Assimilation or Cultural Relativism
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Chapter Outline
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Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Explain the nature of culture.
2. Define ideology.
3. Discuss ideological communication.
4. Explain the relationship between beliefs and feelings.
5. Enumerate the differences between real and ideal culture.
6. Discuss the ways cultures may influence each other.
7. Recognize how scientific and humanistic approaches to culture influence the ways culture is conceptualized.
8. Discuss the implications of cultural universals.
Culture 2
2.1 Culture
2.2 Ideology
• Ideological Communication • Beliefs • Feelings • The Enculturation Process • Cultural Change
2.3 Viewpoints About Culture
• Diversity in Conceptualizing Culture • The Unity and Diversity of Cultures
2.4 Cultural Universals
• Biology and Cultural Universals • The Coexistence of Cultural Differences and
Universals
2.5 Culture In Nonhuman Primates?
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.1 Culture
Unlike other animals, we humans have a persistent tendency to try to make sense of our existence and to share those understandings with others of our group. In so doing, we also construct a shared system of survival strategies. These ideas and survival strategies are institutionalized and perpetuated as culture, the subject of this chapter. After analyzing the systematic patterning of beliefs, feelings, and ways of surviving, we must note that these patterns differ from one society to the next, frequently resulting in misunderstandings and mistrust between human groups.
2.1 Culture
Human beings are social animals. We live in communities that are part of larger social groups called societies. A society is a group of people who conceive of themselves as distinct from other groups and who are connected by communica- tion ties, common customs and traditions, and shared institutions such as politics, law, and economics. What makes human societies different from the groups other social ani- mals form is that members of human societies share a sense of common identity that grows out of their shared culture, or the learned system of beliefs, feelings, and rules for living through which they organize their lives. In everyday language, a culture is the “way of life” that is passed from one generation to the next. The awareness that their soci- ety is guided by a distinctive set of shared beliefs, feelings, and strategies for living gives the members of each society a sense of common identity as “a people” that is distinctively human.
Great diversity exists among anthropologists’ formal definitions of culture. Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) surveyed 158 definitions of culture by anthropolo- gists and other social and behavioral scientists. They found that the concept of culture always centers on the idea that there is a system to the beliefs and feelings that unify a human group and give it an identity as a society. Those who share a culture may be aware of some parts of the system, whereas their awareness of other parts of the system may be implicit in their customary behavior without their being conscious of it.
Although cultures are said to be shared, people in a society need not share their culture in its entirety. In fact, in societies such as industrialized societies with populations in the hundreds of millions, there are tremendous differences in the specialized cultural knowl- edge of different individuals. For instance, legal specialists will have a much more detailed knowledge of the rules and values that govern legal institutions than do ordinary citizens; governmental bureaucrats will be similarly more knowledgeable about the customary policies and practices of government than nonbureaucrats; and religious specialists will have a much more detailed knowledge of theology and ritual than will most other reli- gious participants.
In learning the customs of their culture, people are taught that they share some “common understandings” with one another and that others expect them to follow the traditional customs of their group. Our North American culture gives particular meanings to behav- iors such as shaking hands and applauding a performance. Our common understanding about the use of these behaviors lets us know when we should and should not do them. A definite awkwardness or embarrassment is felt by everyone involved if someone does either behavior at the wrong time or place. In this sense, much of a way of life is like a set
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.1 Culture
of rules about how one ought to live. Anthropologists call these rules social norms. Social norms, like the rules of a game, give structure and continuity to the social life of each human group. The predictability that culture lends to people’s behavior gives them secu- rity because it allows them to anticipate the behavior of others, including those they are meeting for the first time. Therefore, the parts of culture that are explicitly taught are often thought of as the proper way of behaving.
Participating in a shared system of customs con- ceptualized as traditional also gives life a sense of meaningfulness. Thus, attending the World Series, the Super Bowl, your high school prom, rock concerts, and a picnic on a crowded beach on the Fourth of July are all activities that help the people of the United States conceive of them- selves as members of a society with its own dis- tinctive culture. Customs, objects, and events acquire particular meanings for the participants and may be thought of as symbols of the cul- ture. Clothing, for example, is chosen not only to protect our bodies from the elements but also to convey symbolic messages that may be inter- preted by others according to the shared mean- ings of our culture. For instance, clerical collars reveal the religious profession of pastors; jeans, a cowboy hat, and handcrafted cowboy boots sug- gest an American West identification; and heavy black eyeliner, dark clothing, a heavy metal band t-shirt, and bat earrings scream “Goth!”.
Earlier anthropologists tended to use the concept of culture as if there were no diversity among the
“common understandings” of a people. This was an easy oversimplification in an era in which most fieldwork was done in small-scale, relatively isolated societies of 50 to 300 people, where it was easy to stress the commonalities of thought and values expressed. But anthropologists who do their research in societies with larger populations can hardly ignore that their descriptions of a society’s culture must take into account the fact that it is not fixed and changeless, that even within a single society there is variation in the univer- sally accepted pattern of customs, ideas, and feelings. Awareness of this diversity within a culture led to the concept of subcultures, or cultural variations shared by particular groups within a society. We might, for example, say that marriage is typically viewed by Americans as a fundamentally important institution. However, how we view marriage has changed over time, and even today an understanding of what actually constitutes marriage is not entirely shared. A hundred years ago, interracial marriages violated the social norms of American society, but attitudes changed; laws against interracial marriage were declared unconstitutional; and such marriages came to be accepted as a fundamental legal right. Today, gay and gay-friendly Americans differ politically with more tradition- alist Americans in how the institution of marriage should be legally defined and who should have the right to marry.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock Neck rings reveal a woman’s belonging to one of a few particular African or Asian cultures.
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.1 Culture
The essential element that defines a subculture as opposed to a culture is not its com- ponent parts. Both are systems of shared beliefs and values that guide the customs of a group and give the group a sense of shared identity. Instead, a culture is the dominant way of life of an entire society, whereas a subculture informs the distinctive identity and customs of a smaller segment of a society. Members of that smaller segment are aware of and participate in the culture of the larger society. A subculture is a distinctive variant of a culture that has developed within a segment of society in much the same way as a dialect develops as a distinctive variant of the language from which it arose. Some subcultures are regional variants of a national culture that have become distinctive due to the rela- tive isolation of people who live in different geographical areas, as seen in the variants of U.S. culture found in New England, the southern states, the intermountain states, and on the West Coast. A subculture can also be composed of elements of a different cultural tradition that have been maintained by a group that has immigrated into and become a part of another society. A good illustration of this second pattern is the Cajun subculture of Louisiana and neighboring parts of the United States. Cajuns participate in the domi- nant, English-speaking culture of the United States, but have also maintained a distinctive identity and set of customs that derive from their French-speaking Acadian ancestors. These French ancestors first settled in the maritime areas of Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick in Canada during the 17th century but were forced to leave after the Brit- ish took control of the region. They migrated south to the Mississippi Delta region, which was then under French control, and that is where they still live today.
The recognition that each culture may be made up of subcultures, much as languages may have various dialects, underscores the fact that cultures are not static. In recent decades some anthropologists have joined scholars working in cognate fields in exploring the pro- cesses whereby diverse identities, viewpoints, values, and ways of behaving are negotiated and expressed by members of a society (e.g., Clifford, 1988; Gable, Handler, & Lawson, 1992; Linnekin, 1992; Shryock, 1997; Sturm, 2002). John Fiske’s work (1993, 2010) is par- ticularly noteworthy for drawing attention to music videos, Hollywood blockbusters, and other forms of popular culture as a key arena in which various groups and individuals struggle for control of meaning, renegotiate their place in society, and try to redefine what constitutes appropriate behavior. Anthropologist Debra Buchholtz (2010) has focused her attention on the different ways people understand and use their shared pasts. She stud- ied the iconic Indian Wars fight variously known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn (by mainstream historians), the Greasy Grass Battle (by Lakota, Cheyenne, and other Native Americans), and Custer’s Last Stand (in popular culture). Buchholtz discovered that even today the culturally diverse people who live in and visit the battlefield area use the battle story to talk about their pasts, present circumstances, and futures, to strategically construct and assert a fluid and overlapping array of identities, and to negotiate their social relations. In approaches like these, the concept of culture is viewed as consisting of a polyphony of voices rather than as a solo melody. From this perspective, the diversity within a culture is not merely a matter of the existence of subcultures. Diversity exists at the level of individu- als as well. As Linda Stone and Nancy McKee (1999) put it, “Culture is better seen as sets of ideas and behaviors that human actors themselves continually generate. Each actor is in a dynamic relationship with his or her culture; as a result, all cultures undergo change” (p. 3). They pointed out that different groups of people within the same society may differ in what various parts of the common culture mean and in how they feel about them. Thus, for instance, while the Confederate flag is a distinctively American symbol, not all Americans respond to it in the same way. And while the Custer fight is a part of American history, there is little agreement over what it meant at the time and what it means now.
