How can the term civilization be culturally biased

Progress, on the other hand, is directionality toward improvement, or movement in a desirable direction, an idea currently not in favor because of the current impossibility of reaching global consensus on issues of value. Another approach to value-free historical descriptions is to think through the process by which some human groups moved from agricultural villages and towns into cities and states; by clarifying this process we can arrive at a more nearly neutral checklist that reflects the complexity of our thinking.

The startling fact revealed by big history about states and civilization is that they emerged independently in many places—at least seven—around the world at about the same time, when viewed on a large time scale. Egypt and Nubia constituted states by bce, the Indus Valley and China, probably in two places, by about bce, with Mesoamerica and Peru having simple states by about bce. Smaller centers of independent agriculture likely emerged in numerous other places, like the Amazon, Southeastern Asia, Ethiopia, and eastern North America.

How did these cities evolve out of villages and towns? Why did this happen at about the same time everywhere, give or take a few thousand years? How did elite rulers acquire enough power to coerce the masses of people? Why did people allow this to happen?

These are questions that can help us understand what civilization is. Cities cannot survive without a surplus of food being available, since there is not space within a city for everyone to grow their own food. Over time surplus food became available as the climate changed and as people accumulated their learning and techniques. The last Ice Age peaked at about 20, BP before the present, with the present defined as ce. After that, the climate warmed rapidly to about bce and since then has warmed very slowly, until the recent rapid warming began, at least partially induced by humans.

As the climate warmed after the last ice age, agriculture became possible and necessary, as human density increased and large mammals disappeared. At the same time, human ingenuity produced cumulative strategies for survival. As people and animals domesticated each other, humans learned not to eat their animals at once but to use their products—milk for food, wool for clothes, waste for fertilizer, and muscle power for pulling plows and carts.

Plows, irrigation, pottery for storage, and metallurgy helped make surplus food possible. Recent evidence has shown that as the climate warmed, it also dried in many areas, forcing people to migrate to sources of water.

This may be the main reason that most early civilizations developed in river valleys. Of course, they also turned out to be phenomenally fertile from the silt deposited during floods, and irrigation schemes by humans magnified the fertility, first as small projects and later, under state organization, as monumental projects.

Ripe grain must be harvested and stored. When there is a surplus, it must be collected, centrally stored, and re-distributed. Archeologists believe that possibly priests were initially responsible for this, as part of their responsibilities for keeping the calendars, specifying the days for planting, and praying for abundant harvests.

Surplus grain allowed human density to increase to the level of cities tens of thousands in certain places, always dependent on their outlying regions for their food. Yet priests could not manage the process for long. As density increased, the surplus grain had to be protected against internal robbers and external raiders. Land use had to be allocated; people needed protection for their fields and they needed services, such as large-scale irrigation projects, beyond the scope of neighborhood groups.

In one possible scenario, some of the priests, who controlled the surplus wealth, used it to become elite rulers, or kings. These early kings acquired enough power to maintain standing armies of warriors or to call up warriors when needed. As private property developed and land was divided up, people without land, migrants perhaps from arid areas, became landless peasants or independent craftspeople, dependent on others for their livelihood.

Rulers worked closely with priests, often from their family, to establish state religions and ideologies, binding people together. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website.

You cannot download interactives. Egypt was a vast kingdom of the ancient world. It was unified around B. Today Egyptologists, archaeologists who focus on this ancient civilization, have learned a great deal about the rulers, artifacts, and customs of ancient Egypt. Use these resources to teach your students about the ancient Egyptians. Civilization describes a complex way of life characterized by urban areas, shared methods of communication, administrative infrastructure, and division of labor.

Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Photograph by W. Not all tablet records were transferred to papyrus as there was no reason to do so; they made sense in a specific time, within a given political and cultural context. Unfortunately, not all papyrus content was transferred to codices, because of culture bias among other reasons, and not all codices were then transferred to the printed media before disappearing.

There are important ideological and historical elements in a change of media , in what is preserved and what is discarded and it is left to disappear. Again, an example of this is the invention and use of the codex. When its use became widespread, the surrounding civilization and its religious values and cultural references had completely changed.

Respect was not given to Olympian gods and the digressions by Plato or Epicurus were not regarded in awe. Jesus of Nazareth was the dominant force within the framework of both the Roman hierarchy and its orthodox version. A scribe copying texts from a decaying parchment to a new codex, either at a monastery or in the palace of Constantinople, was driven by specific reasons: to preserve works by Plato and due to its use by St. Augustine of Hippo, minutes from ecumenical councils, or Imperial histories that lent legitimacy to the government by tracing a continuous line between Republican Rome and that specific period in history.

Yes, there is a selection process. In general, this has meant that literary and historical works from the classical period but only a small part have reached us via Byzantium , while philosophy and science have come from Arabic translations , and a significant portion via the Toledo School of Translators.

This stems from the fact that both the Christian and Muslim civilizations used classical culture for their own purposes. We astronomers have faced this problem for some time, and initiatives such as the Virtual Observatory are trying to handle the problem of storing, accessing and analyzing huge volumes of data.

