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Culture (Latin: cultura, lit. "cultivation" ) is a modern concept based on a
term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman orator Cicero: "cultura
animi" (cultivation of the soul). This non-agricultural use of the term "culture"
re-appeared in modern Europe in the 17th century referring to the betterment or
refinement of individuals, especially through education. During the 18th and 19th
century it came to refer more frequently to the common reference points of whole
peoples, and discussion of the term was often connected to national aspirations
or ideals. Some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human
capacity.
In the 20th century, "culture" emerged as a central concept in anthropology,
encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be attributed to genetic
inheritance. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two
meanings:
the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols,
and to act imaginatively and creatively; and
the distinct ways that people living differently classified and represented
their experiences, and acted creatively.
Hoebel describes culture as an integrated system of learned behavior patterns
which are characteristic of the members of a society and which are not a result
of biological inheritance.
Distinctions are currently made between the physical artifacts created by a
society, its so-called material culture, and everything else, the intangibles
such as language, customs, etc. that are the main referent of the term "culture".
Etymology
The etymology of the modern term "culture" has a classical origin. In English,
the word "culture" is based on a term used by Cicero in his Tusculan
Disputations, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi",
thereby using an agricultural metaphor to describe the development of a
philosophical soul, which was understood teleologically as the one natural
highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this
metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming
that philosophy is man's natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers
after him "refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original
barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human".
As described by Velkley:
The term "culture," which originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind,
acquires most of its later modern meanings in the writings of the 18th-century
German thinkers, who on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of ″modern
liberalism and Enlightenment″. Thus a contrast between "culture" and "civilization"
is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such. Two
primary meanings of culture emerge from this period: culture as the folk-spirit
having a unique identity, and culture as cultivation of waywardness or free
individuality. The first meaning is predominant in our current use of the term "culture,"
although the second still plays a large role in what we think culture should
achieve, namely the full "expression" of the unique or "authentic" self.
Aspects of culture
Language and dialect
Science
Technology
Cuisine
Aesthetics - art, music, literature, fashion, and architecture
Values, ideology
Social conventions, including norms, taboos, and etiquette
Gender roles
Recreational activities such as festivals and holidays
Commercial practices
Social structure
Religion
Cultural regions are often defined with respect to an ethnolinguistic group or
religion; the larger cultural groupings are sometimes referred to as "civilizations".
Subcultures have distinct aspects, but share a connection with a larger culture
(whether by virtue of inhabiting the same society or by inheriting certain
cultural elements). Individuals can participate in multiple cultures and
subcultures; countercultures specifically reject at least some aspects of
mainstream culture.
Cultural identities and subcultures can be defined along any of these lines, or
others; for example:
Profession - e.g. truck driver culture
Workplace - organizational culture
Time and place - e.g. the Victorian era in the British Empire
An archaeological culture, defined by similar artifacts
Broad geography - e.g. Western culture
Narrow geography - e.g. Culture of the United States, National dress
Unified system of writing conventions - e.g. IETF language tags used for
internationalization and localization in computing
Ethnic minority - e.g. African-American culture
Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures
Individual adoption of cultural style - e.g. Goth subculture
Social class, caste, or socioeconomic status - High culture (usually referring
to artistic culture) might be differentiated from low culture, folk culture, or
middlebrow culture
Audience - e.g. popular culture
Technology - e.g. cyberculture, video game culture
Cultural landscape
Mutual communication (whether through technology or transportation of people or
goods) is an essential activity which maintains the coherence of a cultural
group. This explains why cultural boundaries can follow divisions in language
and geography, why globalization has created larger cultural spheres, and
highlights the role of mass media in defining and maintaining culture. Education
and tradition communicate culture through time.
A given nation-state or society may have a single, dominant culture to which
immigrants assimilate (the melting pot model), or be multicultural (the salad
bowl/cultural mosaic model).
Cultural conflict can arise within a society or between different societies with
different cultures.
Change
A 19th-century engraving showing Australian "natives" opposing the arrival of
Captain James Cook in 1770
Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be
useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not
exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change
period," driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and
above all, the human population explosion, among other factors.
Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces
resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural
events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices
within current structures, which themselves are subject to change. (See
structuration.)
Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a
society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and
spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany
ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S.
feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender
relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental
conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests
returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were
available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about
many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.
Full-length profile portrait of Turkman woman, standing on a carpet at the
entrance to a yurt, dressed in traditional clothing and jewelry
Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also
produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or
competition over resources may impact technological development or social
dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another,
through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though
not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example,
hamburgers, fastfood in the United States, seemed exotic when introduced into
China. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one
culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct Borrowing" on
the other hand tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one
culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based
model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and
products.
Acculturation has different meanings, but in this context refers to replacement
of the traits of one culture with those of another, such has happened to certain
Native American tribes and to many indigenous peoples across the globe during
the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include
assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and
transculturation.
Early modern discourses
German Romanticism
Johann Herder called attention to national cultures.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) has formulated an individualist
definition of "enlightenment" similar to the concept of bildung: "Enlightenment
is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argued that this
immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to
think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: Sapere
aude, "Dare to be wise!" In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily
takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human
rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of bildung: "For Herder,
Bildung was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and
sense of common destiny, to a people."
Adolf Bastian developed a universal model of culture.
In 1795, the great linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835)
called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests.
During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with
nationalist movements—such as the nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out
of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities
against the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive notion of culture
as "worldview." According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a
distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups.
Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still
allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal"
cultures.
In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) argued for "the psychic unity of mankind". He
proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that
distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian,
all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas" (Elementargedanken);
different cultures, or different "folk ideas" (Völkergedanken), are local
modifications of the elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the
modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this
tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.
English Romanticism
British poet and critic Matthew Arnold viewed "culture" as the cultivation of
the humanist ideal.
In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold
(1822–1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human
refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." This
concept of culture is comparable to the German concept of bildung: "...culture
being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the
matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the
world."
In practice, culture referred to an élite ideal and was associated with such
activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine. As these forms were
associated with urban life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from
lat. civitas, city). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in
folklore, which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites. This
distinction is often characterized as that between high culture, namely that of
the ruling social group, and low culture. In other words, the idea of "culture"
that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected
inequalities within European societies.
British anthropologist Edward Tylor was one of the first English-speaking
scholars to use the term culture in an inclusive and universal sense.
Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with anarchy; other Europeans, following
philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted "culture" with
"the state of nature". According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans
who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in
a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized"
and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could classify some
countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more
cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer's theory of Social
Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. Just as some
critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is really
an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, some
critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized
people is really an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers
and their colonial subjects.
Other 19th century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this
differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement
and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that
obscure and distort people's essential nature. These critics considered folk
music (as produced by "the folk", i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly
express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and
decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as "noble
savages" living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted
by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.
In 1870 Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower
culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this
theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms.
In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities
characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern
understanding of culture.
20th century discourses
Anthropology
American anthropology
Petroglyphs in modern-day Gobustan, Azerbaijan, dating back to 10 000 BCE and
indicating a thriving culture
Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of culture, in
the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of
American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human
capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to
communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American
anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important
role in research on culture:
biological anthropology
linguistic anthropology
cultural anthropology
archaeology
Research in these fields has influenced anthropologists working in other
countries to different degrees.
Biological anthropology This article or section may contain previously
unpublished synthesis of published material that conveys ideas not
attributable to the original sources. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk
page. (May 2013)
Discussion concerning culture among biological anthropologists centers around
two debates. First, is culture uniquely human or shared by other species (most
notably, other primates)? This is an important question, as the theory of
evolution holds that humans are descended from (now extinct) non-human primates.
Second, how did culture evolve among human beings?
Gerald Weiss noted that although Tylor's classic definition of culture was
restricted to humans, many anthropologists take this for granted and thus elide
that important qualification from later definitions, merely equating culture
with any learned behavior. This slippage is a problem because during the
formative years of modern primatology, some primatologists were trained in
anthropology (and understood that culture refers to learned behavior among
humans), and others were not. Notable non-anthropologists, like Robert Yerkes
and Jane Goodall thus argued that since chimpanzees have learned behaviors, they
have culture. Today, anthropological primatologists are divided, several
arguing that non-human primates have culture, others arguing that they do not.