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.2 Ideology
In the first half of the last century, Ruth Benedict (1934), Margaret Mead (1935), Bronislaw Malinowski (1922), and other anthropologists emphasized the integrated qual- ity of the values and beliefs that were characteristic of each culture and described each as an internally consistent system of meanings. Today, we are more likely to acknowledge that even when there are important regularities within the symbolic patterns that make up a culture, those patterns are neither rigidly present nor necessarily consistently reflected in individual behavior. Thus, despite some degree of internal consistency, any culture may include contradictory beliefs and competing values and objectives. The different names Americans attach to the Custer fight and the different ways of understanding the single moment in the shared American past suggest that this is particularly the case is a large multicultural society like the United States. The ongoing debates within American society over abortion, gun control, and marriage equality offer further evidence for the lack of consensus within society.
2.2 Ideology
Although they may not be shared by every individual, within any culture there are regularities in how people typically act, think, feel, and communicate, but people are not conscious of all of them. They may never explicitly state an underlying rule to which they seem to be conforming, yet the regularity in their behavior may be obvious to an outsider. Suppose we observed that members of a certain society always took care to lock the doors and windows of their homes and automobiles when leaving them, that they never left their bicycles unlocked when they entered a store, and that they never left valuable items unattended or in open view even at home. We might conclude that these people believe that some members of their society are likely to steal, even if they never say so directly. If we were further reporting on our observations, we would include in our description of their culture the implicit rule of maintaining the security of one’s own pos- sessions, even if these people did not explicitly refer to such a rule when speaking among themselves or to us.
A culture, then, includes all of the rules and regulations that govern a way of life, both conscious, formally stated beliefs and feelings—called ideology—and unconscious, infor- mal, or implicit beliefs and feelings that can be inferred from the consistencies in a peo- ple’s customs and behaviors.
Ideological Communication As people communicate about themselves and their environment, they build a consensus about the nature of humankind and the universe in which it exists. Much of the commu- nication among members of a society is done to reinforce this consensus. Such ideological communication is an important way in which people identify themselves as members of a group, declare their allegiance to it, and define their rules for behaving in the group. It frequently takes the form of highly ritualized acts, such as a pledge of allegiance to a flag or some other symbol of the group, recitation of articles of faith, or singing of songs that glorify the doctrines of the group. Ritual affirmations of one’s social solidarity with others may, of course, be less formally structured, as in so-called “small talk,” the con- tent of which is nonetheless highly predictable. For instance, North Americans recognize
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that the greeting “How are you?” is not a request for information but simply the opening gambit of a ritual communication of friendship and will- ingness to interact. The more or less predictable response—”I’m fine, thank you”—is not a mea- sure of one’s actual state of health, but an affir- mation of the same willingness to interact and a declaration that one shares the same cultural code of symbolic behavior. Such ritual reaffirmations of mutuality may be interspersed throughout an entire conversation in stereotyped communica- tions, as in a discussion of the weather. Although ideological communication conveys little infor- mation, it reinforces existing conventions about reality and our place in it. It is through the effort we devote to ideological communication that we construct and reconstruct the meaningfulness of the world. As Clifford Geertz (1973), an anthro- pologist who stressed the need to understand the symbols around which people organize their lives, poetically described it, we humans are “sus- pended in webs of significance” (p. 5) that we ourselves spin.
Beliefs An ideology has two main interacting components: a subsystem of beliefs and a subsys- tem of feelings. Beliefs are the means by which people make sense of their experiences; they are the ideas that they hold to be true, factual, or real. By contrast, feelings are peo- ple’s inner reactions, emotions, or desires concerning experiences. Although beliefs are judgments about facts, they are not always the result of rational analysis of experience. Thus, emotions, attitudes, and values—aspects of the feeling system—may ultimately determine what people believe. Within limits set by the necessities of survival, persons may choose to believe what is pleasing to believe, what they want to believe, and what they think they ought to believe. Once people are convinced of the truth of a new set of beliefs, then, they may change some of their previous feelings to make it easier to maintain those new beliefs.
Conformity to a Belief System People in each society have their own distinctive patterns of thought about the nature of reality. These beliefs reflect what those who share a culture regard as true (e.g., “God exists,” “the sky is blue,” “geese fly south for the winter,” “spilling salt causes bad luck”).
As children are socialized, they learn that other members of their society share a system of thought and a pattern of thinking about—or way of conceptualizing—the nature of the world. For example, North Americans grow up under a formal educational system in which mechanical models sometimes are used to demonstrate the plausibility of the idea that the moon is a sphere, the apparent shape of which depends on the relative positions
Creatas/Thinkstock The events of our social life are defined by our culture. What cultural items can you identify in this photo?
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of the sun, the moon, and the Earth. By contrast, the Shoshone Indians of the western U.S. Great Basin area traditionally explained the phases of the moon by describing it as shaped like a bowl or basket rather than a sphere. The phase of the moon was thought to be simply a matter of which side of the moon was facing the observer: A crescent moon was a side view and a full moon was the outside convex bottom. By learning the distinc- tive culture of their own society, children use this knowledge to anticipate the behavior of those around them and interpret the meanings of those behaviors. In this sense, a culture can be thought of as a system of understandings that describe how members of a society customarily behave and make sense of the world around them. Much as a map helps a traveler negotiate a terrain, a culture helps people negotiate the flow of interactions with other members of their society that punctuate daily life.
However, the knowledge embodied in the culture of a society is also taught to each new generation as a set of prescriptions, or rules that define the proper way of thinking, feeling, or acting. Rather than simply describe what people are likely to do, these rules specify what they should do. Culture as a set of prescriptions can be taught explicitly, as when rules of etiquette or law are explained by someone who already knows them to someone who is learning the way of life. However, such expectations may also be taught implicitly, as when children learn that their nonconformity is unacceptable by inferring from others’ emotional reactions to their behavior the limits and boundaries of rules that were never explained in words. We infer the existence of such unspoken rules when we break them and our nonconforming behavior is met with stony silence, active anger, derisive laughter, or shunning. When we learn the prescriptive rules of a culture, we learn that to obtain full acceptance as members of our group, we must conform to the ways in which others think.
Prescriptive cultural ideology is instilled by rewarding conformity and punishing devi- ance. Individuals who violate their culture’s rules for proper thinking and behaving are likely to experience punishment ranging from a mild reproof or laughter to severe sanc- tions such as banishment, imprisonment, or death. In the contemporary United States, for example, normal people do not “hear voices.” Those who do may find themselves placed in mental hospitals “for their own good” or “for the safety of others.” In other times and places, those who heard voices have been honored as spiritual teachers. Black Elk, the respected Lakota holy man, was one such person (Neihardt, 1961). Throughout his life, Black Elk had visions and heard voices. He and his people interpreted these not as evidence of psychosis but as important messages from the spirit world. Similarly, North American schoolchildren, of which I was one, are rewarded for believing that the moon is a sphere and punished for believing otherwise. But during my fieldwork on an isolated Shoshone reservation in the late 1960s, I discovered that my attempt to describe the moon as a sphere evoked either argument or skeptical looks, and my desire for acceptance soon silenced my expression of deviant views. I thus learned that my own culturally instilled understanding of the phases of the moon violated Shoshone cultural prescriptions.
Widespread acceptance of a system of beliefs gives people a sense of identity as a group. A people’s knowledge that they share a set of beliefs gives them a feeling of security and a sense of belonging. When people become conscious of their shared beliefs, especially if they assign a name to their system of beliefs, this part of their ideology may begin to func- tion as an active, driving force in their lives. Such conscious systems are particularly com- mon in complex societies. They are most dramatically illustrated by the named religions and political factions that can command the loyalties of great masses of people. But once
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again, it should be kept in mind that to say that an ideology is “shared” does not neces- sarily mean that everyone is in lockstep unity about the beliefs and feelings that make up the ideology of their culture. Differences do exist, although those whose beliefs are not mainstream may be willing to acknowledge that their own views are not “typical” in their society. For instance, in a study I conducted of Mormon students at my own university, most had religiously based reservations about biological evolution. The minority who affirmed their own acceptance of the scientific validity of biological evolution also identi- fied their doing so as religiously contrary to “Mormon doctrine.” That is, they recognized that their own views were not part of the Mormon subculture they otherwise identified with and accepted. Such diversity among individuals is found in every group. If there was no diversity among a people’s understandings or the feelings they have in different situ- ations, cultures would be static and unchanging. But, in fact, cultures change and evolve.
Types of Belief Systems Every society tends to develop two different kinds of belief systems: scientific and non- scientific. The former occurs because a certain degree of practical insight into the nature of the world and its workings is necessary for any society to survive, as Nelson found in his many years of conducting research among the Inuit and neighboring Arctic peoples (1993). Beliefs about such matters as how to obtain food and shelter or how to set broken bones must be based on pragmatic rather than emotional judgments if they are to be use- ful. The beliefs that arise from the search for practical solutions to mundane problems of living may be referred to as the scientific beliefs of a society. Even in societies in which science is not practiced by a group of professional “scientists,” some beliefs are held by most because of their demonstrable practical value, and these form what can be under- stood as the folk science of each culture. One of the Inupiaq hunters Nelson accompanied even referred to himself as an “Eskimo scientist,” a clear indication he appreciated the value of empirical knowledge (p. 106).
