Ethnicity vs. Culture

By Jaxson

Main Difference

The main difference between Ethnicity and Culture is that the Ethnicity is a socially defined category of people who identify with each other and Culture is a range of human phenomena that cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance.

  • Ethnicity

    An ethnic group, or an ethnicity, is a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities such as common ancestry, language, society, culture or nation. Ethnicity is usually an inherited status based on the society in which one lives. Membership of an ethnic group tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language or dialect, symbolic systems such as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art, and physical appearance.

    Ethnic groups, derived from the same historical founder population, often continue to speak related languages and share a similar gene pool. By way of language shift, acculturation, adoption and religious conversion, it is sometimes possible for individuals or groups to leave one ethnic group and become part of another (except for ethnic groups emphasizing racial purity as a key membership criterion).

    Ethnicity is often used synonymously with ambiguous terms such as nation or people. In English, it can also have the connotation of something exotic (cf. “White ethnic”, “ethnic restaurant”, etc.), generally related to cultures of more recent immigrants, who arrived after the founding population of an area was established.

    The largest ethnic groups in modern times comprise hundreds of millions of individuals (Han Chinese being the largest), while the smallest are limited to a few dozen individuals (numerous indigenous peoples worldwide). Larger ethnic groups may be subdivided into smaller sub-groups known variously as tribes or clans, which over time may become separate ethnic groups themselves due to endogamy or physical isolation from the parent group. Conversely, formerly separate ethnicities can merge to form a pan-ethnicity, and may eventually merge into one single ethnicity. Whether through division or amalgamation, the formation of a separate ethnic identity is referred to as ethnogenesis.

  • Culture

    Culture () is the social behavior and norms found in human societies. Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Some aspects of human behavior, social practices such as culture, expressive forms such as art, music, dance, ritual, and religion, and technologies such as tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing are said to be cultural universals, found in all human societies. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.

    In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the lower classes and create a false consciousness, and such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.

    When used as a count noun, a “culture” is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes “culture” is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. “bro culture”), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism holds that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture. Yet within philosophy, this stance of cultural relativism is undermined and made inapplicable since such value judgement is itself a product of a given culture.

Wikipedia
  • Ethnicity (noun)

    The common characteristics of a group of people, especially regarding ancestry, culture, language or national experiences.

  • Ethnicity (noun)

    An ethnic group.

  • Ethnicity (noun)

    Race; common ancestry.

  • Culture (noun)

    the arts, customs, lifestyles, background, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation

  • Culture (noun)

    the beliefs, values, behaviour and material objects that constitute a people’s way of life

  • Culture (noun)

    any knowledge passed from one generation to the next, not necessarily with respect to human beings

  • Culture (noun)

    cultivation

  • Culture (noun)

    the process of growing a bacterial or other biological entity in an artificial medium

  • Culture (noun)

    the growth thus produced

    “I’m headed to the lab to make sure my cell culture hasn’t died.”

  • Culture (noun)

    the collective noun for a group of bacteria

  • Culture (noun)

    the details on a map that do not represent natural features of the area delineated, such as names and the symbols for towns, roads, meridians, and parallels

  • Culture (verb)

    to maintain in an environment suitable for growth especially of bacteria cultivate}}

  • Culture (verb)

    to increase the artistic or scientific interest in something cultivate}}

Wiktionary

Leave a Comment