The following definitions are derived from cultural anthropology, the study of human cultures. CULTURE may be defined as the abstract values, beliefs, and perceptions of the world--i. Culture encompasses all that is human-made, learned and transmitted, especially through language, rather than what is inherited biologically. People develop and maintain cultures to deal with basic problems like survival and other issues geographical, social, economic, philosophical, etc. To take root and survive, a culture must satisfy the basic needs of people who live by its rules, develop means to ensure its transmission and continuity across generations, and provide an orderly existence for members of the society. Religion, Myth and Stories -- i. Narratives, both sacred and secular -- Art and Aesthetics, Language and Language Arts including Oral Arts, Literature, and Film are all important expressions of a people's culture. All cultures have religions, which are powerful and dynamic forces in human society. To overcome limitations, people often turn to supernatural beings and powers: e. Through ritual religion in action —e. Most cultures have religious specialists—e. Such sacred stories, or narratives, concern where a people and the things of their world come from, why they are here, where they are going. Myths, stories, legends, folklore, tall tales give valuable insights into how people perceive and think about their world. Language arts, oral and literary traditions express how people order their experience and the universe, set standards of behavior, shape and reflect cultural values. Poets, storytellers, writers, as well as other artists and performers, make and use symbols to shape and interpret experience, create works of beauty and significance—whether religious or secular—and exercise the human imagination in a rich diversity of ways the world over. Some poets--notably William Blake of the late eighteenth-century, and William Butler Yeats of the late-19th and early 20th century Modernist period--have even created their own personal mythic systems. Why do these similarities occur? Do all human beings inherit a common, if unconscious, set of mythic figures, forces, patterns, implications, and structures from our common ancestors? Myth critics draw upon philosophy, anthropology, psychology, history, folklore, linguistics, and literature to study these correspondences and speculate on the reasons why. They approach myth, as well as language, as a way of responding to the world and creating a worldview. They describe myth as non-intellectual, primal, emotion-laden, experiential, and imagistic. They suggest that literature and orature or oral arts tap into a universal human mythic consciousness and reveal the dynamics that have given meaning and intelligibility to our world. In The Golden Bough 1890-1915 , James Frazier identified common elemental patterns of myth and ritual found across seemingly disparate cultures and times and places. These archetypes are expressed in myths, religion, dreams, private fantasies, as well as in works of literature. Archetypes can be defined as a set of universal and elemental mental forms or patterns—e. The archetype of archetypes has been identified as the death-rebirth theme, connected with the cycle of seasons and the organic cycle of human life and death. Other archetypes include sacrifice of the king, gods who die to be reborn e. Such archetypes express a mythic conception of human life. As such, they cannot be understood by intellectual, rational, or logical methods or procedures; rather, archetypes are the stuff of dreams, the unconscious, ceremony, trance, and ritual. Drawing upon anthropology, linguistics, and psychology, Claude Levi-Strauss proposed that the meaning of myths lies not in their content, but in the structure of relationships that myths reveal. Levi-Strauss believes that myth patterns arise out of the structures and operations of the human mind—not racial memory. In The Anatomy of Criticism, Frye traces recurring mythic formulas embedded in the genres and plot patterns of literature, and myth criticism aims to reveal how such mythic patterns persist and continue to re-enact themselves across cultures in human imaginative works today. Sources Haviland, William A. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994. Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. San Francisco and New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
