The Culture Concept
What is Culture?
Culture is a set of shared customs.
Sometimes, culture is self-identified and intentionally reproduced (e.g. "in my culture we value family"). Other times, it is an external label that is implied to be unwittingly reproduced (e.g. "the culture of poverty").
Why do we suggest that cultural institutions are different from political institutions and religious institutions?
Why do we distinguish between high culture and low culture? In some ways, we accept that culture can be hierarchical, and that there can be some cultures that are better than others. But we also commonly hear the argument that culture is inherently relative (cultural relativism).
The History of Culture
"Culture... includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" - E.B. Tylor
- Tylor developed this definition at the height of European imperialism
- Culture quickly became the dominant framework to understand non-European peoples
- Culture was originally been a tool used from the perspective of the colonizer to understand the colonized ("the other")
There were several issues with early anthropological work:
- Early anthropologists relied on the accounts of others, but did not have contact with the people they were studying (cultural evolutionism)
- Early anthropologists tended to evaluate other cultures from the viewpoint that their own culture was superior (ethnocentrism)
- Early anthropologists believed that cultures evolved through distinct stages, from savagery, barbarism, to civilization (cultural evolutionism)
Around the 19th century, the field of anthropology changed:
- Anthropologists began to travel and live among the group of people they are studying (participant observation, or going native)
- Anthropolgists began to believe that culture should be understood on its own terms rather than be compared to an outsider's standard (cultural relativism)
Franz Boas argued that Inuit culture was shaped by the cold environment, and so cannot be compared to cultures without this environmental context. This led to the idea of cultural relativism. However, this kind of environmental determinism was also used to justify racist beliefs about other cultures.
Margaret Mead showed that Somoan teenagers had an easier time transition from childhood to adulthood than U.S. teenagers, mostly because of culture. This was a novel argument against biological racism.
Bronislaw Malinowski argued that cultural traditions were developed as a response to specific needs, like food, safety, and stability. This idea was called structural functionalism. However, this view eventually fell out of favor because it views cultures as stable and orderly; it is unable to explain social change. It also is unable to explain why a society develops one particular kind of social institution instead of another.
Cultural Change
How do cultures change?
One view is that cultures change in a deterministic, teleological way. Teleology is the explanation of phenomena in terms of purpose instead of cause. Examples of teleological explanations of culture include:
- Structural functionalism, which tries to explain society in terms of structures which promote stability
- Social evolution, which theorizes that cultures go through a process of competition, accommodation, conflict, and assimilation
The problem with teleology is that culture changes in ways that we can't product, and which can't be mapped into a linear structure. This is called the cultural specificity theory.
Politics of Culture
Franz Boas challenged both the idea of racial inferiority and cultural inferiority. He made two important studies:
- He took head measurements of immigrants and found that they differed from the measurements of local Americans. He showed that environment caused the variability of traits usually used for racial categorization. This challenged the idea of racial inferiority.
- He engaged in an ethnographic student of Inuit people in Canada, which lead to the idea of cultural relativism.
Although Boas were successful in challenging racial inferiority, he was unsuccessful in promoting cultural relativism to ethnic immigrants and Blacks. In other words, there persisted the idea that rural black folk culture was "culturally inferior," and that the best outcome was for Black people to assimilate into white culture.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund led a legal campaign to desgregate public schools, culminating in the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. The NAACP accepted Boas's argument that there is no racial inferiority, but rejected his theory of cultural relativism.
This is because of the following reasons:
- Black people negatively deviated from the white population on multiple metrics (poverty, crime, disease), in a way that were correlated to cultural variables (incidence of female-headed households, divorces, fictive kin relations).Anthropologists believed that cultural change (assimilation) could change these metrics.
- The cultural specificity theory that culture was slow to change and not reversible. This was a problem because it may relieve whites of social obligations to change the status quo. Social evolution put more responsibility on white people to take part in speeding up assimilation.
References: Lee Baker. 1998. Unraveling the Boasian Discourse: The Racial Politics of "Culture" in School Desegregation, 1944 - 1954, Transforming Anthropology 7(1): 15 -32.
Balinese cock-fighting
- Importance is not in making money by betting (formal function)
- Metonym for broader society, which shows the punctuatedness of Balinese life
- Cultural text that represents society, and allows people to learn and mimic culture
References: Clifford Geertz. 1973. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock Fight. The Interpretation of Cultures.