The second basic type of beliefs found in every culture grows out of a people’s feelings about their existence. These nonscientific beliefs are often formally organized within the framework of religious and artistic philosophies that portray the universe and express (sometimes in the guise of descriptions of reality) deeply valued feelings about the world in which people find themselves. Strong emotional commitments may also exist in politics or recreation. These, too, are often guided by beliefs that express the members’ deeply held feelings.
Feelings Feelings and beliefs tend to strengthen each other. Our feelings may be the motivation for believing things for which no objective support exists. Beliefs may, in turn, validate our feelings. When we believe that our feelings are the same ones that other people experience in the same situations, we are more confident that they are valid. Recognizing that our feelings are shared by others also supports our sense of belonging to a definable group.
Four major kinds of feelings find their idealized expression within an ideology: emotions, attitudes, values, and drives. See Figure 2.1.
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Figure 2.1: Feelings in culture
Emotions, attitudes, values, and drives contribute to a person’s ideological communication.
Emotions An emotion is a reaction to an experience as pleasant or unpleasant, to varying degrees. As we mature, we learn to distinguish many subtle variations on the two basic emotional themes of pleasantness and unpleasantness, such as delight, elation, affection, love, mirth, happiness, surprise, or exultation, and contempt, anger, distress, terror, or grief. The basic emotions of happiness, fear, guilt, grief, and embarrassment are found in every society and are expressed with the same facial expressions, as well as the same changes in blood flow (e.g., blushing when embarrassed) and breathing (e.g., sighing when grieving). Paul Ekman (1984), for example, found that the Fore of the New Guinea Highlands were able to
Reaction to experience learned through one’s culture.
Emotions:
Ideals of morality, etiquettes, piety, and aesthetics in a society.
Values:
The general likes and dislikes learned through one’s culture.
Attitudes:
Things people value the most in everyday life.
Drives:
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accurately identify the emotional states of non-Fore individuals from photographs of their faces. Also, when asked to demonstrate the facial expressions they associate with basic emotions, the Fore expressions matched those found in many other cultures. However, which emotions we learn to experience in various circumstances, the degree to which showing them is acceptable, and exactly how we express them behaviorally depends on the culture in which we are raised. For instance, Maoris show intense levels of grief when faced with the loss of a loved one, while the Japanese are more subdued in expressing their grief in front of others. Both males and females experience sadness, but in America we still hear the admonition that “big boys don’t cry”.
American anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has grappled with these universal and cultur- ally specific aspects of grief in a very personal way. Rosaldo once struggled to under- stand why Ilongot men of the northern Luzon in the Philippines headhunted. He reports that his elderly informants attributed their headhunting behavior to “rage, born of grief” (1989). This was something he simply could not understand, at least not until his own wife died suddenly in a fall while they were doing fieldwork. In the aftermath, he experienced for himself the emotional force of a death, or “rage, born of grief.” Instead of going out in search of a head, which would have been the culturally shaped impulse of a grief-stricken Ilongot man, Rosaldo expressed and dealt with the rage that accompanied his own grief in a manner in line with the ideology of his own culture. He may have experienced the same emotion as his Ilongot consultants, but how he expressed it bore the stamp of his own American culture.
Each society trains its members to associate certain emotions with certain situations and to experience each emotion at differing intensities in different settings. For instance, J. Briggs (1970) found the expression of anger to be almost totally taboo among one Inuit group. Levy (1973) found almost no expression of anger among the Tahitians he studied, while very elaborate customs for the display of anger exist among the New Guinea Kaluli (Schieffelin, 1983) and the Yanomamö of Brazil and Venezuela (Chagnon, 1983). Even the frequency with which people experience emotion varies. In a 2012 Gallup poll (Clifton, 2012), only 36% of Singaporeans reported experiencing positive or negative emotions every day, while 60% of their neighbors in the Philippines and 54% of Americans reported feeling such emotions on a daily basis. These are very interesting statistics, but what an anthropologist would really want to know is what situations evoke positive and negative emotions in each cultural context, the form and intensity those emotions take, how they are experienced by the individual and, finally, how they are expressed.
Marston Bates (1967), a zoologist, illustrated how some foods, which are considered deli- cacies to people in some cultures, can be disgusting to people of other cultures: “We once served iguana at a dinner party in South America. The subject had been thoroughly dis- cussed, and we thought everyone understood what he was eating. Certainly all the guests ate with gusto. But as the conversation continued during the meal, a French lady who was present suddenly realized that the iguana she had been eating était un lézard and became violently nauseated, although a few minutes before she had considered the meat delicious” (p. 21). Foods as diverse as snakes, dogs, spiders, and insects are accepted in some cultures, while rejected in others. In other words, although all humans have the same biological ability to feel disgust, what is disgusting to them is greatly influenced by what their culture teaches them to feel disgusted about. In early 2013 British food retailers were confronted with this cultural reality when traces of horse DNA appeared in a very small fraction of processed foods containing ground beef. British consumers
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immediately lost their appetite for such foods and changed their buying habits overnight (Hutchison & Baghdjian, 2013). The issue for them was the possibility, however small, that their premade burger patties and frozen lasagna might contain horse meat, some- thing Britons tend to find repulsive even though many other Europeans savor horse meat, either cooked or raw. The U.K. Food Standards Agency, in contrast, was alarmed by what it perceived as contamination in a food chain that stretched across Europe, as evidenced by the unexpected appearance of horse DNA in ground beef products and a lack of infor- mation regarding where the horse meat entered the chain, what kind of food and drugs the animals had ingested, and their state of health at the time of slaughter. Testing for horse DNA also revealed pig DNA in kosher and halal foods, which greatly alarmed peo- ple whose religious beliefs forbid the eating of pork.
Cultures also differ in how strongly or mildly feelings should be expressed and in exactly which emotional experiences are emphasized. According to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1950), “The thresholds of excitement, the limits of resistance are different in each culture. The ‘impossible’ effort, the ‘unbearable’ pain, the ‘unbounded’ pleasure are less individual functions than criteria sanctioned by collective approval, and disapproval” (p. xii). Cultural differences in emotional intensity were illustrated by Ruth Benedict, author of one of the most widely read anthropological books ever printed, Pat- terns of Culture (1934). For instance, she cited the late 19th-century Kwakiutl culture of Vancouver Island as one in which the expression of strong emotion—especially feelings of extreme self-worth bordering on megalomania—was encouraged. She explained that in their religious ceremonies,
the final thing they strove for was ecstasy. The chief dancer, at least at the high point of his performance, should lose normal control of himself and be rapt into another state of existence. He should froth at the mouth, trem- ble violently and abnormally, do deeds which would be terrible in a nor- mal state. Some dancers were tethered by four ropes held by attendants, so that they might not do irreparable damage in their frenzy. (pp. 175–176)
Benedict contrasted the Kwakiutl with the Zuñi of the early 1900s. The Zuñi, who lived in the southwestern part of the United States, had a culture that encouraged moderation in the expression of all feelings. Zuñi rituals were monotonous in contrast with those of the Kwakiutl. They consisted of long, memorized recitations that had to be performed with word-perfect precision. The Zuñi had no individualized prayers; personal prayers were also memorized and recited word for word. As an illustration of how Zuñi culture required moderation in emotion, Benedict cited the case of a woman whose husband had been involved in a long extramarital affair. She and her family initially ignored the situa- tion, but after she was exhorted by a white trader to take some action, the wife did so by not washing her husband’s clothes. In her words, “Then he knew that I knew that every- body knew, and he stopped going with the girl” (p. 108). No argument, no yelling and crying. Just a mild indication that her wifely status was in question. For a Zuñi husband, this message was strong enough.
For the Dobuans, a people of Melanesia whose culture was studied in the early 1900s by Reo Fortune (1932b), the dominant feelings were animosity and a mistrust that bordered on paranoia. These feelings permeated their customs. For instance, even husband and wife would not share food for fear that they might poison each other. All deaths were regarded as murders. In deaths that other people might ascribe to natural causes, black magic was
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the assumed weapon, with the surviving spouse the most likely suspect as the murderer. Dobuans assumed that their spouses were unfaithful whenever the opportunity existed, so they bribed their children to spy on each other. Benedict (1934) described Dobuan para- noia: “The formula that corresponds to our thank-you upon receiving a gift is, ‘If you now poison me, how should I repay you?’” (p. 166).
Similar contrasts in the degree to which emotions are encouraged or inhibited have been reported by other anthropologists. For instance, Byron Good, Mary-Jo Good, and Robert Moradi (1985) have described the various ways in which profound sadness and sorrow are expected to be expressed in Iranian culture, where such feelings have deep personal and religious value. They report, for instance: “Pious Shi’ite Moslems gather weekly to hear the cruel martyrdom of Hossein, the grandson of the Prophet, commemorated in poetry and preaching and to respond with open weeping. Their secular literature is filled with melancholy and despair. Tragedy, injustice, and martyrdom are central to Iranian political philosophy and historical experience.” In Iranian culture, sadness is equated with personal depth and thoughtfulness, while boisterous talking and joking is consid- ered unmannerly. Likewise, Gananeth Obeyesekere (1985) expressed surprise when what to him was quite an ordinary Buddhist Sri Lankan expression of hopelessness, suffering, and sorrow was perceived by a psychologist in the United States as evidence of clini- cal depression. Similarly, the Yanomamö culture described by Napoleon Chagnon (1983) fosters strong emotional involvement between individuals, and anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) described Javanese culture as encouraging individuals to maintain psycho- logical states of “smoothness” and calm.
