Culture is always "translation" because you can only approach another culture through you own culture so i think you can read "l'empire des signes" from Roland Barthes. I is going inside the japonese culture as far is possible and "come back" in a quite transformed french language.

Culture, according to Edward Tylor,  is a complex whole.......and  Geertz (1973) argued that in order to fully understand this complex whole, we need a microscopic lens. Further, Geertz develops semiotic approach to culture concept: human behaviour is ‘symbolisation’,  not just symbolic systems but symbolic behaviours . ‘Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’.

Geertz took ‘culture to be those webs of significance, and the analysis of it to be not ‘an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’

Therefore,  I recommend Clifford Geertz's  (1973) 'The Balinese Cockfight',  and the birth of 'Interpretative Anthropology'......

Thanks.

Oladele Ayorinde.

You ask for "introductory" and "easier readings". These manuals are also entertaining, educational, profusely illustrated and deep.... and expensive :-(  

--Haviland, Prins, McBride & Walrazh: Cultural Anthropolgy. The Human Challenge. Wadsworth (483 p.)

--Kottak, Conrad: Cultural Anthropology. Appreciating Cultural Diversity. McGraw Hill (514 p.)

--Nanda, S and Warms, R.: Cultural Anthropology. Wadsworth (554 p.)

https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=DfEWAAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=haviland+cultural+anthropology&hl=es-419&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=haviland%20cultural%20anthropology&f=false

https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=8csWAAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=nanda+cultural+anthropology&hl=es-419&sa=X&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAGoVChMI-4yKltONxwIVVyqICh0k4gS9#v=onepage&q=nanda%20cultural%20anthropology&f=false

What about 'Social Theory: a Basic Toolkit' (J Parker and others) which looks at Culture along with Structure, Action, and other key concepts. It's a very basic introductory text but very thought-provoking.

Here is a great text - REPRESENTATION: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices - Edited by Stuart Hall - London, Sage Publications, 1997.   Used at Amazon for under $6.00 - it is a good over view of the questions of culture and is an insightful yet easy read.

Dear Pablo,

You might have a look at a paper of Paul Smaldino on the cultural evolution of group level traits. it is a commentary paper and the commentary is also interesting. My own argument is that it is institutions are the most important group level traits. institutions are a concept mostly used by sociologists, political scientists, and some economists. The basic idea is that institutions are systems of rules that structure social life in specific social systems. These rules govern how those who conform to the rules acquire rewards and those who deviate are punished. Institutions tend to vary substantially from society to society, even from company to company or village to village. A prominent person who exemplifies the the institution approach is Elinor Ostrom. See also the Bednar and Page paper for a game theory based approach. 

Other social science disciplines nominate related concepts to be central to societies as systems or wholes. Anthropologists talk about "meaning" by which I think they mean the emotional attachments people have to the institutions and other emergent properties of their social systems. Social identity theorists in psychology have done neat experiments showing how people's social identity is a deep part of individual identities.

Best, Pete

Bednar, J., & Page, S. (2007). Can Game(s) Theory Explain Culture?: The Emergence of Cultural Behavior Within Multiple Games. Rationality and Society, 19(1), 65-97. doi: 10.1177/1043463107075108

Haslam, S. A. (2001). Psychology in Organizations: The Social Identity Approach. London: Sage Publications.

Ostrom, E. (2009). A general framework for analyzing the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Science, 325, 419-422.

Smaldino, P. E. (2014). The cultural evolution of emergent group-level traits. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37, 243-254 doi: doi:10.1017/S0140525X13001544

I have used Kottak. Try one of the textbooks by Ember and Ember, and focus

on E.B. Tylor's definition ("Culture is that complex whole...acquired by man as a

member of society..."), with Leslie White's three layers of culture (subsistence,

social structure, ideology)/Marvin Harris's three layers (Infrastructure, structure,

superstructure), A good example of this integration, which I have discussed in

classes, is how family size, a factor based on subsistence, is reinforced by the

culture's ideology (large family sizes adaptive in farming societies and promoted

the religious institutions). Students have difficulty understanding this integration,

however.

See the interpretation of the culture by Cliffort Geertz

Kroeber and Kluckhohn give a summary of over 100 definitions. Geertz is useful, as are more recent writings by Ulf Hannerz.

