Culture (from the
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
cultura stemming from
colere, meaning "to cultivate") is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and
Clyde KluckhohnClyde Kluckhohn , was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology.-Early Life and Education:Kluckhohn matriculated at Princeton...
compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in
Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:
- excellence of taste in the fine art
Fine art describes any art form developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than utility. This type of art is often expressed in the production of art objects using visual and performing art forms, including painting, sculpture, music, dance, theatre, architecture, photography and...
s and humanitiesThe humanities are academic disciplines which study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences....
, also known as high cultureHigh culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture. In more popular terms, it is the culture of an elite such as the aristocracy or intelligentsia...
- an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
- the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.
When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in
agricultureAgriculture is the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of human civilization, with the husbandry of domesticated animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more densely populated and...
or
horticultureHorticulture is the industry and science of plant cultivation. Some would say that horticulture is the process of preparing soil for the planting of seeds, tubers, or cuttings. Horticulturists work and conduct research in the disciplines of plant propagation and cultivation, crop production, plant...
. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through
educationEducation in its broadest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual...
, and then to the fulfillment of
national aspirations or idealsNationalism is an ideology, a sentiment, a form of culture, or a social movement that focuses on the nation. It is a type of collectivism emphasizing the collective of a specific nation...
. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity.
In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time....
, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with
symbolA symbol is something such as an object, picture, written word, sound, or particular mark that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention. For example, a red octagon may stand for "STOP". On maps, crossed sabres may indicate a battlefield...
s, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as
sociologySociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
,
cultural studiesCultural studies is an academic field which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies...
, organizational psychology and management studies.
English Romanticism
In the nineteenth century, humanists such as
EnglishThe English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity as a people is of early medieval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn....
poet and essayist
Matthew ArnoldMatthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...
(1822-1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." This concept of culture is comparable to the German concept of
bildung: "...culture being a pursuit of our total
perfectionPerfection is, broadly, a state of completeness and flawlessness.The term "perfection" is actually used to designate a range of diverse, if often kindred, concepts...
by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."
In practice,
culture referred to an
éliteElite is taken originally from the Latin, eligere, "to elect". In sociology as in general usage, the elite is a relatively small dominant group within a large society, having a privileged status perceived as being envied by others of a lower line of order.The elite at the top of the social strata...
ideal and was associated with such activities as
artArt is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and paintings...
, classical music, and
haute cuisineHaute cuisine or grande cuisine was characterised by French cuisine in elaborate preparations and presentations served in small and numerous courses that were produced by large and hierarchical staffs at the grand restaurants and hotels of Europe.The 17th century chef and writer La Varenne...
. As these forms were associated with urbane life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from lat.
civitas, city). Another facet of the
RomanticRomanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution...
movement was an interest in
folkloreFolklore is the body of expressive culture, including stories, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which...
, which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between "
high cultureHigh culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture. In more popular terms, it is the culture of an elite such as the aristocracy or intelligentsia...
", namely that of the
rulingThe term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy - assuming there is one such particular class in the given society...
social group, and "
low cultureLow culture is a derogatory term for some forms of popular culture. The term is often encountered in discourses on the nature of culture. Its opposite is high culture...
." In other words, the idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.
Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with "anarchy;" other Europeans, following
philosophersPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
Thomas HobbesThomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, remembered today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.Hobbes also contributed to a diverse array of fields,...
and
Jean-Jacques RousseauJean Jacques Rousseau was a major philosopher, writer, and composer of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, whose political philosophy influenced the French Revolution and the development of modern political and educational thought.His novel, Emile: or, On Education, which he considered his most...
, contrasted "culture" with "the state of nature." According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the
Native AmericansThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples...
who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized" and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to
Herbert SpencerHerbert Spencer was an English philosopher, prominent classical liberal political theorist, and sociological theorist of the Victorian era....
's theory of
Social DarwinismSocial Darwinism refers to various ideologies based on a concept that competition among all individuals, groups, nations, or ideas drives social evolution in human societies....
and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is really an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, some critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is really an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.
Other 19th century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature. These critics considered
folk musicThe term folk music originated in the 19th century as a term for musical folklore. It has been defined in several ways; as music transmitted by word of mouth, music of the lower classes, music with no known composer...
(as produced by working-class people) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed
indigenous peoplesThe term indigenous peoples can be used to describe any ethnic group of people who inhabit a geographic region with which they have the earliest known historical connection, alongside more recent immigrants who have populated the region and may be greater in number...
as "
noble savageThe term "noble savage" expresses a concept of the universal essential humanity as unencumbered by civilization; the normal essence of an unfettered human....
s" living
authenticAuthenticity is a technical term in existentialist philosophy, and is also used in the philosophy of art and psychology. In philosophy, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very...
and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified
capitalistCapitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor...
systems of
the WestWestern culture refers to cultures of European origin.The term "Western culture" is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies...
.
In 1870 Edward Tylor (1832-1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms. In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture.
German Romanticism
The German philosopher
Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg...
(1724-1804) formulated an individualist definition of "enlightenment" similar to the concept of
bildung: "Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged:
Sapere aude, "Dare to be wise!" In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as
Johann Gottfried HerderJohann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.-Biography:...
(1744-1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of
bildung: "For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people."
In 1795, the great linguist and philosopher
Wilhelm von HumboldtFriedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt , government functionary, diplomat, philosopher, founder of Humboldt Universität in Berlin, friend of Goethe and in particular of Schiller, is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of...
(1767-1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. During the
Romantic eraRomanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution...
, scholars in
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
, especially those concerned with
nationalistNationalism is an ideology, a sentiment, a form of culture, or a social movement that focuses on the nation. It is a type of collectivism emphasizing the collective of a specific nation...
movements — such as the nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire — developed a more inclusive notion of culture as "
worldviewA comprehensive world view is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing natural philosophy, fundamental existential and normative postulates or themes, values, emotions, and ethics. The term is a loan translation or calque of German Weltanschauung , composed of...
." According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal" cultures.
In 1860,
Adolf BastianAdolf Bastian was a 19th century polymath best remembered for his contributions to the development of ethnography and the development of anthropology as a discipline...
(1826-1905) argued for "the psychic unity of mankind". He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas" (
Elementargedanken); different cultures, or different "folk ideas" (
Volkergedanken), are local modifications of the elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture.
Franz BoasFranz Boas was a German American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography...
(1858-1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.
American Anthropology
Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of American
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time....
, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode their experiences
symbolA symbol is something such as an object, picture, written word, sound, or particular mark that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention. For example, a red octagon may stand for "STOP". On maps, crossed sabres may indicate a battlefield...
ically, and communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology,
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
,
cultural anthropologyCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
and
archeologyArchaeology or archeology is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material culture and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, and landscapes...
. Research in these fields have influenced anthropologists working in other countries to different degrees.
Biological Anthropology: the Evolution of Culture
Discussion concerning culture among biological anthropologists centers around two debates. First, is culture uniquely human or shared by other species (most notably, other primates)? This is an important question, as the theory of
evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
holds that humans are descended from (now extinct) non-human primates. Second, how did culture evolve among human beings?
Gerald Weiss noted that although Tylor’s classic definition of culture was restricted to humans, many anthropologists take this for granted and thus elide that important qualification from later definitions, merely equating culture with any learned behavior. This slippage is a problem because during the formative years of modern primatology, some primatologists were trained in anthropology (and understood that culture refers to learned behavior among humans), and others were not. Notable non-anthropologists, like
Robert YerkesRobert Mearns Yerkes was an American psychologist, ethologist, and primatologist best known for his work in intelligence testing and in the field of comparative psychology. Yerkes was a pioneer in the study both of human and primate intelligence and of the social behavior of gorillas and...
and
Jane GoodallDame Jane Goodall, DBE is an English UN Messenger of Peace, primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist...
thus argued that since chimpanzees have learned behaviors, they have culture. Today, anthropological primatologists are divided, several arguing that non-human primates have culture, others arguing that they do not.
This scientific debate is complicated by ethical concerns. The subjects of primatology are non-human primates, and whatever culture these primates have is threatened by human activity. After reviewing the research on primate culture, W.C. McGrew concluded, "[a] discipline requires subjects, and most species of nonhuman primates are endangered by their human cousins. Ultimately, whatever its merit, cultural primatology must be committed to cultural survival [i.e. to the survival of primate cultures]."
McGrew suggests a definition of culture that he finds scientifically useful for studying primate culture. He points out that scientists do not have access to the subjective thoughts or knowledge of non-human primates. Thus, if culture is defined in terms of knowledge, then scientists are severely limited in their attempts to study primate culture. Instead of defining culture as a kind of knowledge, McGrew suggests that we view culture as a process. He lists six steps in the process:
- A new pattern of behavior is invented, or an existing one is modified.
- The innovator transmits this pattern to another.
- The form of the pattern is consistent within and across performers, perhaps even in terms of recognizable stylistic features.
- The one who acquires the pattern retains the ability to perform it long after having acquired it.
- The pattern spreads across social units in a population. These social units may be families, clans, troops, or bands.
- The pattern endures across generations.
McGrew admits that all six criteria may be strict, given the difficulties in observing primate behavior in the wild. But he also insists on the need to be as inclusive as possible, on the need for a definition of culture that "casts the net widely":
Culture is considered to be group-specific behavior that is acquired, at least in part, from social influences. Here, group is considered to be the species-typical unit, whether it be a troop, lineage, subgroup, or so on. Prima facia evidence of culture comes from within-species but across-group variation in behavior, as when a pattern is persistent in one community of chimpanzees but is absent from another, or when different communities perform different versions of the same pattern. The suggestion of culture in action is stronger when the difference across the groups cannot be explained solely by ecological factors ....
As Charles Frederick Voegelin pointed out, if “culture” is reduced to “learned behavior,” then all animals have culture. Certainly all specialists agree that all primate species evidence common cognitive skills: knowledge of object-permanence, cognitive mapping, the ability to categorize objects, and creative problem solving. Moreover, all primate species show evidence of shared social skills: they recognize members of their social group; they form direct relationships based on degrees of kinship and rank; they recognize third-party social relationships; they predict future behavior; and they cooperate in problem-solving.
Nevertheless, the term "culture" applies to non-human animals only if we define culture as any or all learned behavior. Within mainstream physical anthropology, scholars tend to think that a more restrictive definition is necessary. These researchers are concerned with how human beings evolved to be different from other species. A more precise definition of culture, which excludes non-human social behavior, would allow physical anthropologists to study how humans evolved their unique capacity for "culture".
Chimpanzees (
Pan troglodytes and
Pan paniscus) are humans' (
Homo sapiens) closest living relative; both are descended from a common ancestor which lived around five or six million years ago. This is the same amount of time it took for horses and zebras, lions and tigers, and rats and mice, to diverge from their respective common ancestors The evolution of modern humans is rapid:
Australopithicenes evolved four million years ago and modern humans in past several hundred thousand years. During this time humanity evolved three distinctive features:
the creation and use of conventional symbols, including linguistic symbols and their derivatives, such as written language and mathematical symbols and notations; (b) the creation and use of complex tools and other instrumental technologies; and (c) the creation and participation in complex social organization and institutions.
According to
developmental psychologistDevelopmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes that occur in human beings over the course of the life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence and adult development,...
