Functions of culture in relation to man. The main social functions of culture

Culture plays an important role in life societies, which consists primarily in the fact that culture acts as a means of accumulation, storage and transmission of human experience.

This role of culture is realized through a number of functions:

1) Educational and educational function.You can say what exactly culture does human personality... An individual becomes a member of society, a person as he socializes, that is, mastering knowledge, language, symbols, values, norms, customs, traditions of his people, his social group and all mankind. The level of a person's culture is determined by its socialization - familiarization with the cultural heritage, as well as the degree of development of individual abilities. Personality culture is usually associated with developed creativity, erudition, understanding of works arts, fluency in native and foreign languages, accuracy, politeness, self-control, high morality, etc. All this is achieved in the process education and education.

2) Integrative and disintegrative functions of culture... E. Durkheim paid special attention to these functions in his studies. According to E. Durkheim, the development of culture creates in people - members of a particular community a sense of community, belonging to one nation, people, religion, group, etc. Thus, culture unites people, integrates them, ensures the integrity of the community. But by rallying some on the basis of some subculture, it opposes them to others, separates broader communities and communities. Cultural conflicts can arise within these broader communities and communities. Thus, culture can and often does a disintegrating function.

3) Social functions that culture fulfills allow people to carry out collective activities, in the best way satisfying their needs. The main functions of culture include:

social integration - ensuring the unity of mankind, a community of worldview (with the help of myth, religion, philosophy);

organization and regulation of the joint life of people through law, politics, morality, customs, ideology, etc .;

providing the means of life for people (such as cognition, communication, accumulation and transfer of knowledge, upbringing, education, stimulation of innovation, selection of values, etc.);

regulation of individual spheres of human activity (culture of everyday life, culture of recreation, culture of work, food culture, etc.).

Thus, the cultural system is not only complex and diverse, but also highly mobile. Culture is an immutable component of the life of both society as a whole and its closely interrelated subjects: individuals, social communities, social institutions.

4) Regulatory function of culture... As noted earlier, in the course of socialization, values, ideals, norms and patterns of behavior become part of the personality's self-awareness. They shape and regulate her behavior. We can say that culture as a whole determines the framework in which a person can and should act. Culture regulates human behavior in family, school, at work, at home, etc., putting forward a system of prescriptions and prohibitions. Violation of these regulations and prohibitions triggers certain sanctions that are established by the community and are supported by the power of public opinion and various forms of institutional coercion.

5) Function of accumulation and storage of information inextricably linked with the cognitive function, since knowledge, information is the result of knowing the world. The need for information on a variety of issues is a natural condition for the life of both an individual and society as a whole. A person must remember his past, be able to assess it correctly, admit his mistakes; must know who he is, where he is from and where he is going. To obtain an answer to these questions, a person has created sign systems that collect, systematize and store the necessary information. At the same time, culture can be represented as a complex sign system that provides historical continuity and the transfer of social experience from generation to generation, from era to era, from one country to another, as well as the synchronous transfer of information between people living at the same time. Various sign systems help a person not only understand the world, but also fix this understanding, structure it. Humanity has only one way of preserving, increasing and spreading accumulated knowledge in time and space - through culture.

The natural memory of the individual, the collective memory of the people, fixed in the language and spiritual culture, symbolic and material means of storing information - books, works of art, any objects created by man, since they are also texts, act as means of storing, accumulating and transmitting information. Recently, electronic means of information storage have begun to play an increasing role. The society also created special institutions to perform this function of culture - libraries, schools and universities, archives, and other services for collecting and processing information.

6) The function of broadcasting (transferring) social experience often called the function of historical continuity, or informational. Culture, which is a complex sign system, transfers social experience from generation to generation, from era to era. In addition to culture, society has no other mechanisms for concentrating all the wealth of experience that has been accumulated by people. Therefore, it is no coincidence that culture is considered the social memory of humanity.

7) Cognitive function (epistemological) is closely related to the function of transferring social experience and, in a sense, follows from it. Culture, concentrating the best social experience of many generations of people, acquires the ability to accumulate the richest knowledge about the world and thereby create favorable opportunities for its cognition and development. It can be argued that society is intellectually as much as it fully uses the richest knowledge contained in the cultural gene pool of mankind. All types of society that live on Earth today differ significantly, primarily on this basis.

Cognitive (epistemological) function most fully manifests itself in science and scientific knowledge. Culture concentrates the experience and skills of many generations of people, accumulates rich knowledge about the world and thereby creates favorable opportunities for its knowledge and development. Of course, knowledge is acquired not only in science, but also in other spheres of culture, but there it is a by-product of human activity, and in science, obtaining objective knowledge about the world is the most important goal.

Science for a long time remained a phenomenon of only European civilization and culture, while other peoples chose a different way of learning about the world around them. So, in the East, for this purpose, the most complex systems of philosophy and psychotechnics were created. They seriously discussed such unusual for rational European minds ways of knowing the world, such as telepathy (transmission of thoughts at a distance), telekinesis (the ability to influence objects with thought), clairvoyance (the ability to predict the future), etc.

8) Regulatory (normative) function is associated primarily with the definition (regulation) of various aspects, types of social and personal activities of people. In the sphere of work, everyday life, interpersonal relations, culture in one way or another affects the behavior of people and regulates their actions and even the choice of certain material and spiritual values. The regulatory function of culture is supported by such normative systems as morality and law.

Normative (regulatory) function culture manifests itself as a system of norms and requirements of society for all its members in all areas of their life and activities - work, everyday life, family, intergroup, interethnic, interpersonal relations.

In any human community, it is necessary to regulate the behavior of their constituent individuals to maintain balance within the community itself and for the survival of each individual. The products of culture that a person has at his disposal outline the field of his possible activity, make it possible to predict the development of various events, but do not determine how

a person must act in a given situation. Each person must consciously and responsibly perform their actions, relying on the norms and requirements for the behavior of people that have historically developed in society and are clearly entrenched in our consciousness and subconsciousness.

The norms of human behavior, both permissive and prohibitive, are an indication of the permissible limits and boundaries in which a person must act in order for his behavior to receive a positive assessment of other people and society as a whole. Each culture has its own norms of behavior. There are cultures with a strong normative side (China) and cultures in which normativity is less expressed (European cultures). The question of the existence of universal human norms remains controversial.

By means of norms, culture regulates, coordinates the actions of individuals and human groups, develops optimal ways to resolve conflict situations, and gives recommendations when solving vital issues.

Regulatory function culture is carried out at several levels:

morality and all norms that are strictly observed, despite the absence of special supervisory institutions; violation of these norms meets with sharp condemnation of the society;

norms of law, which are set out in detail in the constitution and laws of the country. Their observance is controlled by specially created institutions - the court, the prosecutor's office, the police, the penitentiary system;

customs and traditions, which represent a stable system of human behavior in different spheres of life and different situations, which has become the norm and is passed down from generation to generation. As a rule, they take the form of a certain stereotype, are stable for centuries under any social changes;

norms of human behavior at work, in everyday life, in communication with other people, in relation to nature, including a wide range of requirements - from elementary neatness and adherence to the rules of good manners to general requirements for the spiritual world of a person.