The entry on ‘culture’ in Barnard and Spencer’s Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (2010), by the editors, is comprehensive and up to date. For a longer read, Adam Kuper’s Culture: the anthropologists’s account (1999). Clifford Geertz provided the most elegant and satisfying theory of culture as a system before the whole thing became fragmented and politicised. For an overview, see my article ‘Clifford Geertz’ available on my RG page.

I would also recommend Clifford Geertz and his works in this topic. (not only culture as a system, but the understanding of religion, ideology, etc. as part of the cultural system)

Maybe not easy to read, but, in my opinion, seminal to your intent is "The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology", edited by Jaan Valsiner. In that sort of encyclopedia, you could find, in addiction to Geertz, milestones-definitions of culture-as-a-whole by Vygotsky, Moscovici, Jodelet, Markova, etc.

Dear Pablo, I would like to indicate the book's French sociologist Edgar Morin which in Portuguese was published under the title "Ciência com Consciência" (Science avec conscience).

I propose Marcel Mauss Sociology and anthropology or the text of 1936 about body technics... It allows to understand how al our motor behavior are situated in a cultural context. But it depends what sort of language you can read and what is your topic precisely.

Ruth Benedict's book, Patterns of Culture.

If reading Italian, "Cultura" by Marco Aime (Boringhieri 2013)

Pablo, First, a comment: you seem to make a difference between, on the one hand, a functional approach to culture and, on the other hand, the statement that elements of culture ("cultural traits"?) do not "have intrinsic meaning or value". I am not sure these necessarily are incompatible ideas.

Now to your request: it is very basic, so basic in fact that I am not certain that many/most of the suggestions listed below will be very helpful. I would like to suggest that you contact the nearest university/college with an Anthropology Dept., and ask which readings they use in their first semester introductory course (you can likely just as easily find this on the dept. website).

Check out any of the editions of Melvin Ember and Carol Ember. An

introductory textbook is the best way to go.

Studies on culture constitute a huge field to which contribute various fields of scientific knowledge. From those offered by cognitive linguistics , I would suggest the book of Lakoff and Johnson's authorship , Metaphors we live by . In addition , also considering the universe of achievements of cognitive sciences and neurosciences, consider the book by Antonio Damasio , Self comes to mind,as an important contribution to compose an interesting scenario where you can find reflection alternatives to answer you question.

But I would advice you not to give in completely to the current anthropological depreciation for high culture. None other than Western academics started this idea that one cannot make value judgements about the quality of culture, in that all cultures are survival strategies in response to particular environments, which is true enough. And yet high culture is something else, as it cannot be directly connected to survival but entails creativity in art, poetry, music, philosophy, etc.  When it comes to high culture, there is no question that Europeans made the highest contributions, see the book by  Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment:The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Science 800 to 1950. There is a Wikipedia summary of this book's argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment

I would advice you any book of Mary Douglas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Douglas

Best Wishes

Culture could be seen as an elusive concept that defies anlysis or a precise definition.

However, we still need to find our way or terms of recognition around it.

I would like to suggest:

Geertz's (1973 a&b), 'Balines Cockfight' and Interpretative anthropology.

or Edward  B. Tylor's (evolutionist) text on culture

also, Franz Boas's cultural reletivism and historical particularism.

N'B: these are the classic and the foundation on which many analysis or definition of cultures are based.

All the best.

Oladele.

Speaking of classics, Darwin's Descent of Man is a sadly neglected one. in it he accomplishes at least three major goals. First he very neatly demolishes the then-prevalent idea, especially beloved of racist defenders of slavery and colonialism, that each race was a separate species. Second, he proposed that some form of group selection accounted for why human social psychology, and hence our societies, are so different from our closest relatives. Third, he argued that evolution after "primordial times" had been driven  "natural selection only to a subordinate degree." Rather it was a matter of laws, traditions, the teachings of the best men, and public opinion. In other words, he already had a pretty decent theory of cultural evolution in 1871, the same year Tylor published the first scientific definition of culture as anthropologists came to use the term. Rob Boyd and I wrote an essay on this you can find on my web site.

http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/Cultural%20EvolutionDarwins150FinalMS%20version.pdf

The idea that each race is a separate species is not the issue, but whether there are different races within the species Homo sapiens. And it happens to be the case that Darwin believed there were different races, and argue this in Descent of Man, which leads me to think that Richerson has either not read this book, or is willfully confounding the issues so as to conform to the cultural Marxist expectations of academia. Here are some passages from Darwin on differences between races from his book Descent:

"There is however no doubt that the various races when carefully compared and measured differ much from each other as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs the form, and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference The races differ also in constitution in acclimatisation and in liability to certain diseases Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct chiefly as it would appear in their emotional but partly in their intellectual faculties Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted talkative negroes."

