A New Classification of Culture and a Restatement of the Culture Lag Theory

M BOOST OF what will here be said is implicit in current social theory, especially in the work of MacIver and Ogburn, but even in that of Coste, DeRoberty, and Bagehot, partially in that of Sumner and many others. We have the highest regard for these contributions and here attempt only a more precise statement.' We would divide culture into three categories: the inductive (or empirico-logico-experimental) culture; the aesthetic (or appreciative-expressive) culture; and the control (or authoritarian) culture. In the inductive culture, we would include all inductively arrived at bodies of knowledge and all empirically validated devices. It would, therefore, include such material objects as tools, devices, machines, and various utilitarian objects and instruments; but also such non-material items as crafts, skills, techniques, mathematics, logic, scientific method, and bodies of scientific knowledge. Thus this category cuts across the division into material and non-material culture and infringes somewhat even on the territory of the so-called adaptive culture. It represents one sub-division of what Alfred Weber and MacIver have termed civilization by contrast to pure culture. The aesthetic or appreciative-expressive culture is almost identical with what Weber and MacIver have termed pure culture and with what Ogburn terms the non-material, non-adaptive culture. It consists of such material objects as paintings, sculptures, mystic ritual symbols and vestments, architectural forms, and the like; and such non-material items as dance forms, recreational forms, the folkways of purely social intercourse, and the purely aesthetic aspects of poetry, literature, music, ceremonial, and the like

Lag · Sociology · Computer Science · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics

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