9) Sign function is the most important in the system of culture. Representing a certain sign system, culture presupposes knowledge and possession of it. It is impossible to master the achievements of culture without studying the corresponding sign systems. So, language (oral or written) is a means of communication between people. The literary language acts as the most important means of mastering the national culture. Specific languages ​​are needed for understanding the world of music, painting, theater. Natural Sciences also have their own sign systems.

Sign, significative function(naming) is associated with culture as a picture of the world. The formation of names and titles is very important to a person. If some object or phenomenon is not named, does not have a name, is not designated by a person, they do not exist for him. Having given a name to an object or phenomenon and evaluating it as threatening, a person simultaneously receives the necessary information that allows him to act in order to avoid danger, since when marking a threat, it is not just given a name, but it fits into the hierarchy of being. Let's give an example. Each of us at least once in our life was ill (not with a mild cold, but with some rather serious illness). At the same time, a person experiences not only painful sensations, feelings of weakness and helplessness. Usually in this state, unpleasant thoughts come to mind, including about a possible fatal outcome, the symptoms of all diseases that I have heard about are remembered. The situation is straightforward according to J. Jerome, one of the heroes of whose novel Three Men in a Boat, Excluding a Dog, while studying a medical reference book, found all diseases except for childbirth fever. In other words, a person experiences fear because of the uncertainty of his future, because he feels a threat, but does not know anything about it. This significantly worsens the general condition of the patient. In such cases, a doctor is called in, who usually diagnoses and prescribes treatment. But relief occurs even before taking medications, since the doctor, having made a diagnosis, gave a name to the threat, thereby inscribing it into the picture of the world, which automatically gave information about possible means of combating it.

We can say that culture as an image and picture of the world is an ordered and balanced scheme of the cosmos, is the prism through which a person looks at the world. It is expressed through philosophy, literature, mythology, ideology and in human actions. The majority of members of the ethnos are fragmentarily aware of its content, in full it is available only to a small number of specialists in culturology. The basis of this picture of the world is ethnic constants - values ​​and norms of ethnic culture.

8) Valuable, or axiological, the function reflects the most important qualitative state of culture. Culture as a definite system of values ​​forms in a person quite definite value needs and orientations. By their level and quality, people most often judge the degree of culture of this or that person. Moral and intellectual content, as a rule, serves as a criterion for an appropriate assessment.

10) Adaptive function

The complex and multi-level structure of culture determines the variety of its functions in the life of a person and society. But there is no complete unanimity among cultural scientists regarding the number of functions of culture. Nevertheless, all authors agree with the idea of ​​polyfunctionality of culture, with the fact that each of its components can perform different functions.

Adaptive function is the most important function of culture, ensuring human adaptation to the environment. It is known that the adaptation of living organisms to their environment is a necessary condition for their survival in the process of evolution. Their adaptation occurs due to the work of the mechanisms of natural selection, heredity and variability, which ensure the survival of individuals most adapted to the environment, the preservation and transmission of useful traits to the next generations. But it happens in a completely different way: a person does not adapt to the environment, to changes in the environment, like other living organisms, but changes the environment in accordance with his needs, remaking it for himself.

When the environment is transformed, a new, artificial world is created - culture. In other words, a person cannot lead a natural way of life, like animals, and in order to survive, creates an artificial habitat around himself, protecting himself from adverse environmental conditions. A person gradually becomes independent of natural conditions: if other living organisms can live only in a certain ecological niche, then a person is able to master any natural conditions for the estimate of the formation of an artificial world of culture.

Of course, a person cannot achieve complete independence from the environment, since the form of culture is largely determined by natural conditions. The type of economy, dwelling, traditions and customs, beliefs, ceremonies and rituals of peoples depend on the natural and climatic conditions. So. the culture of mountain peoples differs from the culture of peoples leading a nomadic lifestyle or engaged in sea fishing, etc. Southern peoples use a lot of spices in their cooking to stop spoilage in hot climates.

As culture develops, mankind provides itself with ever greater security and comfort. The quality of life is constantly improving. But having got rid of old fears and dangers, a person stands face to face with new problems that he creates for himself. For example, today there is no need to be afraid of the formidable diseases of the past - the plague or smallpox, but new diseases have appeared, such as AIDS, for which no cure has yet been found, and other deadly diseases created by man himself await their time in military laboratories. Therefore, man needs to defend himself not only from the natural environment, but also from the cultural world, artificially created by man himself.

Adaptive function has a dual nature. On the one hand, it manifests itself in the creation of specific means of protecting a person - the means of protection necessary for a person from the outside world. These are all the products of culture that help a person to survive and feel confident in the world: using fire, storing food and other necessary things, creating productive agriculture, medicine, etc. At the same time, they include not only objects of material culture, but also those specific means that a person develops to adapt to life in society, which keep him from mutual extermination and destruction - state structures, laws, customs, traditions, moral norms, etc. etc.

On the other hand, there are non-specific means of protecting a person - culture as a whole, existing as a picture of the world. Understanding culture as a “second nature”, the world created by man, we emphasize the most important property of human activity and culture - the ability to “duplicate the world”, to isolate sensory-objective and ideally-shaped layers in it. By linking culture with an ideal-imaginative world, we get the most important property of culture - to be a picture of the world, a defined grid of images and meanings through which the surrounding world is perceived. Culture as a picture of the world makes it possible to see the world not as a continuous flow of information, but as ordered and structured information. Any object or phenomenon of the external world is perceived through this symbolic grid, it has a place in this system of meanings, and it will be assessed as useful, harmful or indifferent for a person.

11) The communicative function of culture provides communication of people with each other. A person cannot solve any difficult problem without the help of other people. People enter into communication in the course of any kind of work activity. Without communication with their own kind, a person cannot become a full-fledged member of society, develop their abilities. A long separation from society leads the individual to mental and spiritual degradation, turning him into an animal. Culture is a condition and result of communication between people. Only through the assimilation of culture do people become members of society. Culture provides people with a means of communication. In turn, communicating, people create, preserve and develop culture.

Nature has not endowed man with the ability to establish emotional contacts, exchange information without the help of signs, sounds, writing, and for communication man has created various means of cultural communication. Information can be transmitted in verbal (verbal) ways, non-verbal (facial expressions, gestures, postures, communication distance, information that is transmitted through material objects, for example, using clothing, especially uniforms) and paraverbal (speech rate, intonation, volume, articulation, voice pitch etc.).

To communicate with other people, a person uses natural languages, artificial languages ​​and codes - computer, logical, mathematical symbols and formulas, traffic signs, as well as various technical devices.

The communication process consists of three stages:

coding of information to be transmitted to the addressee, i.e. translation of everything into any symbolic form;

transmission through communication channels, while interference and loss of part of the information are possible;

decoding of the received message by the addressee, moreover, due to the difference in ideas about the world, different individual experiences of the sender and recipient of the message, decoding occurs with errors. Therefore, communication is never 100% successful, more or less losses in it are inevitable. The effectiveness of communication is provided by a number of cultural conditions, such as the presence of a common language, channels for transmitting information, appropriate motivation, ethical, semiotic rules, which ultimately determine who, what, when and how can be communicated and from whom and when to expect a response message.