This scientific debate is complicated by ethical concerns. The subjects of
primatology are non-human primates, and whatever culture these primates have is
threatened by human activity. After reviewing the research on primate culture, W.C.
McGrew concluded, "[a] discipline requires subjects, and most species of
nonhuman primates are endangered by their human cousins. Ultimately, whatever
its merit, cultural primatology must be committed to cultural survival [i.e. to
the survival of primate cultures]."
McGrew suggests a definition of culture that he finds scientifically useful for
studying primate culture. He points out that scientists do not have access to
the subjective thoughts or knowledge of non-human primates. Thus, if culture is
defined in terms of knowledge, then scientists are severely limited in their
attempts to study primate culture. Instead of defining culture as a kind of
knowledge, McGrew suggests that we view culture as a process. He lists six steps
in the process:
A new pattern of behavior is invented, or an existing one is modified.
The innovator transmits this pattern to another.
The form of the pattern is consistent within and across performers, perhaps even
in terms of recognizable stylistic features.
The one who acquires the pattern retains the ability to perform it long after
having acquired it.
The pattern spreads across social units in a population. These social units may
be families, clans, troops, or bands.
The pattern endures across generations.
McGrew admits that all six criteria may be strict, given the difficulties in
observing primate behavior in the wild. But he also insists on the need to be as
inclusive as possible, on the need for a definition of culture that "casts the
net widely":
Culture is considered to be group-specific behavior that is acquired, at least
in part, from social influences. Here, group is considered to be the species-typical
unit, whether it be a troop, lineage, subgroup, or so on. Prima facie evidence
of culture comes from within-species but across-group variation in behavior, as
when a pattern is persistent in one community of chimpanzees but is absent from
another, or when different communities perform different versions of the same
pattern. The suggestion of culture in action is stronger when the difference
across the groups cannot be explained solely by ecological factors ....
—
As Charles Frederick Voegelin pointed out, if "culture" is reduced to "learned
behavior," then all animals have culture. Certainly all specialists agree
that all primate species evidence common cognitive skills: knowledge of object-permanence,
cognitive mapping, the ability to categorize objects, and creative problem
solving. Moreover, all primate species show evidence of shared social skills:
they recognize members of their social group; they form direct relationships
based on degrees of kinship and rank; they recognize third-party social
relationships; they predict future behavior; and they cooperate in problem-solving.
Cast of the skeleton of Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis
One current view of the temporal and geographical distribution of hominid
populations
Nevertheless, the term "culture" applies to non-human animals only if we define
culture as any or all learned behavior. Within mainstream physical anthropology,
scholars tend to think that a more restrictive definition is necessary. These
researchers are concerned with how human beings evolved to be different from
other species. A more precise definition of culture, which excludes non-human
social behavior, would allow physical anthropologists to study how humans
evolved their unique capacity for "culture".
Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus) are humans' (*** sapiens)
closest living relative; both are descended from a common ancestor which lived
around five or six million years ago. This is the same amount of time it took
for horses and zebras, lions and tigers to diverge from their respective common
ancestors. The evolution of modern humans is rapid: Australopithicenes
evolved four million years ago and modern humans in past several hundred
thousand years. During this time humanity evolved three distinctive features:
(a) the creation and use of conventional symbols, including linguistic symbols
and their derivatives, such as written language and mathematical symbols and
notations; (b) the creation and use of complex tools and other instrumental
technologies; and (c) the creation and participation in complex social
organization and institutions.
According to developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, "where these complex
and species-unique behavioral practices, and the cognitive skills that underlie
them, came from" is a fundamental anthropological question. Given that
contemporary humans and chimpanzees are far more different from horses and
zebras, or rats and mice, and that the evolution of this great difference
occurred in such a short period of time, "our search must be for some small
difference that made a big difference – some adaptation, or small set of
adaptations, that changed the process of primate cognitive evolution in
fundamental ways." According to Tomasello, the answer to this question must form
the basis of a scientific definition of "human culture."
In a recent review of the major research on human and primate tool-use,
communication, and learning strategies, Tomasello argues that the key human
advances over primates (language, complex technologies, and complex social
organization) are all the results of humans pooling cognitive resources. This is
called "the ratchet effect:" innovations spread and are shared by a group, and
mastered "by youngsters, which enables them to remain in their new and improved
form within the group until something better comes along." The key point is that
children are born good at a particular kind of social learning; this creates a
favored environment for social innovations, making them more likely to be
maintained and transmitted to new generations than individual innovations.
For Tomasello, human social learning—the kind of learning that distinguishes
humans from other primates and that played a decisive role in human evolution—is
based on two elements: first, what he calls "imitative learning," (as opposed to
"emulative learning" characteristic of other primates) and second, the fact that
humans represent their experiences symbolically (rather than iconically, as is
characteristic of other primates). Together, these elements enable humans to be
both inventive, and to preserve useful inventions. It is this combination that
produces the ratchet effect.
Chimpanzee mother and baby
Chimpanzee extracting insects
The Japanese Macaques at Jigokudani hotspring in Nagano
The kind of learning found among other primates is "emulation learning," which "focuses
on the environmental events involved – results or changes of state in the
environment that the other produced – rather than on the actions that produced
those results." Tomasello emphasizes that emulation learning is a
highly adaptive strategy for apes because it focuses on the effects of an act.
In laboratory experiments, chimpanzees were shown two different ways for using a
rake-like tool to obtain an out-of-reach-object. Both methods were effective,
but one was more efficient than the other. Chimpanzees consistently emulated the
more efficient method.
Examples of emulation learning are well documented among primates. Notable
examples include Japanese macaque potato washing, Chimpanzee tool use, and
Chimpanzee gestural communication. In 1953, an 18-month-old female macaque
monkey was observed taking sandy pieces of sweet potato (given to the monkeys by
observers) to a stream (and later, to the ocean) to wash off the sand. After
three months, the same behavior was observed in her mother and two playmates,
and then the playmates' mothers. Over the next two years seven other young
macaques were observed washing their potatoes, and by the end of the third year
40% of the troop had adopted the practice. Although this story is
popularly represented as a straightforward example of human-like learning,
evidence suggests that it is not. Many monkeys naturally brush sand off of food;
this behavior had been observed in the macaque troop prior to the first observed
washing. Moreover, potato washing was observed in four other separate macaque
troops, suggesting that at least four other individual monkeys had learned to
wash off sand on their own. Other monkey species in captivity quickly learn
to wash off their food. Finally, the spread of learning among the Japanese
macaques was fairly slow, and the rate at which new members of the troop learned
did not keep pace with the growth of the troop. If the form of learning were
imitation, the rate of learning should have been exponential. It is more likely
that the monkeys' washing behavior is based on the common behavior of cleaning
off food, and that monkeys that spent time by the water independently learned to
wash, rather than wipe their food. This explains both why those monkeys that
kept company with the original washer, and who thus spent a good deal of time by
the water, also figured out how to wash their potatoes. It also explains why the
rate at which this behavior spread was slow.
Chimpanzees exhibit a variety of population-specific tool use: termite-fishing,
ant-fishing, ant-dipping, nut-cracking, and leaf-sponging. Gombe Chimpanzees
fish for termites using small, thin sticks, but chimpanzees in Western Africa
use large sticks to break holes in mounds and use their hands to scoop up
termites. Some of this variation may be the result of "environmental shaping" (there
is more rainfall in western Africa, softening termite mounds and making them
easier to break apart, than in the Gombe reserve in eastern Africa. Nevertheless
it is clear that chimpanzees are good at emulation learning. Chimpanzee children
independently know how to roll over logs, and know how to eat insects. When
children see their mothers rolling over logs to eat the insects beneath, they
quickly learn to do the same. In other words, this form of learning builds on
activities the children already know.
Mother and child
Inuit family
Girls in Xinjiang in northwestern China
Children in Jerusalem
The kind of learning characteristic of human children is imitative learning,
which "means reproducing an instrumental act understood intentionally."
Human infants begin to display some evidence of this form of learning between
the ages of nine and 12 months, when infants fix their attention not only on an
object, but on the gaze of an adult which enables them to use adults as points
of reference and thus "act on objects in the way adults are acting on them."
