Download What Is Culture? The Conceptual Question

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What Is Culture?
The Conceptual Question
The anthropologist sees culture as the shared ideas and behaviors of a group of people.
These Trobriand Island women are assembling yams they have harvested in preparation for a
feast.
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Overview
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Fishy Culture, Part I
On the outskirts of the small town of Main Brook, in northern Newfoundland, surrounded by spruce forest, is “the Pit,” a gravel pit once excavated to build a road
but subsequently treated as an all-purpose community resource for storing firewood, drying fishnets, picking berries, and gardening. My wife, Susan, and I drive
out to the Pit to watch Aunt Belle, two of her sons, and a granddaughter setting
potatoes in the sandy ground. We’re living in Main Brook to learn about Newfoundland culture, and Aunt Belle has become one of our best informants, or consultants, of cultural information. She is a vigorous, vocal advocate of traditional life
in rural Newfoundland, which she draws her large extended family into sharing
with her. Planting a big vegetable garden with a “crowd” of kin is one way to live
that life (Figure 1.1). “I like for all hands to be as one,” she says, pausing to lean
on her shovel. “All hands . . .” Aunt Belle’s language is shot through with evidence
that her people have been fishermen. The image of the fishing boat and its crew
spills over even into the potato patch. Her sons call me “skipper,” a friendly sign of
respect less distancing than “sir.” They joke that being a teacher, I have a good
“berth.” Berths are locations along the coast for anchoring cod traps, and some
berths catch more cod and thus are more profitable than others. When today’s
gardening is done, Aunt Belle will air out her garden boots and gloves not on her
“stoop,” “stairs,” or “porch,” but on her “bridge,” an allusion to the captain’s
observation deck on a ship. When she and her sons drive their pickup truck south
to shop they “climb aboard our machine and steam up the coast”— “up . . .”
meaning not “north” but upwind into the prevailing sailing winds. Belle’s is a culture thoroughly colored by nautical and fishing lore. So what do anthropologists
mean by this term “culture”?
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Overview
Social workers, fish biologists, historians, and journalists have all at some time
pulled on rubber boots and stood in the mud with Newfoundlanders while they
were planting potatoes or cleaning fish. The anthropologist’s distinction doesn’t
come from observing something that no one else observes. True, they occasionally study some uncommon subject, such as fish-grease boxes or toilet stall graffiti. And as recently as forty years ago anthropologists often were the first persons
to walk into some remote village with the intention of learning the residents’
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Chapter One What Is Culture?
Figure 1.1
In Newfoundland,
Canada, Belle and
her neighbors share
a culture that calls
for entire families to
clear their gardens in
early June to plant
potatoes with fish
and seaweed
fertilizers.
undocumented language and observing their unknown rituals. Those days are
gone. The anthropologist’s genuine distinction from the other visitors standing
around observing the scene has always been that she or he conceives of what people are doing and thinking in terms of their culture. Over many years we’ve developed the concept of culture and the questions that we ask ourselves, whether
standing in muddy gardens or elegant courtyards, about the culture behind
what’s happening.
This chapter begins with a working definition of culture and goes on to distinguish the terms “ethnic group,” “society,” “race,” and “subculture” from the term
“culture.” Seven widely accepted characteristics of culture are described. As societies become less isolated and cultures less geographically separated, anthropologists have adjusted their concept of culture; so three more recently conceived
characteristics of culture are introduced. To help sharpen our idea of what culture is, the chapter concludes with seven statements about what culture is not.
Upon successful completion of this chapter you should be able to:
1. Define culture.
2. Differentiate culture, ethnic group, and subculture, and distinguish culture from civilization, society, and behavior.
3. Explain why “race” is not a scientific concept.
4. Illustrate how cultural anthropologists study concepts of “race.”
5. Describe the impact of globalization on the anthropological concept of
culture.
6. Apply seven characteristics of cultures to describe a culture with which
you are familiar.
A Definition of Culture
27
A Definition of Culture
The questions cultural anthropologists ask about people’s lives derive from the
way we define “culture.” I propose this general definition:
Culture is the learned, shared understandings among a group of people
about how to behave and what everything means.
Take that sentence apart and examine the terms.
“Learned, shared understandings” contrasts with instinctual or inborn behaviors, of which humans have relatively few except for the powerful drive of little
ones to learn to talk, learn to walk, and acquire a culture. “Learned” means that
young Newfoundlanders or recent immigrants to the island, such as a new
spouse from the mainland, have probably acquired less of the culture than have
the old Newfoundlanders and those who have lived in Newfoundland all their
lives. Through social interaction Newfoundlanders are always learning from each
other. They teach each other, imitate each other, correct each other, and so come
to share a culture. From infancy on, a Newfoundlander is always learning, thus
acquiring culture, a process we call enculturation.
“Learned, shared understandings” means that if Susan and I are going to learn
Newfoundland culture, we will have to assemble it from what we find in common
among Belle, her neighbors, and many other people. If Belle knows or does something unique, then it isn’t in the culture. If her neighbors and kinfolk begin to
know or do that something, too, then by definition it becomes part of the culture.
“Learned, shared understandings” means that culture is in people’s minds. I use
the word “understandings” to include knowledge, such as Newfoundlanders’
vocabulary for soil types (“pug,” “mud,” “sand,” and so forth) and also their
deeper grasp of things, such as a feel for where that thin line is between joking
with someone and insulting him.
“Learned, shared understandings among a group of people” reinforces the
“shared” idea, that culture only exists if a collectivity has it. The group can be
small, such as Belle’s family or a fishing crew, which shares some experiences,
knowledge, in-jokes, vocabulary, and so on. Or the group can be large, such as all
Canadians, which includes French speakers and Inuktitut (formerly “Eskimo”)
speakers, among others; but nevertheless all Canadians share some things by
attending school, interacting politically, participating in the same economy, dealing with similar northern climates, and watching television.
“Learned, shared understandings among a group of people about how to
behave” says that culture guides our actions, sometimes as rules and knowledge
that you are conscious of (“drive on the right, pass on the left”), and sometimes as
habits you picked up unconsciously by imitating those around you, such as the
way the tone of your voice rises at the end of a question. My field assistant in
Newfoundland, Viva, learned how to sew from her mother Mabel, with additional
clues from her Aunt Stella next door and from an older cousin up the road. Viva
became a better seamstress than any of them, and now she teaches other women,
informally and in workshops. Thus do actions become shared behavior in a
group.
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Chapter One What Is Culture?
Figure 1.2
During the twelve days
of Christmas in Newfoundland, groups of
rowdy “mummers”
(disguised tricksters)
visit the houses
demanding a drink
and a dance, playing
on their neighbors’
fear of strangers.
“Learned, shared understanding among a group of people about how to
behave and what everything means” says that not only does culture provide guidance on what to do, how to do it, and when, but culture also predicts and interprets what others will do and say. In Newfoundland, for example, Susan and I
fairly quickly grasped that one doesn’t go to the front door of a house—the one
that opens into the living room or “parlour”—unless one is the Mountie or the
undertaker. We learned that to be interpreted correctly we were expected to enter
a house through the kitchen door. Entering through the kitchen door “means”
that we are neighbors or kin—that is, familiar, like family. Entering through the
front door “means” death and trouble. After we grasped that, it still took us a
while to learn to stop knocking on the kitchen door and waiting for the women
of the house to admit us. Knocking on a door instead of just walking in and sitting down by the stove “means” that you’re a stranger (“you don’t belong to this
place”), perhaps even a ghost, and thus again, probably trouble. At Christmas,
the masked troublemakers, the “mummers,” knock on doors to frighten the
inhabitants before entering to drink their booze, insult them, and pinch them
(Figure 1.2).