In a large society such as the United States, the emotions and degree of emotionality expressed in public can vary widely from region to region. For instance, a student from Chicago who entered my university’s graduate program in psychology once confided in me that he experienced a lot of discomfort with the way clerks and cashiers in Utah stores smiled and expressed their willingness to be helpful. He had the nagging feeling that they were trying to manipulate him. Similarly, Europeans who visit the United States always comment on how friendly everyone is, sometimes expressing doubt over their sincerity.
Attitudes Our attitudes are statements of our preferences, our individual likes and dislikes that are more generalized than our specific emotional reactions to situations. Attitudes need not correspond to the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the emotions associated with an activity. Skydiving, for instance, may create conflicting emotions: fear and exhilaration. Almost all of us will experience both emotions in association with the act of jumping out of a plane in midair, but only some of us will actually embrace them and take the plunge. For the rest of us, the combination of fear and exhilaration will lack appeal, and we just won’t do it. A general attitude toward high adventure—liking or disliking it—determines which way the scales will tip. Probably in every society individuals are taught to dislike or feel neutral about some situations that may lead to pleasant emotions and to like other situations in which they experience unpleasant emotions. Athletes may learn to crave the exercise that their goals demand, even though they dread the pain that attends each work- out; soldiers may be taught to seek the very situations in battle that arouse their deepest fears; and people who have broken the habit of smoking or drinking can be among the most outspoken opponents of tobacco or alcohol.
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.2 Ideology
Values The third part of the feeling subsystem of an ideology is values: feelings about what should or should not be considered good and bad. Values play a role in so many parts of life that it is useful to distinguish between various kinds of values. Morality consists of those values that prescribe the proper treatment of fellow humans. Cultures differ, of course, in regard to who are considered “fellow humans,” but there are certain general categories of moral values that seem to be recognized everywhere. Although the precise definitions of each may differ from culture to culture, these general categories include rules against doing unjustified harm (e.g., rules against theft and murder) and rules about obligations toward others (such as fulfilling promises and nurturing one’s dependent children). Those values that govern manners and define what are considered courteous or civil ways of commu- nicating with others are called etiquette. Such values do not function, like moral values, to prevent victimization of others or to meet the needs of those for whose welfare we are responsible. Rather, they create a comfortable social distance between individuals that make moral conflicts less likely. For instance, in English the word “please” has the effect of making it clear that a request is not to be taken as a demand. Piety is composed of dis- tinctly religious values that define our purely spiritual obligations, including right and wrong conduct that affect our relationship with the supernatural. Jewish dietary laws, Mormon rules against drinking alcohol or coffee, and the Blue Laws outlawing liquor sales on Sundays fall into this category. Aesthetics, or rules that govern feelings about beauty and ugliness, also control our judgments about whether things are compatible with one another. Most Americans, for instance, would regard Greek columns as an inap- propriate feature on a cabin in the woods.
The values of different cultures can be amazingly diverse, to the extent that what is held to be supremely desirable by the members of one society may be despised by another. That which one people holds dear as a religious or moral obligation of the most sacred kind may be viewed as sacrilegious or immoral by another. When the Samoans were first met by Europeans, women did not cover their breasts in public. Indeed, to do so would have been considered highly improper and immodest by the traditional Samoans. In con- temporary Europe, an opposing set of evaluations prevails concerning public exposure of the breast; yet the European woman is quite unconcerned about exposing the back of her neck in public, an act that would have resulted in strong disapproval in traditional Chinese society.
When they were first described by anthropologists, the Toda of India had no word for adultery in their language. They considered it highly immoral for a man to begrudge another man his wife’s sexual favors. On the other hand, they had strong rules against being seen eating in public. Among the Dobuan islanders in the first part of the 20th century, being happy was not a valued emotional state. In contrast, the Founding Fathers of the U.S. government declared the pursuit of happiness to be one of the fundamental values of society. In the United States today, competitiveness seems fundamental to much of day-to-day life, while the early 19th-century Hopi of the southwestern United States carefully taught their children that it was wrong to shame others by outdoing them in competitive situations. The child who finished a race first was expected to take care not to do so the next time around.
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Drives Jules Henry (1963) suggested a distinction between what he calls drives and values. Drives are motives that people actually pursue, sometimes at great cost, rather than those to which they merely give lip service. Because it is in pursuit of their culture’s drives that people invest their time and energy, drives represent the things that people value most strongly in the practical sense. They also are the source of stresses in life. What Henry calls values represent ideals that people long for but do not necessarily pursue. They are often opposites of drives, as they might give release from the stresses created by the pursuit of drives.
In the United States, status climbing and upward social mobility are drives derived from competitive circumstances. The extreme emphasis on competition as a social good even carries over into the realm of relaxation and recreation. Even though people assert the idealized value that “it’s not who wins the game, but how you play the game” that counts, this statement is probably best understood as a wistful but unrealistic protestation against the practicalities of a way of life in which “nice guys finish last.” Those who follow the mainstream U.S. culture continue to teach their children to keep score when playing games. Material acquisitiveness and “keeping up with the Joneses” are also a manifesta- tion of this drive of competitiveness.
The idealized values that counter the implicit conflict and potential hostility in competition include relaxed interpersonal relations, friendliness, frankness, love, kindness, decency, openness, and good sportsmanship. Charity and generosity also are valued as contrasts to the drive to make a profit. Simplicity, idealization of the idyllic pastoral life, and the myth of the noble savage are values that counterbalance the drives of material acquisitiveness.
The Enculturation Process The process by which children learn the culture that guides the life of members of their society is known as enculturation or socialization, depending on whether the main emphasis is on cultural or social learning. Enculturation and socialization are closely related processes with some overlap. The term “enculturation” is usually reserved for the process whereby individuals learn their culture through informal means such as observa- tion and everyday participation and more formal means such as schooling and hands-on instruction. The term “socialization” usually refers to the process whereby individuals learn the social norms and behaviors of their society and how their society works. Even before children begin to communicate in the language of their society, those around them have begun to mold their behavior to conform with the rules for living that make up their culture.
In the United States, people socialize their children differently depending on the sex of the child (Witt, 1997). Symbolically, the color pink is often associated with girls and the color blue with boys. This, then, influences the colors deemed appropriate for clothing, bedroom, and crib decorations. It has been noted that mothers speak more to girl babies than to boys, and fathers tend to play in a rougher, more jostling fashion with their male children. Before 6 months of age, male babies are touched more frequently by their moth- ers than are girls, but after 6 months of age the opposite is true. Boys are given less emo- tional support throughout the rest of their lives and learn rapidly that “big boys don’t cry.” Instead of emotional support from others, they are encouraged to obtain pleasure
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from success in competition and in demonstrating skill and physical coordination. Girls were traditionally encouraged to take care in making themselves pretty, and even now their clothing is often designed more for eye appeal than for practicality in play. By and large, differences in the socialization of children reflect stereotypes of gender differences that view males as strong, active, unemotional, logical, dominant, independent, aggres- sive, and competitive and females as weak, passive, emotional, intuitive, supportive, dependent, sociable, status-conscious, shy, patient, and vain. These traditional gender stereotypes have functioned to perpetuate a variety of gender inequalities, a fact that has become a point of resistance to many Americans during the past half century.
Anthropologists have long asserted that enculturation occurs partly by imitation and partly by direct teaching through language. In imitative learning, which Edward Hall (1959) calls informal learning, learners are on their own to simply observe how others do something and then to keep trying it themselves until they “get the hang of it.” Much of what we learn informally is done automatically, without awareness or concentration and with little or no feeling. Learning informally how to behave in a situation results in a lot of variation in individual personal styles and a generally greater tolerance for such differ- ences. The range of permitted variation in customs that are learned by this trial-and-error method also makes it easier for such customs to gradually change by adapting older ways of doing things to new situations. The range of individual differences within informally learned customs makes the boundaries between successful conformity and rule breaking somewhat fuzzy, and the rules that govern proper behavior in informally learned areas of life may literally “go without saying.” Nevertheless, there are limits on how different an individual may perform informally learned customs and still be accepted. Since the rules are not spelled out and members of the group have not been taught how to talk about those rules, or their violation, awareness that informally learned rules are being broken can take the form of rapidly mounting anxiety in those present until someone acts to deal with the rule violation. According to Hall, in Japan, tension over the breaking of informal rules is expressed by giggling and laughter, while in the United States the nervous anxiety may take the form of anger or withdrawal.
Learning that occurs when language is used to admonish us for violating a custom is called formal learning. A familiar example is when the teacher expresses disapproval of our behavior and suggests an alternative way as the proper, moral, or good way to act. We are conscious of the rules we are following if we learned them formally, as talking about them was part of the learning. Formal ways of doing things are endowed with deep feel- ings by the participants, and their violation leads to tremendous insecurity in those who rely on them to order and structure their lives. For this same reason, formally learned customs are slow to change.
