CHAPTER 9: CULTURE
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter introduces students to the anthropological concept of culture. It focuses on the defining dimensions of culture and includes a discussion of the mechanisms of cultural change and globalization.
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
1. Know the defining dimensions of culture. In particular, understand what it means that culture is learned, shared, symbolic, all-encompassing, and integrated.
2. Consider how people may avoid, subvert, and manipulate particular cultural “rules” and expectations, and know how anthropologists today tend to view and analyze such practices.
3. Identify the levels of culture described by Kottak and address why it is important to differentiate among them.
4. Distinguish between ethnocentrism and cultural relativism and consider how both relate to human rights.
5. Understand and be able to provide examples of cultural universalities, generalities, and particularities.
6. Identify and understand the mechanisms of cultural change.
7. Know how globalization may be defined and consider how people may affect and be affected by the interrelated forces of globalization.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction
A. According to Edward Tylor, “Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
B. Enculturation is the process by which a child learns his or her culture.
II. What is Culture?
A. Culture Is Learned
1. Cultural learning depends on the uniquely developed human capacity to use symbols, signs that have no necessary or natural connection to the things they stand for or signify.
a. Clifford Geertz defined culture as ideas based on cultural learning and symbols, and he characterized cultures as “control mechanisms” or “programs” that govern behavior.
b. Through enculturation, people gradually internalize a previously established system of meanings and symbols, which helps guide their behavior and perceptions throughout their lives.
2. Culture is learned through direct instruction as well as observation, experience, interaction with others, and conscious and unconscious behavior modification.
B. Culture Is Shared
1. Culture is transmitted in society; it is an attribute not of individuals per se, but of individuals as members of groups.
2. Enculturation tends to unify people by providing them with shared beliefs, values, memories, and expectations.
3. Parents become agents in the enculturation of their children, just as their parents were for them.
C. Culture Is Symbolic
1. Symbolic thought is unique and crucial to humans and to cultural learning.
a. A symbol is something verbal or nonverbal, within a particular language or culture, that comes to stand for something else.
b. While human symbol use is overwhelmingly linguistic, there are also myriad nonverbal symbols (e.g., flags, the golden arches) that have arbitrary and conventional associations with the things they symbolize.
2. Every contemporary human population has the ability to use symbols and thus to create and maintain culture.
3. Although chimpanzees and gorillas have rudimentary cultural abilities, no other animal has elaborated cultural abilities to the extent that humans do.
D. Culture and Nature
1. Culture teaches humans how to express in particular ways the natural biological urges we share with other animals.
2. Culture converts natural acts into cultural customs.
3. Culture, and cultural changes, affect how we perceive nature, human nature, and “the natural.”
E. Culture Is All-Encompassing
1. The anthropological concept of culture encompasses all aspects of human group behavior.
2. All people are cultured, not just those who are formally educated and sophisticated.
F. Culture Is Integrated
1. Cultures are integrated, patterned systems; if one aspect of a cultural system changes, other parts change as well.
2. A set of characteristic core values (key, basic, central values) integrates each culture and helps distinguish it from others.
G. Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive
1. Although humans continue to adapt biologically, reliance on social and cultural means of adaptation has increased during human evolution and plays a crucial role.
2. Cultural traits, patterns, and inventions can also be maladaptive, threatening a group’s continued survival and reproduction.
H. Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice
1. People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly following its dictates.
a. Culture is contested—that is, different groups in society struggle with one another over whose ideas, values, goals, and beliefs will prevail.
b. Common symbols may have radically different meanings to different individuals and groups in the same culture.
2. Ideal culture consists of what people say they should do and what they say they do, whereas real culture refers to their actual behavior.
3. Agency refers to the actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities.
4. Practice theory recognizes that individuals within a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and influence.
a. Practice theory focuses on how individuals influence, create, and transform the world in which they live.
b. Culture shapes how individuals experience and respond to external events, but individuals also play an active role in how society functions and changes.