By the end of the first season of fieldwork, in and out of peoples’ houses all
day, Susan and I had learned enough Newfoundland culture to behave correctly
in approaching a house and thus be interpreted as friendly and familiar, so we
could get on with the business of talking and observing without alarming people.
You can imagine how much longer it took us to grasp the meaning of subtler,
more complex events, such as when Aunt Sophie sent pies to the Anglican
Church Women’s bake sale but didn’t show up herself to make purchases.
Sophie’s action may be translated, “I’m going to do my duty as a responsible
community member, not like some people I could mention, but I’m upset about
the way some things are being done and if you don’t know what they are, you had
A Definition of Culture
29
better approach me in a concerned and respectful manner and find out!” Obviously, our learning the Newfoundlanders’ culture was going to require some
sophisticated interpretations of what everything means.
In the foregoing I have sketched a working definition of culture. Before distinguishing the term from related concepts, note that anthropologists speak both of
“culture” and “a culture.” Used in the first sense, and sometimes capitalized, “culture” or “Culture” refers to something that all humans have by virtue of being
members of social groups. We mean the word that way when we say, “Culture distinguishes our species from that of the banana slug.” Used in the second sense, “a
culture” refers to the particular shared understandings of a certain social group.
We mean the word that way when we say, “The culture changed when the community abandoned wood fires for coal stoves.” Thinking about particular cultures associated with certain social groups leads to the concepts of subcultures
and ethnic groups.
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Fishy Culture, Part II
Belle’s son empties a tub of caplin, a smeltlike fish, onto the newly planted potato
bed, and Belle spreads the little fish around with her shovel. Newfoundland is an
island in the north Atlantic, the farthest eastern province of Canada. Like Belle,
most of the northern peninsula’s residents trace their ancestry back to southeastern Ireland and southwestern England. Their families have been settled in tiny
coastal communities, called “outports,” engaged in fishing and logging since the
early nineteenth century. In 1911, the geographer J. D. Rogers called Newfoundland’s entire social framework “fishy,” and in many respects it still is, even if Belle’s
sons now spend most of their time logging or building highways. The way of life
in Main Brook, and much of Newfoundland, is “fishy,” a culture shaped by 200
years of coastal settlement to supply European and Caribbean markets with salt
cod, and now to provide fresh snow crab, shrimp, and flounder (Figure 1.3). As a
landlubber, I notice immediately the turns of phrase, the clothing, the detailed
attention to the weather, and the conversation starters by Belle and her crowd that
evoke a life by the sea.
A fishy culture, compared to the farming tradition that underlies most of
North American culture, has strikingly different ideas about ownership, about
risk, and about accumulation of resources. Fishermen’s religion is different, and
they treat the land differently than farmers do. This maritime culture is not just
a legacy celebrated by proud old women like Belle, however; the young in
school have lessons and fieldtrips to perpetuate some of the lore. More important, the teachers are often locals who grew up with the legacy and teach it as
much by example as by lessons. One of the teachers is Belle’s daughter-in-law.
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Chapter One What Is Culture?
Figure 1.3 The shared understandings and behaviors that make up Newfoundland culture
are permeated by centuries of coastal settlement in pursuit of cod and salmon.
This fishy maritime culture has never been static, although to visitors the
communities may seem like museums of old-time ways of doing and talking. In
fact, Newfoundland culture had been undergoing changes for decades before I
stood in Belle’s potato patch. The traditional culture as well as the cultural
changes became my research career for the next twenty years, summarized in a
book and numerous articles that Susan and I wrote for the scholarly and popular press. How we have thought about that “fishy” culture will often serve as
examples in this book.
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Culture, Subculture, and Ethnic Group
Many people in European American nations like the United States, Canada, and
England use the terms “culture,” “society,” “ethnic group,” and “race,” often
interchanging these terms. Cultural anthropologists, on the other hand, have
attempted to distinguish and clarify these terms.
To review, “culture” has been defined here as shared understandings, a guide
to behavior and thought that people learn as members of some group. Culture is
not the group, but it is a property of the group. The group could be a Boy Scout
troop, a Newfoundland village, a population of Iraqi shepherds traveling over a
dry grassland, an entire nation, or perhaps a group of nations. A society is a
Culture, Subculture, and Ethnic Group
31
group of people organized into social relationships to perform certain tasks such
as feeding and defending themselves and raising children. A society usually has
its own territory, perpetuates itself over generations, and is at least partly selfgoverning. The society’s culture specifies what the social relationships should be,
how to perform the tasks, and why to go to the trouble in the first place.
A subculture is that particular mix of shared understandings held by groups
within a larger society. What distinguishes the subculture from other subcultures
in the society might be language, dress, religion, habits of work, food preferences,
and child-raising practices, to mention just a few topics. Mexican farm workers in
Michigan and Francophones (French speakers) in Canada participate in such
subcultures. While maintaining some cultural distinctions from those around
them, the farm workers and Francophones are also sharing some features of the
wider culture. Other subcultures derive from common residence, work, or avocation. Silicon Valley computer programmers and Civil War reenactors participate
in subcultures. A hundred years ago, “campus culture” was a fairly distinctive
subculture of the United States, in which a relatively small number of students,
mostly wealthy and mostly male, participated wholeheartedly for a few years,
then remembered fondly and a little sheepishly for the rest of their lives (Moffatt
1989).
An ethnic group is a group within a society that maintains a subculture based
on religion, language, common origin, or ancestral traditions. The ethnic group
invests effort to distinguish itself from others in the wider society. Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia, for example, is a multiethnic city in Southeast Asia. Residing
there are Christians and Jews from Europe, Hindus from India, Moslem
Malaysians, Buddhist Chinese from South China, and many smaller ethnic
groups whose members immigrated to Kuala Lumpur from the rural areas and
still practice the languages, religions, and historical traditions of their home area.
As for Newfoundlanders like Belle and her family, now that their onceindependent country has become a Canadian province, they are closely tied into
the rest of the nation, but they are still somewhat culturally distinct in their
dialect and ancestral traditions; so they too may be considered an ethnic group.
Ethnic groups usually share some culture with the other ethnic groups in
order to participate in the political and economic life of the society of which they
are parts. Newfoundlanders, for example, vote in Canadian national elections
and watch the same television programs as other Canadians do. Ethnic group
members are also aware of their group identity and distinctiveness, and they usually invest effort to foster such awareness in themselves and their fellow citizens.
Newfoundlanders are definitely aware of their distinctiveness, as you’ll see in this
book. To distinguish themselves from other groups, ethnic group members may
intentionally display some cultural differences, which we call ethnic flags (Barth
1998). An ethnic flag might be as obvious as the chador, or “head scarf,” with
which Muslim Malaysian women cover their heads in public, or as subtle as the
little figurine of the god of commerce mounted next to the cash register in a Chinese Malaysian shop. For Newfoundlanders, one ethnic flag is their Anglo-Irish
accent; another is their use of archaic and maritime words.
Ethnic groups are easy to label (“Mennonite” or “Japanese Peruvian”) but
harder to specify culturally. There is always the question of what is the essential
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Chapter One What Is Culture?
core and where is the boundary. Is it a defining characteristic of Mennonites that
they drive black cars with no chrome? What distinguishes the Japanese Peruvians,
since few of them speak Japanese? For individuals, ethnicity, meaning one’s identification with or participation in an ethnic group, can be even more challenging
to define. One’s ethnicity may be multiple, or unclear to oneself, or vary depending upon the social situation. As cultural anthropologists have grappled with this
complexity and fluidity, they have revised their concept of “culture,” as this chapter later describes.