Michael TomaselloMichael Tomasello is an American developmentalpsychologist. He is a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany....
, “where these complex and species-unique behavioral practices, and the cognitive skills that underlie them, came from” is a fundamental anthropological question. Given that contemporary humans and chimpanzees are far more different than horses and zebras, or rats and mice, and that the evolution of this great difference occurred in such a short period of time, “our search must be for some small difference that made a big difference – some adaptation, or small set of adaptations, that changed the process of primate cognitive evolution in fundamental ways.” According to Tomasello, the answer to this question must form the basis of a scientific definition of “human culture.”
In a recent review of the major research on human and primate tool-use, communication, and learning strategies, Tomasello argues that the key human advances over primates (language, complex technologies, complex social organization) are all the results of humans pooling cognitive resources. This is called “the
ratchet effectThe ratchet effect is the commonly observed phenomenon that some processes cannot go backwards once certain things have happened, by analogy with the mechanical ratchet that holds the spring tight as a clock is wound up...
:” innovations spread and are shared by a group, and mastered “by youngsters, which enables them to remain in their new and improved form within the group until something better comes along.” The key point is that children are born good at a particular kind of social learning; this creates a favored environment for social innovations, making them more likely to be maintained and transmitted to new generations than individual innovations. For Tomasello, human social learning — the kind of learning that distinguishes humans from other primates and that played a decisive role in human evolution — is based on two elements: first, what he calls “imitative learning,” (as opposed to “emulative learning” characteristic of other primates) and second, the fact that humans represent their experiences symbolically (rather than iconically, as is characteristic of other primates). Together, these elements enable humans to be both inventive, and to preserve useful inventions. It is this combination that produces the ratchet effect.
The kind of learning found among other primates is “emuluation learning,” which “focuses on the environmental events involved – results or changes of state in the environment that the other produced – rather than on the actions that produced those results.” Tomasello emphasizes that emulation learning is a highly adaptive strategy for apes because it focuses on the effects of an act. In laboratory experiments, chimpanzees were shown two different ways for using a rake-like tool to obtain an out-of-reach-object. Both methods were effective, but one was more efficient than the other. Chimpanzees consistently emulated the more efficient method.
Examples of emulation learning are well-documented among primates. Notable examples include Japanese
macaqueThe macaques constitute a genus of Old World monkeys of the subfamily Cercopithecinae. Aside from humans , the macaques are the most widespread primate genus, ranging from northern Africa to Japan...
potato washing, Chimpanzee tool use, and Chimpanzee gestural communication. In 1953, an 18-month-old female macaque monkey was observed taking sandy pieces of sweet potato (given to the monkeys by observers) to a stream (and later, to the ocean) to wash off the sand. After three months, the same behavior was observed in her mother and two playmates, and then the playmates’ mothers. Over the next two years seven other young macaques were observed washing their potatoes, and by the end of the third year 40% of the troop had adopted the practice. Although this story is popularly represented as a straightforward example of human-like learning, evidence suggests that it is not. Many monkeys naturally brush sand off of food; this behavior had been observed in the macaque troop prior to the first observed washing. Moreover, potato washing was observed in four other separate macaque troops, suggesting that at least four other individual monkeys had learned to wash off sand on their own. Other monkey species in captivity quickly learn to wash off their food. Finally, the spread of learning among the Japanese macaques was fairly slow, and the rate at which new members of the troop learned did not keep pace with the growth of the troop. If the form of learning were imitation, the rate of learning should have been exponential. It is more likely that monkeys the washing behavior is based on the common behavior of cleaning off food, and that monkeys that spent time by the water independently learned to wash, rather than wipe their food. This explains both why those monkeys that kept company with the original washer, and who thus spent a good deal of time by the water, also figured out how to wash their potatoes. It also explains why the rate at which this behavior spread was slow.
Chimpanzees exhibit a variety of population-specific tool use: termite-fishing, ant-fishing, ant-dipping, nut-cracking, and leaf-sponging. Gombe chimpanzees fish for termites using small, thin sticks, but chimpanzees in Western Africa use large sticks to break holes in mounds and use their hands to scoop up termites. Some of this variation may be the result of “environmental shaping” (there is more rainfall in western Africa, softening termite mounds and making them easier to break apart, than in the Gombe reserve in eastern Africa. Nevertheless it is clear that chimpanzees are good at emulation learning. Chimpanzee children independently know how to roll over logs, and know how to eat insects. When children see their mothers rolling over logs in order to eat the insects beneath, they quickly learn to do the same. In other words, this form of learning builds on activities the children already know.
The kind of learning characteristic of human children is “Imitative learning,” which “means reproducing an instrumental act understood intentionally.” Human infants begin to display some evidence of this form of learning between the ages of nine and twelve months, when infants fix their attention not only on an object, but on the gaze of an adult which enables them to use adults as points of reference and thus “act on objects in the way adults are acting on them.” This dynamic is well-documented and has also been termed “joint engagement” or “joint attention.” Essential to this dynamic is the infants growing capacity to recognize others as “intentional agents:” people “with the power to control their spontaneous behavior” and who “have goals and make active choices among behavioral means for attaining those goals.”
The development of skills in joint attention by the end of a human child’s first year of life provides the basis for the development of imitative learning in the second year. In one study 14-month old children imitated an adult’s overly-complex method of turning on a light, even when they could have used an easier and more natural motion to the same effect. In another study, 16-month old children interacted with adults who alternated between a complex series of motions that appeared intentional and a comparable set of motions that appeared accidental; they imitated only those motions that appeared intentional. Another study of 18-month old children revealed that children imitate actions that adults intend , yet in some way fail, to perform.
Tomasello emphasizes that this kind of imitative learning “relies fundamentally on infants’ tendency to identify with adults, and on their ability to distinguish in the actions of others the underlying goal and the different means that might be used to achieve it.” He calls this kind of imitative learning “cultural learning because the child is not just learning about things from other persons, she is also learning things through them — in the sense that she must know something of the adult’s perspective on a situation to learn the active use of this same intentional act.” He concludes that the key feature of cultural learning is that it occurs only when an individual “understands others as intentional agents, like the self, who have a perspective on the world that can be followed into, directed and shared”
Emulation learning and imitative learning are two different adaptations that can only be assessed in their larger environmental and evolutionary contexts. In one experiment, chimpanzees and two-year-old children were separately presented with a rake-like-tool and an out-of-reach object. Adult humans then demonstrated two different ways to use the tool, one more efficient, one less efficient. Chimpanzees used the same efficient method following both demonstrations. Most of the human children, however, imitated whichever method the adult was demonstrating. Were chimps and humans to be compared on the basis of these results, one might think that Chimpanzees are more intelligent. From an
evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
ary perspective they are equally intelligent, but with different kinds of intelligence adapted to different environments. Chimpanzee learning strategies are well-suited to a stable physical environment that requires little social cooperation (compared to humans). Human learning strategies are well-suited to a complex social environment in which understanding the intentions of others may be more important than success at a specific task. Tomasello argues that this strategy has made possible the “ratchet effect” that enabled humans to evolve complex social systems that have enabled humans to adapt to virtually every physical environment on the surface of the earth.
Tomasello further argues that cultural learning is essential for language-acquisition. Most children in any society, and all children in some, do not learn all words through the direct efforts of adults. “In general, for the vast majority of words in their language, children must find a way to learn in the ongoing flow of social interaction, sometimes from speech not even addressed to them.” This finding has been confirmed by a variety of experiments in which children learned words even when the referent was not present, multiple referents were possible, and the adult was not directly trying to teach the word to the child. Tomasello concludes that “a linguistic symbol is nothing other than a marker for an intersubjectively shared understanding of a situation.
Tomasello’s 1999 review of the research contrasting human and non-human primate learning strategies confirms biological anthropologist
Ralph HollowayRalph Holloway is a physical anthropologist at Columbia University and research associate with the American Museum of Natural History. Since obtaining his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkley in 1964, Holloway has served as a professor of anthropology at Columbia...
’s 1969 argument that a specific kind of sociality linked to symbolic cognition were the keys to human evolution, and constitute the nature of culture. According to Holloway, the key issue in the evolution of
H. sapiens, and the key to understanding “culture,” “is how man organizes his experience.” Culture is “the
imposition of arbitrary form upon the environment.” This fact, Holloway argued, is primary to and explains what is distinctive about human learning strategies, tool-use, and language. Human tool-making and language express “similar, if not identical, cognitive processes” and provide important evidence for how humankind evolved.
In other words, whereas McGrew argues that anthropologists must focus on behaviors like communication and tool-use because they have no access to the mind, Holloway argues that human language and tool-use, including the earliest stone tools in the fossil record, are highly suggestive of cognitive differences between humans and non-humans, and that such cognitive differences in turn explain human evolution. For Holloway, the question is not whether other primates communicate, learn or make tools, but that the
way they do these things. “Washing potatoes in the ocean … stripping branches of leaves to get termites,” and other examples of primate tool-use and learning “are iconic, and there is no feedback from the environment to the animal .” Human tools, however, express an independence from natural form that manifests symbolic thinking. “In the preparation of the stick for termite-eating, the relation between product and raw material is iconic. In the making of a stone tool, in contrast, there is no necessary relation between the form of the final product and the original material.”
In Holloway’s view, our non-human ancestors, like those of modern chimpanzees and other primates, shared motor and sensory skills, curiosity, memory, and intelligence, with perhaps differences in degree. “It is when these are integrated with the unique attributes of arbitrary production (symbolization) and imposition that man qua cultural man appears.”
- I have suggested above that whatever culture may be, it includes “the imposition of arbitrary forms upon the environment.” This phrase has two components. One is a recognition that the relationship between the coding process and the phenomenon (be it a tool, social network, or abstract principle) is non-iconic. The other is an idea of man as a creature who can make delusional systems work—who imposes his fantasies, his noniconic constructs (and constructions) , upon the environment. The altered environment shapes his perceptions, and these are again forced back on the environment, are incorporated into the environment, and press for further adaptation.
This is comparable to the “ratcheting” aspect suggested by Tomasello and others that enabled human evolution to accelerate. Holloway concludes that the first instance of symbolic thought among humans provided a “kick-start” for brain development, tool complexity, social structure, and language to evolve through a constant dynamic of positive feedback. “This interaction between the propensity to structure the environment arbitrarily and the feedback from the environment to the organism is an emergent process, a process different in kind from anything that preceded it .”
Linguists Charles Hockett and R. Ascher have identified thirten design-features of language, some shared by other forms of animal connunication. One feature that distinguishes human language is its tremendous productivity; in other words, competent speakers of a language are capable of producing an infinite number of original utterances. This productivity seems to be made possible by a few critical features unique to human language. One is “duality of patterning,” meaning that human language consists of the articulation of several distinct processes, each with its own set of rules: combining phonemes to produce morphemes, combining morphemes to produce words, and combining words to produce sentences. This means that a person can master a relatively limited number of signals and sets of rules, to create infinite combinations. Another crucial element is that human language is symbolic: the sound of words (or their shape, when written) bear no relation to what they represent. In other words, their meaning is arbitrary. That words have meaning is a matter of convention. Since the meaning of words are arbitrary, any word may have several meanings, and any object may be referred to using a variety of words; the actual word used to describe a particular object depends on the context, the intention of the speaker, and the ability of the listener to judge these appropriately. As Tomasello notes,
- An individual language user looks at a tree and, before drawing the attention of her interlocutor to that tree, must decide, based on her assessment of the listener’s current knowledge and expectations, whether to say “that tree over there,” “it,” “the oak,” “that hundred-year-oak,” “the tree,” “the bagswing tree,” “that thing in the front yard,” “the ornament,” “the embarrassment,” or any of a number of other expressions. … And these decisions are not made on the basis of the speaker’s direct goal with respect to the object or activity involved, but rather that they are made on the basis of her goal with respect to the listener’s interest and attention to that object or activity.
