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Ralph Linton

Belonging to the diffusionist school of culture along with Kluckhon and Kroeber, he deals with culture from the angle of subjective nature of human understanding. Accepting culture as a configuration of learnt behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society he distinguished between real culture, ideal culture and cultural construct.

Ideal culture implies the cultural patterns which society delineates as ideal or proper behavior while real culture shows the manner in which such behavior actually occurs in reality. If the former is reality, the latter is our understanding of the same. If the former may be called culture, then the latter may be called cultural construct.

Important Books:

  • The Study Of Man
  • The Cultural Background Of Personality
  • The Tree Of Culture
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