Culture and Race
Anthropologists consider the concept of race to be unscientific, yet they study
race all the time. How can that be? Defining “race” is difficult, because different
cultures and scholars give it different meanings. In practice, most Americans
treat ethnic group and race as the same thing, but for anthropologists, race refers
to biological differences between populations, while “culture” and “ethnic
group” refer to learned behavioral differences between groups (American Anthropological Association 1997).
In the nineteenth century anthropologists tried to sort and classify the world’s
races by biological criteria, but we now know that it can’t be done. In addition,
nothing has been accomplished by trying to explain differences in history, behavior, and abilities of human populations in racial terms, because the differences
are better explained by who has the “guns, germs, and steel,” as one scholar puts
it (Diamond 1997). Our professional association’s “Statement on Race” points
out that race doesn’t explain anything (American Anthropological Association
1998). It concludes that “any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations [is] both arbitrary and subjective.”
Some ethnic groups’ members may indeed appear physically different from
others in the society. Among the Chinese in the Philippines, with whom I lived
for a couple of years, were individuals who looked different from the Filipino
majority, which stands to reason because the Chinese and Filipinos were geographically separate populations until the sixteenth century. But the Amish in
western Pennsylvania are not physically different from their non-Amish neighbors, many of whom are, like the Amish, also descended from German immigrants. Even ethnic groups that are usually physically distinguished from other
groups include individuals who are physically different from each other. The
reverse is also true: individuals who are physically similar may be members of different ethnic groups. In other words, the biological differences within any named
group (“Mexicans in Texas,” “Japanese Americans,” “whites,” for example) are as
great as the differences between groups (American Anthropological Association
1998).
To deny the reality of race in humans is not to deny the reality of biological
difference. Obviously, biological variation in our species is enormous, encompassing important and fascinating heritable characteristics such as blood chemistry, body build, skin color, hair form, and physiology (the functioning of cells
and organs). However, these traits vary independently of each other; all mixes are
Race as a Cultural Construct
33
possible, and many combinations exist today. The traits don’t stick together
through time in a cluster as something called a “race.” The branch of anthropology called biological anthropology takes as one of its tasks the study of human
physical variety. That study shows that humans constitute just one species—one
with much genetic variety, to be sure; but because its members are mobile and
interbreeding, clear subdivisions are obliterated.
Race as a Cultural Construct
Even though there is no scientific basis for classifying people into races, societies
never let the facts bother them. They develop ideas about the differences between
people; so “race” may be called a cultural construct, meaning a conceptual model
of reality shared by a group. A construct may be thoroughly tested, as has been the
navigational knowledge about currents and weather possessed by Polynesian outrigger captains (Gladwin 1970). On the other hand, a cultural construct may be
just one of many possible but flawed models of reality, as have been most cultures’
systems of racial categories. In creating these cultural constructs, cultures act as
Humpty Dumpty does in Through the Looking Glass when he declares to Alice,
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
A scheme of human races is not a fact, it’s an “ideology of inequality” (American
Anthropological Association 1998). For example, the North American concept of
race and racial distinctions derives from the ideology of inequality developed during the European worldwide expansion that began in the sixteenth century.
Explorers groped for reasons to justify conquest in other continents. Deciding
that those continents were home to peoples of inferior races who needed help to
save their souls and develop a proper work ethic was a convenient justification. In
the United States, slavery, the Chinese Exclusion Laws, and the displacement of
Native Americans during Western settlement were made more acceptable by defining other peoples as races and then claiming inheritable shortcomings in those
races. This is the essence of racism, the belief that actual or alleged differences
between racial groups indicate the superiority of one of them (Doob 1999, 7).
Some of the nineteenth-century pioneers of cultural anthropology shared this
cultural construct, this widespread ideology of differences, and they tried to place
race on a scientific footing. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that
anthropologists, particularly Americans led by Franz Boas, the first anthropologist to hold a university position, demonstrated the flaws in racial research. Boas
forcefully argued that race and culture should be treated as separate phenomena,
and that the behavior that most of his countrymen were attributing to race was
in fact cultural (Boas 1948).
The question that arises for the cultural anthropologist today is not, therefore,
what are the races of humankind, but what races do people of this or that culture
imagine there are? What does the group think about human biological diversity,
and why does it label differences in that way? Exercise 4 investigates the cultural
constructs of English-speaking Americans concerning the races. Besides sharing
an understanding of the names for races, most Americans have thought that children inherit a certain race from their parents and then remain that race for life.
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Chapter One What Is Culture?
Figure 1.4
In the United States
(top), no matter how
different these brothers look from each
other, they will all be
labeled as the same
race: a person is
labeled the same as his
or her parents and
retains that label for
life. In Brazil (bottom),
these boys will be
labeled differently
based upon their
appearance, regardless
of their parents’
appearance; and if
their appearance
changes, their race
label changes.
To classify the race of a child of parents of two races, the cultural rule (often codified into law) in the United States has been hypodescent, meaning the child is
the same race as the parent of the race of lowest status. Meanwhile, Brazilians,
another multiethnic population with much physical variety, define more races of
people and permit them to change race during their lifetimes.
Each Brazilian’s tipo, or race, is based on appearances, not on her or his parents
(Figure 1.4). My professor collected forty terms for tipo used by residents of just
one village (Kottak 2004, 122). A morena, for example, is a female with dark,
straight hair, dark eyes, brown skin, and thin nose and lips. A sarara is a female
with light hair, skin, and eyes, a wide nose, and thick lips. A morena and a sarara
could be sisters, with the same mother and father. Brazilians also permit people
to change racial labels when their lives change. If they acquire a different social
status or cultural lifestyle or become tanned, they will be labeled as a different tipo
(Fish 1995). My professor’s Brazilian research assistant referred to himself, variously, as escuro (“dark”), preto (“black”), or moreno escuro (“dark brunet”) (Kottak
2004, 123). Can you see how social mobility could differ between societies
depending upon whether they believed the “races” were fixed or variable?
Distinguishing the terms culture, a culture, subculture, society, race, and ethnic group allows us to speak somewhat more precisely about human groups and
The Characteristics of Culture
35
their shared understandings. Next I’ll continue to sharpen the concept of culture
and distinguish it from related concepts.
The Characteristics of Culture
The concept of culture as anthropologists use it to mean shared understandings
and patterns of behavior is only a little more than 160 years old, beginning as
European folklorists such as Gustav Klemm developed a way to understand peasants’ traditions and beliefs (Table 1.1). Since then, thousands of anthropologists
Table 1.1 Timeline for the Concept of Culture
Contemporary Events
Year
The Concept of Culture
Napoleon’s army conquers Italy.
1796
–
–
–
–
German philosopher Immanuel Kant
uses the term “Kulture,” meaning
“civilization.”
First telegraph lines are strung across
the United States.
1843
–
–
–
–
–
German ethnographer Gustav
Klemm is first to use “Cultur” in an
anthropological sense.
First Wild West show is staged in
Niagara Falls, New York.
1871
–
–
–
–
E. B. Tylor is the first English speaker
to use “Culture” in an anthropological sense.
The “Monkey Trial” in Dayton,
Tennessee, convicts John Thomas
Scopes for teaching evolution.