The development of forms and methods of communication is the most important aspect of the formation of culture. In the early stages of human history, the possibilities of communication were limited to direct contacts between people, and in order to transmit information, they had to approach each other at a distance of line of sight and hearing. Over time, people found the opportunity to increase the range of communication, for example, with the help of special devices. This is how signal drums and bonfires appeared. But their capabilities were limited to the transmission of only a few signals. Therefore, the most important stage in the development of culture was the invention of writing, which made it possible to transmit complex messages over long distances. In the modern world, the mass media are becoming increasingly important, primarily television, radio, print, as well as computer networks, which come out on top as a means of communication between people.

In modern conditions, the importance of the communicative function of culture is growing faster than any other function. The development of communicative capabilities leads to the erasure of national characteristics and contributes to the formation of a single common human civilization, i.e. processes of globalization. These processes, in turn, stimulate the intensive progress of communication media, which is expressed in an increase in the power and long-range action of communication facilities, an increase in information flows, an increase in the speed of information transfer. Along with this, mutual understanding of people, their ability to sympathy and empathy are progressing.

12) The integrative function of culture is related to communicative and is associated with the fact that culture unites any social community - peoples, social groups and states. The basis of the unity of such groups are: a common language, a single system of values ​​and ideals, which creates a common view of the world, as well as common norms that regulate people's behavior in society. The result is a sense of community with people who are members of their own group, as opposed to other people who are perceived as "outsiders." Because of this, the whole world is divided into "us" and "aliens", into We and They. As a rule, a person has more confidence in “theirs” than in “strangers” who speak an incomprehensible language and behave incorrectly. Therefore, communication between representatives of different cultures is always difficult, there is a great risk of mistakes that give rise to conflicts and even wars. But recently, in connection with the processes of globalization, the development of the media and communication, intercultural contacts are strengthening and expanding. This is largely facilitated by modern mass culture, thanks to which books, music, achievements of science and technology, fashion, etc. become available to many people in different countries. The Internet plays a particularly important role in this process. We can say that the integrative function of culture in recent years has contributed to the cohesion not only of individual social and ethnic groups, but also of humanity as a whole.

13) Axiological (evaluative) function culture is associated with its value orientations. Cultural regulation of human activity is carried out not only normatively, but also through a system of values ​​- ideals that people strive to achieve. Values ​​imply the choice of an object, state, need, goal in accordance with the criterion of their usefulness for a person's life and help society and a person to separate good from bad, truth from error, just from unfair, permissible from forbidden, etc. The selection of values ​​occurs in the process of practical activity. As experience is accumulated, values ​​are formed and disappear, revised and enriched.

Values ​​provide the specificity of each culture. What is important in one culture may not be important in another. Each nation has its own hierarchy of values, although the set of values ​​is universal in nature. Therefore, we can conditionally classify basic values ​​as follows:

vital values ​​- life, health, safety, well-being, strength, etc .;

social - social status, work, profession, personal independence, family, gender equality;

political - freedom of speech, civil liberties, legality,

civil peace;

moral - good, good, love, friendship, duty, honor, disinterestedness, decency, loyalty, justice, respect for elders, love for children;

aesthetic values ​​- beauty, ideal, style, harmony, fashion, originality.

Each society, each culture is guided by its own set of values, which may lack some of the above values. In addition, each culture in its own way represents certain values. So, the ideals of beauty among different peoples are quite different. For example, in medieval China, aristocrats, in accordance with the then existing ideal of beauty, should have tiny feet; what they wanted was achieved by painful leg bandaging, which girls were subjected to from the age of five and as a result of which they became literally crippled.

Through values, the orientation of people's behavior occurs. A person cannot treat the opposites that make up the world in the same way, he must give preference to one thing. Most people believe that they strive for good, truth, love, but what seems good to some may turn out to be evil for others. This again leads to the cultural specificity of values. Based on the ideas we have about good and evil, all our lives we act as "appraisers" of the world around us.

14) Recreational function of culture(mental relaxation) is the opposite of the normative function. Regulation and regulation of behavior are necessary, but their consequence is the restriction of the freedom of individual individuals and groups, the suppression of some of their desires and drives, which leads to the development of latent conflicts and tensions. A person comes to the same result due to excessive specialization of activity, forced loneliness or excess of communication, unmet needs for love, faith, immortality, intimate contact with another person. Not all of these tensions are rationally solvable. Therefore, the culture is faced with the task of creating organized and relatively safe ways of detente that do not violate social stability.

From all of the above, it becomes obvious that culture plays an important role in the life of society, which consists primarily in the fact that culture acts as a means of accumulating, storing and transferring human experience.

This role of culture is realized through a number of functions:

Educational and educational function... We can say that it is culture that makes a person a person. An individual becomes a member of society, a person as he socializes, that is, mastering knowledge, language, symbols, values, norms, customs, traditions of his people, his social group and all of humanity. The level of a person's culture is determined by its socialization - familiarization with the cultural heritage, as well as the degree of development of individual abilities. Personality culture is usually associated with developed creativity, erudition, understanding of works of art, fluency in native and foreign languages, accuracy, politeness, self-control, high morality, etc. All this is achieved in the process of upbringing and education.

Integrative and disintegrative functions of culture... E. Durkheim paid special attention to these functions in his studies. According to E. Durkheim, the development of culture creates in people - members of a particular community a sense of community, belonging to one nation, people, religion, group, etc. Thus, culture unites people, integrates them, ensures the integrity of the community. But by rallying some on the basis of some subculture, it opposes them to others, separates broader communities and communities. Cultural conflicts can arise within these broader communities and communities. Thus, culture can and often does a disintegrating function.

Regulatory function of culture... As noted earlier, in the course of socialization, values, ideals, norms and patterns of behavior become part of the personality's self-awareness. They shape and regulate her behavior. We can say that culture as a whole determines the framework in which a person can and should act. Culture regulates human behavior in the family, school, at work, in everyday life, etc., putting forward a system of prescriptions and prohibitions. Violation of these regulations and prohibitions triggers certain sanctions that are established by the community and are supported by the power of public opinion and various forms of institutional coercion.

The function of broadcasting (transferring) social experience often called the function of historical continuity, or informational. Culture, which is a complex sign system, transfers social experience from generation to generation, from era to era. In addition to culture, society has no other mechanisms for concentrating all the wealth of experience that has been accumulated by people. Therefore, it is no coincidence that culture is considered the social memory of humanity.

Cognitive function (epistemological) is closely related to the function of transferring social experience and, in a sense, follows from it. Culture, concentrating the best social experience of many generations of people, acquires the ability to accumulate the richest knowledge about the world and thereby create favorable opportunities for its cognition and development. It can be argued that society is intellectually as much as it fully uses the richest knowledge contained in the cultural gene pool of mankind. All types of society that live on Earth today differ significantly, primarily on this basis.

Regulatory (normative) function is associated primarily with the definition (regulation) of various aspects, types of social and personal activities of people. In the sphere of work, everyday life, interpersonal relations, culture in one way or another affects the behavior of people and regulates their actions and even the choice of certain material and spiritual values. The regulatory function of culture is supported by such normative systems as morality and law.

Sign function is the most important in the system of culture. Representing a certain sign system, culture presupposes knowledge and possession of it. It is impossible to master the achievements of culture without studying the corresponding sign systems. So, language (oral or written) is a means of communication between people. The literary language acts as the most important means of mastering the national culture. Specific languages ​​are needed for understanding the world of music, painting, theater. Natural sciences also have their own sign systems.

