challenged social evils, and snatches of modern Hindi prose inhabited my memory as verses from Shakespeare would do later. Here’s a random textbook commentary on Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s poem that I can recall and recite like a mantra some thirty years later:

बच्चन जी की पहली पत्नी की मृत्यु ने उनकी कविता को निराशा का नीड़, करुणा की रागिनी और अभाव का आकाश बना दिया था। इस लिए यह कविता उन अवसाद भरे क्षणों की देन है।

A literal English translation loses the music and emotion of the original.

“The death of Bachchan ji’s first wife turned his poetry into a nest of despair, a melody of compassion, and a sky of emptiness. Therefore, this poem is the legacy of those sorrowful moments.”

In the early 20th century, prominent Punjabis were touched by the aesthetic beauty and larger scope of Hindi. The pioneering Punjabi novelist Nanak Singh (1897–1971) writes in his autobiography Meri Duniya ( My World ) how, as a young man, he read Premchand’s novels with deep admiration and discovered his purpose in life: to become a social realist novelist. Punjab’s young anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh (1907–1931) wrote of the relationship between Punjabi and Hindi without promoting a narrow religious agenda. These early days of modern Punjab do not reflect a Hindi-Punjabi divide—rather, they suggest that the two languages were part of the same cultural continuum.

By my mid-teens, I had begun to nurture a fantasy of becoming a Hindi fiction writer. I didn’t know then that it would be a literary way to starve and be mocked by India’s English-speaking cosmopolitan elite. Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize win in 1997 compelled all wannabe Indian writers to write in English, which accelerated the demise of Hindi as India’s major language of books, literature, good journalism and intellectual discourse. How ironic that the recent interest in Hindi literature was revived when Geetanjali Shree’s novel was translated into English as Tomb of Sand and won the International Booker Prize in 2022.

Now most Indians writing in regional languages remain acutely aware of the English translatability of their works and the possibility of access to Western literary and academic markets. When seen from the perspective of the dominance of English in India, both Hindi and Punjabi are native derelicts.

I don’t wish to paint English as a coloniser’s culturally destructive language. Authors like James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and many others have shown me the revolutionary power of literature in dismantling hegemonic narratives of class, race, caste, and religion. For now, as I have noted elsewhere , Indian-English novels rarely offer radical or subversive possibilities within their upper-caste echo chamber.

Beyond these issues of cultural and social engineering, every aspirational Indian should have the intellectual and creative autonomy to express themselves in any regional or global language.

From the 1960s, for Punjab’s Hindus, the Punjabi language written in the Gurmukhi script (used for Sikh holy scriptures) came to be associated with religious orthodoxy and provincialism. With demands from the Shiromani Akali Dal for a Punjabi-speaking (effectively dominant-caste Sikh) state, Punjab was divided in 1966, chopping off the Hindi-speaking regions that now make up Haryana and parts of Himachal Pradesh. Amandeep Sandhu writes in his thought-provoking, albeit strongly pro-Punjabi, book Panjab that in the 1961 census, many Punjabi-speaking Hindus had claimed Hindi as their mother tongue to stay out of the smaller neo-Punjab.

As Pravin J Patel notes, the Akali-led Punjab movement of 1981 intensified the focus on ethno-Sikh identity, leading to demands for a Sikh theocracy (Khalistan) that spiralled into tragic violence and loss of life. As an alarming example of language policing of the time, the wildly popular Dalit Punjabi singer Chamkila received death threats for some of his racy lyrics that supposedly polluted the Punjabi language and culture. In 1988, Chamkila was shot dead at the age of 28 by unknown assailants. While certain people wanted to maintain Punjabi as a dominant and pious language, others began to see it as an imposition.

In 1991, when I was eleven and blissfully ignorant of the dangerous political currents, students at my private school in Jalandhar could be slapped or caned if teachers overheard us speaking Punjabi. Only Hindi and English were encouraged. Many Sikh parents backed this rule, believing that a greater emphasis on Hindi would make their children sophisticated. However, the restriction frustrated me because talking and swearing in Punjabi was so much fun and came naturally when communicating with others who shared the same mother tongue. We (the boys) reserved Hindi for polite conversations with teachers and girls we liked.

My best friend in school, Palwinder Singh (a Sikh with a top knot), fumed at the Hindu and Hindi imperialism. He told me Punjab would soon become a Sikh state called Khalistan. I didn’t quite understand what that meant. I assured him that I, too, resented language policing. Although Palwinder made it clear that there would be no place in Khalistan for Hindus like me, he was happy to get my support on the language issue.