1925
–
–
–
“Culture” in an anthropological
sense first appears in English and
American dictionaries.
Russia launches the first orbiting
satellite, Sputnik.
1958
–
–
–
Influenced by cybernetics and
physics, Leslie White describes “Culture” as a system of energy capture
measurable in kilojoules per capita.
“Ethnic cleansing” leads to massacres in Kosovo, of former
Yugoslavia.
1995
–
–
–
–
American Anthropological Association President Annette Weiner suggests that “Culture” may have
become obsolete in the contemporary globalizing world.
Centenary celebration of the
Olympic Games is held in Athens,
Greece.
2004
Interdisciplinary “Culture Studies”
programs and courses are offered at
many U.S. colleges and universities.
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Chapter One What Is Culture?
have been writing and teaching about culture in that general sense. A few times
they have even declared “culture” dead, but it recovers and even proliferates. The
current growth of interdisciplinary “culture studies” programs at universities
indicates the robustness of the culture concept. Culture studies combine literary
and art criticism, communications, history, and anthropology around a humanistic and political definition of culture.
Working from many theoretical positions on a wide variety of human topics,
anthropologists have proposed and employed many variations on that definition
of culture. Such a variety of definitions may alarm you, as it does some professionals, believing so much variety to be a sign of an immature science. But every
discipline organizes itself around a few big concepts which, fortunately, escape
precise definition and thus retain some power to generate creative work. Anthropology’s “culture” has been compared to the grand concepts in other fields, such
as “energy,” “evolution,” and “society” (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963, orig. 1953,
375). I would add to this list “the market,” “personality,” “power,” and “art.” It’s
not difficult to identify the discipline associated with each of these big and
imprecise concepts.
Even though there are many definitions, there is widespread consensus in textbooks about the principal characteristics of culture (Kottak 1997b, 18). A consensus of what culture is contributes to a consensus of what questions to ask
about it. So here are seven characteristics of culture, each linked to chapters in
this book:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Cultures are integrated.
Cultures are products of history.
Cultures can be changed, and they can cause change.
Cultures are strengthened by values.
5. Cultures are powerful determinants of behavior.
6. Cultures are largely composed of and transmitted by symbols.
7. Human culture is unique in complexity and variability.
Cultures Are Integrated
Cultures are integrated, though imperfectly. Integration means, for example, that
one part of Newfoundland’s culture is related to another part. The traditional
expectation that a young married couple should build a house next door to the
husband’s father and brothers is related to the work organization of a cod-fishing
crew of brothers. Not only do the men launch a boat together at 4:00 a.m., but
the wives and children help split and dry the catch when the boat returns that
afternoon. All this work is easier to organize if the workers are also neighbors.
Cultural integration is imperfect, however, because cultures include inconsistencies. Newfoundland men can survive hard nights out in the bush in winter, but
many are afraid of the dark in their own houses. The holistic question of Chapter
3 examines culture as an integrated system, or set of mutually influential relationships among the parts.
The Characteristics of Culture
37
Cultures Are Products of History
Our lives today have been shaped by the outcomes of past practices. Belle’s gardening and her language are “fishy” because her people have been going to sea for
two centuries or more. American culture would be different today if German had
been adopted as an official second language. In the 1850s, Congress considered
adopting German, but decided against it. Sixty years later, the attitude toward
German culture in the United States had deteriorated. Propaganda against the
Germans during World War I was so intense that German words became taboo.
Sauerkraut was called “liberty cabbage.” The comparative question of Chapter 4
reveals that most cultures have always been interconnected to, and thus influenced by, others. The temporal question of Chapter 5 focuses on history and culture change. If cultures are contingent, meaning highly dependent upon the
particular events of their history, then it is difficult for anthropologists to construct general laws about how they function (“if this happens, that will happen”)
because there will be so many exceptions. The naturalistic question of Chapter 2
and the reflexive question of Chapter 9 both consider the question of whether or
not anthropology is a science.
Cultures Can Be Changed, and They Can Cause Change
Cultures can change rapidly. For example, in the 1970s many Newfoundlanders
who had only recently acquired electricity swiftly accepted television into their
homes. The change that television generated in visiting customs was equally
swift. It became acceptable to stay home and watch “the soaps” instead of going
next door to play card games. The social-structural question in Chapter 7
explores the relationship of society and culture that these house-visiting customs
reveal. A culture also alters and is altered by the biology of the population that
participates in it. As an example of culture affecting human biology, in prehistoric European societies, when milking cows became a regular part of the culture,
smallpox also became established, because the bacterium that produces cowpox
evolved to flourish in the nearby human host and became more virulent. Finally,
a culture changes and is changed by the group’s biophysical environment, as
when forest dwellers acquire metal axes and can more easily alter or eliminate
their forest. The interactions of human biology, environment, and culture are
explored in the bio-cultural question in Chapter 6.
Cultures Are Strengthened by Values
Cultures are strengthened by values, or shared understandings of what is good
and right to do and to be, as well as what is bad and wrong. The values adhering
to many of our common understandings compel us to do the right thing, culturally speaking. The presence of values helps to explain why people follow their culture so often, even if they know they don’t have to. In rural Newfoundland, most
people are practicing Christians, and they observe the Sabbath by not engaging in
any “work,” even if they don’t attend church that day. The value attached to the
biblical injunction to treat the seventh day as a day of rest has been strong
38
Chapter One What Is Culture?
enough that anyone who absolutely needed to do some chores would do them
out of sight.
Susan and I considered it a nuisance that Main Brook’s few shops were closed
on Sunday and that everyone stopped doing their ordinary work, which is what I
was there to observe. Over time, however, we began to see the Sabbath from the
Newfoundlanders’ perspective. One day while I was watching Dan help his
mother Belle to dig potatoes, I asked him whether they would be back the next
day, Sunday, to finish the job. Dan replied, “No, boy, we don’t work on the Sabbath. If you want to work on the Sabbath then you didn’t work hard enough the
other six days.” I thought his retort was amusing at the time, but writing it in my
notes later, I realized that Dan was linking the value of observing the Sabbath
with the value of hard work. Newfoundlanders impressed us as very hard workers, putting in long hours, often both on the job and around their house and garden. To call someone a hard worker is high praise. But as it is written in
Ecclesiastes, there is a time for work and a time for not working.
Viewing other people’s ways as relative to their historical and cultural situation is what is meant by the relativistic question in Chapter 10. When anthropologists look at other cultures from the relativistic perspective, meaning without
judging it by our own standards, we begin to examine our own culture afresh,
and even to become self-critical about the way we examine culture, which is the
point of the reflexive question in Chapter 9.
Cultures Are Powerful Determinants of Behavior
Cultures are powerful determinants of behavior, but people are not puppets. Culture is powerful because much of what we have learned is beneath our awareness,
or has become a comfortable habit, or is surrounded by values that make us feel
bad if we don’t do right, or is being done by everybody else so we conform in order
to be accepted. But sometimes we step out between the bars of our cage and do
something alternative, deviant, unique, or creative. All of us break some of the
rules sometimes. None of us even knows all of the rules, as Exercise 4 in Chapter 2
demonstrates. In Newfoundland I was impressed by how powerful were the forces
for conformity in a small coastal village of 500 souls. Yet each person had also
carved out an individuality, including quirky behaviors and ideas. So cultures can
be employed selectively, argued over, analyzed, and changed by their practitioners. That’s one of the reasons we ask the dialogic question in Chapter 11.
