Now UTOKing: Culture
In this blog and video series, we present you with a curated set of definitions to better understand our place in today’s world through the lens of the UTOK system. In the previous blog and video, we explored how to coherently define the concept of the ego and the persona. Today, we delve into the complex concept of culture.
From the moment we are born, culture surrounds us. We are given a name and are introduced into an existing cultural landscape that expects our participation. As we grow and develop, we take on new roles and learn how to conduct ourselves in various social contexts. We embrace the tools and technology in our environment, and adopt a diversity of habits, rituals, beliefs, morals, and traditions.
The term enculturation captures the idea of being socialized into an existing cultural context within our families, communities, and broader society, and points to how we internalize this culture through experience, observation, and instruction.
While this representation of culture aligns with our everyday understanding of the term, it might still leave room for questions, given its breadth. After all, does culture encompass everything we can possibly learn from our environment?
Viewing Culture Through a UTOK Lens.
When we examine the concept of culture through the lens of UTOK, we can discern two distinct aspects of it.
The broad meaning of culture encompasses learned and shared patterns of behavior, transmitted across generations. Importantly, this definition refers to processes that are shared with other animals. Examples include chimpanzees using tools to access food, lions employing shared hunting strategies, and some groups of monkeys that learned to wash potatoes. Much of our socialization involves learned patterns, such as tying our shoes and setting the table in a certain way. However, we also possess a layer of culture that is exclusive to human persons. This human-only aspect of culture is described in UTOK as the domain of justifications.
Justifications are framed here as propositions that function to coordinate and legitimize our actions on the social stage, both privately and publicly. This encompasses language mediated processes such as question-answer dynamics and self-conscious reflection. The point here is that we need to make a distinction between the learned patterns of behavioral investment and the shared propositional networks of justification that coordinate people.
The Distinction Between Culture and Society.
Another key distinction to make is between culture and society. These two concepts overlap, but they are different. Society is the complex whole and includes our technologies and institutions. Culture refers to both the learned patterns and systems of justification.
The vision logic of the ToK System helps us to see this clearly. It maps cosmological emergence into four dimensions: Matter-Object; Life-Organism; Mind-Animal, and Culture, as described in the first blog in this series. This framework enables us to distinguish between society and culture more effectively. In UTOK’s perspective, societies are human assemblages composed of four key elements linked to the ToK System’s planes of existence. The first two elements encompass a biophysical ecology shaped by natural resources such as mountain ranges, bodies of water, flora, and climate patterns, alongside the material world of technologies and artifacts such as roads, buildings, clothing, and computers. These elements generally correspond to the Matter and Life dimensions of existence, although technology is best considered a hybrid between Matter and Culture, what some anthropologists call “material culture.”
The third central element of societies is linked to the Animal-Mental layer of existence, characterized by the Mind-Animal dimension in the ToK System. This represents the previously described broad meaning of culture, referred to as “small c” culture to distinguish it from uniquely human culture. Moving to examine the “capital C” Culture-Person plane of existence, we find the fourth central element of societies and the specific meaning of culture applied to humans. Capital C Culture comprises systems of justification that coordinate and legitimize action in human society. Considering these four elements as constitutive of societies, we can differentiate society from the concepts of “small c” animal culture as well as capital C human culture.
In sum, exploring culture from the vantage point of UTOK provides us with a more cohesive and unified view of the concept that aligns with the ontology presented by the Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System.
By acknowledging the broad meaning of culture as learned and shared behavioral repertoires found in both animals and humans, and the specific meaning of Culture as the systems of justification that structure human societies, we gain a deeper appreciation of the different facets of the concept.
UTOK’s framework also allows us to differentiate the concepts of society and culture, clarifying existing conceptual ambiguities. Finally, it connects directly with the concepts of ego/persona, which are the human psychological layers that interface with the Culture-Person plane of existence.
This blog was authored by Marcia Gralha, MA