Driven by our youthful rebellion, Palwinder and I swore at our teachers behind their backs, using Punjabi words that are not fit for print.

As I grew older, loving or choosing a language became extremely political and intellectually stunting.

Language and intellectual autonomy

Wendy Doniger has observed that ancient Sanskrit texts have a long tradition of dissent against socio-religious dogma. Modern Hindi has inherited many of these subversive qualities. Given the wide geographical spread of the Hindi language and the diverse belief systems covered under the umbrella term of Hinduism, it is impossible to police them.

The picture isn’t all rosy. Despite the massive popularity of Hindi through Bollywood, TV channels, YouTube and social media, the current state of Hindi literature and intellectual life is gloomy. There are hardly any good literary magazines left; the golden age of Hans , which also introduced many Dalit writers, is over. Even so, the highly politicised, ethno-Sikh Punjabi language fares much worse and offers less freedom.

In the mid-1990s, I was suddenly cut off from my beloved Hindi after completing my class ten exams. Thanks to the Punjab state’s educational policy, Hindi was absent from the curriculum throughout my five years of college, where only Punjabi and English were mandatory language subjects. Taking Hindi literature as an elective wasn’t feasible with my course load.

At the college level, choosing a language should be a matter of individual intellectual aspiration and aesthetic pleasure, not ethno-religious dominance. In 2023, Panjab University in Chandigarh faced political pressure to retain Punjabi as a compulsory subject, which effectively excludes Hindi and the diversity that comes with it.

After migrating to the West, I noticed that Hindi – spoken with various accents – rather than English often serves as the common language among Indians from the Hindi belt, as well as those from Gujarat, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and even Fiji.

In Australia and New Zealand, I fully embraced the intellectual, creative and subversive possibilities of English. But I also had the freedom and pleasure of reading Hindi works by Premchand, Nirmal Verma and eye-opening Dalit writers like Omprakash Valmiki, Dr Tulsiram and Ajay Navaria. In my experience, instead of dividing India, Hindi has the potential to animate and unite it, bringing us into a larger communion and revelation.

Rajiv Thind is a literary scholar and a fiction writer based in New Zealand.

Indian Custom and Culture Community Essay

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• As a template for you assignment

The Indian culture, which reaches back about 5,000 years, is arguably one of the oldest and most varied in the world. The Indian culture is formed by customs and traditions that would tend to differ greatly from region to region.

However, many of the Indian customs and traditions are said to be common, and in that case, are integral part of the country’s unique cultural beauty. India has a wide range of cultural diversity, and for that reason, there are numerous culture-affiliated ceremonies that are celebrated each year to mark diverse customs and traditions of the Hindu.

This clearly explains the multitude festivals marked by different communities in the country all year round. Some of the common aspects of the varied Indian culture include language, religion and the arts. Other common aspects that have been used to define the Indian culture are things such as cuisines, theatre, music, and festivals, to name but a few. Rites of passage form an integral part of the Indian custom and cultural activities.

This paper examines the marriage rite of passage as it is practiced by the Hindu in India. In this particular case, the observations of various activities which are undertaken by the Hindu while marking this particular passage of rite are mainly based on Indian custom and culture, rather than on religion.

I have personally had the opportunity to participate directly in various celebrations intended to mark specific rites of passage in India. Through these celebrations, I have come to gain a better understanding of the colorful and unique culture of India.

As it would be observed, Hindus have come out clearly as the only religious group that has meaningfully celebrated the ideal stages of life as they are perceived by different cultures in India. One of my most memorable custom and culture celebrations of the Hindu was a rite of passage that took place some months ago in Guntur district, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The main transition that was being marked here was marriage.

As it was clearly manifested in this traditional event, Hindus have their own special way of celebrating marriage ceremonies. For example, there were various activities used to illustrate this marking, and these would include invitation and welcoming of the bridegroom, exchange of flower garlands, presentation of the would-be wife, the ceremony of the sacred fire, holding of hands, taking of the seven steps, sacred fire circumambulation, the use of ‘kum-kum’ to mark the hair parting of the bride, viewing of the sun and the pole star, exchange of presents, tying of the knot whereby the garments of the groom and the bride are tied together to symbolize union, and then the blessings from the officiating priest and the elders.

Traditional Hindu marriage celebrations are highly regarded among other custom and culture celebrations in the Indian society, owing to their colorful decorations which are usually expensive (Dubois, 2007).

