Culture and Mental Health

Abstract

Culture, that which is cultivated, has traditionally been contrasted with nature, that which we are born into. Nature is universal, invariable and physically present. Tylor, an early anthropologist, conceived culture as ‘[the] complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, law, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’.¹ He held that each individual human had the same innate capacities but some societies had a more developed culture than others, with the less developed cultures gradually progressing to a more evolved state. While the theory of cultural evolution was soon jettisoned, Tylor’s definition has been broadly retained by much of 20th-century anthropology. For example, a recent definition of culture was provided by Fitzgerald et al.: ‘Culture is an abstract concept that refers to learned, shared patterns of perceiving and adapting to the world which is reflected in the learned, shared beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours characteristic of a society or population’.² Culture thus provides normative standards of behaviour, regulating what a person ought and ought not to do in any given situation.