B. A Definition of Culture Emphasis 1. The fundamental element or building block of culture is the culture trait . A symbol is simply understood as an expression that stands for or represents something else, usually a real world condition. The use of words in a language provides the most obvious example.
Words stand for perceived objective entities and states.
Words as symbols, however, differ from the objects they represent and have special qualities, which is why they are so useful to us. One important characteristic is that they bear no intrinsic relation to what they represent and are thereby arbitrary. I can denote a huge animal with dramatic features such as a hoselike snout, enormous ears, and a pair of spearlike oral projections with very different sound sequences, such as pachyderm or osono. Another important symbolic characteristic is displacement, i.e., words can be used in the absence of the objects represented and thus can be reproduced in any time or place. Thus I can talk about elephants without needing to import them from Africa.