This dynamic is well documented and has also been termed "joint engagement" or "joint
attention." Essential to this dynamic is the infant's growing capacity
to recognize others as "intentional agents:" people "with the power to control
their spontaneous behavior" and who "have goals and make active choices among
behavioral means for attaining those goals."
The development of skills in joint attention by the end of a human child's first
year of life provides the basis for the development of imitative learning in the
second year. In one study 14-month old children imitated an adult's over-complex
method of turning on a light, even when they could have used an easier and more
natural motion to the same effect. In another study, 16-month old children
interacted with adults who alternated between a complex series of motions that
appeared intentional and a comparable set of motions that appeared accidental;
they imitated only those motions that appeared intentional. Another study of
18-month old children revealed that children imitate actions that adults intend,
yet in some way fail, to perform.
Tomasello emphasizes that this kind of imitative learning "relies fundamentally
on infants' tendency to identify with adults, and on their ability to
distinguish in the actions of others the underlying goal and the different means
that might be used to achieve it." He calls this kind of imitative learning
"cultural learning because the child is not just learning about things from
other persons, she is also learning things through them — in the sense that she
must know something of the adult's perspective on a situation to learn the
active use of this same intentional act." He concludes that the key
feature of cultural learning is that it occurs only when an individual "understands
others as intentional agents, like the self, who have a perspective on the world
that can be followed into, directed and shared."
Emulation learning and imitative learning are two different adaptations that can
only be assessed in their larger environmental and evolutionary contexts. In one
experiment, chimpanzees and two-year-old children were separately presented with
a rake-like-tool and an out-of-reach object. Adult humans then demonstrated two
different ways to use the tool, one more efficient, one less efficient.
Chimpanzees used the same efficient method following both demonstrations,
regardless of what was demonstrated. Most of the human children, however,
imitated whichever method the adult was demonstrating. If the chimps and humans
were to be compared on the basis of these results, one might think that
chimpanzees are more intelligent. From an evolutionary perspective they are
equally intelligent, but with different kinds of intelligence adapted to
different environments. Chimpanzee learning strategies are well-suited to a
stable physical environment that requires little social cooperation (compared to
humans). Human learning strategies are well-suited to a more complex social
environment in which understanding the intentions of others may be more
important than success at a specific task. Tomasello argues that this strategy
has made possible the "ratchet effect" that enabled humans to evolve complex
social systems that have enabled humans to adapt to virtually every physical
environment on the surface of the earth.
Tomasello further argues that cultural learning is essential for language-acquisition.
Most children in any society, and all children in some, do not learn all words
through the direct efforts of adults. "In general, for the vast majority of
words in their language, children must find a way to learn in the ongoing flow
of social interaction, sometimes from speech not even addressed to them."
This finding has been confirmed by a variety of experiments in which children
learned words even when the referent was not present, multiple referents were
possible, and the adult was not directly trying to teach the word to the child.
Tomasello concludes that "a linguistic symbol is nothing other than a marker for
an intersubjectively shared understanding of a situation."
Tomasello's 1999 review of the research contrasting human and non-human primate
learning strategies confirms biological anthropologist Ralph Holloway's 1969
argument that a specific kind of sociality linked to symbolic cognition were the
keys to human evolution, and constitute the nature of culture. According to
Holloway, the key issue in the evolution of H. sapiens, and the key to
understanding "culture," "is how man organizes his experience." Culture is "the
imposition of arbitrary form upon the environment." This fact, Holloway
argued, is primary to and explains what is distinctive about human learning
strategies, tool-use, and language. Human tool-making and language express "similar,
if not identical, cognitive processes" and provide important evidence for how
humankind evolved.
In other words, whereas McGrew argues that anthropologists must focus on
behaviors like communication and tool-use because they have no access to the
mind, Holloway argues that human language and tool-use, including the earliest
stone tools in the fossil record, are highly suggestive of cognitive differences
between humans and non-humans, and that such cognitive differences in turn
explain human evolution. For Holloway, the question is not whether other
primates communicate, learn or make tools, but the way they do these things. "Washing
potatoes in the ocean ... stripping branches of leaves to get termites," and
other examples of primate tool-use and learning "are iconic, and there is no
feedback from the environment to the animal." Human tools, however, express
an independence from natural form that manifests symbolic thinking. "In the
preparation of the stick for termite-eating, the relation between product and
raw material is iconic. In the making of a stone tool, in contrast, there is no
necessary relation between the form of the final product and the original
material."
In Holloway's view, our non-human ancestors, like those of modern chimpanzees
and other primates, shared motor and sensory skills, curiosity, memory, and
intelligence, with perhaps differences in degree. He adds: "It is when these are
integrated with the unique attributes of arbitrary production (symbolization)
and imposition that man qua cultural man appears.".
He also adds:
I have suggested above that whatever culture may be, it includes "the imposition
of arbitrary forms upon the environment." This phrase has two components. One is
a recognition that the relationship between the coding process and the
phenomenon (be it a tool, social network, or abstract principle) is non-iconic.
The other is an idea of man as a creature who can make delusional systems work—who
imposes his fantasies, his non-iconic constructs (and constructions) , upon the
environment. The altered environment shapes his perceptions, and these are again
forced back on the environment, are incorporated into the environment, and press
for further adaptation.
—
This is comparable to the "ratcheting" aspect suggested by Tomasello and others
that enabled human evolution to accelerate. Holloway concludes that the first
instance of symbolic thought among humans provided a "kick-start" for brain
development, tool complexity, social structure, and language to evolve through a
constant dynamic of positive feedback. "This interaction between the propensity
to structure the environment arbitrarily and the feedback from the environment
to the organism is an emergent process, a process different in kind from
anything that preceded it."
Arbitrariness
Ancient stone tools
Simple-edge chopper
Chopping-tool
Unretouched biface
Linguists Charles Hockett and R. Ascher have identified thirteen design-features
of language, some shared by other forms of animal communication. One feature
that distinguishes human language is its tremendous productivity; in other words,
competent speakers of a language are capable of producing an exponential number
of original utterances. This productivity seems to be made possible by a few
critical features unique to human language. One is "duality of patterning,"
meaning that human language consists of the articulation of several distinct
processes, each with its own set of rules: combining phonemes to produce
morphemes, combining morphemes to produce words, and combining words to produce
sentences. This means that a person can master a relatively limited number of
signals and sets of rules, to create infinite combinations. Another crucial
element is that human language is symbolic: the sound of words (or their shape,
when written) typically bear no relation to what they represent. In other
words, their meaning is arbitrary. That words have meaning is a matter of
convention. Since the meaning of words are arbitrary, any word may have several
meanings, and any object may be referred to using a variety of words; the actual
word used to describe a particular object depends on the context, the intention
of the speaker, and the ability of the listener to judge these appropriately. As
Tomasello notes,
An individual language user looks at a tree and, before drawing the attention of
her interlocutor to that tree, must decide, based on her assessment of the
listener's current knowledge and expectations, whether to say "that tree over
there," "it," "the oak," "that hundred-year-oak," "the tree," "the bagswing tree,"
"that thing in the front yard," "the ornament," "the embarrassment," or any of a
number of other expressions. ... And these decisions are not made on the basis
of the speaker's direct goal with respect to the object or activity involved,
but rather that they are made on the basis of her goal with respect to the
listener's interest and attention to that object or activity. This is why
symbolic cognition and communication and imitative learning go hand-in-hand.
—
Holloway argues that the stone tools associated with genus *** have the same
features of human language:
Returning to matter of syntax, rules, and concatenated activity mentioned above,
almost any model which describes a language process can also be used to describe
tool-making. This is hardly surprising. Both activities are concatenated, both
have rigid rules about the serialization of unit activities (the grammar, syntax),
both are hierarchical systems of activity (as is any motor activity), and both
produce arbitrary configurations which thence become part of the environment,
either temporarily or permanently.
—
He also adds:
Productivity can be seen in the facts that basic types were probably used for
multiple purposes, that tool industries tend to expand with time, and that a
slight variation on a basic pattern may be made to meet some new functional
requisite. Elements of a basic "vocabulary" of motor operations—flakes,
detachment, rotation, preparation of striking platform, etc.—are used in
different combinations to produce dissimilar tools, with different forms, and
supposedly, different uses. . . . Taking each motor event alone, no one action
is complete; each action depends on the prior one and requires a further one,
and each is dependent on another ax on the original plan. In other words, at
each point of the action except the last, the piece is not "satisfactory" in
structure. Each unit action is meaningless by itself in the sense of the use of
the tool; it is meaningful only in the context of the whole completed set of
actions culminating in the final product. This exactly parallels language.
