Chp 2 Culture: Giving Meaning to Human Lives

What is Culture?

Culture - the taken-for-granted notions, rules, moralities, and behaviors within a social group.
Anthropology’s central concept and most definitions share certain common features.
It is a sign of vigorous discipline
English scholar Sir Edward B. Tylor was a founding figure of cultural anthropology. Tylor defined culture as $“the complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society”$ (1871, p. 1)
Since Tylor’s time, anthropologists have developed many theories of culture. Across these theories, we identify $7 basic elements that anthropologists agree are critical to any theory of culture$ :
  * Culture is learned.
  * Culture uses $symbols$ .
  * Cultures are dynamic, always adapting and changing.
  * Culture is integrated with daily experience.
  * Culture shapes everybody’s life.
  * Culture is shared.
  * Understanding culture involves overcoming ethnocentrism.
The process of learning a culture begins at birth, and that’s partly why our beliefs and conduct seem so natural: we have been doing and thinking in certain ways since we were young. Anthropologists call this $process of learning the cultural rules and logic of society$ enculturation.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposed that culture is a system of symbols--- $something that represents something else$ ---through which people make sense of the world.
* Geertz’s interpretive theory of culture $is the idea that culture is embodied and transmitted through symbols$ .
Today, anthropologists talk less about culture as a totally coherent and static system of meaning (in other words, a $thing$ ) and more about culture as a $process$ through which social meanings are constructed and shared. Attention to these cultural processes shows how culture is dynamic and always changing.
* Cultural anthropologists pay close attention to relations of power and inequality in their analyses of cultural processes. Understanding the changing culture of any group requires understanding who holds power and how they acquire this influence.
Our values and beliefs are shaped by many integrated elements of life experience. Culture is key to understanding how the whole culture operates and is integrated with daily experience.
* A cross-cultural perspective ( $analyzing a human social phenomenon by comparing that phenomenon in different cultures$ ) demonstrates the incredible flexibility and plasticity of the human species. Human beliefs and practices come in all shapes and forms.
Everyone has a culture. Yet, like accents, we tend to notice cultures more when they differ from those we’re familiar with. In the U.S., there’s a tendency to view minorities, immigrants, and others who differ from white middle-class norms as “people with culture.”
* By differing from mainstream patterns, a group’s culture becomes more visible to everyone. The more “culture” in this sense of the term one appears to have, the less power one wields.
People make sense of their worlds and order their lives by participating in social groups. Culture must be $shared$ among members of a group.
* Cultural construction - $the fact people collectively “build” meanings through common experience and negotiation$ . A “construction” derives from past collective experiences in a community, as well as lots of people talking about, thinking about, and acting in response to a common set of goals and problems.
Cultural relativism, $interpreting another culture using their goals, values, and beliefs rather than our own to make sense of what people say and do$ , is a central means of overcoming ethnocentrism, and it is a major feature of the anthropological perspective on culture.
  * Understanding another culture in its own terms does not mean that anthropologists necessarily accept and defend all the things people do.
  * Many anthropologists advocate for “critical relativism” or $taking a stance on a practice or belief after trying to understand it in its cultural and historical context$ .
  * In its extreme form, cultural relativism can lead to cultural determinism, $the idea all human actions are the product of culture$ , which denies the influence of other factors like physical environment and human biology on human action.
Those feelings of naturalness people experience about their beliefs and actions are in fact artificial. They are humanly constructed and variable across social groups, and they can change somewhat quickly.
Presenting culture as a dynamic and emergent process based on social relationships leads anthropologists to study the ways cultures are created and recreated constantly in people’s lives.

If Culture is Always Changing, Why Does It Feel So Stable?