Valuable, or axiological, the function reflects the most important qualitative state of culture. Culture as a definite system of values ​​forms in a person quite definite value needs and orientations. By their level and quality, people most often judge the degree of culture of this or that person. Moral and intellectual content, as a rule, serves as a criterion for an appropriate assessment.

Social functions of culture

Social functions that culture fulfills allow people to carry out collective activities, in the best way satisfying their needs. The main functions of culture include:

• social integration - ensuring the unity of mankind, a community of worldview (with the help of myth, religion, philosophy);
• organization and regulation of the joint life of people through law, politics, morality, customs, ideology, etc .;
• providing the means of life for people (such as cognition, communication, accumulation and transfer of knowledge, upbringing, education, stimulation of innovation, selection of values, etc.);
• regulation of individual spheres of human activity (culture of everyday life, culture of recreation, culture of work, food culture, etc.).

Thus, the cultural system is not only complex and diverse, but also highly mobile. Culture is an immutable component of the life of both society as a whole and its closely interrelated subjects: individuals, social communities, social institutions.

Adaptive function

The complex and multi-level structure of culture determines the variety of its functions in the life of a person and society. But there is no complete unanimity among cultural scientists regarding the number of functions of culture. Nevertheless, all authors agree with the idea of ​​polyfunctionality of culture, with the fact that each of its components can perform different functions.

Adaptive function is the most important function of culture, ensuring human adaptation to the environment. It is known that the adaptation of living organisms to their environment is a necessary condition for their survival in the process of evolution. Their adaptation occurs due to the work of the mechanisms of natural selection, heredity and variability, which ensure the survival of individuals most adapted to the environment, the preservation and transmission of useful traits to the next generations. But it happens in a completely different way: a person does not adapt to the environment, to changes in the environment, like other living organisms, but changes the environment in accordance with his needs, remaking it for himself.

When the environment is transformed, a new, artificial world is created - culture. In other words, a person cannot lead a natural way of life, like animals, and in order to survive, creates an artificial habitat around himself, protecting himself from adverse environmental conditions. A person gradually becomes independent of natural conditions: if other living organisms can live only in a certain ecological niche, then a person is able to master any natural conditions for the estimate of the formation of an artificial world of culture.

Of course, a person cannot achieve complete independence from the environment, since the form of culture is largely determined by natural conditions. The type of economy, dwelling, traditions and customs, beliefs, ceremonies and rituals of peoples depend on the natural and climatic conditions. So. the culture of mountain peoples differs from the culture of peoples leading a nomadic lifestyle or engaged in sea fishing, etc. Southern peoples use a lot of spices in their cooking to stop spoilage in hot climates.

As culture develops, mankind provides itself with ever greater security and comfort. The quality of life is constantly improving. But having got rid of old fears and dangers, a person stands face to face with new problems that he creates for himself. For example, today there is no need to be afraid of the formidable diseases of the past - the plague or smallpox, but new diseases have appeared, such as AIDS, for which no cure has yet been found, and other deadly diseases created by man himself await their time in military laboratories. Therefore, man needs to defend himself not only from the natural environment, but also from the cultural world, artificially created by man himself.

Adaptive function has a dual nature. On the one hand, it manifests itself in the creation of specific means of protecting a person - the means of protection necessary for a person from the outside world. These are all the products of culture that help a person to survive and feel confident in the world: using fire, storing food and other necessary things, creating productive agriculture, medicine, etc. At the same time, they include not only objects of material culture, but also those specific means that a person develops to adapt to life in society, which keep him from mutual extermination and destruction - state structures, laws, customs, traditions, moral norms, etc. etc.

On the other hand, there are non-specific means of protecting a person - culture as a whole, existing as a picture of the world. Understanding culture as a “second nature”, the world created by man, we emphasize the most important property of human activity and culture - the ability to “duplicate the world”, to isolate sensory-objective and ideally-shaped layers in it. By linking culture with an ideal-imaginative world, we get the most important property of culture - to be a picture of the world, a defined grid of images and meanings through which the surrounding world is perceived. Culture as a picture of the world makes it possible to see the world not as a continuous flow of information, but as ordered and structured information. Any object or phenomenon of the external world is perceived through this symbolic grid, it has a place in this system of meanings, and it will be assessed as useful, harmful or indifferent for a person.

Sign function

Sign, significative function(naming) is associated with culture as a picture of the world. The formation of names and titles is very important to a person. If some object or phenomenon is not named, does not have a name, is not designated by a person, they do not exist for him. Having given a name to an object or phenomenon and evaluating it as threatening, a person simultaneously receives the necessary information that allows him to act in order to avoid danger, since when marking a threat, it is not just given a name, but it fits into the hierarchy of being. Let's give an example. Each of us at least once in our life was ill (not with a mild cold, but with some rather serious illness). At the same time, a person experiences not only painful sensations, feelings of weakness and helplessness. Usually in this state, unpleasant thoughts come to mind, including about a possible fatal outcome, the symptoms of all diseases that I have heard about are remembered. The situation is straightforward according to J. Jerome, one of the heroes of whose novel Three Men in a Boat, Excluding a Dog, while studying a medical reference book, found all diseases except for childbirth fever. In other words, a person experiences fear because of the uncertainty of his future, because he feels a threat, but does not know anything about it. This significantly worsens the general condition of the patient. In such cases, a doctor is called in, who usually diagnoses and prescribes treatment. But relief occurs even before taking medications, since the doctor, having made a diagnosis, gave a name to the threat, thereby inscribing it into the picture of the world, which automatically gave information about possible means of combating it.

We can say that culture as an image and picture of the world is an ordered and balanced scheme of the cosmos, is the prism through which a person looks at the world. It is expressed through philosophy, literature, mythology, ideology and in human actions. The majority of members of the ethnos are fragmentarily aware of its content, in full it is available only to a small number of specialists in culturology. The basis of this picture of the world is ethnic constants - values ​​and norms of ethnic culture.

From all of the above, it becomes obvious that culture plays an important role in life, which consists primarily in the fact that culture acts as a means of accumulating, storing and transferring human experience.

This role of culture is realized through a number of functions:

Educational and educational function... You can say what exactly the culture is doing. An individual becomes a member of society, a person as he socializes, that is, he assimilates knowledge, language, symbols, values, norms, customs, traditions of his people, his own and all mankind. The level of a person's culture is determined by its socialization - familiarization with the cultural heritage, as well as the degree of development of individual abilities. The culture of personality is usually associated with developed creativity, erudition, understanding of works, fluency in native and foreign languages, accuracy, politeness, self-control, high morality, etc. All this is achieved in the process and.

Integrative and disintegrative functions of culture... E. Durkheim paid special attention to these functions in his studies. According to E. Durkheim, the development of culture creates in people - members of a particular community a sense of community, belonging to one nation, people, religion, group, etc. Thus, culture unites people, integrates them, ensures the integrity of the community. But by rallying some on the basis of some subculture, it opposes them to others, separates broader communities and communities. Cultural conflicts can arise within these broader communities and communities. Thus, culture can and often does a disintegrating function.

Regulatory function of culture... As noted earlier, in the course of socialization, values, ideals, norms and patterns of behavior become part of the personality's self-awareness. They shape and regulate her behavior. We can say that culture as a whole determines the framework in which a person can and should act. Culture regulates human behavior at school, at work, at home, etc., putting forward a system of prescriptions and prohibitions. Violation of these regulations and prohibitions triggers certain sanctions that are established by the community and are supported by the power of public opinion and various forms of institutional coercion.

