Anthro 4

Prof. Varisco

Fall 2000

 

The Concept of Culture

 

1. What is Social or Cultural Anthropology?

"The comparative study of all human societies in the light of those challengingly unfamiliar beliefs and customs which expose our own ethnocentric limitations and put us in our place within the wider gamut of the worlds's civilizations." (Ian Lewis, Social Anthropology in Perspective, p. 7. Cambridge University Press, 1985)

A) comparative study of human societies (cultural diversity)

+ tool 1: ethnography (biography of a people or society)

-- participant observation (immersion in culture)

-- linguistics (use and study of local language)

-- respect and reciprocity in field

-- reflexive (observer can not escape cultural bias)

+ tool 2: comparative analysis (make sense of data)

-- "cross-cultural analysis" (correlation of traits/variables across cultures)

-- holistic perspective rather than one site or one trait

B) generalizations about social process and social change

+ tool 1: -- framework and/or theory

for example:

-- "functionalist" (Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard)

-- "structuralist" (Levi-Strauss)

-- Marxist, Feminist, etc.

+ tool 2: -- quantitative methods

-- statistical evidence, formal surveys, scientific experiments + tool 3: -- qualitative measures (narrative, symbolism)

 

2. What is "culture"?

 

Recent Anthropology Textbook Definitions:

 

• "A set of rules or standards shared by members of a society, which, when acted upon by the members, produce behavior that falls within a range of variation the members consider proper and acceptable." (William A. Haviland)

 

• "The set of learned behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, values and ideals that are characteristic of a particular society or population." (Carol and Melvin Ember)

 

• "Everything that people collectively do, think, make, and say." (David Hicks and Margaret A. Gwynne

 

Decoding the Definitions:

A. Culture as Everything Man Does

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

-- Tyler thought of evolution of culture as uniform ascent from bestial savagery to civilization similar to transition from child to rational adult; he thought there were laws of cultural development just as there were laws in nature; he thought culture could be defined as the sum of its traits or customs; he emphasized the social "function" of customs

 

B. Culture as Social Function

"To the functionalist, culture, that is, the whole body of implements, the charters of its social groups, human ideas, beliefs, and customs, constitutes a vast apparatus by which man is put in a position the better to cope with the concrete, specific problems which face him in his adaptation to his environment in the course of the satisfaction of his needs." (Bronislaw Malinowski, 1945)

"Functionalism assumes that to a significant extent things are what they do." (Ian Lewis, 1985:60)

-- idea that every custom has a function in society, just as parts of body have function in an organism; if something does not serve a social purpose, it will disappear or be abandoned

 

C. Culture as Adaptation and Cultural Materialism

-- multilinear evolution: "Multilinear evolution is esentially a methodology based on the assumption that significant regularities in cultural change occur, and it is concerned with the determination of cultural laws... Cultural ecology pays primary attention to those features which empirical analysis shows to be most closely involved in the utilization of environment in culturally prescribed ways." (Julian Steward, Theory of Culture Change, pp. 18,37, University of Illinois Press, 1955.

-- cultural materialism: "The essence of cultural materialism is that it directs attention to the interaction between behavior and environment as mediated by the human organism and its cultural apparatus." (Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, p. 659, Columbia University Press, 1968)

-- focus on study of material and environmental constraints on human society

D. Culture as Thinking and Arranging

"Culture, then. consists of standards for deciding what is, standards for deciding what can be, standards for deciding how one feels about it, standards for deciding what to do about it, and standards for deciding how to go about doing it." (Ward H. Goodenough, Culture, Language, and Society, p. 22, Addison Wesley, 1971)

-- culture as a recipe

E. Culture through Symbols

"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning." (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, 1973).

-- the anthropologist reads and understands" culture like a scholar reads a text, although anthropologists should focus on how natives read their own culture rather than imposing his or her own outside framework

 

3. Commonalities of Culture

A. Unique to humans (no chimpanzee "culture," although chimp society) -- logical outcome of link with unique human mind and capacity for language

B. learned behavior (traditional and institutionalized)

C. shared behavior (link to ethnic or social group)

D. expressive behavior (has a meaning for others, can be a symbol or sign)

E. subjective view ("us vs. them" mentality)

 

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