More importantly, the celebrations are momentous occasions that are characterized with great joy and rich food cuisines, among other distinguished aspects of celebration. All these aspects were evident in this big event that would extend for nearly three days. For instance, the wedding venue was decorated with fascinating, beautiful colors that symbolized love and affection.

The other eye-catching aspect was the dressing code of the bride. She wore two dresses; a red one and a white one. It later occurred to me that the colors carried significant meanings in connection to the ceremony. The white one was a symbol of purity, and it showed just how pure the bride was.

The red color, on the other hand, was a symbol of her fertility. I came to realize that a couple of other small, but meaningful activities had preceded the big event over the last few days. One event which had caught my attention was one in which the bridegroom had to break a clay pot by stepping on it to symbolize his strength, just before he walked into the marriage ceremony.

Numerous processes took place in the course of the ceremony and following is a brief description of the main rituals. Invitation of the groom and his people was the first ritual to be conducted as the ceremony unfolded, and this happened at the boundary of the compound where the celebrations were to take place.

This was followed shortly by the application of ‘kum-kum’ powder on the foreheads of the bridegroom and his companions. Formal introductions of family members from both sides taking part in this big occasion were then conducted, indicating the birth of a new reunion between the two sides. It was then time for the bridegroom and the bride to exchange garlands or ‘Jayamaala’ as they are commonly called.

The second ritual of the Hindu marriage ceremony is ‘Madhu-Parka’, and this was another impressive moment, especially for the bridegroom, who was escorted to a well-decorated altar where he was welcomed with a drink. This particular drink, as I would come to learn afterwards, was a thick fluid comprising of a mixture of honey, yoghurt and sugar, among other things.

The next ritual was ‘Gau Daan’ and ‘Kanya Pratigrahan’, and here, a cow was donated to the bride’s family by the bridegroom. There was also a symbolic exchange of presents such as clothes, cosmetics and ornaments, among other things. Afterwards, a special necklace which is the emblem of an Indian woman’s marital status was presented to the bride by her would-be mother in law.

In Hindu, this necklace is known as ‘mangala sootra’, and it means that the bridegroom family has accepted to welcome the bride to be part of them. At this point, the proud father to the bride stood up in front of the couple where he loudly proclaimed that the bride together with her people have conceded to the bridegroom’s plea to marry their daughter, and that there was no other option, but for the other family to take her as their own from that time henceforth.

The above main parts of the marriage ceremony were followed closely by a couple of other rituals that included Vivaha-homa, Paanigrahan, Shilarohan and Laaja Homa, Sapta-Padi , and then Ashirvada. ‘Vivaya-homa’ entails the lighting of the sacred fire which is used to manifest the presence of god ‘Agni’ in the ceremony.

Meanwhile, the just married couple was surrounded by their families and friends, among other people who had attended the ceremony, as the priest started to chant the holy mantras. After he had recited the sacred mantras in the presence of everyone who was in attendance, the priest then embarked in another mission of leading the couple around the fire.

At some point, the sounds of a ringing bell suddenly greeted the air, symbolizing the beginning of just another significant moment of the ceremony. Here, a wide array of offerings was showered onto the fire, with some words representing the virtue of selflessness being uttered by the multitude to escort the gifts. The main theme behind this practice was to remind the newly-wed couple about the importance of the virtue of selflessness as it applies in modern families, and especially the new ones.

‘Paanigrahan’ or the ceremony of vows was the next ritual, and here, the gentleman, while holding his wife by the hand, would make his long-waited proclamation that he and his love were now husband and wife. All these happened as the couple made rounds around the sacred flame, where the main section of the celebrations was centered.

‘Shilarohan’ and ‘Laaja Homa’ were the next rituals. In the course of this part of the ceremony, the woman would systematically jump onto the surrounding stones and stand on them briefly as she and her husband continued to dance around the fire. This was a way of affirming her strength in marriage and loyalty to her husband in the course of her marital period.

There was then the last part of the fire-side activities, where the couple was required to go round the sacred flame in a gentle pace for at least four times. Here, the bride would lead her husband for the better part of the exercise, while the husband led her in the final lap. The main aim of this exercise was to remind the man of his duties and responsibilities as the head of the family.

