Difference Between Culture and Ethno culture

Culture vs Ethno culture

There are various ways that Culture can be defined but whatever the definition, culture is defined with respect to a group of people or animals. A group of people who live together tend to adopt a similar set of norms by which they live, which can be referred to as their culture. Culture is the unique way in which people living in a group or in a community react to different circumstances in life. Right from birth, individuals learn from those staying closer to them and they will take on those common values in life unless they move to a different community where they may have to adopt that community’s values, hence culture. Culture may also be a process by which communities create identities to differ from each other but humans collectively, no matter what community or location, have a distinct culture from animals as a whole.

In sociology, a group of people or a community with consistent culture and ethnicity is known as an ethnoculture. For an ethnoculture to be in existence there has to be an unbroken and unmixed lineage which maintains its culture in values, traditions, art and philosophy, together with the seemingly ordinary but noticeably diverse ways children are raised, how food is prepared and how house and courtship rituals are observed. Usually members from one ethnoculure are not very hospitable towards people of another race living amongst them because they view them as ‘diluters’. They believe that if a person from a different ethnoculture or race lives amongst them, they could have some of their values effectively dissolved ethnoculturally, making them ‘weaker’. It’s not necessarily true that an ethnoculture will consider ‘outsiders’ as inferior but rather they feel it as a basic instinct to preserve their core values of ethnicity and race so they would feel motivated if no ‘outsiders’ lived amongst them.

Through values like faith, beliefs, customs, art, way of life, cooking habits and trading ways, culture was able to develop and evolve over time. When culture developed it gave identities to communities where one’s culture can be identified based on how he establishes those common values. Worth noting is that common values are similar in different cultures but how they are established is different and that’s how different cultures are identified from each other.

Summary:
1. Culture disregards ethnicity whereas ethnicity is a core part of ethnoculture.
2. In a culture outsiders are more welcome and can easily integrate while in an ethnoculture, ‘outsiders’ are usually seem as ‘diluters’.
3. Culture spreads and evolves faster as people adapt to new cultures while ethnocultural values are more guarded and will not evolve faster.
4. An ethnoculture can be part of a culture, for example you can have a community of Jewish people (share ethnicity and culture) within a larger western culture.

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