The function of broadcasting (transferring) social experience often called the function of historical continuity, or informational. Culture, which is a complex sign system, transfers social experience from generation to generation, from era to era. In addition to culture, society has no other mechanisms for concentrating all the wealth of experience that has been accumulated by people. Therefore, it is no coincidence that culture is considered the social memory of humanity.

Cognitive function (epistemological) is closely related to the function of transferring social experience and, in a sense, follows from it. Culture, concentrating the best social experience of many generations of people, acquires the ability to accumulate the richest knowledge about the world and thereby create favorable opportunities for its cognition and development. It can be argued that society is intellectually as much as it fully uses the richest knowledge contained in the cultural gene pool of mankind. All types of society that live on Earth today differ significantly, primarily on this basis.

Regulatory (normative) function is associated primarily with the definition (regulation) of various aspects, types of social and personal activities of people. In the sphere of work, everyday life, interpersonal relations, culture in one way or another affects the behavior of people and regulates their actions and even the choice of certain material and spiritual values. The regulatory function of culture is supported by such normative systems as morality and law.

Sign function is the most important in the system of culture. Representing a certain sign system, culture presupposes knowledge and possession of it. It is impossible to master the achievements of culture without studying the corresponding sign systems. So, language (oral or written) is a means of communication between people. The literary language acts as the most important means of mastering the national culture. Specific languages ​​are needed for understanding the world of music, painting, theater. also have their own sign systems.

Valuable, or axiological, the function reflects the most important qualitative state of culture. Culture as a definite system of values ​​forms in a person quite definite value needs and orientations. By their level and quality, people most often judge the degree of culture of this or that person. Moral and intellectual content, as a rule, serves as a criterion for an appropriate assessment.

Social functions of culture

Social functions that culture fulfills allow people to carry out collective activities, in the best way satisfying their needs. The main functions of culture include:

• social integration - ensuring the unity of mankind, a community of worldview (with the help of myth, religion, philosophy);
• organization and regulation of the joint life of people through law, politics, morality, customs, ideology, etc .;
• providing the means of life for people (such as cognition, communication, accumulation and transfer of knowledge, upbringing, education, stimulation of innovation, selection of values, etc.);
• regulation of individual spheres of human activity (culture of everyday life, culture of recreation, culture of work, food culture, etc.).

Thus, the cultural system is not only complex and diverse, but also highly mobile. Culture is an immutable component of the life of both society as a whole and its closely interrelated subjects: individuals,.

Adaptive function

The complex and multi-level structure of culture determines the variety of its functions in the life of a person and society. But there is no complete unanimity among cultural scientists regarding the number of functions of culture. Nevertheless, all authors agree with the idea of ​​polyfunctionality of culture, with the fact that each of its components can perform different functions.

Adaptive function is the most important function of culture, ensuring human adaptation to the environment. It is known that the adaptation of living organisms to their environment is a necessary condition for their survival in the process of evolution. Their adaptation occurs due to the work of the mechanisms of natural selection, heredity and variability, which ensure the survival of individuals most adapted to the environment, the preservation and transmission of useful traits to the next generations. But it happens in a completely different way: a person does not adapt to the environment, to changes in the environment, like other living organisms, but changes the environment in accordance with his needs, remaking it for himself.

When the environment is transformed, a new, artificial world is created - culture. In other words, a person cannot lead a natural way of life, like animals, and in order to survive, creates an artificial habitat around himself, protecting himself from adverse environmental conditions. A person gradually becomes independent of natural conditions: if other living organisms can live only in a certain ecological niche, then a person is able to master any natural conditions for the estimate of the formation of an artificial world of culture.

Of course, a person cannot achieve complete independence from the environment, since the form of culture is largely determined by natural conditions. The type of economy, dwelling, traditions and customs, beliefs, ceremonies and rituals of peoples depend on the natural and climatic conditions. So. the culture of mountain peoples differs from the culture of peoples leading a nomadic lifestyle or engaged in sea fishing, etc. Southern peoples use a lot of spices in their cooking to stop spoilage in hot climates.

As culture develops, mankind provides itself with ever greater security and comfort. The quality of life is constantly improving. But having got rid of old fears and dangers, a person stands face to face with new problems that he creates for himself. For example, today there is no need to be afraid of the formidable diseases of the past - the plague or smallpox, but new diseases have appeared, such as AIDS, for which no cure has yet been found, and other deadly diseases created by man himself await their time in military laboratories. Therefore, man needs to defend himself not only from the natural environment, but also from the cultural world, artificially created by man himself.

Adaptive function has a dual nature. On the one hand, it manifests itself in the creation of specific means of protecting a person - the means of protection necessary for a person from the outside world. These are all the products of culture that help a person to survive and feel confident in the world: using fire, storing food and other necessary things, creating productive agriculture, medicine, etc. At the same time, they include not only objects of material culture, but also those specific means that a person develops to adapt to life in society, which keep him from mutual extermination and destruction - state structures, laws, customs, traditions, moral norms, etc. etc.

On the other hand, there are non-specific means of protecting a person - culture as a whole, existing as a picture of the world. Understanding culture as a “second nature”, the world created by man, we emphasize the most important property of human activity and culture - the ability to “duplicate the world”, to isolate sensory-objective and ideally-shaped layers in it. By linking culture with an ideal-imaginative world, we get the most important property of culture - to be a picture of the world, a defined grid of images and meanings through which the surrounding world is perceived. Culture as a picture of the world makes it possible to see the world not as a continuous flow of information, but as ordered and structured information. Any object or phenomenon of the external world is perceived through this symbolic grid, it has a place in this system of meanings, and it will be assessed as useful, harmful or indifferent for a person.

Sign function

Sign, significative function(naming) is associated with culture as a picture of the world. The formation of names and titles is very important to a person. If some object or phenomenon is not named, does not have a name, is not designated by a person, they do not exist for him. Having given a name to an object or phenomenon and evaluating it as threatening, a person simultaneously receives the necessary information that allows him to act in order to avoid danger, since when marking a threat, it is not just given a name, but it fits into the hierarchy of being. Let's give an example. Each of us at least once in our life was ill (not with a mild cold, but with some rather serious illness). At the same time, a person experiences not only painful sensations, feelings of weakness and helplessness. Usually in this state, unpleasant thoughts come to mind, including about a possible fatal outcome, the symptoms of all diseases that I have heard about are remembered. The situation is straightforward according to J. Jerome, one of the heroes of whose novel Three Men in a Boat, Excluding a Dog, while studying a medical reference book, found all diseases except for childbirth fever. In other words, a person experiences fear because of the uncertainty of his future, because he feels a threat, but does not know anything about it. This significantly worsens the general condition of the patient. In such cases, a doctor is called in, who usually diagnoses and prescribes treatment. But relief occurs even before taking medications, since the doctor, having made a diagnosis, gave a name to the threat, thereby inscribing it into the picture of the world, which automatically gave information about possible means of combating it.