—
As Tomasello demonstrates, symbolic thought can operate only in a particular
social environment:
Arbitrary symbols enforce consensus of perceptions, which not only allows
members to communicate about the same objects in terms of space and time (as in
hunting) but it also makes it possible for social relationships to be
standardized and manipulated through symbols. It means that idiosyncrasies are
smoothed out and perceived within classes of behavior. By enforcing perceptual
invariance, symbols also enforce social behavioral constancy, and enforcing
social behavioral constancy is a prerequisite to differential task-role sectors
in a differentiated social group adapting not only to the outside environment
but to its own membership.
—
Biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon, in a synthesis of over twenty years
of research on human evolution, human neurology, and primatology, describes this
"ratcheting effect" as a form of "Baldwinian Evolution." Named after
psychologist James Baldwin, this describes a situation in which an animal's
behavior has evolutionary consequences when it changes the natural environment
and thus the selective forces acting on the animal.
Once some useful behavior spreads within a population and becomes more important
for subsistence, it will generate selection pressures on genetic traits that
support its propagation ... Stone and symbolic tools, which were initially
acquired with the aid of flexible ape-learning abilities, ultimately turned the
tables on their users and forced them to adapt to a new niche opened by these
technologies. Rather than being just useful tricks, these behavioral prostheses
for obtaining food and organizing social behaviors became indispensable elements
in a new adaptive complex. The origin of "humanness" can be defined as that
point in our evolution where these tools became the principle [sic?] source of
selection on our bodies and brains. It is the diagnostic of *** symbolicus.
—
According to Deacon, this occurred between 2 and 2.5 million years ago, when we
have the first fossil evidence of stone tool use and the beginning of a trend in
an increase in brain size. But it is the evolution of symbolic language which is
the cause—and not the effect—of these trends. More specifically, Deacon is
suggesting that Australopithecines, like contemporary apes, used tools; it is
possible that over the millions of years of Australopithecine history, many
troops developed symbolic communication systems. All that was necessary was that
one of these groups so altered their environment that "it introduced selection
for very different learning abilities than affected prior species." This
troop or population kick-started the Baldwinian process (the "ratchet effect")
that led to their evolution to genus ***.
The question for Deacon is what behavioral-environmental changes could have made
the development of symbolic thinking adaptive? Here he emphasizes the importance
of distinguishing humans from all other species, not to privilege human
intelligence but to problematize it. Given that the evolution of H. sapiens
began with ancestors who did not yet have "culture," what led them to move away
from cognitive, learning, communication, and tool-making strategies that were
and continued to be adaptive for most other primates (and, some have suggested,
most other species of animals)? Learning symbol systems is more time consuming
than other forms of communication, so symbolic thought made possible a different
communication strategy, but not a more efficient one than other primates.
Nevertheless, it must have offered some selective advantage to H. sapiens to
have evolved. Deacon starts by looking at two key determinants in evolutionary
history: foraging behavior, and patterns of *** relations. As he observes
competition for *** access limits the possibilities for social cooperation in
many species; yet, Deacon observes, there are three consistent patterns in human
reproduction that distinguish them from other species:
Both males and females usually contribute effort towards the rearing of their
offspring, though often to differing extents and in very different ways.
In all societies, the great majority of adult males and females are bound by
long-term, exclusive *** access rights and prohibitions to particular
individuals of the opposite sex.
They maintain these exclusive *** relations while living in modest to large-sized,
multi-male, multi-female, cooperative social groups.
Moreover, there is one feature common to all known human foraging societies (all
humans prior to ten or fifteen thousand years ago), and markedly different from
other primates: "the use of meat. . . . The appearance of the first stone tools
nearly 2.5 million years ago almost certainly correlates with a radical shift in
foraging behavior to gain access to meat." Deacon does not believe that
symbolic thought was necessary for hunting or tool-making (although tool-making
may be a reliable index of symbolic thought); rather, it was necessary for the
success of distinctive social relations.
The key is that while men and women are equally effective foragers, mothers
carrying dependent children are not effective hunters. They must thus depend on
male hunters. This favors a system in which males have exclusive *** access
to females, and females can predict that their *** partner will provide food
for them and their children. In most mammalian species the result is a system of
rank or *** competition that results in either polygyny, or lifelong pair-bonding
between two individuals who live relatively independent of other adults of their
species; in both cases male aggression plays an important role in maintaining
*** access to mate(s).
Human reliance on resources that are relatively unavailable to females with
infants selects not only for cooperation between a child's father and mother but
also for the cooperation of other relatives and friends, including elderly
individuals and juveniles, who can be relied upon for assistance. The special
demands of acquiring meat and caring for infants in our own evolution together
contribute to the underlying impetus for the third characteristic feature of
human reproductive patterns: cooperative group living.
—
What is uniquely characteristic about human societies is what required symbolic
cognition, which consequently leads to the evolution of culture: "cooperative,
mixed-sex social groups, with significant male care and provisioning of
offspring, and relatively stable patterns of reproductive exclusion." This
combination is relatively rare in other species because it is "highly
susceptible to disintegration." Language and culture provide the glue that holds
it together.
Chimpanzees also, on occasion, hunt meat; in most cases, however, males consume
the meat immediately, and only on occasion share with females who happen to be
nearby. Among chimpanzees, hunting for meat increases when other sources of food
become scarce, but under these conditions sharing decreases. The first forms of
symbolic thinking made stone tools possible, which in turn made hunting for meat
a more dependable source of food for our nonhuman ancestors while making
possible forms of social communication that make sharing between males and
females, but also among males, decreasing *** competition:
So the socio-ecological problem posed by the transition to a meat-supplemented
subsistence strategy is that it cannot be utilized without a social structure
which guarantees unambiguous and exclusive mating and is sufficiently
egalitarian to sustain cooperation via shared or parallel reproductive interests.
This problem can be solved symbolically.
—
Symbols and symbolic thinking thus make possible a central feature of social
relations in every human population: reciprocity. Evolutionary scientists have
developed a model to explain reciprocal altruism among closely related
individuals. Symbolic thought makes possible reciprocity between distantly
related individuals.
Archaeology
Excavated dwellings at Skara Brae, Europe's most complete Neolithic village
Bifacial points, engraved ochre and bone tools from the c. 75,000–80,000 year
old M1 & M2 phases at Blombos cave
Monte Alban archaeological site
Excavations at the South Area of Çatal Höyük
In the 19th century archaeology was often a supplement to history, and the goal
of archaeologists was to identify artifacts according to their typology and
stratigraphy, thus marking their location in time and space. Franz Boas
established that archaeology be one of American anthropology's four fields, and
debates among archaeologists have often paralleled debates among cultural
anthropologists. In the 1920s and 1930s, Australian-British archaeologist V.
Gordon Childe and American archaeologist W. C. McKern independently began moving
from asking about the date of an artifact, to asking about the people who
produced it — when archaeologists work alongside historians, historical
materials generally help answer these questions, but when historical materials
are unavailable, archaeologists had to develop new methods. Childe and McKern
focused on analyzing the relationships among objects found together; their work
established the foundation for a three-tiered model:
An individual artifact, which has surface, shape, and technological attributes (e.g.
an arrowhead)
A sub-assemblage, consisting of artifacts that are found, and were likely used,
together (e.g. an arrowhead, bow and knife)
An assemblage of sub-assemblages that together constitute the archaeological
site (e.g. the arrowhead, bow and knife; a pot and the remains of a hearth; a
shelter)
Childe argued that a "constantly recurring assemblage of artifacts" to be an "archaeological
culture." Childe and others viewed "each archaeological culture ... the
manifestation in material terms of a specific people."
