Chapter 2 Outline

Introduction

• Native American sports mascots remain a controversial issue, both sides holding taken-for-granted positions on what an appropriate tradition is. It is a cultural debate.
• Anthropologists use the term “culture” as a concept that refers to the perspectives and actions that a group of people consider natural, self-evident, and appropriate. These perspectives and actions are rooted in shared meanings and the ways people act in social groups.
• This chapter focuses on the question, How does the concept of culture help explain the differences and similarities in people’s ways of life?
• What is culture?
• If culture is always changing, why does it feel so stable?
• How do social institutions express culturw?
• Can anybody own culture?
• Culture is anthropology’s central concept, and most definitions share certain common features.

What Is Culture?

• Despite hundreds of subtly different definitions of “culture” in the anthropological literature, this situation does not hobble anthropology. It is a sign of a vigorous discipline.
• English scholar Sir Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917) was a founding figure of cultural anthropology. Tylor defined culture as “the complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society” (1871, p. 1).
• Since Tylor’s time, anthropologists have developed many theories of culture (see Table 2.1). Across these theories, we identify seven basic elements that anthropologists agree are critical to any theory of culture:
• Culture is learned.
• Culture uses symbols.
• Cultures are dynamic, always adapting and changing.
• Culture is integrated with daily experience.
• Culture shapes everybody’s life.
• Culture is shared.
• Understanding culture involves overcoming ethnocentrism.
• The process of learning a culture begins at birth, and that is partly why our beliefs and conduct seem so natural: we have been doing and thinking in certain ways since we were young. Anthropologists call this process of learning the cultural rules and logic of a society enculturation.
• Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) proposed that culture is a system of symbols—a symbol being something that conventionally stands for something else—through which people make sense out of the world.
• Geertz’s interpretive theory of culture is the idea that culture is embodied and transmitted through symbols.
• Anthropologists today talk less about culture as a totally coherent and static system of meaning (in other words, a thing) and more about culture as a process through which social meanings are constructed and shared. Attention to these cultural processes shows how culture is dynamic.
• Modern cultural anthropologists pay close attention to relations of power and inequality in their analyses of cultural processes. Understanding the changing culture of any group requires understanding who holds power and how they acquire this influence.
• Our values and beliefs are shaped by many integrated elements of life experience that can be grouped under the term “culture.” Understanding that culture comprises a dynamic and interrelated set of social, economic, and belief structures is key to understanding how the whole of culture operates.
• A cross-cultural perspective demonstrates the incredible flexibility and plasticity of the human species—human belief and practices come in all shapes and forms.
• Everyone has culture. Yet, like accents, we tend to notice cultures more when they differ from those we are familiar with. In the United States, there is a tendency to view minorities, immigrants, and others who differ from white middle-class norms as “people with culture.”
• By differing from mainstream patterns, a group’s culture becomes more visible to everyone. The more “culture” in this sense of the term one appears to have, the less power one wields.
• People make sense of their worlds and order their lives by participating in social groups. Today, culture may be transmitted face to face or virtually using a variety of technological innovations. In either case, culture must be shared among members of a group.
• Cultural construction refers to the fact people collectively “build” meanings through common experience and negotiation. A “construction” derives from past collective experiences in a community, as well as lots of people talking about, thinking about, and acting in response to a common set of goals and problems.
• Overcoming ethnocentrism, or the belief that the way we do things is right and the way everyone else does things is wrong, is a major concern for anthropologists
• Cultural relativism, interpreting another culture using their goals, values, and beliefs rather than our own to make sense of what people say and do, is a central means of overcoming ethnocentrism; and it is a major feature of the anthropological perspective on culture.
• Understanding another culture in its own terms does not mean that anthropologists necessarily accept and defend all the things people do. Many anthropologists argue for critical relativism, or taking a stance on a practice or belief only after trying to understand it within context.
• Critical relativism also avoids extreme adoptions of cultural relativism, like cultural determinism, the idea that all human actions are a product of culture, denying the role of physical environment or biology on behavior.
• For some background on the origins of relativism in anthropology, see “Classic Contributions: Franz Boas and the Relativity of Culture.”
• We acknowledge a variety of workable definitions of “culture.” For the purposes of this textbook, culture consists of “those collective processes through which people in social groups construct and naturalize certain meanings and actions as normal and even necessary.”
• This definition emphasizes that those feelings of naturalness people experience about their beliefs and actions are in fact artificial, that is, humanly constructed and variable across social groups, and they can change somewhat quickly.
• Presenting culture as a dynamic and emergent process based on social relationships leads anthropologists to study the ways cultures are created and recreated constantly in people’s lives.

