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Culture
Anthropology:
Appreciating Human Diversity
14th Edition
Conrad Phillip Kottak
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Culture
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What Is Culture?
Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
Universality, Generality, and Particularity
Culture and the Individual:
Agency and Practice
• Mechanisms of Cultural Change
• Globalization
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Culture
• What is culture and why do we study it?
• What is the relation between
culture and the individual?
• How does culture change?
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• We have distinctive features because
we are individuals, but we have other
distinctive attributes because we belong
to cultural groups.
– Display of affection in different cultures.
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What Is Culture?
• Tylor: Cultures–systems of
human behavior and thought–
obey natural laws, so they
can be studied scientifically
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• Tylor: “Culture is that complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, arts,
morals, laws, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man
as a member of society”
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• Not through biological inheritance but by
growing up in a particular society.
• Enculturation: the process by
which a child learns his or her culture
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Culture Is Learned
• Human cultural learning depends
on the uniquely developed human
capacity to use symbols
– Symbols: signs that have no
necessary or natural connection
to the things they signify or stand for
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Culture is Learned
• Clifford Geertz: Culture is ideas based on
cultural learning and symbols.
• Set of “control mechanisms” – plans, recipes,
rules, instructions for governing behavior.
• Cultural system (of meanings and symbols)
used to define world, express feelings and
make judgements.
– Culture is learned through direct
instruction and observation (experience,
conscious and unconscious behavior
modification)
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• Anthropologists in the 19th century
argued for a “psychic unity of man”
– Acknowledgment that individuals vary
in emotional and intellectual
tendencies and capacities, but still, all
human populations have equivalent
capacities for culture.
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Culture is symbolic
• White: Culture is dependent upon
symbolling. Culture consists of tools,
implements, utensils, clothing,
ornaments, customs, institutions,
beliefs, rituals, games, art, language…
• Using symbols: bestowing meaning on
things and events, and grasping and
appreciating such meanings.
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Culture Is Symbolic
• Symbolic thought is unique
and crucial to cultural learning
– Verbal and nonverbal symbols
• The association between symbols and what
is symbolized is arbitrary and conventional
• Other primates also demonstrate
a rudimentary ability to use symbols
• However, no other animal has elaborated
cultural abilities to the extent of Homo sapiens
(use of language)
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• Nonverbal symbols
– Flags
– Logos
– Religious symbols (holy water)
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• A natural thing arbitrarily associated with a
particular meaning for some people, who
share common beliefs and experiences that
are based on learning and transmitted across
generations.
• Human beings share the abilities to learn,
think symbolically, manipulate language, use
tools and other cultural products in organizing
their lives and coping with their environments.
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Culture Is Shared
• Culture is located in and
transmitted through groups
– Shared beliefs, values, memories,
and expectations link people
who grow up in the same culture
– Enculturation unifies people
by providing common experiences
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Culture and Nature
• Culture takes natural biological
urges and teaches us how
to express them in particular ways
– Our culture–and cultural changes–affect
the ways in which we perceive nature,
human nature, and the natural world (use
of medicine)
– How natural acts are converted into
cultural habits (consider bathroom/toilet
habits)
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Culture Is All-Encompassing
• Anthropologically, culture encompasses
features sometimes regarded as trivial
or unworthy of serious study (popular
culture)
– To understand North
American culture, one
must consider television,
fast-food restaurants,
sports, and games
– Which people are
“cultured”?
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Culture Is Integrated
• Cultures are integrated,
patterned systems
– If one part of the system (the economy)
changes, other parts (family structure)
change as well
– Core values: key, basic, or
central values that integrate a culture
– Work ethic and individualism for American
culture. Turkey??
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Culture Can Be Both
Adaptive and Maladaptive
• Humans have biological and
cultural ways of coping with
environmental stress
– What’s good for an individual isn’t necessarily good for the
group
– Adaptive behavior that offers short-term benefits to particular
individuals may harm the environment and threaten
the group’s long-term survival
– Cultural traits, patterns and inventions can also be
“maladaptive”, threatening the group’s continued existence
(survival and reproduction).