It is also possible to teach a custom by talking about it, but without expressing disappoint- ment or disapproval of the learner’s rule-breaking behavior. Instead, the new way of act- ing is explained by telling the learner the logical reason for it. Hall calls this form of learn- ing technical learning. People are most highly conscious of technically learned behaviors because they are generally given explanations for their implementation. Technical learn- ing is especially important in settings in which practical skills are taught—for instance, when parents explain to children the most effective way to do something like tie shoelaces or use a new tool. Little emotion is associated with material learned in this way because the emphasis is on efficiency or effectiveness rather than propriety. Technically learned customs are readily replaced by new technical ways of dealing with the same situation.
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Enculturation includes more than the learning that passes from parents to children. It also includes learning that takes place within peer groups over the entire course of one’s life, as well as various kinds of formal learning in settings outside the home, such as on-the-job training and training within a school setting. If enculturation were limited to learning from parents, then it would be conceivable for at least some adults to know everything that is passed from one generation to another. This once may have been the case in some small societies in which there was little specialization and therefore little specialized knowledge that would not have been shared by all parents, but it is clearly not the case today. Margaret Mead (1978) noticed this almost 4 decades ago when she wrote, “It is not only that parents are no longer guides, but that there are no guides, whether one seeks them in one’s own country or abroad. There are no elders who know what those who have been reared within the last twenty years know about the world into which they were born” (p. 75). In societies with large populations, the existence of many specialists results in a culture that includes knowledge and customs that are not shared generally by every member of society. Individuals are enculturated into these specialized parts of their own culture in specialized settings such as the school system or on the job. In multicultural societies like the United States, individuals are similarly enculturated into their specific ethnic, faith, or subcultural group.
Some cultural knowledge is gained by children through personal exploration and peer interaction. For instance, the exploration of new technologies such as computer games, text messaging, tweeting, social networking, blogging, and the Internet more generally have given many American children knowledge and skills that their parents lack. Today, it is not uncommon for parents and grandparents to turn to their children or grandchildren for help with such things as using computers and cell phones.
Cultural Change The various terms and categories used to define culture may give the false impression that a culture can be completely and accurately described by a simple listing of its characteris- tics as if they were homogeneous, fixed, and unchanging. Unfortunately, it is just not that simple, for culture is a dynamic system, and every culture is in a constant state of flux. Although we may speak glibly about a consensus or about “typical” beliefs or feelings, such descriptions are as inaccurate a portrayal of a culture as a snapshot is of a waterfall or a whirlwind. In the real world of human life, individuals differ from one another in many ways. Consequently, it is more accurate to think of culture as a system of symbols, cus- toms, ideas, and feelings that is constantly being negotiated and redefined by members of a society as they interact and communicate with one another. It is also this dynamism that allows—and, indeed, impels—each culture to change with the passing of time.
As useful as a detailed description of a culture may be, no culture is, or ever was, set in stone. At best, any description of a culture merely evokes images of a way of life as it was perceived at a particular point in time by the one describing it. Even that image will have lost some of its dynamism, some of its variety, in the telling. Just as an automobile repair manual fails to capture the dynamism of an idling engine, a description of a way of life may suggest homogeneity and stasis where heterogeneity and change really exist. The dynamics of culture are not just a result of the fact that individual differences exist in how completely an ideology is shared, but they are also a result of how those differences are
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distributed throughout society. For instance, that there are group as well as social class differences in both feelings and beliefs inevitably makes ideology (and culture more gen- erally) a political reality—one negotiated and re-negotiated in every generation. Which dominant particulars of a culture’s ideology are considered “mainstream” is always deter- mined by those who currently have the greatest power to assert their views.
Ideal Versus Real Culture It is important to note that culture is a system of ideals for behavior, but that people do not always follow the guidelines of their culture. Sometimes, for example, individuals violate cultural ideals about proper communication behavior, as North Americans do when they behave rudely to show their anger. Sometimes people violate their culture’s ideals for per- sonal gain at the expense of others, but most of the time their failure to conform to cultural ideals is not consciously intended. For instance, very few U.S. drivers make technically legal stops at stop signs, but most do not think of themselves as breaking the law as they make their near-stops and proceed.
In studying culture, one must recognize that there is a difference between what is called ideal culture and what is called real culture. The former refers to the ways in which peo- ple describe their way of life; the latter refers to how they actually behave. People’s real behavior can sometimes be quite different from a description of their ideal culture. This can be simply a matter of individual nonconformity to cultural rules, or, as is sometimes the case, nearly everyone may customarily do things differently from what one might expect from listening to what they say about their customs. This difference between real and ideal culture can be dramatic even when there are formal rules that people are sup- posed to obey. The next time you are at a busy street corner governed by a four-way stop, spend a few minutes keeping track of how few drivers actually make full and legal stops.
Intercultural Influences Cultures do not exist in a vacuum. Whenever two societies interact, they influence one another’s culture. The degree of influence varies according to the circumstances, includ- ing the intensity of the interaction and the relative power of each society. Two forms of influence will be considered here: acculturation and assimilation.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock Ideal culture is what we should be doing, while real culture is what actually takes place.
Jupiterimages/Brand X Pictures/Thinkstock
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When two societies interact intensively, the change that results from their continued contact is known as acculturation. Although both societies may change as a result of prolonged contact, the politically or economically less powerful of the two is likely to experience the most dramatic acculturative changes as they adopt the language and certain other cultural traits of the dominant culture. Boas et al. (1938) illustrated the effects of acculturation by pointing out how the introduction of the profit motive to the sheep-herding Zuñi of the American Southwest led to a new emphasis on wealth, which became necessary if one were to obtain credit at stores. This change began in terms of buying and selling with non-Zuñi traders and merchants, but eventually led to such things as litigation over inheritance of sheep (pp. 356–357). A similar thing happened among the Navajo. Today the Navajo and Zuñi both wear Levis and cowboy boots and drive trucks just like their non-Indian neighbors.
Acculturation may result from the choices members of a society make to adopt traits from another culture, but the transition from the original way of life to that of the dominant society is never without turmoil. The cultural subordination of one group or society by another, even when it occurs peaceably, can be a shattering experience, particularly when one of them is economically and politically less powerful than the other. Time and time again, anthropologists have described the tragic effects on the world’s agricultural peo- ples of contact with the industrialized nations of the world. Diseases introduced from more densely populated societies have sometimes decimated local populations who lack immunity to them, as happened among the indigenous peoples of the Americas during the Conquest and European colonization (Thornton, 1987; Stannard, 1992). The awareness that other peoples are more powerful and have more luxuries than they do is also a blow to the cultural pride that unifies a society. Often, contact with another society is followed by a rise in the rate of internal conflict, alcoholism, and suicide. For the Kwakiutl, contact with Europeans and the population loss and economic and disruption that accompanied it may have led to exaggerated—and destructive—attempts to display wealth and power (Codere, 1950; Drucker and Heizer, 1967).
When members of one society become a politically or economically subordinated part of another, as when a conquered group is incorporated into the conquering society or when an ethnic population immigrates into a country with a different culture, the subordinate group may lose its original culture as its members adopt the customs of the larger society, a process called assimilation. Assimilation can occur as a result of the choices of individ- ual members of the assimilating group to enter the lifestyle of the dominant society, but it can also be a coercive process. For instance, for decades the United States pursued a pol- icy of forced assimilation of American Indians (Hoxie, 1984). Under this policy, children were removed from their parental homes and taken hundreds of miles away to boarding schools that were generally run by Christian missionary groups (Adams, 1995). Typically, the children were forbidden to speak their native language or practice their own religions but were required to participate in Christian religious services. When they eventually returned home as adults, they were often unable to speak their Native languages and did not understand the culture and religion of their people.
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.3 Viewpoints About Culture
2.3 Viewpoints About Culture
Throughout the history of anthropology, culture has been variously conceptualized and defined by each school of thought within the field. Anthropology has always played a role in bridging the gap that has traditionally separated the sciences and the humanities. Thus, the diversity of viewpoints ranges from the scientific to the humanistic.
Diversity in Conceptualizing Culture The competing ways in which different anthropologists have portrayed culture reflect the relative influence of physical science and humanities models for understanding the human condition. These two competing strains in anthropological history can be exemplified by the contrasting views of two students of Franz Boas in the early part of this century. In 1917 Alfred Kroeber declared that culture, “though carried by men and existing through them, is an entity in itself, and of another order from life” (p. 285). What he meant was that although culture is a human phenomenon, it cannot be understood by studying human biology or psychology. It must be approached as a superorganic phenomenon (Kroeber, 1917), a system governed by rules that are not explainable in terms of human biology or psychology. Culture exists independently of the human culture bearer; individuals even- tually die, but culture persists. Consequently, it must be studied as a phenomenon in its own right in order to identify the lawful characteristics that govern cultural processes.