Then, the bride and the groom held up their hands together above the burning flames into which barley grains were directly sacrificed by the bride’s male relatives and companions. This, however, was a symbol of unity amongst themselves for the welfare of the entire society. It was then time for the ‘kumkum’ powder to be applied on the woman’s head, and this was done by none other, but the groom himself. This is known as the ‘sindoor’, and it serves as a characteristic feature for married Hindu women.

Finally, there was ‘ Sapta-Padi’, which is regarded as the legal section of the event. During this stage, the newly-wed couple was required to take about seven steps around the sacred flame in a clockwise manner.

The seven steps have significant meanings in the following order, starting from the first to the last one: food, strength, prosperity, wisdom, progeny, health, and friendship. The Hindus attach a lot of significance at this stage, since it is here where it is announced officially that a wedding ceremony has successfully come to an end, and that the union between husband and wife has been sanctified.

A matrimonial knot was eventually tied to unite the couple, after which they took a glance at the sun and another one at the polar star to seek blessings and resolve to remain unshaken, respectively. ‘Ashirvada’ was the last part of the colorful matrimonial ceremony, and here, the couple received immense blessings and best wish greetings in their married life, from the priest and the elders from both sides.

As it would be observed, rites of marriage are conducted for a common goal of marking a transition in people’s lives from adolescence to adulthood (Bell, 2003). Different communities and societies across the world would tend to mark these celebrations in different ways, due to the aspect of cultural diversity.

This, however, does not imply that there are no similarities at all in the manner by which these celebrations are carried out across different cultures. For instance, there are both similarities and differences between Hindu traditional rites of marriage as observed from this case, and the ways in which my folkgroup carry out the ceremonies.

Starting with the similarities, there are several ways in which Hindu rites of marriage match with those of my own folkgroup. For instance, there is the presence of priest in both situations, to officiate the sacred part of the ceremony. Another similarity is observable from the point where the bridegroom is joyously welcomed into the ceremony to meet the bride, before they are bonded for life by the priest.

Another way by which the Hindu rite of marriage matches with the way marriage ceremonies are conducted in my own culture is the exaggerated decoration of the venue where the ceremony is to take place. In both situations, different types of colors are combined to symbolize peace and happiness.

Another similarity with the two is that, a cow is given during the wedding ceremony as part of the dowry payment, and also as a present to the bride’s family for giving out their daughter to the bridegroom and his people. Blessings and best wish greetings from the officiating priest and the elders from both sides are also common features with the two cultures.

Apart from the above similarities, the Hindu rites of marriage also differ greatly with the practices of my own culture as far as this particular rite of passage is concerned. For example, unlike in my own culture, where at least a day is spared for the ceremony, Hindu marriage ceremonies normally comprise of numerous conservative rituals that would see the occasions being extended up to three days or even longer.

Another obvious difference is that, the Hindu tie couples’ garments together into a knot to symbolize matrimonial bonding, while in my culture, both the groom and the bride exchange wedding rings to symbolize that they have accepted each other as husband and wife.

The other common differences would be in the symbols used in Hindu marriage ceremonies, which are not applied in my own folkgroup when similar celebrations are being conducted. For instance, there is the use of sacred fire in Hindu marriage ceremonies, a practice that does not apply in my culture.

Brides in Hindu wear garments with symbolic colors such as white and red, while in my culture only white is the acceptable color for brides’ wedding garments. The other observable difference here is that, the hair parting of Hindu women is marked with colored ‘kumkum’ powder as a symbol of their marital status, a practice that does not apply in my own culture.

There are also differences in the manner by which these two different cultures conduct themselves before and after marriage ceremonies. For example, bridegrooms in my own culture are not required to step on any clay pot to prove their strength, as it is in the case with the Hindu. More importantly, there is nothing like dancing around a burning fire, stepping on bricks around the fire, taking seven steps, and viewing of the sun and the pole star in my own culture, as it applies in Hindu marriage ceremonies.

Bell, B. (2003). The rites of passage and outdoor education: Critical concerns for effective programming. The Journal of Experiential Education, 26( 1), 41-50.

Dubois, A. (2007). Hindu manners, customs and ceremonies . New York: Cosimo, Inc.

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IvyPanda. (2019, January 17). Indian Custom and Culture Community. https://ivypanda.com/essays/indian-custom-and-culture-community/

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IvyPanda . 2019. "Indian Custom and Culture Community." January 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/indian-custom-and-culture-community/.

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UKHSA Advisory Board: People and Culture Committee minutes

Updated 16 September 2024

© Crown copyright 2024

This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: [email protected] .