We can say that culture as an image and picture of the world is an ordered and balanced scheme of the cosmos, is the prism through which a person looks at the world. It is expressed through philosophy, literature, mythology, ideology and in human actions. The majority of members of the ethnos are fragmentarily aware of its content, in full it is available only to a small number of specialists in culturology. The basis of this picture of the world is ethnic constants - values ​​and norms of ethnic culture.

Cognitive function

Cognitive (epistemological) function most fully manifests itself in science and scientific knowledge. Culture concentrates the experience and skills of many generations of people, accumulates rich knowledge about the world and thereby creates favorable opportunities for its knowledge and development. Of course, knowledge is acquired not only in science, but also in other spheres of culture, but there it is a by-product of human activity, and in science, obtaining objective knowledge about the world is the most important goal.

Science for a long time remained a phenomenon of only European civilization and culture, while other peoples chose a different way of learning about the world around them. So, in the East, for this purpose, the most complex systems of philosophy and psychotechnics were created. They seriously discussed such unusual for rational European minds ways of knowing the world, such as telepathy (transmission of thoughts at a distance), telekinesis (the ability to influence objects with thought), clairvoyance (the ability to predict the future), etc.

Accumulation function

Information accumulation and storage function inextricably linked with the cognitive function, since knowledge, information is the result of knowing the world. The need for information on a variety of issues is a natural condition for the life of both an individual and society as a whole. A person must remember his past, be able to assess it correctly, admit his mistakes; must know who he is, where he is from and where he is going. To obtain an answer to these questions, a person has created sign systems that collect, systematize and store the necessary information. At the same time, culture can be represented as a complex sign system that provides historical continuity and the transfer of social experience from generation to generation, from era to era, from one country to another, as well as the synchronous transfer of information between people living at the same time. Various sign systems help a person not only understand the world, but also fix this understanding, structure it. Humanity has only one way of preserving, increasing and spreading accumulated knowledge in time and space - through culture.

The natural memory of the individual, the collective memory of the people, fixed in the language and spiritual culture, symbolic and material means of storing information - books, works of art, any objects created by man, since they are also texts, act as means of storing, accumulating and transmitting information. Recently, electronic means of information storage have begun to play an increasing role. The society also created special institutions to perform this function of culture - libraries, schools and universities, archives, and other services for collecting and processing information.

Communicative function

The communicative function of culture provides communication of people with each other. A person cannot solve any difficult problem without the help of other people. People enter into communication in the course of any kind of work activity. Without communication with their own kind, a person cannot become a full-fledged member of society, develop their abilities. A long separation from society leads the individual to mental and spiritual degradation, turning him into an animal. Culture is a condition and result of communication between people. Only through the assimilation of culture do people become members of society. Culture provides people with a means of communication. In turn, communicating, people create, preserve and develop culture.

Nature has not endowed man with the ability to establish emotional contacts, exchange information without the help of signs, sounds, writing, and for communication man has created various means of cultural communication. Information can be transmitted in verbal (verbal) ways, non-verbal (facial expressions, gestures, postures, communication distance, information that is transmitted through material objects, for example, using clothing, especially uniforms) and paraverbal (speech rate, intonation, volume, articulation, voice pitch etc.).

To communicate with other people, a person uses natural languages, artificial languages ​​and codes - computer, logical, mathematical symbols and formulas, traffic signs, as well as various technical devices.

The communication process consists of three stages:

• coding of information to be transmitted to the addressee, i.e. translation of everything into any symbolic form;
• transmission through communication channels, while interference and loss of part of the information are possible;
• decoding of the received message by the addressee, moreover, due to the difference in ideas about the world, different individual experiences of the sender and recipient of the message, decoding occurs with errors. Therefore, communication is never 100% successful, more or less losses in it are inevitable. The effectiveness of communication is provided by a number of cultural conditions, such as the presence of a common language, channels for transmitting information, appropriate motivation, ethical, semiotic rules, which ultimately determine who, what, when and how can be communicated and from whom and when to expect a response message.

The development of forms and methods of communication is the most important aspect of the formation of culture. In the early stages of human history, the possibilities of communication were limited to direct contacts between people, and in order to transmit information, they had to approach each other at a distance of line of sight and hearing. Over time, people found the opportunity to increase the range of communication, for example, with the help of special devices. This is how signal drums and bonfires appeared. But their capabilities were limited to the transmission of only a few signals. Therefore, the most important stage in the development of culture was the invention of writing, which made it possible to transmit complex messages over long distances. In the modern world, the mass media are becoming increasingly important, primarily television, radio, print, as well as computer networks, which come out on top as a means of communication between people.

In modern conditions, the importance of the communicative function of culture is growing faster than any other function. The development of communicative capabilities leads to the erasure of national characteristics and contributes to the formation of a single common human civilization, i.e. processes of globalization. These processes, in turn, stimulate the intensive progress of communication media, which is expressed in an increase in the power and long-range action of communication facilities, an increase in information flows, an increase in the speed of information transfer. Along with this, mutual understanding of people, their ability to sympathy and empathy are progressing.

The integrative function of culture is related to communicative and is associated with the fact that culture unites any social community - peoples, social groups and states. The basis of the unity of such groups are: a common language, a single system of values ​​and ideals, which creates a common view of the world, as well as common norms that regulate people's behavior in society. The result is a sense of community with people who are members of their own group, as opposed to other people who are perceived as "outsiders." Because of this, the whole world is divided into "us" and "aliens", into We and They. As a rule, a person has more confidence in “theirs” than in “strangers” who speak an incomprehensible language and behave incorrectly. Therefore, communication between representatives of different cultures is always difficult, there is a great risk of mistakes that give rise to conflicts and even wars. But recently, in connection with the processes of globalization, the development of the media and communication, intercultural contacts are strengthening and expanding. This is largely facilitated by modern mass culture, thanks to which books, music, achievements of science and technology, fashion, etc. become available to many people in different countries. The Internet plays a particularly important role in this process. We can say that the integrative function of culture in recent years has contributed to the cohesion not only of individual social and ethnic groups, but also of humanity as a whole.

Normative (regulatory) function culture manifests itself as a system of norms and requirements of society for all its members in all areas of their life and activities - work, everyday life, family, intergroup, interethnic, interpersonal relations.

In any human community, it is necessary to regulate the behavior of their constituent individuals to maintain balance within the community itself and for the survival of each individual. The products of culture that a person has at his disposal outline the field of his possible activity, make it possible to predict the development of various events, but do not determine how

a person must act in a given situation. Each person must consciously and responsibly perform their actions, relying on the norms and requirements for the behavior of people that have historically developed in society and are clearly entrenched in our consciousness and subconsciousness.

The norms of human behavior, both permissive and prohibitive, are an indication of the permissible limits and boundaries in which a person must act in order for his behavior to receive a positive assessment of other people and society as a whole. Each culture has its own norms of behavior. There are cultures with a strong normative side (China) and cultures in which normativity is less expressed (European cultures). The question of the existence of universal human norms remains controversial.

By means of norms, culture regulates, coordinates the actions of individuals and human groups, develops optimal ways to resolve conflict situations, and gives recommendations when solving vital issues.

