Culture, Theory, Ethnocentrism

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Culture, Theory, Ethnocentrism
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Introduction

• How anthropology began awareness of cultural
  differences
• Definitions of culture
• a desireable quality we can acquire by attending
  a sufficient number of plays and concerts and
  visiting art museums and galleries
• a set of learned behaviors, beliefs, attitudes,
  values, and ideals that are characteristic of a
  particular society or population
• Enculturation is the process by which a child
  learns his or her culture.

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Culture is Shared

• Culture is located and transmitted in groups.
• The social transmission of culture tends to unify
  people by providing us with a common experience.
• The commonalty of experience in turn tends to
  generate a common understanding of future events.
• Subculture - commonly shared customs of a group
  within a society (e.g. Russian-American customs)
• Western culture - example of commonly shared
  customs of some group that includes different
  societies
• Society - A group of people who occupy a
  particular territory and speak a common language
  not generally understood by neighboring peoples.
• Variation

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Levels of Culture

• National culture refers to the experiences,
  beliefs, learned behavior patterns, and values
  shared by citizens of the same nation.
• International culture refers to cultural
  practices which are common to an identifiable
  group extending beyond the boundaries of one
  culture.
• Subcultures are identifiable cultural patterns
  existing within a larger culture.
• Cultural practices and artifacts are transmitted
  through diffusion.
• Direct diffusion occurs when members of two or
  more previously distinct cultures interact with
  each other.
• Indirect diffusion occurs when cultural artifacts
  or practices are transmitted from one culture to
  another through an intermediate third (or more)
  culture.

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Levels of Culture
Levels of culture, with examples from sports and
food.
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Culture is Learned

• For something to be cultural, it must be both
  learned and shared.
• hair color ? culture
• what, where, when people eat culture
• Cultural learning is unique to humans.
• Cultural learning is the accumulation of
  knowledge about experiences and information not
  perceived directly by the organism, but
  transmitted to it through symbols.
• Symbols are signs that have no necessary or
  natural connection with the things for which they
  stand.
• Symbols are very important in language.

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Culture is Learned

• Culture is learned through both direct
  instruction and through observation (both
  conscious and unconscious).
• Anthropologists in the 19th century argued for
  the psychic unity of man.
• This doctrine acknowledges that individuals vary
  in their emotional and intellectual tendencies
  and capacities.
• However, this doctrine asserted that all human
  populations share the same capacity for culture.

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Culture is Symbolic

• The human ability to use symbols is the basis of
  culture (a symbol is something verbal or
  nonverbal within a particular language or culture
  that comes to stand for something else).
• While human symbol use is overwhelmingly
  linguistic, a symbol is anything that is used to
  represent any other thing, when the relationship
  between the two is arbitrary (e.g. a flag).
• Other primates have demonstrated rudimentary
  ability to use symbols, but only humans have
  elaborated cultural abilitiesto learn, to
  communicate, to store, to process, and to use
  symbols. (Example teaching a child to avoid a
  snake.)

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Individual Variation

• A culture is a system changes in one aspect will
  likely generate changes in other aspects.
• There is variation in culture, in behavior.
• Core values are sets of ideas, attitudes, and
  beliefs which are basic in that they provide an
  organizational logic for the rest of the culture.
• Norms - Standards or rules about what is
  acceptable behavior.
• Cultural constraints - direct and indirect
• Can be found out through observation or
  interviews.

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People Use Culture Creatively

• Humans have the ability to avoid, manipulate,
  subvert, and change the rules and patterns of
  their own cultures.
• Ideal culture refers to normative descriptions of
  a culture given by its natives.
• Real culture refers to actual behavior as
  observed by an anthropologist.
• Culture is both public and individual because
  individuals internalize the meanings of public
  (cultural) messages.

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Discovering Cultural Patterns

• Statistics
• modal response - most often stated response
• frequency distribution, modal pattern bell
  curve
• random sampling

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Culture is Adaptive and Maladaptive

• Culture is an adaptive strategy employed by
  hominids, a cultural version of natural
  selection.
• Adaptive only with respect to a specific physical
  and social environment.
• Because cultural behavior is motivated by
  cultural factors, and not by environmental
  constraints, cultural behavior can be
  maladaptive.
• Determining whether a cultural practice is
  adaptive or maladaptive frequently requires
  viewing the results of that practice from several
  perspectives.
• Example Kwashiorkor and pregnancy in tropical
  areas

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Culture is Integrated

• Elements or traits that make up that culture are
  not just a random assortment of customs but are
  mostly adjusted to or consistent with one
  another.
• Culture is generally adaptive.
• Traits of a culture are attitudes, values,
  ideals, and rules for behavior

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Culture Universal

• Cultural universals are features that are found
  in every culture, those that distinguish Homo
  sapiens from other species.
• Biological infant dependency, sexuality, brain
  that enables us to use symbols, languages, and
  tools.
• Psychological ways in which humans think, feel,
  and process information.
• Social incest taboos, life in groups, families
  (of some kind), and food sharing.