Cultures Are Largely Composed of and Transmitted by Symbols
Bundling our shared understandings in symbols is what gives culture such power
to cumulate, to be transferred between people, and to endure across generations.
A symbol is anything to which its users assign meaning. The meaning is given by
the culture and may be quite arbitrary. The action or object may have no obvious
relationship to its given meaning. Actions can be symbolic, as when Mother waggles her index finger at you. Objects can be symbolic, such as a red octagon representing the STOP sign. The eight-pointed icon used on the first page of each
chapter in this book is an old symbol still being stitched into Amish and plains
The Characteristics of Culture
39
Lakota quilts as the “lone star” or “morning star,” rising in the east and representing Christian hope. We may treat it here as hope for the enlightenment or
insight about human culture.
Human languages are symbolic. The funny little figures covering this page or
the squeaks and grunts I utter when I lecture are symbolic, transmitting meaning
to readers and listeners who have learned English. Some symbols are freighted
with deep layers of significance, such as a wedding ring, and others have simple
meanings, such as the word “asparagus.”
An individual is largely enculturated through symbolic communication, even
when practical experience accompanies it. For example, a Newfoundlander teaching her friend to hook a rug relies on demonstration but also on a good deal of talk.
The talk greatly extends the cultural transmission or lesson about how to hook this
rug. It will probably include reference to the past (“this is how my mother used to
do this”), to the hypothetical (“another way this stitch could be done,” or “be sure
not to . . .”), and to the relationship between instructor and student (“just because
I’m teaching you this doesn’t mean I think I’m better than you are”).
Verbal or visual, most of human behavior is symbolic, in that it carries meaning assigned to it by the participants. If the ads in my New Yorker magazine are to
be believed, even the fragrance of a cologne can carry a fairly precise meaning.
Discovering meaning is the purpose of the interpretive question in Chapter 8.
Human Culture Is Unique in Complexity and Variability
Scholars disagree about human uniqueness. But arguing about uniqueness is
good intellectual exercise, so here is a taste of the debate. Some anthropologists
propose that the abilities of other species indicate a continuum in cultural behavior between humans and other animals, such as the great apes (Savage-Rumbaugh
1992). To claim that we are unique, those anthropologists warn, may not be particularly useful and may in practice justify bad treatment of other animals. No, we’re
unique, say others (e.g., Barrett 1991, 55–76; Perry 2003, 58–60). They acknowledge that other social species—wolves, honeybees, and chimpanzees—share complex behaviors, communicate abundantly, and solve problems creatively; but they
point out that those shared understandings are not learned and expressed symbolically, as human culture is, which greatly expands our possibilities. We alone, they
say, can discuss the past, plan the future, and imagine alternate worlds. Some linguists add that human thought, being syntactical—meaning it is structured into
sentences—is also unique to humans (Bickerton 1996; Chomsky 1988). But apes
can be taught grammar, others retort; consider Kanzy, the pygmy chimpanzee who
constructed sentences in a symbolic language on a computer keyboard (Greenfield
and Savage-Rumbaugh 1990). But apes don’t do that kind of communication
except in captivity with human trainers, comes the reply, and a lot of teaching is
necessary. No human has to be taught symbolic language. “In fact, you can’t prevent the child from learning it” (Chomsky 1994).
The debate over uniqueness has led to many interesting discoveries about language, learning, apes, and animals’ abilities. Whichever side of the debate one
takes, however, one will still be impressed by the great gulf between humans and
40
Chapter One What Is Culture?
other species in the complexity and variability of human culture and the variability of cultures within our species (Geertz 1973b). As for the complexity of human
culture, Exhibit A might be the Australian aborigines’ kinship and marriage
rules, the workings of which can render a graduate student insensate. For an
example, see “Gidjingali Marriage Arrangements” (Hiatt 1968).
As for human cultural variability, anthropologists find great differences
among cultures in such matters as their political or religious systems. The speed
with which a culture can change is also an indicator of its variability. Because
shared understandings can be altered and the new forms transmitted from person to person within a lifetime, a group can change culturally almost overnight.
Cultures’ ability to change swiftly has resulted in many varieties of human societies, not only over time but at any one time. For example, in just a few centuries
between 1600 to 1900, the culture of Great Britain generated variations of itself
among its colonists in South Africa, Australia, Newfoundland, the Falklands, and
the United States. These colonies adapted Mother England’s culture to the land,
climate, and societies encountered in their new place, resulting in differences
among them in language, farming methods, religion, and which side of the road
to drive on, to name a few.
Meanwhile, thousands of other human societies, on those and other continents, whose heritage owed nothing to Great Britain, were adapting, adopting,
and inventing their way to distinctiveness. Thus we find Jivaro, Samoan, Zuni,
Chinese, and Icelandic cultures exhibiting greater behavioral differences among
them than we find between different species of seagull or gazelle. Anthropology
arose as a discipline to discover, catalogue, and explain all this human variety; so
the comparative question of Chapter 4 has long been central to our inquiry.
As Cultures Change, “Culture” Changes
Now our culture-made and culture-making human species has reached the
twenty-first century. The people of the world are drawn into an increasingly dense
web of communication, trade, and travel. This change process, referred to as
globalization, is not new, but just the latest phase in 500 years of European
expansion. With few exceptions, the current trend is still largely driven by and for
the interests of societies derived from those of the early expansionists, namely,
those in North America and Europe. This long-term globalization trend has had a
pronounced effect upon cultures and on anthropology’s idea of what “culture” is.
One effect has been that the idea of “a culture” as equivalent to a single,
bounded society in one physical place may have become obsolete. Until the
1960s, the cultures that anthropologists studied were commonly presented in
textbooks as discrete ways of life associated with geographically separate societies, such as the Hopi or the Samoans. On a map you could point to a few
islands in the South Pacific, just east of New Guinea, and say “Trobriand Island
culture is here,” or to a spot in the Amazon and say, “Yanomamo culture is here.”
With few exceptions, the old days of distinct, geographically bounded, slowchanging societies and cultures are gone. Samoans are in Los Angeles, and
As Cultures Change, “Culture” Changes
41
Figure 1.5 The prominent role of ethnicity in current national and international affairs
demands a sophisticated and flexible notion of culture. These Kurds distinguish themselves
from other Iraqis in language, history, dress, and religion, and insist upon political representation in the newly forming government.
Trobriand Islanders watch Hollywood movies. Many of my friends from Newfoundland have moved to the petroleum fields of Northern Alberta or above the
arctic circle, on the tundra in Nunavut, historically the territory of those we
called the “Copper Eskimo.”
Nevertheless, “culture” is still at the center of human events. The powerful
and sometimes alarming role of ethnicity in current events is evidence of that
(Figure 1.5). So anthropologists, the students of cultures, still have a subject matter. But anthropology will need to adjust to what is happening to cultures. Some
of the language that anthropologists have used to talk of culture will be abandoned, and new language will be adopted. These days we think of cultures as
being more fluid, constructed, and mixed than we used to. Let’s look at each of
these characteristics.
Culture Is Seen as Fluid and Negotiable
A culture is not just a tidy inventory of understandings shared by one society in
one place. Because people are relocating themselves and passing around many
objects and ideas, cultures flow between multiple groups. Two interacting groups
may adjust their cultures to each other in a kind of unspoken bargaining process.
Cultures may be situational, with different elements practiced or displayed
depending upon where the practitioners are and who is nearby. When Newfoundlanders migrated in large numbers to Ontario in the 1960s to work in the factories, they emphasized their cultural tradition of hard work and sense of humor
42
Chapter One What Is Culture?
and downplayed their religious and speech traits that Ontarians considered
unsophisticated or old-fashioned.
