The Concept and Role of Culture in Socioscientific Systems

Abstract

The term “culture” has two interesting connotations in social thought.Both carry important implications on the kind of social interrelationshipsthat are generated by the preferences formed at the level of the individual.Since culture is an intermediate course for generating interrelationships,which in turn reinforce and continue the very meaning of culture,a cause-effect relationship must exist between social transformation andculture. In this, the formative basis of culture, the individual and groupsmust play a determining role. Such a social-political-institutionalapproach to the study of culture, though not prevalent in common literature,has played a central role in two opposing schools. The first schoolwas generated from Ibn Khaldun’s concept of the “science of culture.”’The second was given life by the ontological status given to culture byHegel in his definition of the “world spirit,” which he associated with theheart of western civilization.2 (Weber, too, saw in culture the same characteristic?)These two perspectives have recently been invoked byFukuyama to expound his own theory of the “end of hi~tory.”H~e seesthe Hegelian dialectical process to be at the heart of an atomism of culture-the “isothymia,” as he calls it-and governing individualism.When viewed in light of a transmitting medium for social changeagainst the perspectives of different worldviews, the role of culture hasbeen construed in terms of “cultural pluralism.” But when this is takenup in the light of its transforming and cause-effect impact on social transformation,cultural pluralism is nothing less than the consequence of aparticular political philosophy. Thus, an important causal nexus of “global”interactions emerges: First, there is a worldview that establishes ameaning of culture. Second, the meaning of culture so formed creates a ...