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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ukhsa-advisory-board-meeting-papers-for-september-2024/ukhsa-advisory-board-people-and-culture-committee-minutes

Date: 17 September 2024

Sponsor: Sir Gordon Messenger

1. Recommendation

The Advisory Board is asked to note the minutes of 24 April 2024 meeting of the People and Culture Committee. The minutes were agreed on 23 July 2024.

2. Minutes (confirmed), UKHSA People and Culture Committee, 24 April 2024

Present at the meeting were:

• Sir Gordon Messenger – Non-Executive Member of UKHSA Advisory Board (Chair)
• Jac Gardner – Chief People Officer
• Dame Jenny Harries – Chief Executive
• Mark Lloyd – Non-Executive Member of UKHSA Advisory Board
• Cindy Rampersaud – Non-Executive Member of UKHSA Advisory Board

In attendance were:

• 7 attendees had their names and titles redacted

3. Welcome, apologies and declarations of interest

24/042 The Chair welcomed participants to the People and Culture Committee and noted no apologies and declarations of interest.

4. Minutes of the previous meeting and matters arising

24/043 The minutes from the previous meeting on 5 February 2024 (enclosure PAAC-24-008) were agreed.

24/044 It was noted that 2 actions or recommendations were completed and 2 were ongoing or work in progress (enclosure PAAC-24-009).

5. Chief People Officer brief

24/045 The Chief People Officer provided an update on organisation-wide people-related activities (enclosure PACC -24-010).

24/046 The People and Culture Committee noted the following key points:

• UKHSA had recently transferred recruitment back to an ‘in-house’ service, away from the outsourced Reed contract put in place last year to cope with the large recruitment demand as UKHSA built its permanent workforce – demand would continue to be monitored against the capacity of the in-house recruitment service and work was underway with the organisation to ensure expectation were managed and appropriate solutions offered
• [this information is redacted in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000]
• the programme of Future Engage Deliver courses had been successfully completed
• the project to deliver the leadership framework was nearing completion – the leadership competencies required further work to align them to UKHSA leadership needs
• the second ‘We are UKHSA Awards’ would be held on 6 June 2024, building on the successful event that was held the previous year
• the UKHSA careers website was being developed to enhance the profile of UKHSA and a phased approach was being adopted – in the short-term, content would be published on the official government webpages; longer term, the ambition was for a dedicated microsite with direct recruitment system access

24/047 The committee asked about the capacity of the recruitment team balanced against the workforce plans of the business. It was clarified that Reed would complete recruitment against existing campaigns that they were managing for UKHSA and any new campaigns would be managed by the in-house team.

24/048 The committee noted that Civil Service line manager standards had been developed and would be launched imminently.

24/049 The committee asked about the tailoring of development training for scientific leaders, especially mid-level early career scientific managers. The development of the leadership offer included inputs from many stakeholders across the business, for example the Head of Radiation Effects Department and UKHSA Deputy Head of Science and Engineering Profession) and the Deputy Director Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professionals, who will ensure professional and technical requirements are reflected in the development of career paths and leaders. We are also drawing on the knowledge of what had been successfully implemented in other parts of the Civil Service. It was agreed the Committee would be kept updated on the leadership framework developments and how it was being made bespoke for UKHSA .

6. UKHSA People Strategy

24/052 The Deputy Director People Strategy, HR Project Manager and Project Support Officer provided an update on UKHSA ’s People Strategy developments and progress to date, including identifying priorities for strategic action planning and actions (enclosure PACC -23-011).

24/053 An emerging People Strategy was introduced to the Advisory Board back in September 2022, with 6 strategic priorities. These pillars had guided the work of the People Group over the last financial year. With the launch of the agency’s overarching 3-year plan in summer 2023, as well as the outputs from the People Experience project, the 6 strategic priorities were being reviewed to ensure alignment and focus for our work over the next 3 years.

24/054 The committee noted the presentation provided.

24/055 The committee recommended that:

• further narrative should be added to explain how the organisation would shift its shape quickly in response to an emergency
• the individual journey of colleagues should be explained further
• further detail should be added on building a single UKHSA identity and colleagues ‘belonging’ to the agency
• in addition to quantified metrics, qualified metrics should be introduced to measure progress – this was linked to defining colleagues as team players, recognising their role and a natural collaborative instinct
• it would be emphasised that successful internal and external collaboration was key for the vision to succeed
• the narrative should address becoming a leader within a profession
• the importance of leadership should be emphasised in all areas of the workforce and there should be a relevant development offer to encourage loyalty
• robust appraisals to measure performance and improve understanding of the workforce – colleagues should be measured not only what they do but also how they act

24/056 The committee endorsed the approach of the plan to frame UKHSA as a category 1 responder which would step up for the UK at times of need. It was explained that the Ready to Respond Programme Board and the People Surge Delivery Framework had mapped out the strategy for these activities, including building volunteers, secondary roles, and the relationship with unions. These would be presented to the People and Culture Committee in future.