Although one’s culture includes much of what one ought to do and think,
nevertheless participants can respond to these instructions in various ways, by
emphasizing some aspects and downplaying others, or by giving new meanings
to some traditional parts. In North America, for example, Christopher Columbus
and his arrival in the New World are still commemorated by a bank holiday, but
now we view the man and his achievement critically as being in the vanguard of
conquest as much as we celebrate them as symbols of our cherished values of
valor, ambition, and curiosity.
Culture is Treated as a Constructed Phenomenon
The shared understandings in a group are not necessarily dictated by reality; this
was the point of my earlier description of Americans’ notion of race as a cultural
construct. Groups construct or create their understandings by selecting this,
ignoring that, and making up another thing. Although there are plenty of reality
checks, a culture’s ideas sometimes have a life of their own, and they define reality
for its practitioners. For example, in North America, in the seventeenth century
the early European colonists’ conception of a pasture as good and a wilderness as
bad was such a cultural construct. For practical and religious reasons, wilderness
was nothing but trouble for those pioneers. By the nineteenth century, some
Americans and Canadians reversed that view, deciding that wilderness was what
made their nations great (Nash 1973). The North American wilderness hadn’t
changed substantially in three centuries (except to grow smaller), but North
Americans’ culture substantially changed its conception of wilderness. By the
nineteenth century Americans thought of their landscape and their society as the
antithesis of a class-bound Europe packed into a domesticated landscape. The
idea of an America that is free and powerful like wild nature is a construct that
remains central to our culture.
Culture Is Expected to Be Mixed
Individuals participate in a combination of subcultures (such as the understandings that you share with your sports team), regional cultures (such as Cajun or
Pennsylvania Dutch), national (such as “American”), and even international cultures (sharing English, nuclear physics, air travel, the euro, soft drinks, traffic
signs, and other traits). “We are all multicultural,” writes anthropologist John
Caughey (2002, 174). He means that each of us has learned several cultures, which
overlap and even compete or contradict one another in our lives (Figure 1.6).
The idea of someone being multicultural was made clear to me one summer
when I was analyzing interviews conducted with families in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The father, the mother, and one teenage child in each of these families
were interviewed. My task was to see how these families were becoming acculturated. Acculturation is the culture change in one population that has come into
contact with another, usually larger and dominant, population. Which families,
and which family members, were changing the most, and what traits were chang-
What Isn’t Culture?
43
Figure 1.6 Filipinos, colonized by the United States from 1898 to 1942, are widely literate
in English. From it they have developed their own English slang. This tiny shop’s name illustrates the distinctive way that Filipinos compose English slogans.
ing among these first-generation Chinatown immigrants? I developed a coding
system to rate the interviewees’ participation and identification with Chinese or
American culture. I expected a simple replacement process, in which a family
member became more “American” over time and less “Chinese,” in language,
recreational activities, values, self-identification, and the ethnicity of coworkers.
The data refused to conform to my replacement model. How much and how
fast an immigrant acculturated to American ways varied markedly from family to
family, and even within families. Family members in school or multiethnic workplaces picked up American ways first, as I expected, but they didn’t always abandon Chinese ways in the process. So my analysis indicated that some interviewees
were at once more Chinese and American than were others. This struck me as
nonsensical at first, but I recalled from my language studies that some bilingual
speakers are more articulate in both languages than some monolingual speakers
are in either language. So I came to accept that some of these immigrants were
richly bicultural. They played mah jong and they played tennis.
What Isn’t Culture?
To help sharpen your image of what culture is, consider some of what culture is
not, at least when anthropologists use the term.
1. Culture is not the same as civilization, although in the early nineteenth century the
political philosophers, in their attempts to write histories of mankind, equated
44
Chapter One What Is Culture?
the two. Then, the word “culture” carried the notion of improvement or refinement, particularly by careful breeding. Improvement in livestock was an example
of this meaning of “culture” and was indeed one of eighteenth-century science’s
most momentous accomplishments. By extension, scholars of the time thought
that humans too could be cultured and become civilized if they were properly
educated. Today, anthropologists claim that every human group has culture.
Civilization now refers to a complex society supported by intensive food production and organized around large urban centers providing administrative, commercial, artistic, and religious leadership. Civilization represents only one form
of society among several, all of which operate with common shared understandings, or culture.
2. Culture is not the same as being refined or sophisticated, as when we think of someone
who appreciates the art forms of European urban civilization such as opera and
oil paintings. While it may be true that “you ain’t got no culcha,” you do have
what anthropologists call culture.
3. Culture is not the same as society, although we often use those two terms interchangeably in loose talk. We might say, “Pathan culture is invading Besseri culture in Pakistan,” but what we mean is that groups of people who share a set of
understandings that includes self-identification as Pathan are moving into the
territory occupied by a population who share identity as Besseri. The true relationship between society and culture is that a society, by means of the interactions among its members, creates, shares, and perpetuates a culture.
4. Culture is not the explanation for everything people do. “His culture made him do it”
could be an interesting legal defense, but anthropologists know that people can
act with, around, or against their culture (Figure 1.7). Also, things happen that
aren’t part of the plan. That Newfoundlanders used to play soccer with a seal
bladder on the harbor ice can be viewed as cultural, but which team happened to
win, or which player broke through the ice and got wet, isn’t cultural.
Anthropology doesn’t claim that culture offers a complete explanation of
human behavior, just that “there is a cultural element in most human behavior
and that certain things in behavior make the most sense when seen through culture” (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963, 369). In this way culture joins the other
grand concepts such as the market, personality, a lust for power, and lust itself, in
being a valuable but partial explanation for what people do.
5. Culture is not behavior, although it guides behavior by informing us actors what
to do and why to do it. Culture is shared understandings, which can’t be seen
themselves. Anthropologists construct an ethnography, a description of a culture, by observing what people do, listening to what they say, and examining the
objects that they make. From the patterns we observe, we then infer the common
understandings that generated them—that is, the culture. Chapter 2 will discuss
further how ethnographies are created, and Exercise 3 in that chapter provides an
opportunity to practice constructing your own ethnography.
I can check my recognition of a cultural pattern by predicting to myself what
others will do or say the next time, and then watching to see if they do it. Then to
What Isn’t Culture?
45
Figure 1.7 Newfoundland culture provides guidelines for who should fish together, how
they should cast their net, and how they’ll divide the income. On the other hand, culture
cannot explain why they didn’t catch many fish today, or why the second mate got seasick.
test my understanding I try to act, say, or make something according to what I’ve
learned, to see how it is received. If people smile and pat me on the back, then I’ve
successfully tested my cultural discovery. If strong men faint and the elders turn
their dogs on me, then it’s clear that I need to revise my conclusions.
6. Culture is not just food customs, musical traditions, and colorful costumes. These aspects
of a culture are easily noticed, shared, even marketed. At diversity festivals or
international fairs, food, music, and costume are celebrated. These are some of
the ethnic flags defined earlier: attractive and distinctive but only small parts of
the whole. Culture also includes much that occurs during one’s ordinary day.