But the issue of culture is much wider and more general. Also, the vast number of works and information of any type produced every year raises an additional problem: accessibility of all and only all relevant information. In other words, how to access the required data or work since they are literally buried underneath numerous layers of similar texts that, in fact, add no value and do not answer the question.

It is enough to give a simple example: typing a simple question on a web browser may return hundreds or even thousands of pages in an order of priority based on criteria that are not always appropriate or are even completely incorrect. Specific answers to concrete questions are not always accessible.

How can we preserve our culture? How can we transfer it to new formats while ensuring that nothing of interest is lost? Should we create cultural databases, new libraries of Alexandria, as encouraged by the United Nations? And, most importantly, who should carry out this selection and using which criteria?

I do not feel able to do so. However, in cross-temporal research, there may not be any colleague or informant available. They may be long gone.

Researchers may at times have lived through some of the historical period that they are investigating e. How is it possible to understand meaningful action in the past without an informant?

This is the crux of the problem. Taylor suggests that interpreters i. In contrast, Ricoeur argues that this intentional world has external referents, and is anchored in the physical reality of a sort. This is because the intentional world is constituted by what Searle called constitutive rules , which stipulate a symbolic function of physical stimulus, X physical stimulus counts as Y meaning in context C. Whether constitutive rules are explicitly understood and used by all actors is debatable Kashima, , but humans learn to perform actions against the social reality that presupposes the constitutive rules.

To clarify this point, let us imagine a future archeologist who is investigating the cultural dynamics of the 21st century Earth. To the extent that this constitutive rule is recoverable from elsewhere e. By careful explication of constitutive rules and their methodical application, the model suggests that it is possible to arrive at an increasingly valid interpretation of a meaningful action.

Methodology for research on cultural dynamics is diverse. Cross-temporal methods using archival data, past research, running surveys, and longitudinal surveys can bring out macro-level cultural change in long- to medium-term.

Cross-generational and experimental simulation methods can shed light on medium- to short-term mechanisms of cultural dynamics. Formal models and computer simulations can help consider complex implications of models and mechanisms, and link micro-level mechanisms with macro-level dynamics. By combing these complementary methods, cultural dynamics research should be able to bring out new insights about cultural change and human experience. The empirical methods of cultural dynamics have much in common with any other social science research.

A number of validity and reliability concerns need to be addressed in order to support or challenge a theoretical proposition or statement, which the researcher wishes to test and which typically involves some form of generalization about a social phenomenon of interest.

There are well known issues of construct validity, internal and external validity, and the like as well as threats to them e. Nonetheless, it brings into focus two classes of validity issues that are rarely problematic in typical psychological research. First, because it deals with meaning, the question about interpretation and how it differs from causal explanation — an enduring epistemological issue that cultural psychology brought to the forefront — is also present.

In addition, because of its cross-temporal nature, the relation between researchers and the object of inquiry is often more complex. The existence of the recorder and record keeper should be explicitly recognized and its potential role as an enabler and a bias needs to be considered.

The most pernicious of all the methodological issues stems from the interaction of the two — the fact that cultural dynamics is about meaning over time. Is the measurement procedure valid across time? Even if a measure may be valid now, there is no guarantee it was so in the past or will be in the future.

Is a construct relevant across time? A construct meaningful at one historical time may not be meaningful at another period of time. Furthermore, this issue can potentially bring up the question about the method of interpretation — how is it possible for the present day humans to understand the action of the peoples long gone? We no longer have informants with whom researchers can enter into conversations or colleagues who can check the validity of our interpretation.

In dealing with these issues, the age old issue about methods of interpretation — hermeneutic circle — needs to be revisited and considered. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council DP to the author. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Front Psychol v. Front Psychol. Published online Sep Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer.

Reviewed by: Ayse K. This article was submitted to Cultural Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Received Jun 19; Accepted Aug The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author s or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.

No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract Cross-cultural comparison is a critical method by which we can examine the interaction between culture and psychological processes. Keywords: cultural dynamics, culture change, cultural evolution, history, methodology.

Cross-temporal method The first class of research designs may be called cross-temporal method , in which data are collated over a period of time and the trajectory of the time-stamped data points is examined.

Cross-generational method A central mechanism of cultural dynamics is cultural transmission, that is, how cultural information is transmitted from one person to another Kashima, Experimental simulation method The Zeitgeist method is a creative solution for the problem of examining oblique and horizontal cultural transmission.

Formal modeling and computer simulation method The designs examined so far are all empirical in that they all make use of observations of human action. Table 1 Research designs.

Open in a separate window. There are some blank cells, representing that there is no clear implication. Complementarity of research methods These research designs complement each other.

Issues related to methods of observation All the empirical research designs involve observations of human action or its outcomes e. Model of action and interpretation The last set of issues — historical relevance of measures and constructs — touches on a pernicious epistemological issue in philosophy of social science. Conflict of Interest Statement The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments The preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council DP to the author. Knowing what to think by knowing who you are: self-categorization and the nature of norm formation, conformity and group polarization.

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