Societies function most smoothly when cultural processes feel natural and stable. People need cultural stability, and enculturation occurs every day, whether we are aware of it or not.
Our experience of culture is repeatedly stabilized by $symbols, values, norms, and traditions$ .
A symbol is $something that conventionally, and arbitrarily, stands for something else$ .
* Symbols do change (sometimes dramatically)
* They are a particularly stable, and easily remembered, way of preserving a culture’s conventional meanings.
Values are $symbolic expressions of intrinsically desirable principles or qualities$ .
* Tend to conserve a society’s dominant ideas about morality and social issues.
* Can change when opposing views coexist within a community but more slowly than other aspects of culture
Norms are $typical patterns of behavior, viewed by participants as the unwritten rules of everyday life$ .
  * Remain stable because people learn from them from an early age and
  * Because society encourages conformity
  * We’re usually aware of our own norms until they’re broken
  * Social sanctions are $the reactions or measures intended to enforce norms and punish their violations$ .
  * Long-established norms may become customs, which $have a codified and lawlike aspect$ .
Tradition - $the most enduring and ritualized aspects of a culture, usually assumed to be timeless or, at least, very old$ . The powerful notion that things have “always been a certain way” makes challenging traditions difficult.
* Anthropologists have shown that many “timeless” traditions are in fact relatively new. Just because a tradition is a recent invention doesn’t mean people are less protective of it.

How Do Social Institutions Express Culture?

Another reason that dynamic culture feels so stable is that it is expressed and reinforced by social institutions, $the organized sets of social relationships that link individuals to each other in a structured way in a particular society$ . These institutions include:
  * Patterns of kinship and marriage
  * Economic activities
  * Religious institutions
  * Political forms
British anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, functionalism $proposes that cultural practices and beliefs perform functions for societies, such as explaining how the world works and organizing people into efficient roles$ .
  * Functionalists emphasize that social institutions function together in an integrated and balanced fashion to keep the whole society functioning smoothly and minimize social change.
  * E.E. Evans-Pritchard, a critic of functionalism, argued that functionalism was too associated with the natural sciences and viewed culture as too stable and smoothly functioning.
  * Elements of functionalism are still used by modern cultural anthropologists, especially its holistic perspective, $a perspective that aims to identify and understand the whole systematic connections between individual cultural beliefs and practices rather than the individual parts$ .
    * Can identify patterns in seemingly unrelated phenomena like breakfast cereals and sexuality. Why do so many Americans prefer cereal for breakfast? How did this become a cultural norm?
      * John Harvey Kellogg $invented cornflakes in the 19th century because he believed that bland, healthy foods helped prevent “unhealthy” sexual urges, such as masturbation$ .
      * In the 19th century, rich, hearty breakfasts (meat, eggs, biscuits, gravy, and butter) were a sign of prosperity, as was the resulting full-bodied body type.
      * In the early 20th century, Americans began valuing a healthier diet and a leaner body type. Thus, breakfast cereals became a more desirable option.
      * By the 1920s a booming breakfast cereal industry flooded the market with cereal choices.
      * Nearly a century later, cereal remains a breakfast norm.
      * A holistic analysis of cornflakes illustrates interrelationships between separate domains like beliefs (sexual morality, good health), social institutions and power (expert knowledge, medical practices), and daily life (changes in labor organization and economic life, dietary preferences)
      * It also shows how doing something that feels natural is really the product of intertwined $cultural$ processes and meanings.

Can Anybody Own Culture?

Technically, nobody can own culture, but conflicts arise over claims to the exclusive right to use symbols that give culture power and meaning.
This is the phenomenon of cultural appropriation, $the unilateral decision of one social group to take control over the symbols, practices, or objects of another$ .

Key Terms

1. Cross-cultural perspective - analyzing a human social phenomenon by comparing that phenomenon in different cultures
2. Cultural appropriation - the unilateral decision of one social group to take control over the symbols, practices, or objects of another
3. Cultural construction - the meanings, concepts, and practices that people build out of their shared and collective experiences
4. Cultural determinism - the idea that all human actions are the product of culture, which denies the influence of other factors like physical environment and human biology on human action
5. Customs - long-established norms that have a codified and lawlike aspect
6. Enculturation - the process of learning the cultural rules and logic of a society
7. Functionalism - a perspective that assumes that cultural practices and beliefs serve social purposes in any society
8. Holistic perspective - a perspective that aims to identify and understand the whole---that is, the systematic connections between individual cultural beliefs, practices, and social institutions---rather than the individual parts
9. Interpretive theory of culture - a theory that culture is embodied and transmitted through symbols

Norms - typical patterns of actual behavior as well as the rules about how things should be done
Social institutions - organized sets of social relationships that link individuals to each other in a structured way in a particular society
Social sanction - a reaction or measure intended to enforce norms and punish their violation
Symbol - something---an object, idea, image, figure, or character---that represents something else
Tradition - practices and customs that have become most ritualized and enduring
Values - symbolic expressions of intrinsically desirable principles or qualities