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Culture (1993) by António José Saraiva. Translation, Revision and Comments by Mário Vítor Bastos (2022)

1.

Culture and natura or nature are opposites. Culture covers all things/objects and operations that nature does not produce and are added (to nature) by the spirit/the mind. Speech is already a condition of culture by enabling the communication of emotions and mental concepts. In addition, religion, the arts, sports, luxury, science, and technology are cultural products (practices that also re-make culture: they influence among them, are mechanically and digitally reproducible, and became central to many industries).

That is the more extensive sense of culture. It coincides with civilization, a word that entered use by the French path, while culture itself was made known by the German (see Kulture).

2.

In a stricter sense, Culture is the set of ludic/playful and valuable/practical activities and intellectual and affective features that distinguish a particular people/community.

3.

It is also possible to circumscribe the concept of culture depending on the themes under analysis. In this case, we consider it as a set of ludic (aesthetic) arts - especially those the ancient Greeks attributed to "the nine muses" (such as poetry, music, dance, mimics, etc.), excluding science and technology.

4.

English folklore (literally "popular wisdom") spread internationally with the broad meaning of "popular poetry, dance, music, and craftsmanship (artesanato) and art (Folk Art/ Arte popular)

5.

Individual culture is written down in autobiographies (and biographies). Cicero was the first to use culture in this sense. [quote missing]

6. Culture or Cultures? Depending on the context we will have “culture” or “cultures”.

7. Civilization or Culture(s)?

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In the beginning, it was the Logos, and the Logos was with God. And the Logos was God. This text starts enigmatically the Gospel of the Apostle John, impregnated with Greek culture. Logos is the Word (in Latin, Verbum), to which John gives a divine status, as the Greeks from the time of Homer usually did. Often in Homer, the gods descend and enter men's bodies: for example, Pallas enters Odysseus's body and speaks through his mouth.

This example shows that mankind felt language as a mysterious and supernatural gift in Antiquity. Therefore, the anthropoid is human only when he has the divine gift of the Word. Language is not solely the emission of a sound under the combined articulation of a set of muscles and gestures. The critical point is that those sounds express one idea, a purely mental concept. One chain of sounds corresponds to a chain of ideas that constitutes the spoken discourse. To learn words is not enough to acquire the speech gift, and memory is not enough to learn how to speak.

Anthropologists, like Claude Lévi-Strauss, understand language not because of a slow and progressive acquisition [of data] but as a kind of abrupt mutation in the human primate. Evolution occurs in leaps, not continuously. Speech would then result from a mutation, not by significant competencies increase.

The origins of human language are part of the approach in language evolution in their broader context within biological and cultural evolution.

Language is a collective invention on the model of writing or the wheel (all media), and this process places social and cultural dynamics at the centre of its evolution.

Language emerged and further developed in human communities already imbued with meaning and communication, mimesis, ritual, song and dance, alloparenting, new divisions of labor and revolutionary changes in social relations.

To challenge assumptions about the causal relations between genes, capacities, social communication, and innovation,

The biological capacities evolve incrementally based on cognitive plasticity, which involves previous adaptations and fine-tunes them to serve new communicative ends.

Bibliography:

Social Origins of Language (paper)