Kroeber’s ideas differed markedly from those of his teacher, Boas, and most of Boas’s students, who paid much more attention to the role of human individuals in the history of each culture they studied. The most vigorous attack on Kroeber’s concept of culture as a superorganic phenomenon was carried out by another of Boas’s students, Edward Sapir (1934). Sapir, who was particularly interested in the human use of language, argued that the superorganic view of culture was an unjustified treatment of an abstraction as if it were a concrete, material thing, as “the true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific indi- viduals and, on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each of these individ- uals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions” (p. 236). To Sapir (1934), Kroeber’s concept of culture was too concrete and fixed because it portrayed culture as “a neatly packaged up assemblage of forms of behavior handed over piecemeal, but without serious breakage, to the passively inquiring child” (p. 414). Sapir conceived of the transfer of culture as a process in which each child interpreted, evalu- ated, and modified every cultural pattern during the process of enculturation.
These two approaches to the concept of culture have competed with one another through- out the history of anthropology. Those who follow some variant of Kroeber’s definition share a scientific interest in the discovery of the laws that govern cultural processes and emphasize the customs and institutions such as politics and economics by which society adapts to its natural environment. Roy Rappaport’s (2000) study of the Tsembaga Maring of the highlands of New Guinea is a classic example of this type of approach. Using meth- ods and concepts derived from the science of ecology, he was able to demonstrate how the Tsembaga’s ritually controlled cycles of raising pigs and then slaughtering them at
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long intervals for huge feasts helped prevent local resources from being depleted through overexploitation and maintained a sustainable balance between the human population and the environment. Another classic example is Marvin Harris’s (1974) study of India’s sacred cows. Harris demonstrated that India’s cows are more valuable to Hindus alive than they are dead and in the stew pot. Hindu farmers rely on them to pull their plows and use their dung for fertilizer. Hindu women rely on cattle dung for cooking and heat- ing fuel. When the cattle die, their hides are turned into badly needed leather products are sold, and their meat is eaten by the Untouchable caste, who have few other sources of quality protein. For all other Hindu castes, eating beef is taboo. Anthropologists like Clifford Geertz (1973), whose vision of culture comes closer to Sapir’s humanistic focus,
emphasize the role of human discourse and nar- ratives in defining the meaning of social life and nature. Buchholtz’s (2011) study of the dialogue between three contending versions on Little Bighorn/Greasy Grass battle story and the strug- gle it enacts, which was mentioned earlier, exem- plifies this approach.
Viewpoints that focus on culture as an adaptive system (e.g., Rappaport, 2000; Harris, 1974) tend to focus on the natural resources that are available to people in different environments, on the roles of social institutions such as economics and politics in a society’s adaptation to its environment, and on what some anthropologists refer to as a soci- ety’s material culture. Material culture consists of physical products such as the tools that arise from and are used during the practice of a society’s cus- toms—for instance, the tools that people produce and use to obtain food, shelter themselves, and defend themselves from both human and nonhu- man dangers. Viewpoints that focus on culture as a system of symbols (e.g., Geertz, 1973) tend to emphasize those social institutions such as reli- gion, art, and education in which communication, symbolism, and ideology are more central and the nonmaterial products, or nonmaterial culture, of human life such as beliefs and values.
Whether culture is best understood as a distinctively human adaptive mechanism that can be studied without reference to the individual members of society or as a system of ideas and feelings that are given form through the dialogues that individuals create and use as they negotiate their way through daily life may never be fully resolved. In one form or another, however, culture can be seen as the unifying concept of the field of anthropology.
The Unity and Diversity of Cultures Throughout its history, anthropology has embodied an interest in both the diversity and the unity of cultures around the world. Approaches that emphasize the diversity
imagebroker.net/SuperStock The baskets used and the lip plates worn by people in the Mursi culture are an example of material culture because they are physical items that the Mursi use to practice their customs.
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.3 Viewpoints About Culture
Tattoos in Cross-Cultural Perspective
People in all parts of the world decorate their bodies for personal, aesthetic, social, or religious reasons. To ensure success, before going into battle Plains Indian warriors often painted their faces and bodies with designs received in visions. Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala Lakota warrior, painted hailstones and lightning bolts on his own body and that of his horse (Bray, 2006), as instructed by his spirit guide. After he started doing this, neither he nor his horse were ever again injured in battle. Yoruba men often incise stripped patterns on their faces in a process anthropologists refer to as scarification. These patterns are not only aesthetically pleasing to the Yoruba, but they also signify the individual’s clan affiliation and, hence, place in society (Orie, 2011). Across West Africa, scarifica- tion and the related practice of cicatrisation, which involves rubbing plant juices into an incision to create a permanent welted scar, are used to beautify the faces and bodies of men and women and to communicate a variety of social roles and statuses.
Today, young Americans often pierce and tattoo their bodies for aesthetic reasons, to assert their individuality, as a sign of rebellion against parental and other adult control, and for a myriad of other personal and social reasons (DeMello, 2000). In some cases, tattoos carry very specific mean- ings that can be read by other members of a particular group or subculture. Military personnel, for example, often have their branch or regiment insignia tattooed on their arms. In a similar fash- ion, it is common for gang members to have one or more “tats” as emblems of their gang affilia- tion and loyalty. Individuals who have been incarcerated often have “prison tats” recognizable by other former inmates and some law enforcement officials. Prison tats are voluntarily acquired by inmates. Sometimes individuals receive tattoos against their will to signify their lack of freedom or inferior social status. Slaves are often tattooed to mark their lack of freedom or the fact that some- one owns them. Upon arrival at the Nazi concentration camps, Jews, “gypsies,” homosexuals, and others deemed undesirable by the Nazis had identification numbers tattooed on their forearms as a permanent record of their status.
(continued)
of cultures have tended to focus on the unique customs, beliefs, and values that give each culture its distinctive identity, much as Ruth Benedict did in Patterns of Culture (1934). Such approaches were particularly common in the earlier days of anthropological research, when fieldwork often took anthropologists far from home to small and relatively isolated societies. When carried to an extreme, this emphasis on the diversity of human ways of life often focused attention on non-Western cultures that might seem exotic to outsiders. But an underlying goal of the anthropological descriptions of other cultures has always been to make them understandable. This search for unity within diversity has been carried out by humanistically oriented anthropologists seeking to demonstrate how each part of a way of life fits coherently into the broader system of meanings of its culture. They find parallels between otherwise alien customs and analogous elements of the daily life that one knows and understands. Much like Margaret Mead did in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), where she used her observations of Samoan adolescents to challenge American assumptions that adolescence is an inevitably stormy period marked by emo- tional upheaval, humanistically oriented anthropologists often use their studies of other cultures to shed light on and even critique their own, usually Western, culture.
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.4 Cultural Universals
Tattoos in Cross-Cultural Perspective (continued)
Tattoos are a worldwide phenomenon and archaeological evidence suggests that the practice stretches as far back in time to at least the Upper Paleolithic period, or 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. Everywhere they are found, tattoos are created in essentially the same way—ink, dye, or ash is rubbed into an incision or inserted or injected under the skin. The Inuit of the Arctic, and especially Inuit women, tattooed themselves. Unsurprisingly, they favored their hands, wrists, and faces for decoration; the rest of their bodies were almost always concealed beneath layers of warm clothing. The Inuit tattooed themselves to express their personal identity or for aesthetic reasons but also for spiritual reasons. Inuit men living in coastal areas sometimes tattooed on themselves the number of whales they had killed. In warmer climates like the South Pacific, it was common to tattoo other parts of the body as well as the hands and face. In ranked societies characterized by significant dif- ferences in social status, the extent and degree of elaboration in tattooing signified the individual’s social status. The higher one’s social status, the more elaborate one’s tattoos. The Maori of New Zealand—whose distinctive tattoos have been imitated by Western pop stars like Rihanna and Rob- bie Williams—correlate tattoos with rank, status, ferocity, and virility (Riria & Simmons, 2000). Their tattoos also have a sacred component deeply rooted in Maori tradition, something most Western imitators fail to understand or appreciate. Among the Natchez, who had an elaborate agricultural based society on the banks of the southern Mississippi River at the time of European contact, both sexes had their noses tattooed to indicate their rank and status. As individuals accumulated hon- ors and accolades over the course of their lives, they recorded them with additional tattoos. Some high-ranking, very successful individuals covered their whole bodies with tattoos. Interestingly, the Natchez were ruled by the Great Sun, who had authority over internal affairs, and his brother the Tattooed Serpent, who had authority over external affairs. This is just one indicator of how important tattoos were in Natchez life.
Tattoos, which are now so common across most sectors of American society, have long been a worldwide phenomenon. But despite their ubiquity, they have no widely shared meaning. Different peoples perceive different designs as aesthetically pleasing and attach different meanings to them. Tattoos, like most other elements of culture, can only be fully understood in the context of the spe- cific culture in which they are occur. A Maori tattoo on Robbie Williams’s arm means something quite different to Robbie and his fans than to a Maori. And a Maori tattoo on a Maori arm would mean something altogether different to a Maori than it would to Robbie Williams. Cultural practices like tattooing may be global, but there meanings are inevitably local.