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Culture General

• Cultural generalities include features that are
  common to several, but not all human groups
  certain practices, beliefs, and the like that may
  be held commonly by more than one culture, but
  not universal.
• Diffusion and independent invention are two main
  sources of cultural generalities. (Definitions
  follow.)
• The nuclear family is a cultural generality since
  it is present in most, but not all societies.

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Culture Change Diffusion

• Diffusion is the spread of culture traits through
  borrowing from one culture to another. It has
  been a source of culture change throughout human
  history.
• Diffusion can be direct (between to adjacent
  cultures) or indirect (across one or more
  intervening cultures or through some long
  distance medium).
• Diffusion can be forced (through warfare,
  colonization, or some other kind of domination)
  or unforced (e.g., intermarriage, trade, and the
  like).

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Acculturation

• Acculturation is the exchange of features that
  results when groups come into continuous,
  firsthand contact.
• Acculturation may occur in any or all groups
  engaged in such contact.
• A pidgin is an example of acculturation, because
  it is a language form that develops by borrowing
  language elements from two linguistically
  different populations in order to facilitate
  communication between the two.

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Independent Invention

• Independent invention is defined as the creative
  innovation of new solutions to old and new
  problems.
• Cultural generalities are partly explained by the
  independent invention of similar responses to
  similar cultural and environmental circumstances.
• The independent invention of agriculture in both
  the Middle East and Mexico is an example.

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Culture Particularity

• Cultural particularities are features that are
  unique to certain cultural traditions.
• That these particulars may be of fundamental
  importance to the population is indicative of the
  need to study the sources of cultural diversity.
• Birth control in tropical areas to prevent
  kwashiorkor

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Theory in Cultural Anthropology

• 19th Century Evolutionism
• Historical Particularism
• Functionalism
• Cognitive and Symbolic Approaches
• Postmodernism

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19th Century Evolutionism

• Premise That culture generally develops (or
  evolves) in a uniform and progressive manner.
• It was thought that most societies pass through
  the same series of stages, to arrive ultimately
  at a common end.
• The sources of culture change were generally
  assumed to be embedded within the culture from
  the beginning, and therefore the ultimate course
  of development was thought to be internally
  determined.
• Divided the ethnological record into evolutionary
  stages ranging from the most primitive to the
  most civilized based on Darwins work and new
  cross-cultural, historical, and archaeological
  evidence--savagery, barbarism, civilization
  (Morgan).
• Main forces of cultural evolution
• psychic unity among all peoples that explained
  parallel evolutionary sequences in different
  cultural traditions (different societies often
  find the same solutions to the same problems
  independently)
• simple diffusion
• Leading figures Lewis Henry Morgan, Edward
  Tylor

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Historical Particularism - 1900s to 1930s

• While cultural evolution offered an explanation
  of what happened and where, it was unable to
  describe the particular influences on and
  processes of cultural change and development.
• To accomplish this, an historical approach was
  needed for the study of culture change and
  development to explain not only what happened and
  where but also why and how.
• Main forces of cultural change
• Diffusionism (psychic unity of mankind)
• Culture circles (Venn diagrams)
• Leading proponent Franz Boas
• Believed that one had to carry out detailed
  regional studies of individual cultures to
  discover the distribution of culture traits and
  to understand the individual processes of culture
  change at work. In short, Boas sought to
  reconstruct their histories.
• Boas stressed the meticulous collection and
  organization of ethnographic data on all aspects
  of many different human societies. Only after
  information on the particulars of many different
  cultures had been gathered could generalizations
  about cultural development be made with any
  expectation of accuracy.