Beyond distinctive food recipes, for example, culture also influences elementary food routines such as how you hold your fork and knife, or that you eat with
some other utensil altogether, or with your fingers, and which hand may be used
to eat, and when you may eat, and with whom. Beyond songs and dances, culture
also suggests ordinary physical actions such as how you are to move and hold
your body the rest of the day when you’re not dancing, and which sounds you are
allowed or expected to make when you’re not singing. Beyond the distinctive costume you might wear at a festival, culture also guides your basic clothing choices
such as what you wear to bed, which parts of your body may be uncovered in public, what distinctions male and female garb will have, and when a garment ought
to be laundered.
7. Culture is not complete agreement or consensus. You and I may share quite a bit of
culture, but we could disagree strongly about many things, such as the morality
of eating veal, the best way to raise children, and whether an all-powerful God
46
Chapter One What Is Culture?
would permit evil to happen to good people. What culture actually does is define
the debates and provide a language for our disagreement.
Each culture has its issues of contention, some of which may not even occur to
people of another culture. The issue of abortion, for example, is currently an
intense legal, religious, moral, and political argument in the United States, about
which reasonable, moral people will disagree. Calculating the number of angels
that can dance on the head of a pin is not an issue for us now, although it once
was very important in European scholastic circles. In the abortion debate, our
culture defines the positions we take. We argue, for example, about how much
authority a woman has over her own body. But doesn’t the state also have a
responsibility to protect its future citizens? We also argue about the personhood
of a fertilized egg. Is it a human at conception—or not until the second trimester?
In U.S. society we do not argue about whether or not abortion is acceptable if the
fetus is female rather than male. In other societies, there is cultural agreement
that this is a hot debate item. It has been argued and legislated recently in India
(Fukuyama 2002).
In sum, each society is an “organization of diversity” (Wallace 2003); each society’s culture includes shared understandings of what to disagree about (Varenne
1984). Ideas and practices vary in their “cultural standing”: some are highly controversial, others disputable, many are common opinion, and others are completely taken for granted (Strauss 2004).
Summary
Culture is defined here as “the learned, shared understandings among a group of
people about how to behave and what everything means.” After 200 years of use,
the modern term “culture” has been defined in many ways, but there is a surprisingly consistent core of ideas within these definitions. Seven characteristics of
culture are widely agreed upon: that cultures are integrated, the outcomes of history, and both the causes and results of events outside of culture. Also, anthropologists agree that cultures are powerful determinants of human behavior, are
strengthened by values, and depend upon symbolic communication. Lastly, culture makes human behavior highly complex and variable.
To further clarify the anthropological definition of culture, we examine seven
common misconceptions about that definition. Culture is not the same as civilization, nor does it refer to refinement or sophistication. Culture is not the same
as society, although the two make each other possible. Culture cannot explain
everything that people think or do. It does not refer to the observed behavior
itself, although it guides behavior. Culture is not limited to observable ethnic
flags such as food, music, and costume. Finally, culture does not imply complete
agreement or consensus among its practitioners.
Cultural isolation is rare today, and culture change accelerates, fueled by what
many people call the globalization process. Globalization has consequences both
for cultures and for cultural anthropology. Culture, including cultural difference, will probably remain a dominant force in human affairs in the twenty-first
Summary
47
century. At the same time, cultural anthropologists have adjusted the culture
concept to emphasize three additional characteristics that acknowledge the practitioners’ mobility and motivations: culture is now seen as fluid and negotiable,
as a constructed phenomenon, and as mixed for individuals as well as groups.
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
Fishy Culture, Part III
We’re back from the gardens, sitting in Belle’s kitchen over a cup of tea. Belle’s
best friend Flo drops in to join us. I’m quizzing Belle about some of her cousins
in town. She remarks in passing,
“’Is hant ’ad ’ee.”
Flo replies, “Yis, girl,” and takes a sip of tea.
I glance at Susan, but she shakes her head and raises her eyebrows.
“’ee what?” I try.
Patiently, as if we were two of her younger grandchildren, Belle explains.
I’ve just cracked my shin, so to speak, on a cultural difference between Belle
and me. We both think we speak English. But English has spread widely around
the world, diversifying in pronunciation, idiomatic expression, and meanings of
words. The journal World English is devoted to exploring this diversification.
English speakers from Scotland, the Philippines, and Kenya would be hard
pressed to understand one another without some time together to work things
out. It took a couple of fieldtrips to Newfoundland before Susan and I no longer
needed to repeat everything we said to Belle and her sons, or to ask them to
repeat for us.
“’Is hant ‘ad ‘ee” is English, but steeped in Newfoundland culture. To recognize Belle’s remark, put the h’s on where they were taken off, and take them off
where they were put on. The result is “his aunt had he.” What that means,
Belle explained, is that her cousin was born out of wedlock and raised by his
mother’s sister, who was married and had other children. Therefore his biological mother became his “aunt” and his aunt became his “mother.” In witty Newfoundland shorthand, we have a statement that is true both ways: his aunt was
his mother. It all makes perfect sense—after a while.
So, anywhere there are humans there is culture, being practiced, constructed, manipulated, evaded, mixed—and, too often, misunderstood. Most of
the time, most people are not aware of culture any more than the fish is aware
of the water. But by the time you finish learning about the anthropological
questions that make up the following chapters, you will be aware of culture and
48
Chapter One What Is Culture?
also prepared to use the questions to think about what you see. Next we
answer the question How do anthropologists learn about culture?
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
t
EXERCISES
Exercise 1: The Embarrassing Incident
If culture includes shared understandings for how to behave, then anthropologists can learn a good deal from observing what embarrasses the culture’s participants, and from inferring which understandings about how to behave were
broken. In this exercise you will collect a pair of biographical anecdotes from
your classmates and analyze them for the cultural rules lying behind them.
Break into groups of three, and collect a story from two of you. Each informant gives a short description of an embarrassing incident in which the informant was present, although not necessarily as the “perpetrator.” All of you take
notes on the form on page 49, which is a semistructured interview protocol—a
fancy name for a common anthropological research tool. Such an interview protocol guides the questioning and organizes the answers but doesn’t constrain
their wording.
The informant provides the answers to the first four questions, but your
group should develop an answer to the fifth question: What was the cultural rule
that appears to have been broken? The cultural rule may be expressed as a dictum, such as You may begin eating only after Mother has raised her fork.
Compare the two incidents you’ve collected. What do they have in common?
For example, is the same rule broken in both? Did the audience respond to the
transgression with similar remarks or actions?
Take a poll of what rules were broken in all the incidents in the class. Does the
gender, age, or ethnic affiliation of the participants influence what causes
embarrassment?
Exercise 2: The American Family
This class shares some culture. Need proof? Remove a blank page from your notebook and orient it in landscape mode (long side is horizontal). Across the top
write “The American Family.” Now draw a picture on that page illustrating that
title.
You hesitate, you chuckle, and you say, “I can’t draw.” That’s not the point I
intend to make, but notice how widespread this reaction is. Most adults say, “I
can’t draw,” although most drew enthusiastically when they were children. I’ve
asked you to do something that is not a comfortable habit for adults and definitely odd for an anthropology class, so everyone is nervous.
Exercise 2: The American Family
49
Semistructured Interview Protocol: Embarrassing Incidents
Incident 1
Incident 2
1. Describe the scene: who, where,
when, what was happening:
2. Identify the embarrassing event:
3. Describe the responses
of the “audience”:
4. Describe the responses
of the “perpetrator”:
5. Explain the cultural rule that
was broken:
Just draw, for at least five minutes. When everyone is finished, the pictures can
be taped on the wall (in small classes) or circulated within groups (in large
classes).