2.4 Cultural Universals
Although cultural differences are important to explain, anthropology is also con-cerned with cultural universals, characteristics or traits that are found in all cultures. The existence of cultural universals has long been noted by anthropolo- gists. For instance, all cultures include taboos against incest and, more generally, rules that govern some aspects of sexuality and proper sexual behavior.
Donald Brown (1991) asserts that many of the differences among cultures are rather superficial, being differences of when and where and how much rather than fundamental differences. As examples of universal human traits, he lists language; nonverbal commu- nication with gestures; the expression of emotion with the same facial expressions; sexual
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.4 Cultural Universals
responsiveness to signs of nubility and health; sexual jealousy; an incest taboo; kinship and a distinction between close versus distant kin and nonkin; customs concerning the socialization of children; tool making; concepts of group based on locality or territory; a division of labor that includes differences based on age and sex; regulations concerning public affairs; differences in the prestige of individuals; restrictions against violence, rape, and murder; concepts of right and wrong; etiquette and hospitality; standards of sexual modesty; religious beliefs and practices; concepts of property; aesthetics (including music and dance); and play and play fighting. The specifics of these categories are, of course, not identical from culture to culture, but Brown argues that the categories themselves are and that their existence reflects the biological predispositions of our species. Other scholars have carried this discussion of what is particular and what is universal in human cultures, and why, into an interdisciplinary arena (Roughly, 2000), and some have explored the ori- gins of the human universal more explicitly, focusing particularly on the question of what distinguishes humans from nonhuman primates (Kappeler & Silks, 2010). See Figure 2.2.
Figure 2.2: Cultural universals
Cultural universals are the values universal to all human cultures across the world. They are interpreted differently in each culture.
Language and use of non-verbal
communication
Incest taboo and rules about
appropriate sexual behavior
Concept of family, kinship and
ancestry
Some concept of social prestige
and class
Division of labor based on gender
and age
Moral codes about
child-rearing
Belief in one or more supernatural
powers
Law and order system to resolve
conflict and avoid violence
Group loyalty (tribal, regional, provincial, state, or national)
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.4 Cultural Universals
Biology and Cultural Universals Brown contends that “a great many universals do require explanation, at least in part, in biological terms” (p. 88). The idea here is that biological evolution has resulted in cer- tain human predispositions that are useful for the survival of the human population. For instance, in all cultures, body characteristics that are indicative of youth, vitality, and health are particularly sexually attractive. This results in those who are most likely to be fertile and able to care for their offspring also being the most likely to attract mates. It is also a source of gender bias insofar as concepts of youth, vitality, and health are applied differently to males and females, as when they are more equated with strength in males and simply as “beauty” in females.
The expectation that parents will care for their young rather than simply let them fend for themselves also helps the species survive more successfully, even though childcare may be worked out differently in different cultures. Play and play fighting allow individuals to channel energy that could result in conflict into cooperative behavior while at the same time developing skills that may contribute to group survival later in life. In sum, we humans have inherited some biological predispositions that influence our individual behavior.
It should be kept in mind that biolog- ical predispositions are not shared to the same degree by every individual. Some individuals may show more or less than the average predispo- sition. Furthermore, a culture may accommodate those biological pre- dispositions, or it may try to enhance or inhibit them. In the first case, the behavior that flows from these pre- dispositions will simply be viewed as normal. In the latter two cases, those individuals who do not meet expectations will be treated as devi- ant. For instance, a person who is less predisposed to aggression than most may well experience more difficulty during basic military training than others, or an individual whose sex drive is above the biological norm may behave in ways that are regarded in his or her culture as immoral.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock It is a universal belief that parents will care for their children up to a certain age because this practice helps ensure the survival of the human race.
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.4 Cultural Universals
Although no consensus exists today about the merits of most biologically oriented expla- nations for specific human behaviors, such approaches are most convincing when they focus on true human universals, and cultural explanations are most useful in account- ing for those human behaviors that vary the most from society to society. Nevertheless, some universals can be adequately accounted for as the result of practical considerations without postulating the existence of undocumented genetic influences. For instance, the widespread, perhaps even culturally universal, preference exhibited by women for men of high rank and resources as husbands may be explained quite adequately in terms of the economic benefits to be obtained by such a preference. It is the middle range of behaviors that are general (but not universal) across cultural boundaries for which the application of biological interpretations is most controversial. These will be discussed in Chapter 3, in terms of their misapplication in the context of supposed racial differences within the human species.
The Coexistence of Cultural Differences and Universals Anthropologist Donald Brown (1991) recognized that many other cultural universals “seem to require explanation in ‘interactionist’ frameworks—i.e., in terms of a combina- tion of biological and cultural factors” (p. 88). This is particularly the case, he notes, when “we want to understand universals in the context of particular societies” (p. 88). In so saying, he tacitly acknowledges that differences between societies may often be simply variations on universal themes (see figure 2.3 for an offbeat example). For instance, in his own fieldwork in Brunei, Brown was caught off-guard by how unwilling a group of young men was to remain seated above him when he moved to a lower place to sit. They too shifted their places to avoid sitting above him, and they did this despite his urging them to remain where they were most comfortable. Even when he pointed out that there was no one else present, they refused to remain seated above him on the grounds that someone across the river from them might notice. Brown’s first reaction was that their behavior was a bit of exotica about cultural differences. However, upon further consid- eration he recognized that the behavior of the young men in Brunei shared similarities with how his own American students behave. As Brown put it, “[A]bove all, the young men were concerned with what other people would think about them; they were also concerned with politeness in particular, rules in general; even their concern with rank was only a matter of difference in degree” (p. 2). Like their American counterparts, the young men of Brunei equated physical highness with the height of a person’s stature; balanced language and gesture in their conversations; and used the concepts of question, answer, and explanation. In other words, despite specific cultural differences, Brown was able to detect underlying cultural universals.
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.5 Culture in Nonhuman Primates?
Figure 2.3: Cultural code of symbolic behavior
Source: Data from McConchie, A. (2013). Pop vs. Soda Statistics. Pop vs. Soda. Retrieved February 4, 2013 from http://www.popvssoda .com/stats/USA.html
An ongoing, online survey is being conducted across the United States, asking people what word they would use to denote carbonated soft drinks: pop, soda, or coke?
2.5 Culture in Nonhuman Primates?
Because some cultural universals may be rooted in human biology, cultural anthro-pologists have also considered the possibility that culture, or at least a precursor of it, will be found among other primates. Research of this nature has focused especially on the behavior and learning abilities of the great apes: chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos.
It has long been recognized that humans are not unique among the primates in making and using tools. For instance, chimpanzees have been observed using sticks to get honey out of logs and to fish for termites and “sponges” made by chewing leaves to sop up drinking water from inaccessible locations. Researchers have discovered that behaviors such as these were individual innovations that other group members then learned by imitation. Thus, even without language for explaining how to make and use a new kind of tool, that knowledge and practice can still spread. This sometimes leads to noticeable differences between local primate groups—for instance, in how they use those simple tools. Lind and Lindenfors (2010) found that much of this learning by imitation occurs from mother to offspring.
121,369 135,608
50,849
15,033
322,859
Pop Soda Coke Other Total
Term Used
Terms for Carbonated Soft Drinks in the United States
N u
m b
er o
f P
eo p
le
350,000
300,000
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.5 Culture in Nonhuman Primates?
Communication in Nonhuman Primates
Is language unique to the human species? Since the 1950s, researchers have been studying the com- munication patterns and linguistic capabilities of other animals, including our own closest relatives. Biologically speaking, human beings are members of a group of animals known as primates, which consists of the apes, monkeys, and small tree-dwelling prosimians. As a group, primates tend to be social and communicative animals. Nevertheless, the uniqueness of human language is apparent when one compares it with the communication systems of other primates. Primates observed in the wild have call systems consisting of a limited number of vocalizations or calls, each of which is pro- duced in response to a specific and immediate environmental stimulus (e.g., the presence of food or a particular type of predator). Human communication systems, in contrast, are highly versatile symbolic systems that enable us to innovate so that we can talk about new things and about things that happened in the past, that may happen in the future, or abstractions that won’t ever happen.
Nonhuman primate communicative abilities have been explored through attempts to teach various forms of language to chimpanzees (Mounin, 1976), possibly the most similar to human beings in their biological characteristics. These efforts have revealed a striking capacity in chimpanzees to expand their communication skills. One such study was started in 1966 by Allen and Beatrix Gardner with the chimpanzee Washoe (1969, 1985). A major problem encountered in earlier attempts to teach a human language to chimpanzees was the difficulty chimpanzees have in forming the sounds used in human speech. The Gardners overcame this problem by teaching Washoe a modified ver- sion of American Sign Language (ASL), the gestural language of the hearing-impaired in North Amer- ica. Chimpanzees naturally make use of a variety of gestures when communicating in the wild, so the Gardners’ use of ASL proved to be a breakthrough. Within four years, Washoe had mastered more than 130 ASL signs. In addition to using signs appropriately to name objects (e.g., dog, flower,
(continued)
Humans are the only primates that routinely use language as a means of transmitting customs from one generation to the next. Nonethe- less, over half a century of research has demonstrated that chimpanzees and gorillas can learn an impressive sign language and computer sym- bol vocabulary when humans make the effort to teach them, and at least one researcher has noted a female chimpanzee teaching sign language words to her offspring. What appears to remain unique to humans is their ability to use language, either spo- ken or in sign language form, in a way that shows an awareness that
anything can be assigned a new name and that it is possible to communicate any idea to others.
