Culture

Culture or Civilization,...is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. (Edward Tylor in Primitive Culture, 1871)

Anthropology is the study of humans as both biological and cultural beings. As cultural anthropologists, our focus in this class is on humans as cultural beings, but as anthropologists, we should never forget that humans are also biological organisms. Our greatest biological, genetically determined trait is our ability to learn, which is the foundation of culture.

Definitions of culture tend to focus on three general categories:

• cognitive (values, beliefs and ideas people carry around inside their head,
• behavioral (what people actually do), and
• material (material goods, things people make or build).

One anthropologist has said that culture is everything people think, everything they do, and everything they make. While it is a nice simple definition, I have one that is even simpler. (Check your text for more complex, and comprehensive, definitions.)

Culture is the learned, shared behavior of humans

Culture is learned. While as mentioned above, the ability to learn is our greatest genetic trait, we are not born with any genetically programmed behaviors except for a few reflex-type behaviors (grasping, sucking) which tend to disappear after a short time. Since we all have a great ability to learn, if I had kidnapped all of you at birth, and distributed you to, say, the Yanomamo culture, you would all have grown up thinking and acting quite differently than you do now.

Culture is shared. You learn your culture from your social group, starting with your immediate family. While ultimately each individual is unique in their values and behaviors, each value or behavior is still shared by some other members of their group(s).

Culture is behavior. While culture is also what people carry around inside their heads, behavior is the only thing that can be observed and recorded with hopefully at least some objectivity. It is much more difficult to study the ideas in peoples heads. If you ask parents, for example, about their values and behaviors with regard to child rearing, there might be several reasons why you would get incomplete or inaccurate information. The parents might tell you what they think you want to hear; they might be worried about what you might do with the information (or just think it is none of your business); they might have thought very little about their own values of child rearing; or perhaps they are not very good at self-monitoring either thoughts or behavior, and would find it difficult to talk about. Behavior can be observed and described. There are still problems in focusing on behavior, but it is still better to try to infer values from observable behavior. (Of course, ideally anthropologists need to study all aspects of culture.)

To help in your understanding of what culture means, I offer you some of my favorite comments, analogies, and comparisons about culture. None of these are entirely original with me.

Culture is what makes you feel strange away from home.

Have you ever been away from home and felt strange or uncomfortable in a social situation? How far away from home did you have to go? Probably everyone on earth has found themselves in a social situation in which they felt uncomfortable, and in most cases, one doesn't have to go far from home for this to occur. Perhaps your first day in college, or when you visited a friend's home, or when you had your first day at a new job would all qualify. In a sense, such experiences are cross-cultural experiences, since a different home, a new school, or a new job are really new subcultures (sub-sub-sub cultures?) within our larger cultures. There are slight differences in what is expected of you, and you may have difficulty knowing what to do, understanding the "insider's" language or jokes, or being able to "read" the behavior of those with whom you interact. You are feeling cultural differences.

Culture is like a security blanket.

The notion of a security blanket (such as Linus carried in the old Peanuts cartoon) is a well-known concept amongst parents. Many babies and toddlers will develop a profound emotional attachment to some object, often a baby blanket or stuffed animal. They will insist on carrying and hugging this object, sometimes for years, even after it becomes tattered and torn and thoroughly (to others) ridiculous.

My oldest daughter was born in May, so she was an infant over Hawaii's hot summer and early fall. When her father came home from work, he liked to take off his shirt, and then play with the baby. He did not like to put the baby against his bare, rather sweaty chest, so he would throw his blue mesh tank top shirt over his shoulder, and put the baby against that. Soon we noticed that when he put the baby down, she hung on to his shirt. If we took the shirt away from her, she would cry. Naturally, we gave the shirt back!

Soon, the shirt became her shirt. It went with my daughter everywhere, since she was always content as long as she could feel the blue mesh and the white trim with her fingers. Her first word was not daddy or mommy, but "shirt"! When she started preschool at age three, I warned her that preschool was a big place, with lots of things going on. "Your shirt will get lost", I told her. Still, she took it to preschool that first day, and it got lost. After a three hour search, fortunately successful, she agreed not to take the shirt to preschool.

My daughter at two with her shirt

Gradually, as she got older, the shirt was banned from leaving the house, and finally, banned from leaving her room. Still, when my daughter had a bad day at kindergarten, or 2nd grade, the first thing she would do when she got home was to go to her room and find her shirt. When she was about 11 she went to camp for a week, and I took the opportunity to retrieve her shirt, and hide it in my room. She never asked about it. However, when she was 16, she came to me one day: "Mom, do you still have my old shirt around anywhere?" When I admitted I did, she hesitantly asked if she could have it. I gave it to her, and have only seen it out once or twice since. I don't know where it is: as far as I know, it accompanied her through college, and she still has it with her.

