1.4.

La culture from an anthropological perspective

The concept of culture is linked to the thinking of the social sciences, all anthropologists agree that every
people without exception has a culture. There is not one culture better than another; indeed, each has its own
way of thinking, feeling, acting and reacting. One way to understand the culture of the other is to interpret
the various manifestations according to the cultural principles of this culture, that is to say that it is
necessary to moderate ethnocentrism so that it is possible to interpret the other culture from a position of
openness and otherness.
Man does not live outside society, the human being is essentially a being of culture. Each individual has a
culture to which he belongs and with which he delimits his personality. One can wonder how to determine to
which culture belongs an individual who is born in a particular culture and who, recently, is led to live in
another. It could be said that it is part of the culture in which he lived most of the time. Thus, if an individual
has the same genetic code of another, he is differentiated by his cultural "software". He moves from genetic
adaptation to cultural adaptation. Nature in humans is interpreted by culture.
From this point of view, man is different from the animal whose behavior is pre-recorded in the genetic
program, and are therefore hereditary. Man, on the other hand, realizes his natural aptitudes only in a given
form of social organization. L. Malson (1964) argues that behavior in humans does not have the same
heredity as in animals. Thus a domestic cat, let loose in nature, will instinctively recover all the behaviors of
the species like hunting, reproduction, etc. while deprived of its first years of its cultural environment, the
human being will be unable to feed himself and will remain even below the animality and this definitively, if
the society recovers it too late.
Anthropology is concerned with the study of man and makes a difference between man and animal. To go
from nature to culture is to go from innate behavior, inscribed in the genes, to acquired behaviors, that is to
say transmitted through the mediation of learning.
(Vinsonneau, 2002: 103). According to this point of view, culture is acquired from exchange with a society,
and nature remains at the genetic level. Most anthropologists find themselves in the idea that culture is not
innate but acquired, the various aspects of culture constitute a system, it is shared and delimits different
groups. The personality of men and women is less determined by their biological sex than by the cultural
model transmitted by each society and imposed from an early age (cited by
Curie, R. 2006: 36-37). Thus, in our research, we rely on the anthropological conception of culture, in that
we take into account the proper aspects of a society to develop a reflection on the way in which it is possible
to study the competence in communication. intercultural according to the particularities of the latter. Indeed,
as we have already said, each society is different and has its own characteristics.
According to the anthropological vision, culture is linked to the personality of individuals and to civilization,
in other words, in its time. The relationship between man-society, civilization and culture is obvious. Indeed,
Strauss defines culture as knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, customs and any other skills or habits
acquired by man as a member of society (Levi Strauss, 1984: 54). All the elements that
are part of the society are transmitted by all its members and are acquired from their contact with others. We
can therefore take up the idea that despite possible identical genetic characteristics, the cultural code can
differentiate a group of people who are part of the same society. Culture therefore exists thanks to
individuals who are part of a society and who share their own culture. F. Laplantine (2001: 124) concludes
that culture is the social itself. So there is not a culture without society or a society without culture. Societies
are not static; they undergo a structural transformation through time, a transformation that
is related to the evolution of individuals. There are traditional societies and industrialized societies. The
more traditional culture is, the more subsets of meanings it contains (family, education, work, leisure,
celebration, death), tend to articulate themselves coherently in a sense of together, systematic and accurate.
In the context of our research, we find, for example, remote villages of large
cities where there are traditional societies with a set of representations and values that are perpetuated from
generation to generation: do not leave the house without completing your homework, go to the cemetery
every Monday, do not listen to music on Good Friday, the many Grandma's remedies, etc.
On the other hand, there is a social complexity that is part of an industrialized society that becomes more
autonomous in relation to the general cultural system. Meanings begin to vary, interests and points of view
are diverse and there is the possibility of thinking about the existence of different points of view. Unlike
traditional societies, the individual is confronted with different conceptions, often opposed to each other.
in relation to various subjects (the relationship of authority, the role of men and women, procreation, etc.).
As part of our research, we are dealing with young people who come from more traditional families,
sometimes families less attached to the thought of grandparents.

We therefore find in the two academic institutions a heterogeneous population at the social, political,
educational, origin, worldviews, etc.Each individual, as has been emphasized throughout our report, keeps
his "software" cultural heritage that will influence its identity. Culture and identity go in pairs, the identity of
the individual is acquired in the construction of the person as social being and not as a mere organic atom, it
is part of a set. The individual actor and the social pole constitute the individual in its essence, to the extent
that both compose the answer to the question "who am I? ". For the construction of identity It is therefore
obligatory to think of one's entourage, one's personal history, in other words, one's cultural heritage which
develops in a context shared with others.
Culture is the more or less strongly connected set of acquired meanings, the most persistent and the most
shared that the members of a group, by their affiliation to this group, are brought to distribute in a prevalent
way on the stimuli coming from environment and of themselves, inducing visions vis--vis these attitudes,
representations and common valued behaviors, which they tend to ensure
non-genetic reproduction (Camilleri, Cohen M. 1989: 27.)
Membership in a culture is therefore obvious, and is explicit or implicit, through conscious or unconscious
manifestations of individuals. Culture, whatever its definition, is always about the relationship between
individuals, the values they share and the social forms that underpin the community. (Caune, 1999: 86).
Indeed, each society, from its daily life, customs, morals, values, begins to create what Aren H. named
"cultural differences."
All the elements that are part of a culture can be transmitted between generations; however, in the modern
world, there is a change in traditions, customs, values, etc. In Colombian society, for example, there is a
transformation in young people compared to the youth of previous years. Technological novelty,
autonomous time, video games, means of communication, globalization, consumption,
etc. could be the cause of these changes. It is not our purpose to determine whether today's ways of doing
things are positive or negative from the past, but to understand their meaning in today's world.