NHPA/SuperStock Recent studies involving chimpanzees have shown that other primates have developed tools and can teach other members of the group to use them as well.
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CHAPTER 2Section 2.5 Culture in Nonhuman Primates?
Communication in Nonhuman Primates (continued)
or shoe), attributes (e.g., red, dirty, or funny), and actions (e.g., give, want, or drink), Washoe learned to combine signs into sequences such as “give” + “tickle.” The Gardners and Washoe’s later trainer, Roger Fouts, claim that Washoe mastered something equivalent to grammar in human language. Fouts (1997) also reports that she proved herself capable of lying, creating the equivalent of swear words, and telling jokes, very human ways of using language. Washoe died in 2007 at the age of 42. After completing six successful studies, the Gardeners and Fouts believe that they have proven that chimpanzees have at least a basic ability to use language in the human sense. In related research, Rumbaugh (1977) trained a chimpanzee named Lana to communicate by pressing keys embossed with geometric signs. Like the Gardeners and Fouts, Rumbaugh concluded that Lana had demon- strated an ability to learn language and arrange words in grammatical sequences. Others disagree (Hess, 2008; Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok, 1980).
Herbert Terrace (1979), one of the skeptics, has worked with chimpanzees, including one named Nim Chimsky after linguist Noam Chomsky, who is well known for his work on universal grammar. He has also analyzed other researchers’ videotapes of human/chimpanzee sign language interac- tions, including those of Washoe and her handlers. He and his colleagues have concluded that many of the apparent examples of chimpanzees’ combining signs into grammatical sequences are not actually spontaneous but result from the chimpanzees’ responding to subtle cues by the trainers. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues agreed with Terrace. They believed that chimpanzees can learn to associate signs with objects and actions and to use signs to make simple requests, but that chimpanzees taught ASL do not demonstrate a grasp of grammar (Savage-Rumbaugh, Rum- baugh, & Boysen, 1980; Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1983). Chimpanzees, they argued, merely string together signs they know that are relevant to the situation in which they are making a request. Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues (1980) asserted that the most important difference between chimpanzee communication and that of human children is that when chimpanzees make requests they do not spontaneously describe their environment. They create sequences like “give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you,” but they do not add comments such as “the orange is cold” or “the orange juice is sticky” while they are eating the orange (p. 60). This is a significant difference in language use. The study of language-like skills in chimpanzees is still an ongoing area of research.
Another long-running primate language training study has been carried out by Francine Patterson with a gorilla named Koko (1978, 1999; see also Hill, 1978). Like Washoe, Koko has been taught American Sign Language. By 2002 (Patterson & Gordon, 2002) Koko had a sign language vocabulary of over 1,500 words, including signs to communicate about her feelings. By then, she was also able to use her signing skills to have conversations with her trainers, who were using spoken language. She has spontaneously used descriptive phrases, such as “finger bracelet” for “ring,” to refer to things for which she had learned no word from her trainer, an ability that Washoe also demon- strated. Like Washoe, Koko has been caught lying, as when she tried to blame a human for some- thing she had broken. By 2002 she had mastered sign language well enough to take the Stanford Binet Intelligence Test, a test designed for human beings. She scored between 85 and 90, which is in the low-average range!
(continued)
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CHAPTER 2Discussion Questions
Chapter Summary 1. Culture consists of the learned ideas and survival strategies that unify members
of a particular human group. Group members are conscious that some of their beliefs and feelings are shaped by the ideology of their culture.
2. Facing different environments with differing ideas about how one should live, cultures have evolved along different lines. Variations are often so extreme that people from different cultures have a hard time understanding each other’s ways.
3. The two ways in which anthropologists study culture focus on it either as a superorganic phenomenon with regularities that can be scientifically understood, or as a system of meanings that are embodied in the dialogues that occur among the individual members of each society.
4. Despite the diversity of cultures, there are many characteristics of cultures that are universally shared. This may be due, in part, to their compatibility with human biological traits as well as to cultural adaptations that make the same traits likely everywhere.
Discussion Questions 1. How does a society’s ideology differ from the other beliefs and feelings of its
culture? 2. How does ideological communication differ from other forms of communication? 3. What is the difference between a belief and a feeling?
Communication in Nonhuman Primates (continued)
Considering the abilities that nonhuman primates have demonstrated thus far, an intriguing ques- tion that remains to be answered is why they have not put these skills to use in the wild, where their communication with one another seems limited to their call systems and a small number of gestures that have natural expressive meanings. In the early 1970s a project was launched at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma that may eventually help us answer questions like this. There, a group of chimpanzees—including Washoe—who had learned American Sign Language were placed together on an island to see if they would use ASL with, and learn signs from, one another, and whether or not their skills would be passed on to the next generation (Linden, 1974). In 1980 the project was moved to Central Washington University, where the study of communication between chimpanzees has continued.
Roger Fouts, who moved with the project, and his colleagues have reported that by 1984 Washoe’s adopted offspring, a female chimpanzee named Loulis, had learned 28 signs from her mother (Fouts, Fouts, & Schoenfeld, 1984); by October 1995 the number had reached 80 (R. Fouts, personal commu- nication, October 1995). In one study alone, the researchers recorded 5,200 instances of chimpanzee- to-chimpanzee sign language communication (Fouts & Fouts, 1992). Although these are significant and intriguing findings, much research remains to be done in clarifying the similarities and differences between human and nonhuman primate language use and capabilities.
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CHAPTER 2Key Terms
4. What is the major criticism that has been leveled at Benedict’s portrayal of cultures as expressions of particular themes?
5. What is the relationship between values and drives? 6. How do the three kinds of learning that occur during socialization differ in their
impact on the ease with which different customs may change? 7. What adaptive functions might ethnocentrism have had in earlier, small-scale
societies? Why do anthropology students need to learn to recognize their own ethnocentrism and try to overcome it?
8. How is the relationship between culture and the human individual viewed dif- ferently by those who see culture as a superorganic phenomenon and those who see culture as the domain of human communication?
9. Why is it important to consider cultures both in terms of their distinctive qualities and in terms of their similarities to other cultures? What are cultural universals?
Key Terms
acculturation The process in which two or more cultures interact intensely so that they change in the process of borrowing traits and adjusting to each other.
aesthetics Values concerning beauty and the compatibility of things; the rules by which beauty is to be evaluated in a culture.
assimilation The process by which a soci- ety experiencing acculturation changes so much that it is hardly distinguishable from a more dominant one.
attitude A subjective reaction to an expe- rience expressed in positive or negative terms.
beliefs Ideas people hold about what is factual or real.
cultural universals Those characteris- tics of human life that can be found in all human ways of life.
culture A learned system of beliefs, feel- ings, and rules for living around which a group of people organize their lives; a way of life of a particular society.
drives The ideals that people actively pursue, sometimes at great cost, rather than those to which they merely give lip service.
emotion Pleasant or unpleasant subjec- tive reaction to experiences, characterized by varying degrees of muscle tension and changes in respiration and heart rate.
enculturation The process by which chil- dren learn the customs, beliefs, and values of their culture.
etiquette Values that govern manners and define what is considered courteous, or civil ways of communicating with others.
feelings Subjective reactions to experi- ences as pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad; feelings include emotions, attitudes, values, and drives.
formal learning Learning that proceeds by admonition and correction of the learner’s errors, with emotional emphasis on the importance of behaving acceptably.
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CHAPTER 2Key Terms
ideal culture The ways people perceive their own customs and behaviors, often more a reflection of their feelings and ideals about what they should be than an accurate assessment of what they are.
ideological communication Communica- tion that reaffirms people’s allegiance to their groups and creates a sense of com- munity by asserting its ideology.
ideology The consciously shared beliefs and feelings that members of a society con- sider characteristic of themselves.
informal learning Learning by imitation.
material culture The physical products such as the tools that arise from and that are used during the practice of a society’s customs.
morality Values concerning proper and improper ways of treating other human beings.
nonmaterial culture The nonphysical products of the customary lives of people in any society, products such as symbols, beliefs, and values.
nonscientific beliefs Beliefs that grow out of people’s feelings.
piety Values that define our relationship to the supernatural.
real culture The ways in which people actually behave as opposed to how they describe their behavior (ideal culture).
scientific beliefs Beliefs that are based on the desire to solve the practical day-to-day problems of living.
socialization See enculturation.
society A group of human beings who conceive of themselves as distinct from other such groups.
subcultures The geographical or social variations that occur within the cultures of societies with large populations.
superorganic Pertaining to culture, the quality of being a system that is governed by rules that are not explainable in terms of human biology.
technical learning Learning that occurs when the logical rationales for specific ways of doing things—rather than emo- tional pressure to behave in that way—are given to the learner.
values Feelings about what should be considered good, bad, moral, or immoral; the ideals that people long for but do not necessarily pursue.
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