24/057 It was confirmed that Talent for Science (a core component in UKHSA ’s science strategy) was integrated into the people strategy, to ensure our specialist and scientific communities are reflected.

24/058 The committee discussed how success would be measured (for example employee engagement scores) and the extent to which these were embedded in the appraisal process for leaders across the organisation.

24/059 It was confirmed these measures would be put in place and would form part of the appraisal process.

7. MaPS progress update

24/060 [Title redacted] provided an update regarding the formation of the new MaPS People Programme and Business case and the findings of the Discovery activity (enclosure PACC -24-12).

24/061 The People and Culture Committee noted the closed status of the Phase 1 MaPS implementation, which primarily focused on Oracle Finance module implementation, and that the Phase 2 MaPS People Programme (HR functionality) had now commenced as a new Programme under Senior Responsible Officer Jac Gardner, Chief People Officer.

24/062 The committee discussed whether learnings could be applied from other parts of the Civil Service which also used Oracle Fusion. It was explained the programme is aligning to the Matrix cluster strategy and has had several best practice sharing sessions with the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice. UKHSA were also applying learnings from the Medicines and HealthCare products Regulatory Agency who have implemented Oracle Fusion core and are now progressing with Recruitment.

24/063 The committee noted the request for investment over two years and asked about the workarounds which would be put in place to ensure resilience during this time. It was explained scoping work was taking place looking at interfaces between the current recruitment and payroll systems. If these interfaces proved both feasible and cost effective, they would be taken forward.

24/064 MaPS was currently being used with limited functionality and therefore there were no issues concerning personal data at present. However, the data protocols and information governance would need to be improved before data was imported and the enhanced functionality rolled out.

24/065 The committee discussed the importance of the systems being set up correctly and the culture and change needed for success. These were both of equal importance. It was acknowledged that there was some cultural resistance to new ways of working that the system enabled, however, the module enhancements could be used together with change and transformation methodologies to potentially address organisational problems in the future. Solving business problems and user centric design and engagement is a core part of the programme’s implementation approach.

24/066 The committee asked about the risks of not having the full budget needed to deliver on the plan. It was explained that there was no budget visibility beyond 2024 to 2025 but there was a high level of confidence that MaPS would be an important part of the strategic priorities and would be part of next year’s funding bid.

24/067 The committee welcomed the creation of a clear project plan and milestones and asked to be kept advised of progress.

8. Diversity and Inclusion Dashboard

24/068 The People Analytics and Insights Lead and Inclusion Lead presented a paper which provided an overview of the Diversity and Inclusion ( D&I ) Dashboard and the progress towards meeting the D&I strategic objectives supported by data and evidence data (enclosure PACC -24-13).

24/069 The committee noted the progress made on the dashboard and delivery against D&I strategic priorities for 2023 to 2025.

24/070 The committee asked about the areas of greatest concern as shown by the dashboard data. It was explained that as more information was captured from joiners and declaration campaigns, disability representation had been identified as an area of concern at around 10%. Other areas included ethnic minority drop off within the talent pipeline. However, this was a trend seen across the Civil Service, public sector and private sector. The score was above the economically active population, but ethnic minorities tended to be on lower grades indicating a need to review how progression was being supported through the grades. It was agreed to arrange a meeting to provide Cindy Rampersaud with further details on progression.

24/071 The committee noted the D&I Dashboard was now being used as a tool by Senior Civil Servants ( SCS ), HR Business Partners and Network Chairs and for group level interventions.

24/072 It was noted that to increase SCS representation, UKHSA had developed an in-house positive action scheme called ‘Accelerate’ aimed at staff with a disability and/or from an ethnic minority background. There were 6 colleagues on the pilot last year and this has now been doubled to 12. The scheme was deliberately small and focused with the participants being given high profile work and projects.

9. Forward look and topics for future meetings

24/073 The People and Culture Committee noted the Forward Look and suggested topics for future discussion (enclosure PACC -24-014).

10. Any other business and close

24/074 None at this time.

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