Term paper History Term Paper Research Paper Essay

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Introduction
Understanding the cultural traits among human beings plays a critical role in learning and appreciating the diversity among the human race. Culture is a complex discipline involving knowledge, art, beliefs, norms and other capabilities acquired within the society one lives. The complexity within the culture makes scholars have a varied opinion about the précised understanding of human cultural traits. For instance, Antony Gideon vies cultural trait as a fading theoretical concept while Clifford Geertz considers it as a concept having a capacity of anticipating both cultural and social transformations among human beings (Matara 2014). The cultural traits refer to a nonmaterial aspect of human culture within the society. For instance, they include norms, laws, family pattern, economic system, mores, and folkways alongside other beliefs. The cultural beliefs guide the relationship among people living within the community. Therefore, they act as basic regulation which controls the mode of conduct within the society.
The society in which one lives provides norms which govern the code of conducts among people. For instance, it is a norm in our society to use terms like please while requesting for something and thank you if you received whatever one requested for. It takes time for one to get encultured to the specific norm within society. Personally, it took me a good duration of time to learn to use terms like an excuse, please while requesting something from another person. However, with continuous interaction with the set norms, one gets used to them and starts applying them in the daily activities. In this case, the cultural traits are learned. Just as in the case of the infants, they are born without any cultural knowledge but through genetically predisposed to other cultural traits like language which they freely get to learn the culture within the society they live. Just like any baby can be placed in any environment and grow up to learn the new cultural practice and accept them as his or her own cultures. The cumulative aspect of culture results in cultural evolution which requires one to learn new things on top of what had already being learnt.
Consequently, another cultural trait of importance is folkways. The folkways depict the ways people devise their ways to satisfy themselves. They form basic principle guiding our interaction with one another within the society one lives. They form norms in which people conform to because it is mandatory to do so within the society. Any law does not enforce the conformity to the folkway but rather determined with the nature of society one is brought up. For instance, in the society where I live, it was our folkway for the young people to stop whatever they were doing and give way for the older person to pass. Since I was not born in such a setup, it took me a lot of time to learn and fully get enculturation of such a culture. From my own experience, I came across many obstacles trying to adapt to such changes. The experience gained from such encounter remained clear in my mind. For instance, one day as we were playing football along the road, we forgot to stop playing while an older adult was passing, our ball was taken, and we had...