Culture in the New Reality: A Conceptual Framework.
|
THE SARAWAK MUSEUM JOURNAL |
|
Title :
Culture in the New Reality: A Conceptual Framework. |
|
Author :
Zainal Kling |
|
Abstract:
Culture is perhaps the most overworked concept in any language. Not only has it been stretched to cover more areas of concern but also over loaded with more meanings. Today, culture covers an area stretching from the individual sentiment to national character and from routine office work to the most deep seated values and emotion. Perhaps that is what culture really is encompassing every detail of human individual and group characteristics stretching into the depth of human histories. The net impact of this stretching is the cumulation of vagueness in the definition and conception of culture. For most writers culture has always been defined along the century-year old Tylorian definition that “culture is a complex whole encompassing the arts, law as the product of human group”. This materialistic definition has to compete also with other more symbolic and ideational formulation where symbols and meaning are emphasized to indicate a more implicit content of culture: ‘Culture refers to the taken-for-granted and problematic web of significance and meaning that human beings produce and act on when they do things together’. For the purpose of this paper I would like to go a little step away from both extremities by taking a more processual perspective in that culture is the adaptive activities of individuals and groups of people within the context of their human ecology.
|
| DOI: XXXX |
|
How to cite:
Zainal Kling. (1999). Culture in the New Reality: A Conceptual Framework. The Sarawak Museum Journal, LIV (75): 1-13 |
|
References
|