This exercise is not a test of your artistic ability, an exercise in embarrassment,
or a technique for diagnosing your neuroses. This is “auto-ethnography”—you
are interviewing yourselves as informants of American culture, using a technique
called “personal documentation.”
To analyze these drawings for what they reveal about U.S. culture, identify the
patterns of shared understandings among their images. On one level, of course,
50
Chapter One What Is Culture?
each drawing is unique, like your fingerprint or your personality. Compared to
people in other nations, many Americans like to be “different,” to express their
individuality. But at the same time, there are a surprising number of common
elements in these drawings, aren’t there?
1. What are the shared elements?
2. How widely are they shared? This is a measure of shared understandings,
or how much culture the class shares.
3. Sort the drawings into a few piles that differ on some basic pattern. How
many patterns are represented?
4. How would you label each of those patterns?
5. Do the patterns reflect any of the cultural and ethnic diversity of the students in the class?
6. What proportion of all the drawings does each pattern represent?
7. As for the most common pattern: how did we come to share those particular elements? Beyond replying, “It’s in our culture,” you need to suggest
how this pattern got into our culture during our society’s history. For
guidance, consult The Family in America: Searching for Social Harmony in the
Industrial Age (Carlson 2003).
8. How did you learn this pattern that you drew?
9. You are surely aware of all the patterns represented here, so what did you
“mean to say” when you chose the pattern you drew?
Exercise 3: Being Multicultural
As I quoted earlier in this chapter, “Most students, like other contemporary
humans, are multicultural. They operate with a diverse and often contradictory
set of cultural traditions” (Caughey 2002, 174). You have a diverse set of traditions because of the variety of ethnic, religious, social class, or other communities
that you have belonged to. Those traditions may not fit well with each other, so
you have to manage or “juggle” them. Furthermore, you have a relationship with
each of these acquired traditions. You may be an advocate of the tradition, as I
am of my longtime membership in the Adirondack Mountain Club. You may be a
resister, as a lapsed Catholic might be. You may be in a negotiated/critical relationship with the culture, accepting it but holding it at arm’s length, picking and
choosing from its repertoire of practices and ideas, as some people do with their
family traditions.
One’s identity is made up substantially of the way one combines these various
cultures and subcultures to answer the question, Who am I? Today students
tackle this question when they create personal web pages. In this exercise you will
analyze the mix of cultures by which a person represents himself or herself on a
personal web page.
Exercise 3: Being Multicultural
51
Background
If you haven’t looked at students’ personal web pages, begin this exercise by
browsing among a few at your institution. If you haven’t created your own web
page, sketch out what you would want yours to look like and to say.
Analysis
Analyze the “who am I?” aspects of two other students’ personal web pages as well
as your own.
The page’s author uses verbal and graphic means to announce (or hint at)
characteristics such as the following, all of which suggest how the author is linked
to communities with cultures. Those communities may be face-to-face (such as
one’s residence group), multisited (one’s far-flung family), imagined (one’s coreligionists in America), or virtual (one’s discussion group on the Internet).
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
age
gender
sexual preference
hometown
current living conditions
work
racial or ethnic affiliations
language
political and other opinions
recreational pursuits
participation in organizations, clubs
likes and dislikes
religious or spiritual background and interests
academic focus
future plans
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
marital/romantic status
other persons or animals central in their lives
possessions central in their lives
lifestyle (vegetarian, night-owl, etc.)
links to other websites
Notice how the personal web pages describe their authors by linking them to a
specific, perhaps a unique, mix of communities, each with its own set of shared
practices and ideas, lifestyles and symbols, ethnic flags, value orientations, rituals, and jargon.
52
Chapter One What Is Culture?
Such self-presentations may be incorrect or incomplete, but they are fairly
accurate because feedback from our peer groups who see these pages holds us to
a certain standard of honesty and contributes to our self-knowledge. (“You . . . a
granola? No you’re not.”) The self-presentations in web pages often emphasize the
author’s distinctiveness, even uniqueness, but that emphasis on distinctiveness
paradoxically reveals our shared American cultural values of individualism, selfexpression, and self-realization: we’re all alike in our efforts to be unalike.
Answer these analytical and comparative questions about the multicultural
character of three personal web pages, including your own page (or proposed
page).
• What connections to lifestyles, cultures, or subcultures can be inferred
•
•
•
•
from the students’ self-descriptions?
How do the other two students’ mixes of cultures compare to those that
can be inferred from your web page (or proposed page)?
Do you think the degree of multiculturalism evidenced in the three web
pages is a recent phenomenon—that is, that young men and women in
America in 1906 would not have been as multicultural?
In the personal pages, are there clues to any perceived or potential contradiction among the various communities the student participates in? Perhaps her religion and her science major are potentially in disagreement
about Creation and evolution. Are there clues to how the student manages this contradiction?
In your web page (or proposed page), what is your relationship (advocate, resister, or negotiated/critical) to each of the cultures that can be
inferred from your self-description?
The product of this exercise is your personal web page or proposed web page, a
page from each of the other two web pages, and answers to these questions.
Exercise 4: Race Classification
This exercise investigates notions of race in American culture, relying on readers
of this book and the U.S. government as informants.
1. On a card or a slip of paper labeled “Humankind,” list the races of the
world today. Put an asterisk (*) beside the term or terms that best
describes your race. (You may describe yourself as multiracial or declare
that none of these terms applies.) The lists will be collected, counted, and
discussed in class.
2. On another card or slip of paper labeled “U. S.,” list the races in the
United States today. For each of those groups, estimate its percentage of
the U. S. population (currently about 300 million total). These slips will
be collected, analyzed, and discussed in class.
3. Your instructor will provide you with the questions about race and ethnic
identification asked on the current U. S. Census standard form. Answer
Recommended Reading
53
these questions on a slip of paper or card labeled “Census.” These will
also be collected, analyzed, and discussed in class.
Recommended Reading
1. Alland’s and Shanklin’s volumes state anthropology’s view of race in useful and
thoughtful ways. Race is a collection of case studies of American notions of race concerning blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Asian Americans, and others.
Alland, Alexander. 2004. Race in Mind: Race, IQ, and Other Racisms. New York: Berg
Publishers.
Gregory, Steven, and Roger Sanjek, eds. 1994. Race. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Shanklin, Eugenia. 1994. Anthropology and Race: The Explanation of Differences. Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth.
2. De Waal criticizes humans’ “anthropocentrism,” or claim to human superiority over
other primates such as apes and monkeys. On the other hand, Kemp and Smith suggest that language abilities lie along a continuum from bee to human being, with
apes and monkeys in the middle.
De Waal, Frans. 2001. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist.
New York: Basic Books.
Kemp, William, and Roy Smith. 1998. “Signals, Signs, and Words: From Animal
Communication to Language.” In Language: Readings in Language and Culture, 6th ed.,
eds. Virginia Clark, Paul Eschholz, and Alfred Rosa, 658–80. Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin’s.
3. A favorable treatment of the culture concept in anthropology in today’s world,
including an historical summary of what the concept has meant in its two centuries
of use.
Kuper, Adam. 2000. Culture: The Anthropologist’s Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
4. Globalization hasn’t eliminated the need to think in terms of culture. Edited by
anthropologists at the World Bank, this book brings together case studies by writers
of international renown—including but not limited to cultural anthropologists—to
demonstrate that culture is still central to economic development in many countries.
Text, videos, and discussion of the book are at www.cultureandpublicaction.org.
Rao, Viyayendra, and Michael Walton, eds. 2004. Culture and Public Action. Palo Alto,
CA: Stanford University Press.