The shirt has not resembled a shirt for years; the white trim quickly fell off, and the blue mesh is ragged and torn. To have any kind of attachment to it appears to the outsider as irrational, ridiculous, nonsensical. Our own culture is much like that shirt. It supplies us with enormous comfort and emotional support. To outsiders, many parts of it seem silly, irrational, or downright dumb. When you catch yourself thinking that someone else's culture is irrational, or silly, remember that culture is a security blanket for its members. Our own culture serves this function for us.

Culture is like ears--you can't see your own, but other peoples look odd or stick out.

Physical anthropologists will tell you that one of the most variable parts of the anatomy is the ear. Do a covert survey, and you will discover that some people do indeed have some rather odd looking ears! Yet your own are not something you notice except for those occasions when you look in a mirror. In the same way, we tend not to notice much about our own culture, since what we do and think seems natural, and those around us feel the same way. Anthropology, some have said, holds up a mirror, so that we can better see our own culture.

Culture is the arbitrary imposition of form on the environment.

Arbitrary is an ordinary English word which means by whim, or caprice. Presumably if I handed out final grades arbitrarily, it would mean that, regardless of how hard you have worked, your final grade would depend upon what I felt like doing at the moment. If culture is an arbitrary human attempt to make sense out of their environment, than it doesn't really matter what a culture has as values or social norms of behavior. Any value or behavioral norm would work just as well. (Instead of saying that monogamy is the best marriage form, we could say that plural marriages are the best marriage form.) For many, it can be scary to think of values as arbitrary.

Culture is a code.

Perhaps when you were a child you and a friend invented your own language, so that you could communicate while the adults around you (and perhaps older siblings) would be clueless as to what you were talking about. All language is a code: a set of sounds which speakers of the language have agreed have meaning. As long as there is agreement as to the meaning, we can communicate. The code itself is somewhat arbitrary, though. We have all "agreed" that the round or oblong thing attached to your computer keyboard is called a "mouse". We could all agree to call it a "roach" (hey, I think it looks as much like a cockroach as a mouse), and as long as we all knew the code, we could communicate. Entering a different culture is much like having to learn a new code, with nobody able to tell you all the rules.

Culture is a paradigm.

Paradigm is another English word that is extremely useful. A paradigm is a model, a set of really fundamental assumptions (or in science, hypotheses with considerable evidence to support them), which are treated as givens and used to interpret events. Culture is much like this: we all have learned a whole set of assumptions about "human nature", about how people should act, about what the goals of life are, etc., and as long as everyone else around us is operating in the same paradigm, we do well.

It is possible that just as in science, some culture's paradigms are more grounded in the "real world" than others. In most cases this would be hard to prove. In science, as evidence accumulates, there sometimes have to be major paradigm shifts. This can be very difficult for a culture to do.

Let me illustrate the concept of a paradigm with a joke that also illustrates how some paradigms may be more valid than others. This is a somewhat sexist joke, so be warned! Two people, one a man and the other a woman, are each alone in their car, driving toward each other on a curvy mountain road. As the man goes around a curve, he sees the woman driver coming toward him, her car totally out of control. She careens into his lane, out again, than back again. At the very last moment, she manages to bring her car into her own lane, and passes him safely. As she goes by, she leans out her window and hollers "pig!" He is instantly insulted and angry--after all, she was the one not in control of her car, and she shouldn't be calling him names. At the last possible instant he leans out and shouts "bitch!" at her. Then, he drives around the next curve, and runs smack into a large pig in the middle of the road.

Two cultures can miscommunicate as completely as this couple when they do not have the same paradigm. There is not always a pig in the road though to make it clear which culture has the "better" paradigm, and in many cases it may be that both paradigms work well to help the two cultures survive.

Culture is the adaptive mechanism of humans.

Adaptation is an important term in anthropology as well as in biology generally. Adaptation refers to the process by which an organism copes with a specific physical, biological, and social environment to meet the fundamental requirements for survival. All life forms must adapt to their environment, and if that environment changes they must adapt to the new environment .There are three ways any organism can adapt: genetically (via evolution), physiologically, and behaviorally. The extent to which a species can adapt either physiologically or behaviorally is in itself a genetically determined trait.

Humans, through evolution over some 4 million years, have adapted genetically to the environment, primarily by evolving an enormous ability to learn. As a result, when the environment changes, we primarily adapt by changing our behavior, which in the case of humans is called culture.

A specific set of cultural beliefs and practices is therefore presumably an adaptation to a specific physical, biological, and social/political/historical environment. If it is, than the specific traits of the culture are not arbitrary. To the extent that cultural traits are arbitrary, they can not be adaptive. To the extent that cultural traits are adaptive, they are not arbitrary.

If most cultural traits either are, or were, adaptive, than the way to understand a culture is to examine its physical, biological, and social/political/historical environment. As an anthropologist, that is what I believe. While some minor aspects of culture may be completely arbitrary, I do not think most traits of any culture are arbitrary. A culture's major traits are adaptive, or at least they were at some point in the past. The trick about one's own culture is to figure out which traits are in fact adaptive, and which are no longer adaptive.

The concept that cultural traits are adaptive is one of the main organizational concepts for this course.