In 1948 Walter Taylor systematized the methods and concepts that archaeologists
had developed and proposed a general model for the archaeological contribution
to knowledge of cultures. He began with the mainstream understanding of culture
as the product of human cognitive activity, and the Boasian emphasis on the
subjective meanings of objects as dependent on their cultural context. He
defined culture as "a mental phenomenon, consisting of the of minds,
not of material objects or observable behavior." He then devised a three-tiered
model linking cultural anthropology to archeology, which he called conjunctive
archaeology:
Culture, which is unobservable(behavior) and nonmaterial
Behaviors resulting from culture, which are observable and nonmaterial
Objectifications, such as artifacts and architecture, which are the result of
behavior and material
That is, material artifacts were the material residue of culture, but not
culture itself. Taylor's point was that the archaeological record could
contribute to anthropological knowledge, but only if archaeologists reconceived
their work not just as digging up artifacts and recording their location in time
and space, but as inferring from material remains the behaviors through which
they were produced and used, and inferring from these behaviors the mental
activities of people. Although many archaeologists agreed that their research
was integral to anthropology, Taylor's program was never fully implemented. One
reason was that his three-tier model of inferences required too much fieldwork
and laboratory analysis to be practical. Moreover, his view that material
remains were not themselves cultural, and in fact twice-removed from culture, in
fact left archaeology marginal to cultural anthropology.
In 1962 Leslie White's former student Lewis Binford proposed a new model for
anthropological archaeology, called "the New Archaeology" or "Processual
Archaeology," based on White's definition of culture as "the extra-somatic means
of adaptation for the human organism." This definition allowed Binford to
establish archaeology as a crucial field for the pursuit of the methodology of
Julian Steward's cultural ecology:
The comparative study of cultural systems with variable technologies in a
similar environmental range or similar technologies in differing environments is
a major methodology of what Steward (1955: 36–42) has called "cultural ecology,"
and certainly is a valuable means of increasing our understanding of cultural
processes. Such a methodology is also useful in elucidating the structural
relationships between major cultural sub-systems such as the social and
ideological sub-systems.
—
In other words, Binford proposed an archaeology that would be central to the
dominant project of cultural anthropologists at the time (culture as non-genetic
adaptations to the environment); the "new archaeology" was the cultural
anthropology (in the form of cultural ecology or ecological anthropology) of the
past.
In the 1980s, there was a movement in the United Kingdom and Europe against the
view of archeology as a field of anthropology, echoing Radcliffe-Brown's earlier
rejection of cultural anthropology. During this same period, then-Cambridge
archaeologist Ian Hodder developed "post-processual archaeology" as an
alternative. Like Binford (and unlike Taylor) Hodder views artifacts not as
objectifications of culture but as culture itself. Unlike Binford, however,
Hodder does not view culture as an environmental adaptation. Instead, he "is
committed to a fluid semiotic version of the traditional culture concept in
which material items, artifacts, are full participants in the creation,
deployment, alteration, and fading away of symbolic complexes." His 1982
book, Symbols in Action, evokes the symbolic anthropology of Geertz, Schneider,
with their focus on the context dependent meanings of cultural things, as an
alternative to White and Steward's materialist view of culture. In his 1991
textbook, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology
Hodder argued that archaeology is more closely aligned to history than to
anthropology.
Language
The connection between culture and language has been noted as far back as the
classical period and probably long before. The ancient Greeks, for example,
distinguished between civilized peoples and bárbaroi "those who babble", i.e.
those who speak unintelligible languages. The fact that different groups
speak different, unintelligible languages is often considered more tangible
evidence for cultural differences than other less obvious cultural traits.
The German romanticists of the 19th century such as Johann Gottfried Herder and
Wilhelm von Humboldt, often saw language not just as one cultural trait among
many but rather as the direct expression of a people's national character,[87]
and as such as culture in a kind of condensed form. Herder for example suggests,
"Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache" (Since
every people is a People, it has its own national culture expressed through its
own language).
Franz Boas, founder of American anthropology, like his German forerunners,
maintained that the shared language of a community is the most essential carrier
of their common culture. Boas was the first anthropologist who considered it
unimaginable to study the culture of a foreign people without also becoming
acquainted with their language. For Boas, the fact that the intellectual culture
of a people was largely constructed, shared and maintained through the use of
language, meant that understanding the language of a cultural group was the key
to understanding its culture. At the same time, though, Boas and his students
were aware that culture and language are not directly dependent on one another.
That is, groups with widely different cultures may share a common language, and
speakers of completely unrelated languages may share the same fundamental
cultural traits. Numerous other scholars have suggested that the form of
language determines specific cultural traits. This is similar to the notion
of Linguistic determinism, which states that the form of language determines
individual thought. While Boas himself rejected a causal link between language
and culture, some of his intellectual heirs entertained the idea that habitual
patterns of speaking and thinking in a particular language may influence the
culture of the linguistic group. Such belief is related to the theory of
Linguistic relativity. Boas, like most modern anthropologists, however, was more
inclined to relate the interconnectedness between language and culture to the
fact that, as B.L. Whorf put it, "they have grown up together".
Indeed, the origin of language, understood as the human capacity of complex
symbolic communication, and the origin of complex culture is often thought to
stem from the same evolutionary process in early man. Evolutionary
anthropologist Robin I. Dunbar has proposed that language evolved as early
humans began to live in large communities which required the use of complex
communication to maintain social coherence. Language and culture then both
emerged as a means of using symbols to construct social identity and maintain
coherence within a social group too large to rely exclusively on pre-human ways
of building community such as for example grooming. Since language and culture
are both in essence symbolic systems, twentieth century cultural theorists have
applied the methods of analyzing language developed in the science of
linguistics to also analyze culture. Particularly the structural theory of
Ferdinand de Saussure which describes symbolic systems as consisting of signs (a
pairing of a particular form with a particular meaning) has come to be applied
widely in the study of culture. But also post-structuralist theories that
nonetheless still rely on the parallel between language and culture as systems
of symbolic communication, have been applied in the field of semiotics. The
parallel between language and culture can then be understood as analog to the
parallel between a linguistic sign, consisting for example of the sound [kau]
and the meaning "cow", and a cultural sign, consisting for example of the
cultural form of "wearing a crown" and the cultural meaning of "being king". In
this way it can be argued that culture is itself a kind of language. Another
parallel between cultural and linguistic systems is that they are both systems
of practice that is they are a set of special ways of doing things that is
constructed and perpetuated through social interactions. Children, for
example, acquire language in the same way as they acquire the basic cultural
norms of the society they grow up in – through interaction with older members of
their cultural group.
However, languages, now understood as the particular set of speech norms of a
particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community
that speak them. Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one
cultural group and difference from others. Even among speakers of one language
several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal
affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. In linguistics
such different ways of using the same language are called "varieties". For
example, the English language is spoken differently in the USA, the UK and
Australia, and even within English-speaking countries there are hundreds of
dialects of English that each signals a belonging to a particular region and/or
subculture. For example, in the UK the cockney dialect signals its speakers'
belonging to the group of lower class workers of east London. Differences
between varieties of the same language often consist in different pronunciations
and vocabulary, but also sometimes of different grammatical systems and very
often in using different styles (e.g. cockney Rhyming slang or Lawyers' jargon).
Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists and
linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking
vary between speech communities.
A community's ways of speaking or signing are a part of the community's culture,
just as other shared practices are. Language use is a way of establishing and
displaying group identity. Ways of speaking function not only to facilitate
communication, but also to identify the social position of the speaker.
Linguists call different ways of speaking language varieties, a term that
encompasses geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the
jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of
language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and
understood within a particular culture.
The difference between languages does not consist only in differences in
pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar, but also in different "cultures of
speaking". Some cultures for example have elaborate systems of "social deixis",
systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English,
social deixis is shown mostly though distinguishing between addressing some
people by first name and others by surname, but also in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy",
"Doctor" or "Your Honor", but in other languages such systems may be highly
complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. In
several languages of east Asia, for example Thai, Burmese and Javanese,
different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of
higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children
ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest. Other
languages may use different forms of address when speaking to speakers of the
opposite gender or in-law relatives and many languages have special ways of
speaking to infants and children. Among other groups, the culture of speaking
may entail not speaking to particular people, for example many indigenous
cultures of Australia have a taboo against talking to one's in-law relatives,
and in some cultures speech is not addressed directly to children. Some
languages also require different ways of speaking for different social classes
of speakers, and often such a system is based on gender differences, as in
Japanese and Koasati.