Regulatory function culture is carried out at several levels:

• morality and all norms that are strictly observed, despite the absence of special supervisory institutions; violation of these norms meets with sharp condemnation of the society;
• norms of law, which are set out in detail in the constitution and laws of the country. Their observance is controlled by specially created institutions - the court, the prosecutor's office, the police, the penitentiary system;
• customs and traditions, which represent a stable system of human behavior in different spheres of life and different situations, which has become the norm and is passed down from generation to generation. As a rule, they take the form of a certain stereotype, are stable for centuries under any social changes;
• norms of human behavior at work, in everyday life, in communication with other people, in relation to nature, including a wide range of requirements - from elementary neatness and adherence to the rules of good manners to general requirements for the spiritual world of a person.

Axiological (evaluative) function culture is associated with its value orientations. Cultural regulation of human activity is carried out not only normatively, but also through a system of values ​​- ideals that people strive to achieve. Values ​​imply the choice of an object, state, need, goal in accordance with the criterion of their usefulness for a person's life and help society and a person to separate good from bad, truth from error, just from unfair, permissible from forbidden, etc. The selection of values ​​occurs in the process of practical activity. As experience is accumulated, values ​​are formed and disappear, revised and enriched.

Values ​​provide the specificity of each culture. What is important in one culture may not be important in another. Each nation has its own hierarchy of values, although the set of values ​​is universal in nature. Therefore, we can conditionally classify basic values ​​as follows:

• vital values ​​- life, health, safety, well-being, strength, etc .;
• social - social status, work, profession, personal independence, family, gender equality;
• political - freedom of speech, civil liberties, legality,
• civil peace;
• moral - good, good, love, friendship, duty, honor, disinterestedness, decency, loyalty, justice, respect for elders, love for children;
• aesthetic values ​​- beauty, ideal, style, harmony, fashion, originality.

Each society, each culture is guided by its own set of values, which may lack some of the above values. In addition, each culture in its own way represents certain values. So, the ideals of beauty among different peoples are quite different. For example, in medieval China, aristocrats, in accordance with the then existing ideal of beauty, should have tiny feet; what they wanted was achieved by painful leg bandaging, which girls were subjected to from the age of five and as a result of which they became literally crippled.

Through values, the orientation of people's behavior occurs. A person cannot treat the opposites that make up the world in the same way, he must give preference to one thing. Most people believe that they strive for good, truth, love, but what seems good to some may turn out to be evil for others. This again leads to the cultural specificity of values. Based on the ideas we have about good and evil, all our lives we act as "appraisers" of the world around us.

The recreational function of culture(mental relaxation) is the opposite of the normative function. Regulation and regulation of behavior are necessary, but their consequence is the restriction of the freedom of individual individuals and groups, the suppression of some of their desires and drives, which leads to the development of latent conflicts and tensions. A person comes to the same result due to excessive specialization of activity, forced loneliness or excess of communication, unmet needs for love, faith, immortality, intimate contact with another person. Not all of these tensions are rationally solvable. Therefore, the culture is faced with the task of creating organized and relatively safe ways of detente that do not violate social stability.

The simplest, natural, individual means of relaxation are laughter, crying, fits of anger, confession, declaration of love, and frank conversation. Specifically cultural, collective forms of detente, fixed by tradition, are holidays and leisure, freed from direct participation in production. On holidays, people do not work, do not observe everyday norms of life, arrange processions, carnivals, and feasts. The meaning of the holiday is a solemn collective renewal of life. During the holiday, the ideal and the real seem to merge, a person who is introduced to the festive culture and knows how to celebrate feels relief and joy. Holidays also take place according to certain rules - observing the appropriate place and time, playing stable roles. With the destruction of these formalities and the intensification of sensual inclinations, physiological pleasure can become an end in itself and will be achieved at any cost; as a result, alcoholism, drug addiction and other vices will appear.

Rituals also represent a means of collective relaxation and regulate the most important moments in people's lives related to the sphere of the sacred (sacred) in a given culture. Among the ritual events are birth and death, marriage, and the rituals of growing up (initiation), especially important in primitive and traditional cultures. This group also includes religious rituals and rituals, the performance of which is one of the best ways of compensation created by culture. The rituals are characterized by a special solemnity and cultural richness.

Also, a game that satisfies drives by symbolic means is effectively used as a collective relaxation. The symbolism of the game will create a special psychological setting, when a person both believes and does not believe in what is happening, it encourages him to use all his strength and skill to achieve the goal. The game allows you to discharge unconscious impulses, prohibited or unclaimed by the culture. So, in many games there are competitive, sexual motives - sports, lottery, contests, dances. In games such as collecting, accumulative drives are realized, which in everyday life are assessed as a manifestation of greed. Finally, there are games that play on the meaning of death - bullfighting, gladiator fights.

On the one hand, today we can talk about the humanization of games, the replacement of many entertainments of the past, such as street fistfights and public executions, with sports, television, and cinema. But on the other hand, cinema and television show many scenes of violence in films and programs, traumatizing the psyche of people, especially children.

Socialization and inculturation function, or human-making function, is the most important function of culture. Socialization is the process of assimilation by a human individual of certain knowledge, norms and values ​​necessary for life as a full member of society, and inculturation is the process of mastering the skills and knowledge necessary for life in a particular culture. These similar processes are possible only with the help of systems of upbringing and education specially created by culture. Outside of society, these processes are impossible, so Mowgli or Tarzan would never have turned out to be a real person. Children, for some reason growing up among animals, themselves forever remain animals.

The processes of socialization and inculturation presuppose the active inner work of the person himself, striving to master the information necessary for life. Therefore, having mastered the complex of knowledge that is obligatory for a given culture, a person begins to develop his individual abilities, his natural inclinations. This can be the development of musical or artistic abilities, mathematical or technical knowledge, something that can be useful in mastering a future profession or become a person's occupation during leisure hours.

Socialization and inculturation continue throughout a person's life, but the most important knowledge is learned in childhood. Then the child learns to speak his native language, assimilates the norms and values ​​of his culture. Basically, this happens automatically when a child first copies the behavior of parents, and then - peers, teachers and other adults. This is how the social experience accumulated by the people is assimilated, the cultural tradition is preserved and transmitted from generation to generation, which ensures the stability of the culture.

Social functions of culture

1. Educational and educational function of culture. Culture shapes a person. An individual becomes a member of society as he socializes, that is, mastering the knowledge of language, symbols, values, norms, customs, traditions of his people and all of humanity.

2. The integrative and disintegrative function of culture. The assimilation of culture creates in people - members of a particular society a sense of community, belonging to one nation, people, religion, group, etc. Τᴀᴋᴎᴍ ᴏϬᴩᴀᴈᴏᴍ, culture ensures the integrity of society. But, rallying some on the basis of some subculture, it opposes them to others, separates wider societies and communities. Conflicts can arise within these broader societies and communities. Τᴀᴋᴎᴍ ᴏϬᴩᴀᴈᴏᴍ, culture can (and often does) a disintegrating function.

3. Regulatory function of culture. In the process of socialization, values, ideals, norms and patterns of behavior become part of the personality's self-awareness. Οʜᴎ shape and regulate her behavior. Culture as a whole determines the framework in which a person can and should act. Culture regulates human behavior in the family, school, at work, in everyday life, etc., because it contains a system of prescriptions and prohibitions. Violation of these prescriptions and prohibitions (deviant behavior) leads to certain sanctions that are established by the community and are supported by public opinion and various forms of institutional coercion.

