American Culture

Abstract

The expansion of the USA culture has been assessed by many European, American and Asian scholars. American culture and society is a mix-up of many things. For example, people from different parts of the world, who, came here and settled down are presenting multicultural environment. Music, art, religious practices, functions and dance parties are also part of American culture. However, the aim of this study is to discuss how America is presenting its culture in the modern world.

Statement of Introduction

Culture contains so many elements that the term gives rise to many possible definitions. Most would stress the idea of a body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits constituting a distinct complex of traditions belonging to a racial, religious, or social group. Others focus on beliefs, morals, laws, customary opinions, religion, superstition, and expressions of art. (Harrison and Samuel, 2000)

In America, culture is a system of meaning that plays a primary role in organizing society, from kinship groups to schools and states, and that extends from generation to generation. However, the relationship between what is taught and what is learned varies with different people, times, and environments. Thus, there arise negotiated agreements among members about the meanings of a word, behaviour, or other symbol.

The ancient Latin word cultura carried the meaning of “cultivation,” which focused on human improvement of some product or plant. Later on, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, culture took the meaning of “the training, development, and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners” or what we today call high culture. More recently, the influence of cultural anthropology and sociology has affected the way we understand the term. For example, the British anthropologist Edward Tylor defined culture as a complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. American anthropologists A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn cited no less than 164 definitions of the word. Despite these differences, however, culture has been regarded as a socially patterned style of human thought and behaviour.

This emphasis on the organised repetitive responses of American society's members and social heredity suggests that culture is static. This characteristic might be due, in part, to the fact that anthropologists were in the habit of paying attention to comparatively stable primitive cultures and pre-state societies and did not usually examine modern cultures that have been rapidly changing. In addition, these same anthropologists tended to focus on general culture, rather than on specific cultures, notably Western culture, or those of Europe and the United States (Clark, 2003). As a result, many important questions have remained unanswered. For instance, the question of why only Western culture provided the necessary conditions for the rise of modern capitalism has yet to be satisfactorily answered. Although Max Weber attributed the rise of capitalism to a cultural phenomenon—the rise of Calvinist Protestantism— Edward Banfield discussed the roots of poverty and authoritarianism in southern Italy in cultural terms. Similarly, recent rapid economic growth in East Asia ...