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Foraging and Agricultural Communities

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Culture is the complex whole that which includes knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, arts, morals, customs, and other capabilities that are learned through a group of people through the course of generations by means of individual and group striving. Culture is not biological, it is inherited by growing up in a certain society where they are exposed to a specific cultural tradition. This process is called “enculturation.” Culture often covers the parts of human experience that is not related to geneticism. Culture is often divided by material and intangibles. Materials, obviously meaning physical objects, and intangibles meaning body language, spoken language, and customs.Culture is central to the way humans experience, interpret, and move forward in life. A simple gesture could mean many different things in many different cultures. Subcultures play a factor in this way also. While small societies tend to usually be culturally unified, larger societies lead to cultural diversity, which creates subcultures. Subcultures are values and norms that are different from the majority and include different traditions and symbol-based patterns. Members of subcultures often share a common identity, background, or ancestral history. In America, most subculture is based on ethnicity, for example: Vietnamese-Americans, African-Americans, or Irish-American. However, subcultures disappear when the dominant cultural differences between the subculture and the dominant culture start to blur or seemingly disappear. Throughout all cultures, there are universal traits. These are behaviors shared by the whole of humanity. Cultural universals transcend time, race, and other boundaries. For example, these include: communicating through verbal language, regulating sexual behavior, and having a division of labor based on sex are just a few of these commonalities all humans share. However, cultures tend to find different ways to express and carry out these commonalities. Culture is also adaptive. It changes due to various circumstances and happenings. No culture is truly set in stone, culture is as malleable as the human brain. For example, some aspects of Western culture are different because of the use of the internet, making the world a much smaller place. Foraging culture, sometimes referred to as hunting and gathering culture, is based around a group people who depend on wild food to sustain themselves. Until agriculture and animal domestication was popularized, all people were foragers. Foraging communities are very diverse, the strategy often depends greatly on the environment that the foragers live in. Many foraging communities utilize the same basic strategies. Such as fishing, hunting, and gathering edible wild plants. Since foragers only live off of the land without replenishing it, it is difficult for foragers to have permanent villages unless the food

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