This is why symbolic cognition and communication and imitative learning go hand-in-hand.
Holloway argues that the stone-tools associated with genus
Homo have the same features of human language:
- Returning to matter of syntax, rules, and concatenated activity mentioned above, almost any model which describes a language process can also be used to describe tool-making. This is hardly surprising. Both activities are concatenated, both have rigid rules about eh serialization of unit activities (the grammar, syntax), both are hierarchical systems of activity (as is any motor activity), and both produce arbitrary configurations which thence become part of the environment, either temporarily or permanently.
- productivity can be seen in the facts that basic types were probably used for multiple purposes, that tool industries tend to expand with time, and that a slight variation on h basic pattern may be made to met some new functional requisite. Elements of a basic “vocabulary” of motor operations—flakes, detachment, rotation, preparation of striking platform, etc.—are used in different combinations to produce dissimilar tools, with different forms, and supposedly, different uses. . . . Taking each motor event alone, no one action is complete; each action depends on the prior one and requires a further one, and each is dependent in another ay on the original plan. In other words, at each point of the action except the last, the piece is not “satisfactory” in structure. Each unit action is meaningless by itself in the sense of the use of the tool; it is meaningful only in the context of the whole completed set of actions culminating in the final product. This exactly parallels language.
As Tomasello has demonstrated, symbolic thought can operate only in a particular social environment:
- Arbitrary symbols enforce consensus of perceptions, which not only allows members to communicate about the same objects in terms of space and time (as in hunting) but it also makes it possible for social relationships to be standardized and manipulated through symbols. It means that idiosyncracies are smoothed out and perceived within classes of behavior. By enforcing perceptual invariance, symbols also enforce social behavioral constancy, and enforcing social behavioral constancy is a prerequisite to differential task-role sectors in a differentiated social group adapting not only to the outside environment but to its own membership.
Biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon, in a synthesis of over twenty years of research on human evolution, human neurology, and primatology, describes this "ratcheting effect" as a form of "Baldwinian Evolution." Named after
psychologistPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
James BaldwinJames Baldwin may refer to:*James Fowle Baldwin , American civil engineer*James Harris Baldwin , U.S. federal judge*James Baldwin *James Baldwin...
, this describes a situation in which an animal's behavior has evolutionary consequences when it changes the natural environment and thus the selective forces acting on the animal.
- Once some useful behavior spreads within a population and becomes more important for subsistence, it will generate selection pressures on genetic traits that support its propagation ... Stone and tymbolic tools, which were initially acquired with the aid of flexible ape-learning abilities, ultimately turned the tables on their users and forced them to adapt to a new niche opened by these technologies. Rather than being just useful tricks, these behavioral proshteses for obtaining food and organizing social behaviors became indispensible elements in a new adaptive complex. The origin of "humanness" can be defined as that point in our evolution where these tools became the principle source of selection on our bodies and brains. It is the diagnostic of Homo symbolicus.
According to Deacon, this occurred between 2 and 2.5 million years ago, when we have the first fossil evidence of stone tool use and the beginning of a trend in an increase in brain size. But it is the evolution of symbolic language which is the cause — and not the effect — of these trends. More specifically, Deacon is suggesting that
Australopithecines, like contemporary apes, used tools; it is possible that over the millions of years of
Australopithecine history, many troops developed symbolic communication systems. All that was necessary was that one of these groups so altered their environment that "it introduced selection for very different learning abilities than affected prior species." This troop or population kick-started the Baldwinian process (the "ratchet effect") that led to their evolution to genus
Homo.
The question for Deacon is, what behavioral-environmental changes could have made the development of symbolic thinking adaptive? Here he emphasizes the importance of distinguishing hmans from all other species, not in order to privilege human intelligence but to problematize it. Given that the evolution of
H. sapiens began with ancestors who did not yet have "culture," what led them to move away from cognitive, learning, communication, and tool-making strategies that were and continued to be adaptive for most other primates (and, some have suggested, most other species of animals)? Learning symbol systems is more time consuming than other forms of communication, so symbolic thought made possible a different communication strategy, but not a more efficient one than other primates. Nevertheless, it must have offered some selective advantage of
H. sapiens to have evolved. Deacon starts by looking a two key determinents in evolutionary history: foraging behavior, and patterns of sexual relations. As he observes competition for sexual access limits the possibilities for social cooperation in many species; yet, Deacon observes, there are three consistent patterns in human reproduction that distinguish them from other species:
- Both males and females usually contribute effort towards the rearing of their offspring, though often to differing extents and in very different ways.
- In all societies, the great majority if adult males and females are bound by long-term, exlusive secual access rights and pronibitions to particular individuals of the opposite sex.
- They maintain these exclusive sexual relations while living in modest to large-sized, multi-male, multi-female, cooperative social groups.
Moreover, there is one feature common to all known human foraging societies (all humans prior to ten or fifteen thousand years ago), and markedly different from other primates: "the use of meat. . . . The appearance of the first stone tools nearly 2.5 million years ago almost certainly correlates with a radical shift in foraging behavior in order to gain access to meat." Deacon does not believe that symbolic thought was necessary for hunting or tool-making (although tool-making may be a reliable index of symbolic thought); rather, it was necessary for the success of distinctive social relations.
The key is that while men and women are equally effective foragers, mothers carrying dependent children are not effective hunters. They must thus depend on male hunters. This favors a system in which males have exclusive sexual access to females, and females can predict that their sexual partner will provide food for them and their children. In most mammalian species the result is a system of rank or sexual competition that results in either polygyny, or life-long pair-bonding between two individuals who live relatively independent of other adults of their species; in both cases male aggression plays an important role in maintaining sexual access to mate(s). What is unique about humans?
- Human reliance on resources that are relatively unavailable to females with infants selects not only for coopartion between a child's father and mother but also for the cooperation of other relatives and friends, including elderly individuals and juveniles, who can be relied upon for assistance. The special demands of acquiring meat and caring for infants in our own evolution together contribute to the underlying impetus for the third characteristic feature of human reproductive patterns: cooperative group living.
What is uniquely characteristic about human societies is what required symbolic cognition, which consequently leads to the evolution of culture: "cooperative, mixed-sex social groups, with significant male care and provisioning of offspring, and relatively stable patterns of reproductive exclusion." This combination is relatively rare in other species because it is "highly susceptible to disintegration." Language and culture provide the glue that holds it together.
Chimpanzees also, on occasion, hunt meat; in most cases, however, males consume the meat immediately, and only on occasion share with females who happen to be nearby. Among chimpanzees, hunting for meat increases when other sources of food become scarce, but under these conditions, sharing descreases. The first forms of symbolic thinking made stone-tools possible, which in turn made hunting for meat a more dependable source of food for our nonhuman ancestors while making possible forms of social communication that make sharing—between males and females, but also among males, decreasing sexual competition:
- So the socio-ecological problem posed by the transition to a meat-supplemented subsistence strategy is that it cannot be utilized without a social structure which guarantees unambiguous and exclusive mating and is sufficiently egalitarian to sustain cooperation via shared or parallel reproductive interests. This problem can be solved symbolically.
Symbols and symbolic thinking thus make possible a central feature of social relations in every human population: reciprocity. Evolutionary scientists have developed
a modelIn evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, inclusive fitness refers to an organism's classical fitness plus the number of equivalents of its own offspring it can add to the population by supporting others...
to explain
reciprocal altruismReciprocal altruism is a concept, introduced into evolutionary biology by Robert Trivers, which explains the evolution of cooperation as instances of mutually altruistic acts...
among closely related individuals. Symbolic thought makes possible reciprocity between distantly related individuals.
Archeological Approaches to Culture: Matter and Meaning
In the 19th century archeology was often a supplement to
historyHistory is the study of the human past, with special attention to the written record. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns...
, and the goal of archeologists was to identify artifacts according to their
typology"Typology" is the study of types. More specifically, it may refer to:*Typology , division of culture by races*Typology , classification of things according to their characteristics...
and
stratigraphyStratigraphy, a branch of geology, studies rock layers and layering . It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks....
, thus marking their location in time and space. Franz Boas established that archeology be one of American anthropology's four fields, and debates among archeologists have often paralleled debates among cultural anthropologists. In the 1920s and 1930s, Australian-British archeologist V. Gordon Childe and American archeologist W. C. McKern independently began moving from asking about the date of an artifact, to asking about the people who produced it — when archeologists work alongside historians, historical materials generally help answer these questions, but when historical materials are unavailable, archeologists had to develop new methods. Childe and McKern focused on analyzing the relationships among objects found together; their work established the foundation for a three-tiered model:
- an individual artifact, which has surface, shape, and technological attributes (e.g. an arrowhead)
- a sub-assemblage, consisting of artifacts that are found, and were likely used, together (e.g. an arrowhead, bow and knife)
- an assemblage of subasemblages that together constitute the archeological site (e.g. the arrowhead, bow and knife; a pot and the remains of a hearth; a shelter)
Childe argued that a "constantly recurring assemblage of artifacts" to be an "
archaeological cultureIn addition to its usual meaning in social science, in archaeology, the term culture is also used in reference to several related concepts unique to the discipline.-Archaeological culture:...
." Childe and others viewed "each archeological culture ... the manifestation in material terms of a specific
people."
In 1948
Walter TaylorFor other persons called Walter Taylor see Walter Taylor Walter Willard Taylor Jr. was an American anthropologist and archaeologist most famous for his work at Coahuila in Mexico and his "Conjunctive archaeology", a method of studying of the past combining elements of both the traditional...
systematized the methods and concepts that archeologists had developed and proposed a general model for the archeological contribution to knoweldge of cultures. He began with the mainstream understanding of culture as the product of human cognitive activity, and the Boasian emphasis on the subjective meanings of objects as dependent on their cultural context. He defined culture as "a mental phenomenon, consisting of the contents of minds, not of material objects or observable behavior." He then devised a three-tiered model linking cultural anthropology to archeology, which he called
conjunctive archeologyConjunctive archaeology is a method of studying of the past developed by Walter Taylor in the 1940s that combined elements of both the traditional archaeology and the allied field of anthropology...
:
- Culture, which is unobservable and nonmaterial
- Behaviors resulting from culture, which are observable and nonmaterial
- Objectifications, such as artifacts and architecture, which are the result of behavior and material
That is, material artifacts were the material residue of culture, but not culture itself. Taylor's point was that the archeological record could contribute to anthropological knowledge, but only if archeologists reconceived their work not just as digging up artifacts and recording their location in time and space, but as inferring from material remains the behaviors through which they were produced and used, and inferring from these behaviors the mental activities of people. Although many archeologists agreed that their research was integral to anthropology, Taylor's program was never fully implemented. One reason was that his three-tier model of inferences required too much fieldwork and laboratory analysis to be practical. Moreover, his view that material remains were not themselves cultural, and in fact twice-removed from culture, in fact left archeology marginal to cultural anthropology.
