SHWEDER et LEVINE (ed.), Culture Theory

"There are, at present, at least three major views about the nature of culture. One is a notion of culture as knowledge, as the accumulation of information (...) A second view is that culture consists of "conceptual structures" that create the central reality of a people, so they "inhabit the world they imagine" (Geertz 1983) (...) A third view of the nature of culture falls between the "culture as knowledge" and the "culture as constructed reality" positions. It treats culture and society as almost the same thing - something made up for institutions, such as the family, the market, the farm, the church, the village, and so on, that is, systems or clusters of norms defining the roles attached to various sets of statuses." (Roy G. D'Andrade, 115)

SHWEDER et LEVINE (ed.), Culture Theory

"Probably every cultural category "creates" an entity, in the sense that what is understood to be "out there" is affected by the culturally based associations built into the category system." (Roy G. D'Angrade, 91)

- cultural category = mariage, argent, succès...
- cultural learned roles

SHWEDER et LEVINE (ed.), Culture Theory

Levine en arrive à trois constats sur la nature de la culture:
La culture est un système COMPLEXE, ORGANISÉ ET COLLECTIF.

"From this perspective, every human community functions with a group consensus about the meanings of the symbols used in the communications that constitute their social life, however variable their behavior and attitudes in other respects, because such a consensus is as necessary for encoding and decoding messages in social communication in genera as agreement about speech rules is to encoding and decoding in the linguistic mode." (Robert A. Levine, 69)