James Boon's Theory Of Culture Theory

James Boon (1972): - "Culture" pertains to operations which render complex human phenomena communicable... What we might call the experience-as-conceived (or let us simply say the communication) of those phenomena is achieved by some sort of selection (implies reduction) and emphasis of some of the elements from each of the orders adduced. And these elements are themselves connected in a more or less traditional arrangement - i.e. in an arrangement which implicitly refers back to tradition either by being like it or unlike it. Most generally, some sort of selection of elements from posited orders which are evidenced in the phenomena, communicates the phenomena (or in effect is the communi- cation of the phenomena) in complex conscious and/or

In the 19th century “culture” was commonly used by some people for a wide range of human activities and by others to mean to civilization. Later in the 20th c, anthropologists began looking at culture as an object of scientific analysis. While one group used it to differentiate the subtle human adaptive strategies from the predominantly instinctively adaptive strategies of animals (primates included), the other group saw it as a symbolic representations and expressions of human experience without any direct adaptive role. Despite the superficial differences, both the groups comprehended culture as being definite of human nature. It is also believed that culture exhibits the way humans interpret their biology and their surrounding environment. Accordingly culture has become an integral part of human existence and almost all cultural change can be attributed to human adaptation to historical events. Furthermore, because culture is seen as the basic human adaptive mechanism and takes place much faster than biological evolution, most cultural evolution or change can be seen as culture adapting to

His first definition of culture is that it is "the sum of the available descriptions through which societies makes sense of and reflect their common experiences" (59). This definition allows us to talk about democratization of culture. His second definition is that, coming from an anthropological perspective, culture "refers to social practices" and "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life" (60). In other words, threaded through all social practices is culture which is the "sum of their inter-relationships" (60). For Hall therefore Cultural Studies "thinks forwards from the best elements in the structuralist and cultura list enterprises" (72). Individually, neither will do but between them, they address the core issues of Cultural