In 1962 Leslie White's former student
Lewis BinfordLewis Roberts Binford, Ph.D. , is an American archaeologist, known as the leader of the "New Archeology" movement of the 1950s/60s. In 2001 Dr. Binford became an "emotionally involved couple" with Amber Johnson, his graduate student assistant, and moved to Missouri where they are now married...
proposed a new model for anthropological archeology, called "the New Archeology" or "
Processual ArcheologyProcessual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory which arguably had its genesis in 1958 with Willey and Phillips' work, Method and Theory in American Archeology in which the pair stated that "American archeology is anthropology or it is nothing" , a rephrasing of Frederic William...
," based on White's definition of culture as "the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism." This definition allowed Binford to establish archeology as a crucial field for the pursuit of the methodology of Julian Steward's cultural ecology:
- The comparative study of cultural systems with variable technologies in a similar environmental range or similar technologies in differing environments is a major methodology of what Steward (1955: 36-42) has called "cultural ecology," and certainly is a valuable means of increasing our understanding of cultural processes. Such a methodology is also useful in elucidating the structural relationships between major cultural sub-systems such as the social and ideological sub-systems.
In other words, Binford proposed an archeology that would be central to the dominant project of cultural anthropologists at the time (culture as non-genetic adaptations to the environment); the "new archeology" was the cultural anthropology (in the form of cultural ecology or ecological anthropology) of the past.
In the 1980s, there was a movement in the United Kingdom and Europe against the view of archeology as a field of anthropology, echoing Radcliffe-Brown's earlier rejection of cultural anthropology. During this same period, then-
CambridgeThe University of Cambridge , located in the City of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, is the second oldest university in the English-speaking world and the fourth oldest in Europe...
archeologist
Ian HodderIan Hodder is a British archaeologist and pioneer of postprocessualist theory in archaeology that first took root among his students and in his own work between 1980-1990...
developed
"post-processual archeology"Post-processual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory which is related to the broader development of postmodernism during the 1980s. Processual archaeologists had, if not a single theoretical position to unify them, then at least a common aspiration that drove them: the construction of a...
as an alternative. Like Binford (and unlike Taylor) Hodder views artifacts not as objectifications of culture but
as culture itself. Unlike Binford, however, Hodder does not view culture as an environmental adaptation. Instead, he "is committed to a fluid semiotic version of the traditional culture concept in which material items, artifacts, are full participants in the creation, deployment, alteration, and fading away of symbolic complexes." His 1982 book,
Symbols in Action, evokes the symbolic anthropology of Geertz, Schneider, with their focus on the context dependent meanings of cultural things, as an alternative to White and Steward's materialist view of culture. In his 1991 textbook,
Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology Hodder argued that archeology is more closely aligned to history than to anthropology.
Language and Culture
The connection between culture and language has been noted as far back as the classical period and probably long before. The ancient Greeks, for example, distinguished between civilized peoples and
bárbarosBarbarian is a term for an uncivilized person, often used pejoratively, either in a general reference to a member of a nation or ethnos, typically a tribal society as seen by an urban civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble savage...
"those who babble", i.e. those who speak unintelligible languages. The fact that different groups speak different, unintelligible languages is often considered more tangible evidence for cultural differences than other less obvious cultural traits.
The German romanticists of the 19th century such as Herder, Wundt and Humbolt, often saw language not just as one cultural trait among many but rather as the direct expression of a people's national character, and as such as culture in a kind of condensed form. Herder for example suggests, "Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache" (Since every people is a People, it has its own national culture expressed through its own language).
Franz Boas, founder of American anthropology, like his German forerunners, maintained that the shared language of a community is the most essential carrier of their common culture. Boas was the first anthropologist who considered it unimaginable to study the culture of a foreign people without also becoming acquainted with their language. For Boas, the fact that the intellectual culture of a people was largely constructed, shared and maintained through the use of language, meant that understanding the language of a cultural group was the key to understanding its culture. At the same time, though, Boas and his students were aware that culture and language are not directly dependent on one another. That is, groups with widely different cultures may share a common language, and speakers of completely unrelated languages may share the same fundamental cultural traits. Numerous other scholars have suggested that the form of language determines specific cultural traits. This is similar to the notion of
Linguistic determinismLinguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought. Determinism itself refers to the viewpoint that all events are caused by previous events, and linguistic determinism can be used broadly to refer to a number of specific views.For...
, which states that the form of language determines individual thought. While Boas himself rejected a causal link between language and culture, some of his intellectual heirs entertained the idea that habitual patterns of speaking and thinking in a particular language may influence the culture of the linguistic group. Such belief is related to the theory of
Linguistic relativityThe linguistic relativity principle is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.The idea that...
. Boas, like most modern anthropologists, however, was more inclined to relate the interconnectedness between language and culture to the fact that, as B.L. Whorf put it, "they have grown up together".
Indeed, the origin of language, understood as the human capacity of complex symbolic communication, and the origin of complex culture is often thought to stem from the same evolutionary process in early man. Linguists and evolutionary anthropologists suppose that language evolved as early humans began to live in large communities which required the use of complex communication to maintain social coherence. Language and culture then both emerged as a means of using symbols to construct social identity and maintain coherence within a social group too large to rely exclusively on pre-human ways of building community such as for example
groomingIn social animals such as humans social grooming or allogrooming is an activity in which individuals in a group clean or maintain each other's body or appearance. It is a major social activity, and a means by which animals who live in proximity can bond and reinforce social structures, family...
. Since language and culture are both in essence symbolic systems, twentieth century cultural theorists have applied the methods of analyzing language developed in the science of linguistics to also analyze culture. Particularly the
structuralStructuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure...
theory of
Ferdinand de SaussureFerdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century...
, which describes symbolic systems as consisting of signs (a pairing of a particular form with a particular meaning), has come to be applied widely in the study of culture. But also post-structuralist theories, that nonetheless still rely on the parallel between language and culture as systems of symbolic communication, have been applied in the field of
semioticsSemiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes , or signification and communication, signs and symbols, into three branches:...
. The parallel between language and culture can then be understood as analog to the parallel between a linguistic sign, consisting for example of the sound
[kau] and the meaning "cow", and a cultural sign, consisting for example of the cultural form of "wearing a crown" and the cultural meaning of "being king". In this way it can be argued that culture is itself a kind of language. Another parallel between cultural and linguistic systems is that they are both systems of practice, that is they are a set of special ways of doing things that is constructed and perpetuated through social interactions. Children, for example, acquire language in the same way as they acquire the basic cultural norms of the society they grow up in - through interaction with older members of their cultural group.
However, languages, now understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speak them. Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group and difference from others. Even among speakers of one language several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. In linguistics such different ways of using the same language are called "
varitiesIn sociolinguistics a variety, also called a lect, is a form of a language used by speakers of that language. This may include dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation, as well as the standard language variety itself...
". For example, the English language is spoken differently in the USA, the UK and Australia, and even within English-speaking countries there are hundreds of
dialectThe term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by scholars of language. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other...
s of English that each signal a belonging to a particular region and/or subculture. For example, in the UK the
cockneyThe term Cockney has both geographical and linguistic associations. Geographically and culturally, it often refers to working class Londoners, particularly those in the East End...
dialect signals its speakers' belonging to the group of lower class workers of east London. Differences between varieties of the same language often consist in different pronunciations and vocabulary, but also sometimes of different grammatical systems and very often in using different
stylesStylistics might apply to:* The Stylistics, a Philadelphia soul group* Stylistics , the study of language and its context...
(e.g. cockney Rhyming slang or Lawyers' jargon). Linguists and anthropologists, particularly
sociolinguistsSociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language,...
,
ethnolinguistsAnthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture, and the relations between human biology, cognition and language...
and
linguistic anthropologistsLinguistic anthropology is that branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of semiotic and particularly linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes....
have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.
A community’s ways of speaking or signing are a part of the community’s culture, just as other shared practices are. Language use is a way of establishing and displaying group identity. Ways of speaking function not only to facilitate communication, but also to identify the social position of the speaker. Linguists calls different ways of speaking language
varietiesIn sociolinguistics a variety, also called a lect, is a form of a language used by speakers of that language. This may include dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation, as well as the standard language variety itself...
, a term that encompasses geographically or socioculturally defined
dialectThe term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by scholars of language. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other...
s as well as the
jargonsIn linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, an English speaker may adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal In linguistics, a...
or styles of
subcultureIn sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong...
s. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture.
The differences between languages does not consist only in differences in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar, but also in different "cultures of speaking". Some cultures for example have elaborate systems of "social deixis", systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English, social deixis is shown mostly though distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, but also in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy", "Doctor" or "Your Honor", but in other languages such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. In several languages of east Asia, for example
ThaiThai is the national and official language of Thailand and the mother tongue of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Kradai language family. The Kradai languages are thought to have originated in what is now southern China, and are linked to...
,
BurmeseThe Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most continue to refer to the language as Burmese. It is the native language of the Bamar and other related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar...
and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than one self in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and membes of royalty as the highest. Other languages may use different forms of address when speaking to speakers of the opposite gender or in-law relatives and many languages have special
ways of speaking to infants and childrenBaby talk, also referred to as caretaker speech, infant-directed talk or child-directed speech and informally as "motherese", "parentese", or "mommy talk"), is a nonstandard form of speech used by adults in talking to toddlers and infants...
. Among other groups, the culture of speaking may entail
not speaking to particular people, for example many indigenous cultures of Australia have a
tabooA taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and forbidden. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society. The term comes from the Tongan language, and appears in many Polynesian cultures...
against talking to one's in-law relatives, and in some cultures speech is not addressed directly to children. Some languages also require different ways of speaking for different social classes of speakers, and often such a system is based on gender differences as well as in
JapaneseThe Japanese language is unusual among major languages in the high degree to which the speech of women seen collectively differs from that of men. Differences in the ways that girls and boys use language have been detected in children as young as three years old .Such differences are sometimes...
and Koasati.
1899-1946: Universal versus Particular
The modern anthropological understanding of culture has its origins in the 19th century with German anthropologist
Adolf BastianAdolf Bastian was a 19th century polymath best remembered for his contributions to the development of ethnography and the development of anthropology as a discipline...
's theory of the "psychic unity of mankind," which, influenced by Herder and von Humboldt, challenged the identification of "culture" with the way of life of European elites, and British anthropologist
Edward Burnett TylorSir Edward Burnett Tylor , was an English anthropologist.Tylor is considered representative of cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive culture and Anthropology, he defined the context of scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell...
's attempt to define culture as inclusively as possible. Tylor in 1874 described culture in the following way: "Culture or
civilizationA civilization is a complex society or culture group characterized by dependence upon agriculture, long-distance trade, state form of government, occupational specialization, population, and class stratification.-Definition:...
, 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." Although Tylor was not aiming to propose a general theory of culture (he explained his understanding of culture in the course of a larger argument about the nature of religion), American anthropologists have generally presented their various definitions of culture as refinements of Tylor's. Franz Boas's student Alfred Kroeber (1876-1970) identified culture with the "superorganic," that is, a domain with ordering principles and laws that could not be explained by or reduced to biology. In 1973, Gerald Weiss reviewed various definitions of culture and debates as to their parsimony and power, and proposed as the most scientifically useful definition that "culture" be defined "
as our generic term for all human nongenetic, or metabiological, phenomena" (italics in the original).