Cultural anthropology
Universal versus particular
Franz Boas established modern American anthropology as the study of the sum
total of human phenomena.
The modern anthropological concept of culture has its origins in the 19th
century with German anthropologist Adolf Bastian's theory of the "psychic unity
of mankind," which, influenced by Herder and von Humboldt, challenged the
identification of "culture" with the way of life of European elites, and British
anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor's attempt to define culture as inclusively
as possible. Tylor in 1874 described culture in the following way: "Culture or
civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities
and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Although Tylor was not
aiming to propose a general theory of culture (he explained his understanding of
culture in the course of a larger argument about the nature of religion),
American anthropologists have generally presented their various definitions of
culture as refinements of Tylor's. Franz Boas's student Alfred Kroeber (1876–1970)
identified culture with the "superorganic," that is, a domain with ordering
principles and laws that could not be explained by or reduced to biology.
In 1973, Gerald Weiss reviewed various definitions of culture and debates as to
their parsimony and power, and proposed as the most scientifically useful
definition that "culture" be defined "as our generic term for all human
nongenetic, or metabiological, phenomena" (italics in the original).
Ruth Benedict was instrumental in establishing the modern conception of distinct
cultures being patterned.
Franz Boas, founded modern American anthropology with the establishment of the
first graduate program in anthropology at Columbia University in 1896. At the
time the dominant model of culture was that of cultural evolution, which posited
that human societies progressed through stages of savagery to barbarism to
civilization; thus, societies that for example are based on horticulture and
Iroquois kinship terminology are less evolved than societies based on
agriculture and Eskimo kinship terminology. One of Boas's greatest
accomplishments was to demonstrate convincingly that this model is fundamentally
flawed, empirically, methodologically, and theoretically. Moreover, he felt that
our knowledge of different cultures was so incomplete, and often based on
unsystematic or unscientific research, that it was impossible to develop any
scientifically valid general model of human cultures. Instead, he established
the principle of cultural relativism and trained students to conduct rigorous
participant observation field research in different societies. Boas understood
the capacity for culture to involve symbolic thought and social learning, and
considered the evolution of a capacity for culture to coincide with the
evolution of other, biological, features defining genus ***. Nevertheless, he
argued that culture could not be reduced to biology or other expressions of
symbolic thought, such as language. Boas and his students understood culture
inclusively and resisted developing a general definition of culture. Indeed,
they resisted identifying "culture" as a thing, instead using culture as an
adjective rather than a noun. Boas argued that cultural "types" or "forms" are
always in a state of flux. His student Alfred Kroeber argued that the
"unlimited receptivity and assimilativeness of culture" made it practically
impossible to think of cultures as discrete things.
Wovoka, Paiute spiritual leader and creator of the Ghost Dance
Zuñi girl with jar, 1903
Edward Curtis photo of a Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch
Hopi Basket Weaver
Boas's students dominated cultural anthropology through World War II, and
continued to have great influence through the 1960s. They were especially
interested in two phenomena: the great variety of forms culture took around the
world, and the many ways individuals were shaped by and acted creatively
through their own cultures. This led his students to focus on the
history of cultural traits: how they spread from one society to another, and how
their meanings changed over time —and the life histories of members of
other societies. Others, such as Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and Margaret Mead (1901–1978),
produced monographs or comparative studies analyzing the forms of
creativity possible to individuals within specific cultural configurations. Essential
to their research was the concept of "context": culture
provided a context that made the behavior of individuals understandable; geography
and history provided a context for understanding the differences between
cultures. Thus, although Boasians were committed to the belief in the psychic unity
of humankind and the universality of culture, their emphasis on local context
and cultural diversity led them away from proposing cultural universals or universal
theories of culture.
There is a tension in cultural anthropology between the claim that culture is a
universal (the fact that all human societies have culture), and that it is also
particular (culture takes a tremendous variety of forms around the world). Since
Boas, two debates have dominated cultural anthropology. The first has to do with
ways of modeling particular cultures. Specifically, anthropologists have argued
as to whether "culture" can be thought of as a bounded and integrated thing, or
as a quality of a diverse collection of things, the numbers and meanings of
which are in constant flux. Boas's student Ruth Benedict suggested that in any
given society cultural traits may be more or less "integrated," that is,
constituting a pattern of action and thought that gives purpose to people's
lives, and provides them with a basis from which to evaluate new actions and
thoughts, although she implies that there are various degrees of integration;
indeed, she observes that some cultures fail to integrate. Boas, however,
argued that complete integration is rare and that a given culture only appears
to be integrated because of observer bias. For Boas, the appearance of such
patterns—a national culture, for example—was the effect of a particular point of
view.
The first debate was effectively suspended in 1934 when Ruth Benedict published
Patterns of Culture, which has continuously been in print. Although this book is
well known for popularizing the Boasian principle of cultural relativism, among
anthropologists it constituted both an important summary of the discoveries of
Boasians, and a decisive break from Boas's emphasis on the mobility of diverse
cultural traits. "Anthropological work has been overwhelmingly devoted to the
analysis of cultural traits," she wrote "rather than to the study of cultures as
articulated wholes." Influenced by Polish-British social anthropologist
Bronisław Malinowski, however, she argued that "The first essential, so it seems
today, is to study the living culture, to know its habits of thought and the
functions of its institutions" and that "the only way in which we can know the
significance of the selected detail of behavior is against the background of the
motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture."
Influenced by German historians Wilhelm Dilthey and Oswald Spengler, as well as
by gestalt psychology, she argued that "the whole determines its parts, not only
their relation but their very nature," and that "cultures, likewise, are
more than the sum of their traits." Just as each spoken language draws very
selectively from an extensive, but finite, set of sounds any human mouth (free
from defect) can make, she concluded that in each society people, over time and
through both conscious and unconscious processes, selected from an extensive but
finite set of cultural traits which then combine to form a unique and
distinctive pattern."
The significance of cultural behavior is not exhausted when we have clearly
understood that it is local and man-made and hugely variable. It tends to be
integrated. A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern
of thought and action. Within each culture there come into being characteristic
purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society. In obedience to their
purposes, each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in
proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogeneous items of behavior
take more and more congruous shape. Taken up by a well-integrated culture, the
most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its particular goals, often by
the most unlikely metamorphoses.
—
Although Benedict felt that virtually all cultures are patterned, she argued
that these patterns change over time as a consequence of human creativity, and
therefore different societies around the world had distinct characters. Patterns
of Culture contrasts Zuňi, Dobu and Kwakiutl cultures as a way of highlighting
different ways of being human. Benedict observed that many Westerners felt that
this view forced them to abandon their "dreams of permanence and ideality and
with the individual's illusions of autonomy" and that for many, this made
existence "empty." She argued however that once people accepted the results
of scientific research, people would "arrive then at a more realistic social
faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the
coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for
itself from the raw materials of existence."
This view of culture has had a tremendous impact outside of anthropology, and
dominated American anthropology until the Cold War, when anthropologists like
Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf rejected the validity and value of approaching "each
culture" as "a world in itself" and "relatively stable." They felt that,
too often, this approach ignored the impact of imperialism, colonialism, and the
world capitalist economy on the peoples Benedict and her followers studied (and
thus re-opened the debate on the relationship between the universal and the
particular, in the form of the relationship between the global and the local).
In the meantime, its emphasis on metamorphosing patterns influenced French
structuralism and made American anthropologists receptive to British structural-functionalism.
Turkish nomad clan with the nodes as marriages
Mexican village with the nodes as marriages
Iroqois Kinship Structure
The second debate has been over the ability to make universal claims about all
cultures. Although Boas argued that anthropologists had yet to collect enough
solid evidence from a diverse sample of societies to make any valid general or
universal claims about culture, by the 1940s some felt ready. Whereas Kroeber
and Benedict had argued that "culture"—which could refer to local, regional, or
trans-regional scales—was in some way "patterned" or "configured," some
anthropologists now felt that enough data had been collected to demonstrate that
it often took highly structured forms. The question these anthropologists
debated was, were these structures statistical artifacts, or where they
expressions of mental models? This debate emerged full-fledged in 1949, with the
publication of George Murdock's Social Structure, and Claude Lévi-Strauss's Les
Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté.