I. Levels of Culture
1. National culture refers to the beliefs, learned behavior patterns, values, and institutions shared by citizens of the same nation.
2. International culture extends beyond and across national boundaries as a result of diffusion (borrowing), migration, colonialism, and globalization.
3. Subcultures are different symbol-based patterns and traditions associated with particular groups in the same complex society.
J. Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights
1. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view one’s own culture as superior and to apply one’s own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures.
a. Ethnocentrism contributes to social solidarity, a sense of value and community, among people who share a cultural tradition.
b. Ethnocentrism is universal—that is, people everywhere believe that their cultural values and customs are true, right, proper, and moral.
2. Cultural relativism is the viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture.
a. Cultural relativism can present problems.
b. At its most extreme, cultural relativism argues that there is no superior, international, or universal morality, that the moral and ethical rules of all cultures deserve equal respect.
3. The idea of inalienable, international human rights challenges cultural relativism by invoking a realm of justice and morality beyond and superior to the laws and customs of particular countries, cultures, and religions.
4. Cultural rights are vested in groups rather than individuals, and include a group’s ability to preserve its culture, language, and economic base.
a. The notion of indigenous intellectual property rights (IPR) attempts to conserve each society’s core beliefs, knowledge, and practices.
b. According to the IPR concept, a particular group may determine how indigenous knowledge and its products may be used and distributed and the level of compensation required.
5. Kottak argues that objectivity, sensitivity, and a cross-cultural perspective do not preclude anthropologists from respecting international standards of justice and morality.
III. Universality, Generality, and Particularity
A. Anthropologists accept the doctrine known as “the psychic unity of man.”
1. According to this doctrine, although individuals differ in their emotional and intellectual tendencies and capacities, all human populations have equivalent capacities for culture.
2. Regardless of their genes or their physical appearance, people can learn any cultural tradition.
B. Cultural universals are features that are found in every culture.
C. Cultural generalities are features that are common to several but not all human groups.
D. Cultural particularities are features that are unique to certain cultural traditions.
E. Universals and Generalities
1. Biologically based universals include a long period of infant dependency, year-round sexuality, and a complex brain that enables us to use symbols, languages, and tools.
2. Social universals include life in groups and in some kind of family.
3. One cultural generality (present in many but not all societies) is the nuclear family, a kinship group consisting of parents and children.
F. Particularity: Patterns of Culture
1. At the level of the individual cultural trait or element, cultural particularities (features that are confined to a single place, culture, or society) are becoming increasingly rare because of cultural diffusion.
2. At a higher level, cultures are integrated and patterned differently and display tremendous variation and diversity.
3. When cultural traits are borrowed, they are modified to fit the culture that adopts them.
IV. Mechanisms of Cultural Change
A. Diffusion
1. Diffusion is the borrowing of traits between cultures.
2. Diffusion has gone on throughout human history, as contact between neighboring groups has always existed and has extended over vast areas.
3. Diffusion can be direct—between two adjacent cultures—or indirect—across one or more intervening cultures or through some long-distance medium (e.g., mass media, information technology).
4. Diffusion is forced when one culture subjugates another and imposes its customs on the dominated group.
B. Acculturation
1. Acculturation is the exchange of cultural features that results when groups come into continuous firsthand contact.
2. Acculturation may occur in either or both groups engaged in such contact.
3. With acculturation, parts of the cultures change, but each group remains distinct.
4. A pidgin—an example of acculturation—is a mixed language that develops to ease communication between members of different cultures in contact (e.g., in the context of trade or colonialism).
C. Independent Invention
1. Independent invention is the process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems.
2. One reason that cultural generalities exist is that people in different societies have innovated and changed in similar ways when faced with comparable problems and challenges (e.g., the independent invention of agriculture in both the Middle East and Mexico).
V. Globalization
A. Globalization encompasses a series of processes, including diffusion, migration, and acculturation, working to promote change in a world in which nations and people are increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent.
