Research On Abacus From The Perspective Of Cultural Structure

Abacus has a long history in China, experiencing long development stages, and it is the social main computing tools in a long historical stage. Until now, abacus still has great research value in the fields such as education and science. Cultural structure theory is a core theory in the field of cultural studies. Analyzing the abacus through cultural structure theory can help us understand the abacus further, and clear its objective positive significance in culture.Overall, improve in material culture is a general trend. When it comes to a particular object, the advancing progress is slow. It is also applicable to abacus.Abacus came from counting rods and now it shows as abacus and mental arithmetic.Abacus' development process fits perfectly Gordon's "limited mutation" principle. The positive significance of abacus include the innovation of calculation tool, promotion of memories and so on. Apart from the decisive role in the material culture of spirit culture, spiritual culture can also react on material culture. In terms of the abacus, its development influenced greatly by the social spiritual culture. The rapid development of the abacus rhymes is pushed to a large extent by the experience-tendency and pragmatism in Chinese. As an accounting tool, abacus assists accounting in implementing more accuracy in practice. Institutional culture is a concentrated reflection of ruling class' s will. It can influence social development in almost every aspects. Along with the gradually mature and the growing user of abacus, it is the ancient Chinese feudal system that gradually developed to the peak. The direct influences of this system culture background include: users of the abacus expand gradually from grassroots to the upper class as "proagricultural and anticommerce". the math books mainly focus on summarizing and amending as selecting scholars through stereotyped writing and banning private calendars. The math books is significantly practical as the capitalism germination and development of commercial economy.Abacus reflected distinct characteristics in spiritual culture and institutional culture,which means a lot in the construction of modern spiritual culture and institutional culture.