Also:

"The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said."

Ah, these passages are always quoted when Darwin is said to be a racist. But they are the bait of his argument, not the hook. He first presents in a rather neutral tone all the arguments that racists used to treat the races as fundamentally different kinds. Only then does he turn to the facts, many of them based on his own observations on the Beagle voyage, to demolish the racist argument. You'll find the same structure to the argument in the Voyage of the Beagle regarding the Fuegans. First he describes the violent and deprived lives of the Fuegans using rather purple prose. Then he attributes their rough life not to innate differences but to the awful climate of the Tierra del Fuego region. He is essentially saying if I had to live in Tierra del Fuego with the same limited technology as the Fuegans, I'd behave like them too.

This is not my opinion. All the serious Darwin scholars read these passages in the same way. Darwin defended the 18th Century doctrine of the Psychic Unity of Humans, the idea that the minds of all human populations were essentially the same and that differences in human behavior are due to what Darwin called customs, traditions, and laws.  We now call all that culture. If you read the chapter On The Races carefully, I'm sure you'll be convinced of this.

The idea that Darwin was a typical Victorian racist is a sort of urban legend among social scientists but it is the dead opposite of the truth. You are a victim of this shameful myth. If your own reading or Rob's and my essay don't convince you of this, below are cites to a couple of books by historians on the subject. 

Gruber, H. E. (1974). Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity. New York: Dutton.

DARWIN'S SACRED CAUSE: RACE, SLAVERY AND THE QUEST FOR HUMAN ORIGINS'2009

by 'ADRIAN DESMOND, JAMES MOORE

Some anthropologists (and others) have challenged the traditional view of culture as by definition "shared," and have instead taken what is often termed a "distributive" concept of culture, which emphasizes intracultural diversity and sees culture as a system of beliefs and values found in a particular society or community. A particularly clear statement of this view is in Anthony F. C. Wallace, Culture and Personality (2nd ed., 1970), more recent ones can be found in Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind (1996) and S. Atran and D. Medin, The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (2008). For a fuller presentation of this view, see Chapter 3, "Meaning and Culture are Real," in my book A Realist Approach for Qualitative Research (2012).

This view is quite compatible with Peter Richerson's emphasis on cultural evolution; if there were no diversity within a culture, there would be nothing for selection to act on. For an example of how this can play out, see Fred Eggan and Joseph Maxwell, "Kinship and Social Organization," in R.DeMallie (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 13, Plains, pp. 974-982.

In reply to Richerson:

Again, Richerson is not making a distinction between those who argued in the 18th century, at at time when so little was known about human evolution, that the races of the world belonged to different species, and those like Darwin who accepted the fact that all humans are members of the same Homo sapiens species but they are differentiated into races. The quotations I cited from Darwin are very clear: he believed that, even though we are all members of the same species, we are differentiated into different races.

Richerson, like most academics, though not all, inflicts damage on this debate by bandying about the word "racist" against those who believe that we members of the same species may be differentiated into races. Darwin clearly believed this. Richerson further confuses matters by implying that if Darwin believed that culture was an important factor in differentiating humans, it follows that he did not believe that humans were differentiated biologically into races. Both views can be held; it is not either or.

I don't believe that Darwin was a racist, that is a childish label that tramples down on open inquiry. Perhaps Richerson does not understand Darwinian theory or natural selection, but would he care to explain why would evolution ceased the moment Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa about 50,000 years ago? Darwinian theory says that different environment have different selective pressures and that populations that are separated for thousands of years will develop distinctive genetic features. See the easily understood book by New York Times science writer, Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Dawn_%28book%29