Cultural Constraints

Komanduri S. Murty & Ashwin G. Vyas

Anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn and William Kelley claim that by “culture,” we mean those historically created selective processes that channel men's reactions, both to internal and to external stimuli. In a more simplistic way, culture is the complex whole that consists of all the ways we think and do and everything we have as members of society. Culture may thus be conceived of as a kind of stream, following down to the centuries from one generation to another. When we think of it in this way, culture becomes synonymous with social heritage. Each society has its own culture. The process of acquiring the culture of a different society from one's own is called “acculturation.” We popularly refer to this process as the “melting pot.” The culture of all people includes a tremendous amount of knowledge about the physical and social world. Even the most primitive societies have to know a great ...

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