Opposing Boas and his students was Yale anthropologist George Murdock, who
compiled the Human Relations Area Files. These files code cultural variables
found in different societies, so that anthropologists can use statistical
methods to study correlations among different variables. The
ultimate aim of this project is to develop generalizations that apply to
increasingly larger numbers of individual cultures. Later, Murdock and Douglas R.
White developed the standard cross-cultural sample as a way to refine this
method.
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology brought
together ideas of Boas (especially Boas's belief in the mutability of cultural
forms, and Bastian's belief in the psychic unity of humankind) and French
sociologist's Émile Durkheim's focus on social structures (institutionalized
relationships among persons and groups of persons). Instead of making
generalizations that applied to large numbers of societies, Lévi-Strauss sought
to derive from concrete cases increasingly abstract models of human nature. His
method begins with the supposition that culture exists in two different forms:
the many distinct structures that could be inferred from observing members of
the same society interact (and of which members of a society are themselves
aware), and abstract structures developed by analyzing shared ways (such as
myths and rituals) members of a society represent their social life (and of
which members of a society are not only not consciously aware, but which
moreover typically stand in opposition to, or negate, the social structures of
which people are aware). He then sought to develop one universal mental
structure that could only be inferred through the systematic comparison of
particular social and cultural structures. He argued that just as there are laws
through which a finite and relatively small number of chemical elements could be
combined to create a seemingly infinite variety of things, there were a finite
and relatively small number of cultural elements which people combine to create
the great variety of cultures anthropologists observe. The systematic comparison
of societies would enable an anthropologist to develop this cultural "table of
elements," and once completed, this table of cultural elements would enable an
anthropologist to analyze specific cultures and achieve insights hidden to the
very people who produced and lived through these cultures.
Structuralism came to dominate French anthropology and, in the late 1960s and
1970s, came to have great influence on American and British anthropology.
Murdock's HRAF and Lévi-Strauss's structuralism provide two ambitious ways to
seek the universal in the particular, and both approaches continue to appeal to
different anthropologists. However, the differences between them reveal a
tension implicit in the heritage of Tylor and Bastian. Is culture to be found in
empirically observed behaviors that may form the basis of generalizations? Or
does it consist of universal mental processes, which must be inferred and
abstracted from observed behavior? This question has driven debates among
biological anthropologists and archeologists as well.
Structural functionalism
In structural functionalism, as a social theory, society is viewed as "a reality
of structural and cultural components or "facts" that can be investigated".
Thus in the 1940s the Boasian understanding of culture was challenged by that
new paradigm for anthropological and social science research. This paradigm
developed independently but in parallel in both the United Kingdom and in the
United States (In both cases it is sui generis: it has no direct relationship to
"structuralism" except that both French structuralism and Anglo-American
Structural-Functionalism were all influenced by Durkheim. It is also analogous,
but unrelated to, other forms of "functionalism"). Whereas the Boasians viewed
anthropology as that natural science dedicated to the study of humankind,
structural functionalists viewed anthropology as one social science among many,
dedicated to the study of one specific facet of humanity. This led structural-functionalists
to redefine and minimize the scope of "culture."
In the United Kingdom, the creation of structural functionalism was anticipated
by Raymond Firth's (1901–2002) We the Tikopia, published in 1936, and marked by
the publication of African Political Systems, edited by Meyer Fortes (1906–1983)
and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) in 1940. In these works these
anthropologists forwarded a synthesis of the ideas of their mentor, Bronisław
Malinowski (1884–1942), and his rival, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955). Both
Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown viewed anthropology—what they call "social
anthropology"—as that branch of sociology that studied so-called primitive
societies. According to Malinowski's theory of functionalism, all human beings
have certain biological needs, such as the need for food and shelter, and
humankind has the biological need to reproduce. Every society develops its own
institutions, which function to fulfill these needs. In order for these
institutions to function, individuals take on particular social roles that
regulate how they act and interact. Although members of any given society may
not understand the ultimate functions of their roles and institutions, an
ethnographer can develop a model of these functions through the careful
observation of social life. Radcliffe-Brown rejected Malinowski's notion of
function, and believed that a general theory of primitive social life could only
be built up through the careful comparison of different societies. Influenced by
the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who argued that
primitive and modern societies are distinguished by distinct social structures,
Radcliffe-Brown argued that anthropologists first had to map out the social
structure of any given society before comparing the structures of different
societies. Firth, Fortes, and Evans-Pritchard found it easy to combine
Malinowski's attention to social roles and institutions with Radcliffe-Brown's
concern with social structures. They distinguished between "social organization"
(observable social interactions) and "social structure" (rule-governed patterns
of social interaction), and shifted their attention from biological functions to
social functions. For example, how different institutions are functionally
integrated, and the extent to, and ways in, which institutions function to
promote social solidarity and stability. In short, instead of culture (understood
as all human non-genetic or extra-somatic phenomena) they made "sociality" (interactions
and relationships among persons and groups of people) their object of study. (Indeed,
Radcliffe-Brown once wrote "I should like to invoke a taboo on the word culture.")
Coincidentally, in 1946 sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) founded the
Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. Influenced by such
European sociologists as Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, Parsons developed a
theory of social action that was closer to British social anthropology than to
Boas's American anthropology, and which he also called "structural functionalism."
Parson's intention was to develop a total theory of social action (why people
act as they do), and to develop at Harvard an inter-disciplinary program that
would direct research according to this theory. His model explained human action
as the result of four systems:
the "behavioral system" of biological needs
the "personality system" of an individual's characteristics affecting their
functioning in the social world
the "social system" of patterns of units of social interaction, especially
social status and role
the "cultural system" of norms and values that regulate social action
symbolically
According to this theory, the second system was the proper object of study for
psychologists; the third system for sociologists, and the fourth system for
cultural anthropologists. Whereas the Boasians considered all of these
systems to be objects of study by anthropologists, and "personality" and "status
and role" to be as much a part of "culture" as "norms and values," Parsons
envisioned a much narrower role for anthropology and a much narrower definition
of culture.
Although Boasian cultural anthropologists were interested in norms and values,
among many other things, it was only with the rise of structural functionalism
that people came to identify "culture" with "norms and values." Many American
anthropologists rejected this view of culture (and by implication, anthropology).
In 1980, anthropologist Eric Wolf wrote,
As the social sciences transformed themselves into "behavioral" science,
explanations for behavior were no longer traced to culture: behavior was to be
understood in terms of psychological encounters, strategies of economic choice,
strivings for payoffs in games of power. Culture, once extended to all acts and
ideas employed in social life, was now relegated to the margins as "world view"
or "values".
—
Nevertheless, several of Talcott Parsons' students emerged as leading American
anthropologists. At the same time, many American anthropologists had a high
regard for the research produced by social anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s,
and found structural-functionalism to provide a very useful model for conducting
ethnographic research.
The combination of American cultural anthropology theory with British social
anthropology methods has led to some confusion between the concepts of "society"
and "culture." For most anthropologists, these are distinct concepts. Society
refers to a group of people; culture refers to a pan-human capacity and the
totality of non-genetic human phenomena. Societies are often clearly bounded;
cultural traits are often mobile, and cultural boundaries, such as they are, can
be typically porous, permeable, and plural. During the 1950s and 1960s
anthropologists often worked in places where social and cultural boundaries
coincided, thus obscuring the distinction. When disjunctures between these
boundaries become highly salient, for example during the period of European de-colonization
of Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, or during the post-Bretton Woods realignment
of globalization, however, the difference often becomes central to
anthropological debates.
Symbolic versus adaptive
American kinship
Huli Wigman from the Southern Highlands
In Hinduism, the cow is a symbol of wealth, strength, and selfless giving.
Cleveley's depiction of Captain Cook
Parsons' students Clifford Geertz and David M. Schneider, and Schneider's
student Roy Wagner, went on to important careers as cultural anthropologists and
developed a school within American cultural anthropology called "symbolic
anthropology," the study of the social construction and social effects of
symbols. Since symbolic anthropology easily complemented
social anthropologists' studies of social life and social structure, many
British structural-functionalists (who rejected or were uninterested in Boasian
cultural anthropology) accepted the Parsonian definition of "culture" and "cultural
anthropology." British anthropologist Victor Turner (who eventually left the
United Kingdom to teach in the United States) was an important bridge between
American and British symbolic anthropology.