Franz BoasFranz Boas was a German American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography...
, founded modern American anthropology with the establishment of the first graduate program in anthropology at Columbia University in 1896. At the time the dominant model of culture was that of cultural evolution, which posited that human societies progressed through stages of savagery to barbarism to civilization; thus, societies that for example are based on horticulture and
Iroquois kinshipIroquois kinship is a kinship system used to define family. Identified by Louis Henry Morgan in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, the Iroquois system is one of the six major kinship systems .-Kinship system:The system has both classificatory and...
terminology are less evolved that societies based on agriculture and
Eskimo kinshipEskimo kinship is a concept of kinship used to define family in anthropology. Identified by Lewis Henry Morgan in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, the Eskimo system was one of six major kinship systems .-Kinship system:The Eskimo system places no...
terminology. One of Boas's greatest accomplishments was to demonstrate convincingly that this model is fundamentally flawed, empirically, methodologically, and theoretically. Moreover, he felt that our knowledge of different cultures was so incomplete, and often based on unsystematic or unscientific research, that it was impossible to develop any scientifically valid general model of human cultures. Instead, he established the principle of
cultural relativismCultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood in terms of his or her own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized...
and trained students to conduct rigorous
participant observationParticipant observation is a type of research strategy. It is a widely used methodology in many disciplines, particularly, cultural anthropology, but also sociology, communication studies, and social psychology...
field research in different societies. Boas understood the capacity for culture to involve symbolic thought and social learning, and considered the evolution of a capacity for culture to coincide with the evolution of other, biological, features defining
genus HomoHomo is the genus that includes modern humans and their close relatives. The genus is estimated to be about 2.5 million years old, evolving from Australopithecine ancestors with the appearance of Homo habilis...
. Nevertheless, he argued that culture could not be reduced to biology or other expressions of symbolic thought, such as language. Boas and his students understood culture inclusively and resisted developing a general definition of culture. Indeed, they resisted identifying "culture" as a thing, instead using culture as an adjective rather than a noun. Boas argued that cultural "types" or "forms" are always in a state of flux. His student Alfred Kroeber argued that the "unlimited receptivity and assimilativeness of culture" made it practically impossible to think of cultures as discrete things..
Boas's students dominated
cultural anthropologyCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
through World War II, and continued to have great influence through the 1960s. They were especially interested in two phenomena: the great variety of forms culture took around the world, and the many ways individuals were shaped by and acted creatively through their own cultures. This led his students to focus on the history of cultural traits — how they spread from one society to another, and how their meanings changed over time — and the life histories of members of other societies. Others, such as
Ruth BenedictRuth Benedict was an American anthropologist.She was born in New York City, and attended Vassar College, graduating in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, studying under Franz Boas, receiving her PhD and joining the faculty in 1923...
(1887-1948) and
Margaret MeadMargaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
(1901-1978), produced monographs or comparative studies analyzing the forms of creativity possible to individuals within specific cultural configurations. Essential to their research was the concept of "context": culture provided a context that made the behavior of individuals understandable; geography and history provided a context for understanding the differences between cultures. Thus, although Boasians were committed to the belief in the psychic unity of humankind and the universality of culture, their emphasis on local context and cultural diversity led them away from proposing
cultural universalA cultural universal is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all human cultures worldwide...
s or universal theories of culture.
There is a tension in cultural anthropology between the claim that culture as a universal (the fact that all human societies have culture), and that it is also particular (culture takes a tremendous variety of forms around the world). Since Boas, two debates have dominated cultural anthropology. The first has to do with ways of modeling particular cultures. Specifically, anthropologists have argued as to whether "culture" can be thought of as a bounded and integrated thing, or as a quality of a diverse collection of things, the numbers and meanings of which are in constant flux. Boas's student Ruth Benedict suggested that in any given society cultural traits may be more or less "integrated," that is, constituting a pattern of action and thought that gives purpose to people’s lives, and provides them with a basis from which to evaluate new actions and thoughts, although she implies that there are various degrees of integration; indeed, she observes that some cultures fail to integrate. Boas, however, argued that complete integration is rare and that a given culture only appears to be integrated because of observer bias. For Boas, the appearance of such patterns — a national culture, for example—was the effect of a particular point of view.
The first debate was effectively suspended in 1934 when Ruth Benedict published Patterns of Culture, which has continuously been in print. Although this book is well known for popularizing the Boasian principle of
cultural relativismCultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood in terms of his or her own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized...
, among anthropologists it constituted both an important summary of the discoveries of Boasians, and a decisive break from Boas's emphasis on the mobility of diverse cultural traits. "Anthropological work has been overwhelmingly devoted to the analysis of cultural traits," she wrote "rather than to the study of cultures as articulated wholes." Influenced by Polish-British social anthropologist
Bronislaw MalinowskiBronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish anthropologist, widely considered one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists. His pioneering ethnographic fieldwork made a major contribution to the study of Melanesia and of reciprocity.-Life:Malinowski was born in Kraków, Poland, to an...
, however, she argued that "The first essential, so it seems today, is to study the living culture, to know its habits of thought and the functions of its institutions" and that "the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behavior is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture." Influenced by German historians
Wilhelm DiltheyWilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, student of hermeneutics, and philosopher...
and
Oswald SpenglerOswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West in which he puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations...
, as well as by
gestalt psychologyGestalt psychology or gestaltism of the Berlin School is a theory of mind and brain positing that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies, or that the whole is different from the sum of its parts...
, she argued that "the whole determines its parts, not only their relation but their very nature," and that "cultures, likewise, are more than the sum of their traits." Just as each spoken language draws very selectively from an extensive, but finite, set of sounds any human mouth (free from defect) can make, she concluded that in each society people, over time and through both conscious and unconscious processes, selected from an extensive but finite set of cultural traits which then combine to form a unique and distinctive pattern."
- The significance of cultural behavior is not exhausted when we have clearly understood that it is local and man-made and hugely variable. It tends to be integrated. A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. Within each culture there come into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society. In obedience to their purposes, each people further and further consolodates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogeneous items of behavior take more and more congruous shape. Taken up by a well-integrated culture, the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its particular goals, often by the most unlikely metamorphoses.
Although Benedict felt that virtually all cultures are patterened, she argued that these patterns change over time as a consequence of human creativity, and therefore different societies around the world had distinct characters.
Patterns of Culture contrasts
ZuňiThe Zuni or A:shiwi are a Native American tribe, one of the Pueblo peoples, most of whom live in the Pueblo of Zuni on the Zuni River, a tributary of the Little Colorado River, in western New Mexico, United States...
,
DobuDOBU, or 2,5-dimethoxy-4--butylamphetamine, is a lesser-known psychedelic drug and a substituted Amphetamine. DOBU was first synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. In his book PiHKAL , neither the dosage nor the duration are known; the duration is simply listed as "very long". DOBU produces paresthesia...
and
KwakiutlThe term Kwakiutl, historically applied to the entire Kwakwaka'wakw enthno-linguistic group of peoples, comes from one of the Kwakwaka'wakw tribes, the Kwagu'ł or Kwagyeulth, at Fort Rupert, with whom Franz Boas did most of his anthropological work and whose Indian Act Band government is the...
cultures as a way of highlighting different ways of being human. Benedict observed that many Westerners felt that this view forced them to abandon their "dreams of permanence and ideality and with the individual's illusions of autonomy" and that for many, this made existence "empty." She argued however that once people accepted the results of scientific research, people would "arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence."
This view of culture has had a tremendous impact outside of anthropology, and dominated American anthropology until the Cold War, when anthropologists like
Sidney MintzSidney Wilfred Mintz is an anthropologist best known for his studies of Latin America and the Caribbean. Mintz studied at Brooklyn College gaining his B.A in 1943. He got his doctoral degree from Columbia University under the supervision of Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict...
and
Eric WolfEric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology.-Early Life:...
rejected the validity and value of approaching "each culture" as "a world in itself" and "relatively stable.". They felt that, too often, this approach ignored the impact of
imperialismImperialism, as defined by the dictionary of human geography, is “the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination.” Imperialism, in many ways, is described...
,
colonialismColonialism is the building and maintaining of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. Sovereignty over the colony is claimed by the metropole...
, and the world
capitalistCapitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor...
economy on the peoples Benedict and her followers studied (and thus re-opened the debate on the relationship between the universal and the particular, in the form of the relationship between the global and the local). In the meantime, its emphasis on metamorphising patterns influenced French
structuralismStructuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure...
and made American anthropologists receptive to British structural-functionalism.
The second debate has been over the ability to make universal claims about all cultures. Although Boas argued that anthropologists had yet to collect enough solid evidence from a diverse sample of societies to make any valid general or universal claims about culture, by the 1940s some felt ready. Whereas Kroeber and Benedict had argued that "culture" — which could refer to local, regional, or trans-regional scales — was in some way "patterned" or "configured," some anthropologists now felt that enough data had been collected to demonstrate that it often took highly structured forms. The question these anthropologists debated was, were these structures statistical artifacts, or where they expressions of mental models? This debate emerged full-fledged in 1949, with the publication of
George MurdockGeorge Peter Murdock was a notable anthropologist. Born in Meriden, Connecticut to a family that had farmed there for five generations, he spent many childhood hours working on the family farm, and acquired a wide knowledge of traditional, non-mechanized, farming methods. He graduated from...
's
Social Structure, and
Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss is a French-Jewish anthropologist.-Biography:Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels, grew up in Paris, living in a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he later admired and wrote about...
's
Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté.
Opposing Boas and his students,
YaleYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
anthropologist
George MurdockGeorge Peter Murdock was a notable anthropologist. Born in Meriden, Connecticut to a family that had farmed there for five generations, he spent many childhood hours working on the family farm, and acquired a wide knowledge of traditional, non-mechanized, farming methods. He graduated from...
, who compiled the
Human Relations Area FilesThe Human Relations Area Files, Inc. , located in New Haven, Connecticut is a nonprofit international membership organization with over 300 member institutions in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries...
. These files code cultural variables found in different societies, so that anthropologists can use
statistical methodsStatistics is a branch of mathematics concerned with collecting and interpreting data. According to other definitions, it is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. Statisticians improve the quality of data with the...
to study correlations among different variables. The ultimate aim of this project is to develop generalizations that apply to increasingly larger numbers of individual cultures. Later, Murdock and
Douglas R. WhiteDouglas R. White is an American complexity researcher , social anthropologist, sociologist, and social network researcher at the University of California, Irvine.-Biography:...
developed the
standard cross-cultural sampleThe standard cross-cultural sample is a sample of 186 cultures, used by scholars engaged in cross-cultural studies.-Origin:Cross-cultural research entails a particular statistical problem, known as Galton's problem: tests of functional relationships can be confounded because the...
as a way to refine this method.
Jewish-French anthropologist
Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss is a French-Jewish anthropologist.-Biography:Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels, grew up in Paris, living in a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he later admired and wrote about...
's
structuralist anthropologyStructuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure...
brought together ideas of Boas (especially Boas's belief in the mutability of cultural forms, and Bastian's belief in the psychic unity of humankind) and French sociologist's
Émile DurkheimDavid Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist and pioneer in the development of modern sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology, L'Année Sociologique, as well as his creation of the first European department of sociology, helped establish sociology...
