FREE ESSAY ON CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Jessica McCorkle
1/12/00
Review 1/Ant.450
Goody, Jack. 1994. Culture and Its Boundaries: A European View. 
Assessing Cultural Anthropology. Borofsky, Robert, ed. Pp.250-261. McGraw-Hill, Inc.
In the beginning of the article Goody talks about the definition of culture and how it is
used. Culture is a difficult word to define. It has many different meanings to many
different people. Goody discusses the two ways that social scientists use the word
culture. They use culture as learned behavior that sets us apart from other species and a
culture which is a group of people who share the same learned behavior. I like Geertz's
definition of culture, the framework of beliefs, expressive symbols, and values in terms
of which individuals define their feelings, and make their judgments (Geertz
1957:33).(Goody 250). This definition encompasses much of what, I think, most people
would describe as what their culture is.
Goody states that Europeans do not separate the definitions of culture and society; that
they are one in the same. I agree with this idea because to me a society and a culture
constitutes the same group of people who have the same values, beliefs, etc. It is
difficult to differentiate the social from the cultural because one is derived from the
other. The aspects of social interaction in the broader definitions of culture blend the
two together. If you could subdivide the word culture social interaction would be below
culture along with many other terms, thus in the Western mind the words culture and
social cannot be separated.