WhatIsCulture

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories

Culture is a set of constantly emerging patterns that attempt to solve the problem of human collaboration. These patterns, the ways in which they are put into practice, and the resulting artefacts differ radically in different times and places.

There are probably millions of patterns that form our culture: language, music, science, religion, economy contain thousands of developments that either stabilize the community feeling (music, religion), create long-term advantages (language, science) or deal with the distribution of synergy (economy). Of course these are large areas, where hundreds or thousands of single inventions are grouped together. We can also break this down to single inventions (cultural patterns) like BarnRaising, "money" or "humor". Wiki culture itself has at least a few hundred patterns.

The fact that a community can embody several different patterns gives rise to social tension, which is the source of both conflict and also creativity (see HealthyConflict). If we wish to develop wiki culture so that it is both creative and systematic, we need to discover patterns that create the feeling of community. The concept of culture is itself a cultural invention, and an elusive one at that, as its definition could potentially encompass almost every kind of behaviour and artefact. For the problem of what is a definition, see WhatIsaMap and DontLookAtTheFinger.

Reference:

Wagner, Roy. 1975. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1].

WhatIsCulture

Discussion