HUMAN CULTURE

Human Culture

Human Culture

The article of Human Culture by Mark Allan on ethnography and ethnology are related disciplines within the field of cultural anthropology. According to Mark “Cultural anthropology deals with all aspects of human culture from social to religious, to political, and beyond”. he word culture is derived from the Latin cultura (from the root colere: to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve), which shows its affinity to “agriculture” and also to religious worship. Throughout most of history, culture has been virtually synonymous with religion. Prior to modern times, culture was not one arena of life but was a whole way of life inextricably bound up with religion. Weber has traced the roots of Western capitalism to the ascetic impulse of Calvinism and the idea of work as a calling. As capitalism came into its own, the religious impulse got detached from the work ethic, and religious asceticism gave way to the reign of unbridled hedonism. With the phrase “the disenchantment of the world,” Weber tried to capture the radical changes that attended the rise of Western capitalism. By the time of Henry Ford, work itself had become religion, and now for the “modern, cosmopolitan man, culture has replaced both religion and work as a means of self-fulfillment or as a justification—an aesthetic justification—of life” . With the separation of the church and state and the secularization of culture, religion lost its public character and became instead a matter of personal belief and the private affair of each individual. Modernity thus marked a radical break with the past. It is precisely at the point when culture became detached from religion that both religion and culture became the subject matter for social scientific study. In short, culture has become a theoretical problem for the West only because ...