– Air conditioners, refrigerators, automobiles, pollution, global
warming
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• Similarities between humans and
apes are evident in anatomy, brain
structure, genetics, and biochemistry
– Hominid: member of hominid family; any
fossil or living human, chimp, or gorilla
– Hominins: hominids excluding the African
apes; all human species that ever existed
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• Many human traits reflect that our
primate ancestors lived in trees
– Grasping ability and manual dexterity
– Depth and color vision
– Learning ability based on a large brain
– Substantial parental investment in offspring
– Tendencies toward sociality and
cooperation
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• What We Share with Other Primates
– Substantial gap between primate society
and fully developed human culture
– Still, primates reveal
many similarities with humans:
• Ability to learn from
experience and change behavior
• Tools turn up among
several nonhuman species
• Other primates are habitual hunters
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• How We Differ from Other Primates
– Cooperation and sharing are much
more developed among humans
– Human females lack a visible
estrus cycle and ovulation is concealed
• Humans mate throughout the year
• Human pair bonds for mating are more
exclusive and durable than those of chimps
• Humans have rules of exogamy and kinship
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• Universality
– Universal traits are the ones that
more or less distinguish Homo sapiens
from other species:
• Biological: a long period of infant dependency,
year-round sexuality, and a complex brain
• Psychological: common ways in which humans
think, feel, and process information
• Social: life in groups, family, food sharing
• Exogamy and incest taboo
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• Generality
– Regularities that
occur in different
times and places but
not in all cultures
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Diffusion
Colonization
Invention
Nuclear family
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• Societies can share the same beliefs
and customs because of borrowing or
through (cultural) inheritance from a
common cultural ancestor.
• Speaking English (common ancestor
and domination (colonialism))
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• Cultural generalities can also arise
through independent invention of the
same cultural trait or pattern in two or
more different cultures.
• Farming
• Nuclear family (thought to be “natural”
but not universal)
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Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
• Particularity: Patterns of Culture
– Traits or features of culture not
generalized or widespread
– Cultural particularities are increasingly
rare:
• Diffusion
• Independent invention
• When cultural traits are borrowed, the traits
are modified to fit the culture that adopts them.
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• Cultures are integrated and patterned
differently and display tremendous
variation and diversity.
• When cultural traits are borrowed, they
are modified to fit the culture that adopts
them.
• McDonald’s
• MTV
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• By focusing on and trying to explain the
various and diverse cultures and
alternative customs, anthropology
forces us to reappraise our familiar
ways of thinking.
• Making strange familiar and familiar
strange!!
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• Ideal culture: what people say they
should do and what they say they do
• Real culture: their actual behavior as
observed by anthropologists.
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Culture and the Individual:
Agency and Practice
• Generations of anthropologists have
theorized about the relationship
between “system” and “individual”:
– Culture is contested
– Culture is public and individual
– Contemporary anthropologists
emphasize how day-to-day
actions make and remake culture
• Practice theory recognizes that individuals
within a society have diverse motives
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Practice theory
• Individuals within a society or culture
have diverse motives and intentions and
different degrees of power and
influence.
• The system shapes the way individuals
experience and respond to external
events, but individuals also play an
active role in the way society functions
and changes.
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• Practice theory recognizes both
constraints on individuals and the
flexibility and changeability of cultures
and social systems.
• subcultures
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Levels of Culture
• National culture: cultural features shared by
citizens of the same nation
• International culture: cultural traditions that
extend beyond national boundaries
• Borrowing, diffusion, migration, colonialism,
multinational organizations, communication
technology, media…
• Religions, the World Cup, olympics
• Subcultures: identifiable cultural patterns
existing within a larger culture
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Table 2.1. Levels of Culture with
Examples from Sports and Foods
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Ethnocentrism, Cultural
Relativism, and Human Rights
• Ethnocentrism: a tendency to view
one’s own culture as superior
and to use one’s own standards
and values in judging outsiders
• Cultural relativism: inappropriate
to use outside standards to judge
behavior in a given society; such
behavior should be evaluated in the
context of the culture in which it occurs
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Ethnocentrism, Cultural
Relativism, and Human Rights
• Human rights: rights based
on justice and morality beyond
and superior to particular
countries, cultures, and religions
• Cultural rights: rights vested
in religious and ethnic minorities
and indigenous societies
• Intellectual Property Rights (IPR):
an indigenous group’s collective
knowledge and its applications
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Culture Clash: Makah
Seek Return to Whaling Past
• Cultures are diverse but not isolated
– Makah see themselves as whalers but
stopped hunting whales in the early 1900s
– Gained permission to hunt
whales again after 1994
• Animal rights groups protested
but treaties seem to support this activity
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Mechanisms of Cultural Change
• Diffusion: borrowing of
traits between cultures
– Direct
– Indirect
– Forced
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Mechanisms of Cultural Change
• Acculturation: an exchange of features
that results when groups come into
consistent firsthand contact
• Independent invention: the process by
which humans innovate, creatively
finding solutions to problems
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Globalization
• Globalization: a series of processes
that work to make modern nations
and people increasingly interlinked
and mutually dependent
– Economic and political forces
– Long-distance communication
– Local people must increasingly
cope with forces generated by
progressively larger systems
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.