Yellow - Clovis Pink - Mousterian Green -
Oldowon Purple - Acheulean Blue - Bamboo tools
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Functionalism - 1920s to 1950s

• Premise Underlying functionalist theory is the
  fundamental metaphor of the living organism, its
  several parts and organs, grouped and organized
  into a system, the function of the various parts
  and organs being to sustain the organism, to keep
  its essential processes going and enable it to
  reproduce. Similarly, members of a society can
  be thought of as cells, its institutions its
  organs, whose function is to sustain the life of
  the collective entity, despite the frequent death
  of cells and the production of new ones.
• Functionalist analyses examine the social
  significance of phenomena, that is, the purpose
  they serve a particular society in maintaining
  the whole.
• Functionalism was an attempt to move away from
  the evolutionism and diffusionism that dominated
  American and British anthropology at the turn of
  the century. There was a shift in focus from the
  speculative nature of anthropology to the study
  of social institutions within current societies.
• Main proponent Bronislaw Malinowski
• Suggested that individuals have physiological
  needs and that social institutions develop to
  meet these needs--uniform psychological responses
  are correlates of physiological needs.
• Four basic "instrumental needs" (economics,
  social control, education, and political
  organization).

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Cognitive and Symbolic Approaches

• Premise Cognitive anthropology focuses on the
  study of the relation between human culture and
  human thought. In contrast with some earlier
  anthropological approaches to culture, cultures
  are not regarded as material phenomena, but
  rather cognitive organizations of material
  phenomena. Cognitive anthropologists study how
  people understand and organize the material
  objects, events, and experiences that make up
  their world as the people they study perceive it.
  Cognitive anthropology posits that each culture
  orders events, material life and ideas, to its
  own criteria. The fundamental aim of cognitive
  anthropology is to reliably represent the logical
  systems of thought of other people according to
  criteria, which can be discovered and replicated
  through analysis.
• Example Proverbial idea that Eskimos have 50
  words for snow.
• Premise Symbolic anthropology views culture as
  an independent system of meaning deciphered by
  interpreting key symbols and rituals.
• Beliefs, however unintelligible, become
  comprehensible when understood as part of a
  cultural system of meaning
• Actions are guided by interpretation, allowing
  symbolism to aid in interpreting ideal as well as
  material activities.
• Traditionally, symbolic anthropology has focused
  on religion, cosmology, ritual activity, and
  expressive customs such as mythology and the
  performing arts as they key to understanding
  culture.

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Postmodernism - 1980s to present

• Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (1996)
  Post-modernism is defined as an eclectic
  movement, originating in aesthetics --
  architecture and philosophy.
• Postmodernism espouses a systematic skepticism of
  grounded theoretical perspective.
• Applied to anthropology, this skepticism has
  focused from the observation of a particular
  society to the observation of the observer.
• Postmodernists are suspicious of authoritative
  definitions and singular narratives of any
  trajectory of events.
• Post-modern attacks of ethnography are based on
  the belief that there is no true objectivity.
• Scientific method is not possible.
• What does the anthropologist feel about this
  culture? Can he separate himself from his job,
  his culture, his own beliefs in order to
  chronicle another culture?

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Ethnocentrism

• Ethnocentrism is the use of values, ideals, and
  mores from ones own culture to judge the
  behavior of someone from another culture.
• Ethnocentrism is a cultural universal.
• Ethnocentrism contributes to social solidarity.
• Ethnocentrism hinders our understanding of the
  customs of other people and, at the same time,
  keeps us from understanding our own customs.
• Miners The Nacirema

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10-Minute Break

• Ethnocentrism
• Activity - Whats happening in this picture?
• Read pages 219-220
• Cultural Relativism
• Activity - Discussion
• Read pages 220-222, including blue box on page 221

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Ritual and Culture
U.S. - Virginia, 2000
Happy anniversary to me ?
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Ritual and Culture
Great Britain - 1966
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Ritual and Culture
Guinea Bissau, Africa
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Ritual and Culture
The Americas
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Ritual and Culture
The Netherlands
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Ritual and Culture
Italy
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Ritual and Culture
Tibet, 1997
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Ritual and Culture
Mexico - November 1
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Cultural Relativism

• Cultural relativism asserts that cultural values
  are arbitrary, and therefore the values of one
  culture should not be used as standards to
  evaluate the behavior of persons from outside
  that culture. A societys customs and beliefs
  should be described objectively.
• Strong form - there are no wrong cultures or
  aspects of culture.
• Weak form - strive for objectivity and dont be
  quick to judge
• Current Issues Discussion
• Are we, as Westerners, trying to force our
  customs onto the rest of the world?