 

If Culture Is Always Chinging, Why Does It Feel So Stable?

• Societies function most smoothly when cultural processes feel natural and stable. People need cultural stability, and enculturation occurs every day, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.
• Our experience of culture is repeatedly stabilized by symbols, values, norms, and traditions.
• A symbol is something that conventionally, and arbitrarily, stands for something else. Although symbols do change (sometimes dramatically), they are a particularly stable, and easily remembered, way of preserving a culture’s conventional meanings.
• Values are symbolic expressions of intrinsically desirable principles or qualities. They tend to conserve a society’s dominant ideas about morality and social issues. Thus, values can change when opposing views coexist within a community but more slowly than other aspects of culture.
• Norms are typical patterns of behavior, viewed by participants as the unwritten rules of everyday life. They remain stable because people learn them from an early age and because society encourages conformity. We’re usually unaware of our own cultural norms until they’re violated, often with memorable results! (Instructors can probably describe their own unwitting violations of norms in other cultural contexts.)
• Tradition refers to the most enduring and ritualized aspects of a culture, usually assumed to be timeless or, at least, very old. The powerful notion that things have “always been a certain way” makes challenging traditions difficult, even if they justify actions that make no logical sense in modern times.

How Do Social Institutions Express Culture?

• Another reason that dynamic culture feels so stable is that it is expressed and reinforced by social institutions, the organized sets of social relationships that link individuals to each other in a structured way in a particular society. These institutions include (among others)
• Patterns of kinship and marriage
• Economic activities
• Religious institutions
• Political forms
• Associated with British anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, functionalism proposes that cultural practices and beliefs perform functions for societies, such as explaining how the world works and organizing people into efficient roles.
• Functionalists emphasize that social institutions function together in an integrated and balanced fashion to keep the whole society functioning smoothly and to minimize social change.
• Critics of functionalism, such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who in 1961 famously broke away from the functionalist mode of analysis that had dominated his research for thirty years, argued that functionalism was too associated with the natural sciences and viewed culture as too stable and smoothly functioning. (History is full of unstable, poorly functioning societies.)
• Elements of functionalism are still used by modern cultural anthropologists, especially its holistic perspective, a perspective that aims to identify and understand the whole—that is, the systematic connections between individual cultural beliefs and practices—rather than the individual parts.
• A holistic perspective can identify patterns in seemingly unrelated phenomena like breakfast cereals and sexuality and, further, what these patterns reveal about American culture. Why do so many Americans prefer cereal for breakfast? How did this become a cultural norm?
• John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) invented cornflakes in the nineteenth century because he believed that bland, healthy foods helped prevent “unhealthy” sexual urges, such as masturbation.
• In the nineteenth century, rich, hearty breakfasts (meat, eggs, biscuits, gravy, and butter) were a sign of prosperity, as was the resulting full-bodied body type.
• When Americans began valuing a healthier diet and a leaner body type, in the early twentieth century, breakfast cereals became a more desirable option.
• By the 1920s a booming breakfast cereal industry, completely detached from any ideas about sexual deviance, flooded the market with cereal choices.
• Nearly a century later, cereals remain a breakfast norm.
• A holistic analysis of cornflakes illustrates interrelationships between separate domains like beliefs (sexual morality, good health), social institutions and power (expert knowledge, medical practices), and daily life (changes in labor organization and economic life, dietary preferences).

It also shows how doing something that feels totally natural (pouring yourself a bowl of cereal in the morning) is really the product of intertwined cultural processes and meanings.

Can Anybody Own Culture?

• Technically, nobody can own “the collective processes that make the artificial seem natural,” but conflicts arise over claims to the exclusive right to use symbols that give culture power and meaning.
• This is the phenomenon of cultural appropriation, the unilateral decision of one social group to take control over the symbols, practices, or objects of another. (For example, the controversial Native American team mascots discussed at the beginning of the chapter.)
• See “Anthropologist as Problem Solver: Michael Ames and Collaborative Museum Exhibits”

Conclusion

• At the heart of all anthropological discussions of culture is the idea that culture helps people understand and respond to a constantly changing world. As we have defined it, culture consists of the collective processes that make the artificial seem natural.