's focus on social structures (institutionalized relationships among persons and groups of persons). Instead of making generalizations that applied to large numbers of societies, Lévi-Strauss sought to derive from concrete cases increasingly abstract models of human nature. His method begins with the supposition that culture exists in two different forms: the many distinct structures that could be inferred from observing members of the same society interact (and of which members of a society are themselves aware), and abstract structures developed by analyzing shared ways (such as myths and
ritualA ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value, which is prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers, or dictated purely by logic, chance, necessity, etc..A ritual may be...
s) members of a society represent their social life (and of which members of a society are not only
not consciously aware, and which typically stand in opposition to, or negate, the social structures of which people
are aware). He then sought to develop one universal mental structure that could only be inferred through the systematic comparison of particular social and cultural structures. He argued that just as there are laws through which a finite and relatively small number of chemical elements could be combined to create a seemingly infinite variety of things, there were a finite and relatively small number of cultural elements which people combine to create the great variety of cultures anthropologists observe. The systematic comparison of societies would enable an anthropologist to develop this cultural "table of elements," and once completed, this table of cultural elements would enable an anthropologist to analyze specific cultures and achieve insights hidden to the very people who produced and lived through these cultures. Structuralism came to dominate French anthropology and, in the late 1960s and 1970s, came to have great influence on American and British anthropology.
Murdock's HRAF and Lévi-Strauss's structuralism provide two ambitious ways to seek the universal in the particular, and both approaches continue to appeal to different anthropologists. However, the differences between them reveal a tension implicit in the heritage of Tylor and Bastian. Is culture to be found in
empiricallyIn philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge"...
observed behaviors that may form the basis of generalizations? Or does it consist of universal mental processes, which must be inferred and abstracted from observed behavior? This question has driven debates among biological anthropologists and archeologists as well.
The Structural-Functionalist Challenge: Society versus Culture
In the 1940s the Boasian understanding of culture was challenged by a new paradigm for anthropological and social science research called
Structural functionalismStructural functionalism is a sociological paradigm which addresses the social structure with regard to the social function of its constituent elements; namely, norms, customs, traditions, and institutions...
. This paradigm developed independently but in parallel in both the United Kingdom and in the United States (In both cases it is
sui generis: it has no direct relationship to "structuralism" except that both French structuralism and Anglo-American Structural-Functionalism were all influenced by Durkheim. It is also analogous, but unrelated to, other forms of "functionalism"). Whereas the Boasians viewed anthropology as that natural science dedicated to the study of humankind, structural functionalists viewed anthropology as one social science among many, dedicated to the study of one specific facet of humanity. This led structural-functionalists to redefine and minimize the scope of "culture."
In the United Kingdom, the creation of structural functionalism was anticipated by
Raymond FirthSir Raymond William Firth, CNZM, FBA, was an ethnologist from New Zealand. As a result of Firth's ethnographic work, actual behaviour of societies is separated from the idealized rules of behaviour within the particular society...
's (1901-2002)
We the Tikopia, published in 1936, and marked by the publication of
African Political Systems, edited by
Meyer FortesMeyer Fortes was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard...
(1906-1983) and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) in 1940. In these works these anthropologists forwarded a synthesis of the ideas of their mentor,
Bronislaw MalinowskiBronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish anthropologist, widely considered one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists. His pioneering ethnographic fieldwork made a major contribution to the study of Melanesia and of reciprocity.-Life:Malinowski was born in Kraków, Poland, to an...
(1884-1942), and his rival, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955). Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown viewed anthropology — what they call "
social anthropologySocial anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies how currently living human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular people: customs, economic and...
" — as that branch of sociology that studied so-called primitive societies. According to Malinowski's theory of
functionalismStructural functionalism is a sociological paradigm which addresses the social structure with regard to the social function of its constituent elements; namely, norms, customs, traditions, and institutions...
, all human beings have certain biological needs, such as the need for food and shelter, and humankind has the biological need to reproduce. Every society develops its own institutions, which function to fulfill these needs. In order for these institutions to function, individuals take on particular social roles that regulate how they act and interact. Although members of any given society may not understand the ultimate functions of their roles and institutions, an ethnographer can develop a model of these functions through the careful observation of social life. Radcliffe-Brown rejected Malinowski's notion of function, and believed that a general theory of primitive social life could only be built up through the careful comparison of different societies. Influenced by the work of French sociologist
Émile DurkheimDavid Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist and pioneer in the development of modern sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology, L'Année Sociologique, as well as his creation of the first European department of sociology, helped establish sociology...
(1858-1917), who argued that primitive and modern societies are distinguished by distinct social structures, Radcliffe-Brown argued that anthropologists first had to map out the social structure of any given society before comparing the structures of different societies. Firth, Fortes, and Evans-Pritchard found it easy to combine Malinowski's attention to social roles and institutions with Radcliffe-Brown's concern with social structures. They distinguished between "social organization" (observable social interactions) and "social structure" (rule-governed patterns of social interaction), and shifted their attention from biological functions to social functions (for example, how different institutions are functionally integrated, and the extent to, and ways in, which institutions function to promote social solidarity and stability. In short, instead of culture (understood as all human non-genetic or extra-somatic phenomena)they made "sociality" (interations and relationships among persons and groups of people) their object of study. (Indeed, Radcliffe-Brown once wrote "I should like to invoke a taboo on the word
culture.")
Coincidentally, in 1946
sociologistSociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
Talcott ParsonsTalcott Parsons was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927–1973.Parsons developed a general theory for the study of society called action theory, based on the methodological principle of voluntarism and the epistemological principle of analytical...
(1902-1979) founded the
Department of Social RelationsThe Department of Social Relations for Interdisciplinary Social Science Studies, more commonly known as the "Department of Social Relations" was an interdisciplinary collaboration among three of the social science departments at Harvard University during the middle of the 20th century,...
at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
. Influenced by such European sociologists as
Émile DurkheimDavid Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist and pioneer in the development of modern sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology, L'Année Sociologique, as well as his creation of the first European department of sociology, helped establish sociology...
and
Max WeberMaximilian Carl Emil Weber was a German lawyer, politician, historian, sociologist and political economist, who profoundly influenced social theory and the remit of sociology itself. His major works dealt with the rationalization, bureaucratization, and 'disenchantment' he associated with the...
, Parsons developed a theory of social action that was closer to British
social anthropologySocial anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies how currently living human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular people: customs, economic and...
than to Boas's American anthropology, and which he also called "structural functionalism." Parson's intention was to develop a total theory of social action (why people act as they do), and to develop at Harvard and inter-disciplinary program that would direct research according to this theory. His model explained human action as the result of four systems:
- the "behavioral system" of biological needs
- the "personality system" of an individual's characteristics affecting their functioning in the social world
- the "social system" of patterns of units of social interaction, especially social status and role
- the "cultural system" of norms and values that regulate social action symbolically
According to this theory, the second system was the proper object of study for psychologists; the third system for sociologists, and the fourth system for cultural anthropologists. Whereas the Boasians considered all of these systems to be objects of study by anthropologists, and "personality" and "status and role" to be as much a part of "culture" as "norms and values," Parsons envisioned a much narrower role for anthropology and a much narrower definition of culture.
Although Boasian cultural anthropologists were interested in norms and values, among many other things, it was only with the rise of structural functionalism that people came to identify "culture" with "norms and values." Many American anthropologists rejected this view of culture (and by implication, anthropology). In 1980, anthropologist
Eric WolfEric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology.-Early Life:...
wrote,
- As the social sciences transformed themselves into "behavioral" science, explanations for behavior were no longer traced to culture: behavior was to be understood in terms of psychological encounters, strategies of economic choice, strivings for payoffs in games of power. Culture, once extended to all acts and ideas employed in social life, was now relegated to the margins as "world view" or "values."
Nevertheless, several of Talcott Parsons' students emerged as leading American anthropologists. At the same time, many American anthropologists had a high regard for the research produced by social anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s, and found structural-functionalism to provide a very useful model for conducting ethnographic research.
The combination of American cultural anthropology theory with British social anthropology methods has led to some confusion between the concepts of "society" and "culture." For most anthropologists, these are distinct concepts. Society refers to a group of people; culture refers to a pan-human capacity and the totality of non-genetic human phenomena. Societies are often clearly bounded; cultural traits are often mobile, and cultural boundaries, such as they are, are typically porous, permeable, and plural. During the 1950s and 1960s anthropologists often worked in places where social and cultural boundaries coincided, thus obscuring the distinction. When disjunctures between these boundaries become highly salient, for example during the period of European de-colonization of Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, or during the
post-Bretton WoodsThe Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states in the mid 20th century...
realignment of
globalizationGlobalization describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communication and exchange....
, however, the difference often becomes central to anthropological debates.
1946-1968: Symbolic versus Adaptive
Parsons' students
Clifford GeertzClifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist and served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.-Life:...
and
David M. SchneiderDavid Murray Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology. He received his B.S. in 1940 and his M.S. from Cornell University in 1941...
, and Schneider's student
Roy WagnerRoy Wagner is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in symbolic anthropology. He received a B.A. in Medieval History from Harvard University , and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago , where he studied under David M. Schneider...
, went on to important careers as cultural anthropologists and developed a school within American cultural anthropology called "symbolic anthropology," the study of the social construction and social effects of symbols. Since symbolic anthropology easily complemented social anthropologists' studies of social life and social structure, many British structural-functionalists (who rejected or were uninterested in Boasian cultural anthropology) accepted the Parsonian definition of "culture" and "cultural anthropology." British anthropologist
Victor TurnerVictor Witter Turner was a cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology.-Biography and research interests:Turner was born in Glasgow,...
(who eventually left the United Kingdom to teach in the United States) was an important bridge between American and British symbolic anthropology.
Attention to symbols, the meaning of which depended almost entirely on their historical and social context, appealed to many Boasians.
Leslie White-Biography:White's father was a peripatetic civil engineer. White lived first in Kansas and then Louisiana. He volunteered to fight in World War I, but saw only the tail end of it, spending a year in the US Navy before matriculating at Louisiana State University in 1919.In 1921, he transferred to...
asked of cultural things, "What sort of objects are they? Are they physical objects? Mental objects? Both? Metaphors? Symbols? Reifications?" In
Science of Culture (1949), he concluded that they are objects "
sui generisSui generis is a Latin expression, literally meaning of its own kind/genus or unique in its characteristics. The expression is often used in analytic philosophy to indicate an idea, an entity, or a reality which cannot be included in a wider concept.-Biology:In the taxonomical structure "genus →...
"; that is, of their own kind. In trying to define that kind, he hit upon a previously unrealized aspect of symbolization, which he called "the symbolate"—an object created by the act of symbolization. He thus defined culture as "symbolates understood in an extra-somatic context."
Nevertheless, by the 1930s White began turning away from the Boasian approach. He wrote,
- In order to live man, like all other species, must come to terms with the external world.... Man employs his sense organs, nerves, glands, and muscles in adjusting himself to the external world. But in addition to this he has another means of adjustment and control.... This mechanism is culture.