B. Forces of globalization include international commerce and finance, travel and tourism, transnational migration, the mass media, and various high-tech information flows.
C. As a result of globalization, local people must increasingly cope with forces generated by progressively larger regional, national, and international systems.
D. Indigenous peoples and traditional societies have devised various strategies to deal with threats to their autonomy, identity, and livelihood.
VI. Anthropology Today: Touching, Affection, Love, and Sex
A. Different cultures have strikingly different notions about displays of affection and matters of personal space.
B. Americans and Brazilians have very different attitudes about personal space and displays of affection.
1. Americans tend to maintain a considerable distance from others when talking, walking, or dancing.
2. In contrast, Brazilians maintain less physical distance during social interactions.
3. Americans tend to blur the distinctions between affection, love, and sex, and thus to avoid displays of affection because of fears of improper sexuality.
4. Brazilians (including men) frequently engage in displays of affection, which are not necessarily considered to imply sex.
LECTURE TOPICS
1. Discuss the social history of early definitions of culture, and address how anthropological notions of culture are both similar and different from these.
2. Explain the distinction between the biological capacity for culture, which all humans share, and particular human cultures.
3. Discuss the deep tenacity of particular social values, illustrating it by citing cases in which people have gone to great sacrifices to maintain the value systems of their cultures.
4. Describe the process of enculturation to a subculture with which you are familiar, such as the academic professional subculture.
5. Using one particular cultural practice (e.g., clitoridectomy), discuss the implications of a culturally relativist position. Clarify the difference between moral relativism and cultural relativism, addressing how cultural relativism presents an analytic stance through which to consider the significance of particular cultural practices for the people who experience them.
6. Discuss how cultures have never been completely isolated, bounded geographically, but rather have been characterized by the movement of people, technologies, and goods across social relations and networks.
7. Analyze the different contemporary uses of the term globalization, among anthropologists and in social discourse. If we agree that such a process exists, is this a new phenomenon? What are the different positions one might take on the manifestations and effects of "globalization"? Question students on what for them constitutes globalization and whether they view such processes as largely positive or negative. How is even the discussion of globalization (e.g., as in current concerns over global terrorism) a social force with which people must contend in their daily lives?
SUGGESTED FILMS
Cry of the Yurok
1991 58 minutes
This film presents the Yuroks, California’s largest Native American tribe, from their arrival in California to their struggles with whites in the 19th century to their modern existence. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Our Identity, Our Land
1994 60 minutes
This film depicts the struggle of the Kanaka Maoli, an indigenous community on the Big Island of Hawaii, and their attempts to keep their land sacred. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Paradise Lost: Traditional Cultures at Risk
53 minutes
This film compares two traditional cultures—the Nenetsi nomads of the Yamal Peninsula, Siberia, and the Caribou Indian tribe of Canada—whose existence is threatened by the spread of Western society. The Nenetsi are depicted as faring better both economically and socially than the Caribou Indian tribe, who attribute the deterioration of their traditional culture to the infiltration of Western conveniences. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Series: Our Developing World: Regional Political Geography
This series investigates global civics in a range of developing nations all over the world. The themes discussed in the series include human rights; minority rights; health; and economic and environmental challenges and advances. 10-part series, each running about 30 minutes. Titles in the series: Central America: Costa Rica; Central America: Cuba; South America: Brazil; South America: Paraguay; Africa: Tunisia, Libya, Egypt; Africa: Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya; Africa: Tanzania, Mozambique, Lesotho; Asia: Mongolia, China, Nepal; Asia: Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam; South Pacific-Oceania: The Philippines, Kiribati. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Series: Global Issues in Our Developing World
This series addresses problems and issues common to various developing countries around the world. Each film explores a common theme in three different developing countries. 4-part series, 30-33 minutes each. Titles in the series: Ecology and the Environment: Galapagos, Mauritania, Madagascar; Economic Development: Colombia, Bolivia, India; Human Rights: Haiti, Turkey, Oman; Drugs and Health: Peru, Uganda, Turkey. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
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