Relationship between society and culture is expressed in their contradictory unity, in which each side is both an end, and a means, and a condition, and a result for the other. That is, on the one hand, culture is a way of existence of society (society), and on the other hand, society is a source of energy and other means of its existence for culture.

Civilization it is customary to call: 1) the cultural and historical type of development of society; 2) a stable cultural and historical community of people, ĸᴏᴛᴏᴩᴏᴇ is distinguished by a common spiritual and moral values, cultural traditions; economic and technological basis; common ethnic characteristics, geographic boundaries.

The opposition of culture and civilization is associated with the theory of closed cultural cycles and, above all, with the name of Oswald Spengler ("The Sunset of Europe"), who predicted the inevitable death of Western European civilization. According to Spengler, human history is the history of closed cultural cycles. Each culture in its development goes through the following phases: birth and childhood, youth and maturity, old age and decline. On the basis of this biological rhythm, within the general cycle of evolution of each of the cultures, two main stages are distinguished: the stage of ascent (culture itself) and the stage of descent (civilization). The first of them is characterized by an organic type of evolution in all spheres of human life, the second - by a mechanical type of evolution, which is the ossification of the organic life of culture and its decay. The era of ossification of the creative principles of culture is the era of its disintegration. The era of ossification of the creative principles of culture in the mechanically lifeless forms of civilization is accompanied, according to Spengler, by the processes of massification, penetrating into all spheres of human life. The symbols of this mass are huge cities. The process of massification, which means the development of civilization on the basis of the quantitative principle, which replaced the principle of culture, finds its complement in the globalization of forms and methods of human existence - economy, politics, technology, science, etc .; and this, in turn, testifies to the domination of the principle of space over the principle of time in human life

In contrast to this theory, Marxist sociology emphasizes progress and continuity in the relationship of cultures, sees civilization as one of the phases of cultural development, one of the necessary stages of the historical process, which is associated with the embodiment of the achieved level of spiritual culture in the system of material production and in social relations. Moreover, the transition of spiritual culture to the stage of civilization is a necessary characteristic of each of the socio-economic formations.

Social functions of culture - concept and types. Classification and features of the category "Social functions of culture" 2017, 2018.

The culture is a process of development of human strengths and abilities, an indicator of the measure of humanity in a person, a process that receives its external expression in all the richness of reality created by people. Functions of culture- a set of roles that culture performs in relation to the community of people who generate and use (practice) it in their own interests; set of selected histories. experience of the methods (technologies) of the implementation of the collective life of people that are most acceptable in terms of their social significance and consequences. A multidimensional, multilevel structure allows her to carry out a range of functions:

1. Accumulation (accumulation) of generic experience.

2. The function is epistemological, cognitive. (Covering all spheres of social consciousness, taken as a whole, culture gives a holistic picture of cognition and development of the world, as well as the level of skills and abilities of people).

3. The function of historical exchange, transfer of social experience. This function is called information... Society has no other mechanism for transferring social experience, "social inheritance", apart from culture. In this sense, culture can be called the "memory" of humanity.

4. Communicative function. Perceiving the information contained in the monuments of material and spiritual culture, a person thereby enters into indirect indirect communication with the people who created these monuments. The means of communication is primarily language.

5. Regulatory and normative functions. Here it acts as a system of norms and requirements imposed by morality and law.

6. Significative function of culture is its ability to it; to create holistic, meaningful ideas about the world and the independence of the philosophical and poetic worlds. For this, culture has developed a stock of meanings, names, signs, and language. Science, art, philosophy are specially organized sign systems designed to represent the world from the outside, make it understandable, meaningful to a loved one.

The transforming function of culture. The assimilation and transformation of the surrounding reality is a fundamental human need, since “the essence of a person is not exhausted by the inclination to self-preservation and, accordingly, the inclination to create conveniences, moreover, the specifically human essence is expressed in something else, in relation to which the created conveniences and the resulting self-preservation only the necessary base ".

If we consider a person only as a creature striving for maximum comfort and self-preservation, then at some historical stage his expansion into the external environment should have stopped, since in the process of mastering and arranging the world there is always a certain amount of risk that persists with an increase in the size of transformations ... However, this does not happen. After all, a person is immanently inherent in the desire to go beyond the given given in transformation and creativity.

Protective function of culture is a consequence of the need to maintain a certain balanced relationship between man and the environment, both natural and social. The expansion of the spheres of human activity inevitably entails the emergence of more and more new dangers, which requires culture to create adequate defense mechanisms (medicine, public order bodies, technical and technological advances, etc.). Moreover, the need for one type of protection stimulates the emergence of others. For example, the extermination of agricultural pests damages the environment and requires, in turn, means of environmental protection. The threat of an ecological catastrophe currently makes the protective function of culture a priority. Among the means of cultural protection - not only the improvement of safety measures - cleaning production waste, synthesizing new drugs, etc., but also the creation of legal norms for environmental protection.

The communicative function of culture. Communication is the process of exchanging information between people using signs and sign systems. A person as a social being needs to communicate with other people in order to achieve various goals. It is with the help of communication that complex actions are coordinated. The main channels of communication are visual, speech, tactile. Culture produces specific rules and methods of communication that are adequate to the conditions of human life.

Cognitive function of culture. The need for this function stems from the desire of any culture to create its own picture of the world. The process of cognition is characterized by the reflection and reproduction of reality in human thinking. Cognition is a necessary element of both labor and communication activities. There are both theoretical and practical forms of knowledge, as a result of which a person receives new knowledge about the world and himself.

Information function of culture provides a process of cultural continuity and various forms of historical progress. It manifests itself in the consolidation of the results of socio-cultural activities, the accumulation, storage and systematization of information. In the modern era, there is a doubling of information every fifteen years. S. Lem drew attention to the fact that the volume of unexplored problems increases in direct proportion to the volume of accumulated knowledge. The situation of the "information explosion" required the creation of qualitatively new methods of processing, storing and transferring information, more advanced information technologies.

Normative function of culture due to the need to maintain balance and order in society, to bring the actions of various social groups and individuals in line with social needs and interests. The function of generally valid norms recognized in a particular culture is aimed at ensuring certainty, intelligibility, and predictability of behavior. You can name the legal norms governing the relationship between people, social institutions, individuals and social institutions; technical standards caused by industrial practice; ethical norms of regulation of everyday life; ecological norms, etc. Many norms are closely related to the cultural tradition and way of life of the people.

In addition, other scientists also distinguish the following functions of culture:

Significative (sign) function of culture, literally - a function of assigning meanings and values. Thanks to the significative function, culture appears as a meaningful representation of the world, no matter in what concrete form this representation is expressed - in the form of a philosophical system, a poem, a myth, or a scientific theory. After all, it is with the help of signs, symbols, metaphors, formulas, numbers, names that a person defines for himself the world around him, and thereby builds a picture of the world. Each nation, country has its own sign system, which consists of verbal and non-verbal images and symbols.

Value (axiological) function of culture. Culture shows the significance or value of what is valuable in one culture and not so in another.

Spiritual and moral function of culture Culture instills and fosters moral values ​​in a person.

Consumer (relaxation) function of culture. The function of relieving stress, tension. Of the natural ways to discharge - laughter, crying, fits of anger, screaming, confession. However, they are classified as individual and not sufficient to relieve collective tension. For such purposes, stylized forms of stress relief are used - entertainment, holidays, festivals, rituals.