Importance of culture

Culture is the identity of a group of people living in specific place; they have their own sketch of life what the culture says they follow that. We have seen that a lot of people do some specific thing they first thought about their culture, what my culture says on this occasion. Especially on the occasion of wedding, and some other celebrating days they follow strictly their culture. Those who do not follow their culture or do some changes in that, they haven’t give any values to them because they are not following their religion.

Different people define culture in different ways, for example “Culture: learned and shared human patterns or models for living; day- to-day living patterns, these patterns and models pervade all aspects of human social interaction. Culture is mankind’s primary adaptive mechanism”1. Another author says that “Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another.”2. from these definitions it is clear that both explains the same idea but in different words, says that culture is first learned after learning it is then shared so it’s a common fact that the younger first learn the culture from their elders and when these young become elders they transfer it to the next generation. But the culture learned it includes all the aspects of human interaction and thus it become the mankind’s adoptive mechanism. In the second definition the author says that the culture is the programming of mind so it includes everything related with the mind programming and because of these different minds programming different group of people distinguish from each others.

Types of culture:

There are several types of culture:

• Material culture
• Dressing
• Food
• Buildings
• Non-material culture
• Language
• Family
• Religion
• Education

Material culture:

Material culture includes all those things that people creates and gives meaning to it. Material culture include lot of things, some of them are given below:

Dressing:

Dressing is the important thing in culture. It identify the cultural society, for example when a stranger from other country come to Pakistan and he know little about here culture dressing so he will definitely identify the place. Every culture gives most importance to their culture. They did not appreciate those who are not wearing their own cultural dress.

Gradually the dressing importance is also disappearing from the people. There a lot of people when they goes to the other cultural society, they adopt that and forget about their culture. According to my survey I have done some days ago a lot of people say that we are not giving so much importance to our culture. Nowadays the culture is changing so much fast because of this reason that the people not giving so much importance to their culture, especially dress.

Food:

According to the Colombia university press “everything having to do with food—its capture, cultivation, preparation, and consumption—represents a cultural act”8 so definitely food when reach to us first it pass from different stages like its cultivation, every culture has its own process of cultivation, capturing and preparation. This mean that food is also one of the important part of the material culture.

Buildings:

Building means construction. Building also plays important role in culture identity. Different cultures have different type of buildings. Some cultures have big houses while some have small. There are also some cultural people who don’t construct houses also, all life they pass in different places. Usually the cultural people from rural areas have big houses while those living in the city have small houses. The reason may be in rural areas the population is so much low and the place available for the house is very cheap as compare to the city. May be of this reason this culture is raised in the rural areas.

Non-material culture:

Non-material culture consists of thoughts and behavior that people learn as part of the culture they live in. It includes language, rules, customs, family, religion or beliefs, values, and knowledge. We will discuss some of them;

Language:

Language is one of the most important forms of material culture, without language there is no concept of culture. Different cultures have different speaking of language. Even when the language is same between the two cultures but still there will be difference in speaking and one will easily difference between them. Sometime because of cultures a large number of cultures are treated as one culture, for example in Pakistan there is a lot of cultures but still to the out countries they treat as just like one culture and is known as Pakistani culture. Even subcontinent is also treated as one culture but this in a specific occasion for example Asia is the largest subcontinent but the countries outside the Asia also says the words like Asian culture and we says the European culture or African culture. Language is the root cause of culture. Humans learn their culture through language, the parents first learned language to the kids after that they gradually also learn their culture.

Family:

Family is one of the most important concept in the culture. Different cultures define family in different ways. Some says that those who have a blood relation with you is your family member, other says that only your wife and kids are included in your family. According to an author “Anthropologists say a culture’s biological and marital kinship rules and patterns of reciprocal obligations define family”9, the definition varies of different cultures. The people from rural background define family in a large sense they include all of their relatives in the family and those from urban background define family in a little narrow sense as compared to the urban background people.

Religion:

Religion is the most important in cultural society. In most of the culture the religion is very respectful to all of the culture members and they also strictly obey their religion. And the most respectful religion among all the culture is Islam. Those cultures that have Islam as religion they apply the order of Islam in their daily life and mostly these people led a very happy life without much resources. According to my survey a lot of my audience says that they follow their religion strictly and says five time prayers which is the most important thing as considered to Islam, and those audiences whose religion was other than Islam they mostly says that we are not so much following our religion.

Education:

Education also play important role in building a cultural society. Education is the basic need of human. Without education humanity is not possible, therefore almost all the cultures gives importance to education and they possess only education for their success. But still there are also so cultures which do not gives focus to education. Some cultures give importance only to boys education and not to female. The number of these types of cultures is decreasing slowly. In general most cultures gives importance to education and they love the educated people of their culture.