What is culture? What is society? Your culture consists of your beliefs about the world, the ways you behave, the kinds of objects you possess. Culture includes things like language, morals, etiquette, and many other things. A society, on the other hand, is the group of people who share those beliefs, behaviors, and objects. A social culture consists of the particular meanings applied to objects, behaviors, and beliefs by a given society.
The discipline of history is rooted in the invention of writing. Before writing came into existence, culture was spread in the form of stories and songs passed from one person to another. While these stories were culturally useful, without an easily shareable format, they were constrained by the number of people who spent their lives physically together.
Thus we can think of the era before
writing as pre-historic. Written culture emerged in Mesopotamia due to the rise
of agriculture that was happening in that region.
One of the biggest impacts of written culture is the growth in the size of societies. It meant that a larger group of people could share a culture, without personally knowing one another. By sharing ideas about morality or technologies, writing allowed societies to extend to anyplace that written words could be shared. Thus writing, as a technology, both allowed history to emerge as a discipline by providing us with data to study, it also allowed for the emergence of larger, more complex societies.
No comments:
Post a Comment