Although this view echoes that of Malinowski, the key concept for White was not "function" but "adaptation." Whereas the Boasians were interested in the history of specific traits, White was interested in the cultural history of the human species, which he felt should be studied from an evolutionary perspective. Thus, the task of anthropology is to study "not only how culture evolves, but why as well.... In the case of man ... the power to invent and to discover, the ability to select and use the better of two tools or ways of doing something- these are the factors of cultural evolution." Unlike 19th century evolutionists, who were concerned with how civilized societies rose above primitive societies, White was interested in documenting how, over time, humankind as a whole has through cultural means discovered more and more ways for capturing and harnessing energy from the environment, in the process transforming culture.
At the same time that White was developing his theory of cultural evolution, Kroeber's student
Julian StewardJulian Haynes Steward was an American anthropologist best known for his role in developing "the concept and method" of cultural ecology, as well as a scientific theory of culture change.-Biography:...
was developing his theory of
cultural ecologyCultural ecology studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment, the life-forms and ecosystems that support its lifeways. This may be carried out diachronically , or synchronically...
. In 1938 he published
Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Socio-Political Groups in which he argued that diverse societies — for example the indigenous
ShoshoneThe Shoshone are a Native American tribe in the United States with three large divisions: the Northern, the Western and the Eastern. The Shoshone were sometimes called the Snake by early White trappers, travelers, and settlers....
or White farmers on the Great Plains — were not less or more evolved; rather, they had adapted differently to different environments. Whereas Leslie White was interested in culture understood holistically as a property of the human species, Julian Steward was interested in culture as the property of distinct societies. Like White he viewed culture as a means of adapting to the environment, but he criticized Whites "unilineal" (one direction) theory of cultural evolution and instead proposed a model of "multilineal" evolution in which (in the Boasian tradition) each society has its own cultural history.
When Julian Steward left a teaching position at the University of Michigan to work in Utah in 1930, Leslie White took his place; in 1946 Julian Steward was made Chair of the Columbia University Anthropology Department. In the 1940s and 1950s their students, most notably
Marvin HarrisMarvin Harris was an American anthropologist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. A prolific writer, he was highly influential in the development of cultural materialism. In his work he combined Karl Marx's emphasis on the forces of production with Malthus's insights on the impact of demographic...
,
Sidney MintzSidney Wilfred Mintz is an anthropologist best known for his studies of Latin America and the Caribbean. Mintz studied at Brooklyn College gaining his B.A in 1943. He got his doctoral degree from Columbia University under the supervision of Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict...
,
Robert MurphyRobert Murphy or Bob Murphy is the name of:In sports:*Irish Bob Murphy , American light heavyweight boxer*Bob Murphy , American baseball announcer...
,
Roy RappaportRoy A. Rappaport was a distinguished anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology....
,
Marshall SahlinsMarshall David Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and...
,
Elman ServiceElman Rogers Service was a cultural anthropologist.- Brief Biography :He was born on May 18, 1915 in Tecumseh, Michigan and died on November 14, 1996 in Santa Barbara, California. He earned a Bachelors Degree in 1941 from the University of Michigan. He earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from...
,
Andrew P. VaydaAndrew P. Vayda is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Ecology at Rutgers University. Formerly a professor at Columbia University, he has taught also at the University of Indonesia and other Indonesian universities and at the University of British Columbia...
and
Eric WolfEric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology.-Early Life:...
dominated American anthropology. Most promoted materialist understandings of culture in opposition to the symbolic approaches of Geertz and Schneider. Harris, Rappaport, and Vayda were especially important for their contributions to
cultural materialismCultural Materialism is an anthropological research orientation. "It is based on the simple premise that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence" ....
and
ecological anthropologyEcological anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that deals with human-environmental relationships over time and space. It investigates the ways that a population shapes its environment and the subsequent manners in which these relations form the population’s social, economic, and political...
, both of which argued that "culture" constituted an extra-somatic (or non-biological) means through which human beings could adapt to life in drastically differing physical environments.
The debate between symbolic and materialist approaches to culture dominated American Anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s. The
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
and the publication of
Dell HymesDell Hathaway Hymes is a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work has dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest...
'
Reinventing Anthropology, however, marked a growing dissatisfaction with the then dominant approaches to culture. Hymes argued that fundamental elements of the Boasian project such as holism and an interest in diversity were still worth pursuing: “interest in other peoples and their ways of life, and concern to explain them within a frame of reference that includes ourselves.” Moreover, he argued that cultural anthropologists are singularly well-equipped to lead this study (with an indirect rebuke to sociologists like Parsons who sought to subsume anthropology to their own project):
- In the practice there is a traditional place for openness to phenomena in ways not predefined by theory or design – attentiveness to complex phenomena, to phenomena of interest, perhaps aesthetic, for their own sake, to the sensory as well as intellectual, aspects of the subject. These comparative and practical perspectives, though not unique to formal anthropology, are specially husbanded there, and might well be impaired, if the study of man were to be united under the guidance of others who lose touch with experience in concern for methodology, who forget the ends of social knowledge in elaborating its means, or who are unwittingly or unconcernedly culture-bound..
It is these elements, Hymes argued, that justify a “general study of man,” that is, “anthropology”.
During this time notable anthropologists such as Mintz, Murphy, Sahlins, and Wolf eventually broke away, experimenting with
structuralistStructuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure...
and
MarxistMarxism is the political philosophy and economic worldview based upon a materialist interpretation of history, a Marxist analysis of capitalism, a theory of social change, and an atheist view of human liberation derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; three primary aspects of...
approaches to culture, they continued to promote cultural anthropology against structural functionalism.
1940 - present: Local versus Global
Boas and Malinowski established ethnographic research as a highly localized method for studying culture. Yet Boas emphasized that culture is dynamic, moving from one group of people to another, and that specific cultural forms have to be analyzed in a larger context. This has led anthropologists to explore different ways of understanding the global dimensions of culture.
In the 1940s and 1950s, several key studies focused on how trade between indigenous peoples and the Europeans who had conquered and colonized the Americas influenced indigenous culture, either through change in the organization of labor, or change in critical technologies. Bernard Mishkin studied the effect of the introduction of horses on
KiowaThe Kiowa are a nation of American Indians who migrated from what now is Canada to their present location in Southwestern Oklahoma. Today the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma is federally recognized, with approximately 14,000 members...
political organization and warfare.
Oscar LewisOscar Lewis was an American anthropologist who is best known for his vivid depictions of the lives of slum dwellers and for postulating that there was a cross-generational culture of poverty among poor people that transcended national boundaries...
explored the influence of the fur trade on Blackfoot culture (relying heavily on historical sources). Joseph Jablow documented how
CheyenneCheyenne are a Native American people of the Great Plains. The Cheyenne Nation is composed of two united tribes, the Só'taa'e and the Tsé-tsêhéstâhese , which translates to "those like us". The name Cheyenne derives from Dakota Sioux Šahíyena, meaning "little Šahíya"...
social organization and subsistence strategy between 1795 and 1840 were determined by their position in trade networks linking Whites and other Indians. Frank Secoy argued that
Great PlainsThe Great Plains are the broad expanse of prairie and steppe which lie west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S...
Indians’ social organization and military tactics changed as horses, introduced by the Spanish in the south, diffused north, and guns, introduced by the British and French in the east, diffused west.
In the 1950s
Robert RedfieldRobert Redfield was an American anthropologist and ethnolinguist. Redfield graduated from the University of Chicago, eventually with a JD from its law school and then a PhD in cultural anthropology, which he began to teach in 1927...
and students of
Julian StewardJulian Haynes Steward was an American anthropologist best known for his role in developing "the concept and method" of cultural ecology, as well as a scientific theory of culture change.-Biography:...
pioneered "community studies," namely, the study of distinct communities (whether identified by race, ethnicity, or economic class) in Western or "Westernized" societies, especially cities. They thus encountered the antagonisms 19th century critics described using the terms "high culture" and "low culture." These 20th century anthropologists struggled to describe people who were politically and economically inferior but not, they believed, culturally inferior.
Oscar LewisOscar Lewis was an American anthropologist who is best known for his vivid depictions of the lives of slum dwellers and for postulating that there was a cross-generational culture of poverty among poor people that transcended national boundaries...
proposed the concept of a "culture of poverty" to describe the cultural mechanisms through which people adapted to a life of economic poverty. Other anthropologists and sociologists began using the term "sub-culture" to describe culturally distinct communities that were part of larger societies.
One important kind of subculture is that formed by an immigrant community. In dealing with immigrant groups and their cultures, there are various approaches:
- Leitkultur
The German language term Leitkultur is a politically controversial concept, first introduced in 1998 by the German-Arab sociologist Bassam Tibi. It can be translated as 'guiding culture' or 'leading culture', less literally as 'comon culture', 'core culture' or 'basic culture'...
(core culture): A model developed in Germany by Bassam TibiBassam Tibi , born 1944 in Damascus, lives in Germany since 1962 and, since 1976, he is a German citizen. He is a political scientist and Professor of International Relations. He is a Muslim , but a staunch critic of Islamism and an advocate of reforming Islam itself...
. The idea is that minorities can have an identity of their own, but they should at least support the core concepts of the culture on which the society is based.
- Melting Pot
The melting pot is an analogy for the way in which heterogeneous societies become more homogeneous, in which the ingredients in the pot are combined so as to develop a multi-ethnic society...
: In the United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, the traditional view has been one of a melting pot where all the immigrant cultures are mixed and amalgamated without state intervention.
- Monoculturalism: In some European states, culture is very closely linked to nationalism
Nationalism is an ideology, a sentiment, a form of culture, or a social movement that focuses on the nation. It is a type of collectivism emphasizing the collective of a specific nation...
, thus government policy is to assimilate immigrants, although recent increases in migration have led many European states to experiment with forms of multiculturalism.
- Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the acceptance of multiple ethnic cultures, for practical reasons and/or for the sake of diversity and applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g. schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities or nations...
: A policy that immigrants and others should preserve their cultures with the different cultures interacting peacefully within one nation.
The way nation states treat immigrant cultures rarely falls neatly into one or another of the above approaches. The degree of difference with the host culture (i.e., "foreignness"), the number of immigrants, attitudes of the resident population, the type of government policies that are enacted, and the effectiveness of those policies all make it difficult to generalize about the effects. Similarly with other subcultures within a society, attitudes of the mainstream population and communications between various cultural groups play a major role in determining outcomes. The study of cultures within a society is complex and research must take into account a myriad of variables.
Cultural Studies
In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by
MarxismMarxism is the political philosophy and economic worldview based upon a materialist interpretation of history, a Marxist analysis of capitalism, a theory of social change, and an atheist view of human liberation derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; three primary aspects of...
, such as
Stuart Hall-People:*Stuart Hall , British radio and television presenter*Stuart Hall , British cultural theorist and first editor of the New Left Review...
and
Raymond WilliamsRaymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
, developed
Cultural StudiesCultural studies is an academic field which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies...
. Following nineteenth century Romantics, they identified "culture" with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). Nevertheless, they understood patterns of consumption and leisure to be determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production. In the United States, "Cultural Studies" focuses largely on the study of
popular culturePopular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture...
, that is, the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. The term was coined by
Richard HoggartHerbert Richard Hoggart is a British academic and public figure, whose career has covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with a special concern for British popular culture.-Career:...
in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural StudiesThe Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was a research centre at the University of Birmingham, England. It was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, its first director...
or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with
Stuart HallStuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was an early and influential contributor to the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham...
, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.
From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with his colleagues
Paul WillisPaul Willis is a leading British cultural theorist.He was born in Wolverhampton and received his education at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Birmingham. He worked at Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and subsequently at the University of Wolverhampton...
,
Dick HebdigeDick Hebdige is an expatriate British media theorist and sociologist most commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its resistance against the mainstream of society. He received his M.A. from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, United Kingdom...
, Tony Jefferson, and
Angela McRobbieAngela McRobbie is a British cultural theorist and commentator. She combines the study of different dimensions of youth culture with a commentary on development in cultural theory and politics....
, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed it began to combine
political economyPolitical economy originally was the term for studying production, buying and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
,
communication Communication is a process of transferring information from one entity to another. Communication processes are sign-mediated interactions between at least two agents which share a repertoire of signs and semiotic rules. Communication is commonly defined as "the imparting or interchange of...
,
sociologySociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
,
social theorySocial theory is the use of theoretical frameworks to study and interpret social structures and phenomena within a particular school of thought....
,
literary theoryLiterary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
,
media theoryIn psychology, communication theory and sociology, media influence or media effects refers to the theories about the ways the mass media affect how their audiences think and behave....
,
film/video studiesFilm theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large...
,
cultural anthropologyCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
,
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
, museum studies and
art historyArt history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and look. This includes the "major" arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture as well as the "minor" arts of ceramics,...
in order to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of
ideologyAn ideology is a set of aims and ideas that directs one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a...
,
nationalityNationality is the relationship between a person and their state of origin, culture, association, affiliation and/or loyalty. Nationality affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state....
, ethnicity,
social classSocial classes are the hierarchical arrangements of people in society as economic or cultural groups. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political economists and social historians...
, and/or
genderGender commonly refers to the set of characteristics that humans perceive as distinguishing between male and female entities, extending from one's biological sex to, in humans, one's social role or gender identity. As a term, "gender" has more than one valid definition...
. Cultural studies is concerned with the
meaningA personal and cultural value is a relative ethic value, an assumption upon which implementation can be extrapolated. A value system is a set of consistent values and measures. A principle value is a foundation upon which other values and measures of integrity are based...
and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. This field studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Recently, as
capitalismCapitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor...
has spread throughout the world (a process called
globalizationGlobalization describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communication and exchange....
), cultural studies has begun to analyse local and global forms of resistance to Western hegemony.
In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a
textText may refer to:* Plain text* Text , a concept in literary theory* TEXT, a Swedish band formed by 3/4 ex-Refused Members* Textbook, a standardized instructional book...
not only includes written language, but also
filmFilm encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects....
s,
photographPhotography is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a photographic film, or an electronic sensor...
s,
fashionFashion is the style and custom prevalent at a given time. In its most common usage however, "fashion" describes the popular clothing style. Many fashions are popular in many cultures at any given time. Important is the idea that the course of design and fashion will change more rapidly than the...
or
hairstyleA hairstyle, hairdo, or haircut refers to a styling of head hair. The fashioning of hair can be considered an aspect of personal grooming, fashion, and cosmetics, although practical considerations also influence some hairstyles...
s: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a cultural studies researcher not only includes traditional
high cultureHigh culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture. In more popular terms, it is the culture of an elite such as the aristocracy or intelligentsia...
(the culture of
rulingThe term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy - assuming there is one such particular class in the given society...
social groups) and
popular culturePopular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture...
, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is
comparative cultural studiesComparative cultural studies is the study of a culture and all of its products and processes with the focus being on the theory, method, and application of the study process rather than on the "what" of the object of study....
, based on the discipline of
comparative literatureComparative literature is critical scholarship dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
and cultural studies.
Scholars in the
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
and the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field's inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies was developed in the 1950s and 1960s mainly under the influence first of Richard Hoggart,
E. P. ThompsonEdward Palmer Thompson , was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, in particular his sociological work The Making of the English Working Class...
, and
Raymond WilliamsRaymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
, and later Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the
University of BirminghamThe University of Birmingham is a British 'Redbrick' university located in the city of Birmingham, England...
. This included overtly political,
left-wingIn politics, left-wing, political left, leftist and the Left are terms used to describe a number of positions and ideologies. They are most commonly used to refer to support for changing traditional social orders or for creating a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and privilege...
views, and criticisms of
popular culturePopular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture...
as 'capitalist' mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the
Frankfurt SchoolThe Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist sociology and philosophy in the tradition of critical theory, which was associated with the early Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
critique of the "
culture industryCulture industry is a term coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer , who argued in "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods - through film, radio and magazines – to manipulate the masses into...
" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and
Paul GilroyPaul Gilroy is a Professor at the London School of Economics.Born in the East End of London to Guyanese and English parents , he was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at Sussex University in 1978. He moved from there to Birmingham University where he...
.
Whereas in the United States Lindlof & Taylor say that "cultural studies was grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition". The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of
fandomFandom is a term used to refer to a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of sympathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest...
. The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded. Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the
Frankfurt SchoolThe Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist sociology and philosophy in the tradition of critical theory, which was associated with the early Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
, but especially from the
structuralistStructuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure...
Marxism of
Louis AlthusserLouis Pierre Althusser was a Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the
production of
meaningA personal and cultural value is a relative ethic value, an assumption upon which implementation can be extrapolated. A value system is a set of consistent values and measures. A principle value is a foundation upon which other values and measures of integrity are based...
. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing
cultural artifactA cultural artifact is term used in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology, and sociology for anything created by humans which gives information about the culture of its creator and users...
s. In a Marxist view, those who control the
means of productionMeans of production , are things used byhuman labourers to create products. They include two broad categories of objects: instruments of labour and subjects of labour...
(the economic
base) essentially control a culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view is best exemplified by the book
Doing Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and art historian
Griselda PollockGriselda Pollock is a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and...
contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of
art historyArt history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and look. This includes the "major" arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture as well as the "minor" arts of ceramics,...
and
psychoanalysisPsychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud and continued by others. It is primarily devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behavior, although it also can be applied to societies.
...
. The writer
Julia KristevaJulia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her...
is influential voices in the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.
Cultural change
Cultural inventionA Cultural invention is any new or useful innovation developed by people that is not of a physical construct. Cultural inventions include sets of behaviour adopted by groups of people as useful. They are perpetuated by being passed on to others within the group or outside it...
has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period", driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the
human populationThe term world population commonly refers to the total number of living humans on Earth at a given time. As of , the Earth's population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be billion. The world population has been growing continuously since the end of the Black Death around 1400...
explosion, among other factors.
Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both
social structureSocial structure is a term used in sociology and anthropology to refer to relationships or bonds between groups of individuals . Whereas 'structure' refers to "the macro", "agency" refers to "the micro"...
s and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change. (See
structurationThe theory of structuration, proposed by Anthony Giddens in The Constitution of Society , is an attempt to reconcile theoretical dichotomies of social systems such as agency/structure, subjective/objective, and micro/macro perspectives...
.)
Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling
generative actionA generative actor is an instigator of social change. He or she promotes cultural change by defying cultural normatives. Noted examples include Galileo and Rosa Parks....
. These social shifts may accompany
ideologicalAn ideology is a set of aims and ideas that directs one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a...
shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S.
feminist movementThe Suffrage movement is a series of campaigns on issues such as reproductive rights , domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. The goals of the movement vary from country to country, e.g...
involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. Changes include following for the film local hero. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last
ice ageThe general term "ice age" or, more precisely, "glacial age" denotes a geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in an expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Within a long-term ice age, individual...
, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of
agricultureAgriculture is the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of human civilization, with the husbandry of domesticated animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more densely populated and...
, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.
Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example,
hamburgerA hamburger is a sandwich consisting of a cooked patty of ground meat, usually beef, placed in an open bun or between two slices of bread...
s, mundane in the United States, seemed exotic when introduced into China. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct Borrowing" on the other hand tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another.
Diffusion of innovationsDiffusion of Innovations is a theory of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. The concept was first studied by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde and by German and Austrian anthropologists such as Friedrich Ratzel or Leo Frobenius . Its basic...
theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.
AcculturationAcculturation is the exchange of cultural features that results when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first hand contact; the original cultural patterns of either or both groups may be altered, but the groups remain distinct...
has different meanings, but in this context refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with those of another, such has happened to certain
Native AmericanThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples...
tribes and to many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include
assimilationCultural assimilation is a political response to the demographic fact of multi-ethnicity which encourages absorption of the minority into the dominant culture...
(adoption of a different culture by an individual) and
transculturationTransculturation is a term coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1947 to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures.-Definition:...
.
See also
- Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition...
- Cross-cultural communication
Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in simlar and different ways among themselves , and how they endeavour to communicate across cultures.- Origins of the discipline :In years during and...
- Intercultural competenceIntercultural competence is the ability of successful communication with people of other cultures.A person who is interculturally competent captures and understands, in interaction with people from foreign cultures, their specific concepts in perception, thinking, feeling and acting...
- Cultural bias
Cultural bias is a bias effected by one's culture. The alleged problem of cultural bias is sometimes considered central to social and human sciences, such as economics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. To counter perceived cultural bias, some practitioners of the aforementioned fields have...
- Cultural imperialismCultural imperialism is the practice of promoting, distinguishing, separating, or artificially injecting the culture of one society into another. It is usually the case that the former belongs to a large, economically or militarily powerful nation and the latter belongs to a smaller, less important...
- EthnocentrismEthnocentrism is the tendency to believe that one's ethnic or cultural group is centrally important, and that all other groups are measured in relation to one's own. The ethnocentric individual will judge other groups relative to their own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with...
- Cultural dissonance
Cultural dissonance is an uncomfortable sense of discord, disharmony, confusion, or conflict experienced by people in the midst of change in their cultural environment...
- Cultural Institutions Studies
Cultural institutions studies is an academic approach "which investigates activities in the cultural sector, conceived as historically evolved societal forms of organising the conception, production, distribution, propagation, interpretation, reception, conservation and maintenance of specific...
- Culture theory
Culture theory is the branch of anthropology and semiotics that seeks to define the heuristic concept of culture in operational and/or scientific terms....
- Culture war
The culture war in American usage is a metaphor used to claim that political conflict is based on sets of conflicting cultural values. The term frequently implies a conflict between those values considered traditional or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal...
- Interculturality
The term interculturality refers to any aspect of any interaction between any cultures.-Description:A culture is understood as a group of people with a common identity that is based on common attributes, attitudes, practices and so on...
- Legal culture
Legal cultures are described as being temporary outcomes of interactions and occur pursuant to a challenge and response paradigm. Analyses of core legal paradigms shape the characteristics of individual and distinctive legal cultures....
- Online Etymology Dictionary
The Online Etymology Dictionary is a dictionary that describes the origins of English language words. The abbreviation, OED, coincides with the frequently used acronym for the Oxford English Dictionary, a coincidence unlikely to be lost on etymologists....
- Outline of culture
- Sociocultural evolution
Sociocultural evolution is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social evolution, describing how cultures and societies have developed over time...
- Urban culture
Urban culture is the culture of towns and cities. All over the world, past and present, these settlements have behaviors and cultural elements that separate them from otherwise comparable rural areas....
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