Attention to symbols, the meaning of which depended almost entirely on their
historical and social context, appealed to many Boasians. Leslie White asked of
cultural things, "What sort of objects are they? Are they physical objects?
Mental objects? Both? Metaphors? Symbols? Reifications?" In Science of Culture (1949),
he concluded that they are objects "sui generis"; that is, of their own kind. In
trying to define that kind, he hit upon a previously unrealized aspect of
symbolization, which he called "the symbolate"—an object created by the act of
symbolization. He thus defined culture as "symbolates understood in an extra-somatic
context."
Nevertheless, by the 1930s White began turning away from the Boasian approach.
He wrote,
In order to live man, like all other species, must come to terms with the
external world.... Man employs his sense organs, nerves, glands, and muscles in
adjusting himself to the external world. But in addition to this he has another
means of adjustment and control.... This mechanism is culture.
—
Although this view echoes that of Malinowski, the key concept for White was not
"function" but "adaptation." Whereas the Boasians were interested in the history
of specific traits, White was interested in the cultural history of the human
species, which he felt should be studied from an evolutionary perspective. Thus,
the task of anthropology is to study "not only how culture evolves, but why as
well.... In the case of man ... the power to invent and to discover, the ability
to select and use the better of two tools or ways of doing something— these are
the factors of cultural evolution." Unlike 19th century evolutionists, who
were concerned with how civilized societies rose above primitive societies,
White was interested in documenting how, over time, humankind as a whole has
through cultural means discovered more and more ways for capturing and
harnessing energy from the environment, in the process transforming culture.
At the same time that White was developing his theory of cultural evolution,
Kroeber's student Julian Steward was developing his theory of cultural ecology.
In 1938 he published Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Socio-Political Groups in which he
argued that diverse societies—for example the indigenous Shoshone or White
farmers on the Great Plains—were not less or more evolved; rather, they had
adapted differently to different environments. Whereas Leslie White was
interested in culture understood holistically as a property of the human species,
Julian Steward was interested in culture as the property of distinct societies.
Like White he viewed culture as a means of adapting to the environment, but he
criticized Whites "unilineal" (one direction) theory of cultural evolution and
instead proposed a model of "multilineal" evolution in which (in the Boasian
tradition) each society has its own cultural history.
When Julian Steward left a teaching position at the University of Michigan to
work in Utah in 1930, Leslie White took his place; in 1946 Julian Steward was
made Chair of the Columbia University Anthropology Department. In the 1940s and
1950s their students, most notably Marvin Harris, Sidney Mintz, Robert Murphy,
Roy Rappaport, Marshall Sahlins, Elman Service, Andrew P. Vayda and Eric Wolf
dominated American anthropology. Most promoted materialist understandings of
culture in opposition to the symbolic approaches of Geertz and Schneider.
Harris, Rappaport, and Vayda were especially important for their contributions
to cultural materialism and ecological anthropology, both of which argued
that "culture" constituted an extra-somatic (or non-biological) means through
which human beings could adapt to life in drastically differing physical
environments.
The debate between symbolic and materialist approaches to culture dominated
American Anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam War and the
publication of Dell Hymes' Reinventing Anthropology, however, marked a growing
dissatisfaction with the then dominant approaches to culture. Hymes argued that
fundamental elements of the Boasian project such as holism and an interest in
diversity were still worth pursuing: "interest in other peoples and their ways
of life, and concern to explain them within a frame of reference that includes
ourselves." Moreover, he argued that cultural anthropologists are
singularly well-equipped to lead this study (with an indirect rebuke to
sociologists like Parsons who sought to subsume anthropology to their own
project):
In the practice there is a traditional place for openness to phenomena in ways
not predefined by theory or design – attentiveness to complex phenomena, to
phenomena of interest, perhaps aesthetic, for their own sake, to the sensory as
well as intellectual, aspects of the subject. These comparative and practical
perspectives, though not unique to formal anthropology, are specially husbanded
there, and might well be impaired, if the study of man were to be united under
the guidance of others who lose touch with experience in concern for methodology,
who forget the ends of social knowledge in elaborating its means, or who are
unwittingly or unconcernedly culture-bound.
—
It is these elements, Hymes argued, that justify a "general study of man," that
is, "anthropology".
During this time notable anthropologists such as Mintz, Murphy, Sahlins, and
Wolf eventually broke away, experimenting with structuralist and Marxist
approaches to culture, they continued to promote cultural anthropology against
structural functionalism.
Local versus global
Taiwanese aborigines dancing
Boas and Malinowski established ethnographic research as a highly localized
method for studying culture. Yet Boas emphasized that culture is dynamic, moving
from one group of people to another, and that specific cultural forms have to be
analyzed in a larger context. This has led anthropologists to explore different
ways of understanding the global dimensions of culture.
In the 1940s and 1950s, several key studies focused on how trade between
indigenous peoples and the Europeans who had conquered and colonized the
Americas influenced indigenous culture, either through change in the
organization of labor, or change in critical technologies. Bernard Mishkin
studied the effect of the introduction of horses on Kiowa political organization
and warfare. Oscar Lewis explored the influence of the fur trade on
Blackfoot culture (relying heavily on historical sources). Joseph Jablow
documented how Cheyenne social organization and subsistence strategy between
1795 and 1840 were determined by their position in trade networks linking Whites
and other Indians. Frank Secoy argued that Great Plains Indians' social
organization and military tactics changed as horses, introduced by the Spanish
in the south, diffused north, and guns, introduced by the British and French in
the east, diffused west.
The Tepozteco mountain dominates views from Tepoztlán.
In the 1950s Robert Redfield and students of Julian Steward pioneered "community
studies," namely, the study of distinct communities (whether identified by race,
ethnicity, or economic class) in Western or "Westernized" societies, especially
cities. They thus encountered the antagonisms 19th century critics described
using the terms "high culture" and "low culture." These 20th-century
anthropologists struggled to describe people who were politically and
economically inferior but not, they believed, culturally inferior. Oscar Lewis
proposed the concept of a "culture of poverty" to describe the cultural
mechanisms through which people adapted to a life of economic poverty. Other
anthropologists and sociologists began using the term "sub-culture" to describe
culturally distinct communities that were part of larger societies.
One important kind of subculture is that formed by an immigrant community. In
dealing with immigrant groups and their cultures, there are various approaches:
Leitkultur (core culture): A model developed in Germany by Bassam Tibi. The idea
is that minorities can have an identity of their own, but they should at least
support the core concepts of the culture on which the society is based.
Melting Pot: In the United States, the traditional view has been one of a
melting pot where all the immigrant cultures are mixed and amalgamated without
state intervention.
Monoculturalism: In some European states, culture is very closely linked to
nationalism, thus government policy is to assimilate immigrants, although recent
increases in migration have led many European states to experiment with forms of
multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism: A policy that immigrants and others should preserve their
cultures with the different cultures interacting peacefully within one nation.
The way nation states treat immigrant cultures rarely falls neatly into one or
another of the above approaches. The degree of difference with the host culture
(i.e., "foreignness"), the number of immigrants, attitudes of the resident
population, the type of government policies that are enacted, and the
effectiveness of those policies all make it difficult to generalize about the
effects. Similarly with other subcultures within a society, attitudes of the
mainstream population and communications between various cultural groups play a
major role in determining outcomes. The study of cultures within a society is
complex and research must take into account a myriad of variables.
Sociology
The sociology of culture concerns culture—usually understood as the ensemble of
symbolic codes used by a society —as it is manifested in society. For Georg
Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency
of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history".
Culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the
ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people's way of
life. Culture can be any of two types, non-material culture or material culture.
Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany, where sociologists such as
Alfred Weber used the term Kultursoziologie (cultural sociology). Cultural
sociology was then "reinvented" in the English-speaking world as a product of
the "cultural turn" of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern
approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may loosely be
regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory.
Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically
focusing on words, artifacts and symbols. "Culture" has since become an
important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely
scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a
result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field.
Thus there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are,
confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted
postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead look for a theoretical
backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.
"Cultural sociology" is one of the largest sections of the American Sociological
Association. The British establishment of cultural studies means the latter is
often taught as a loosely-distinct discipline in the UK.
Early researchers and development of cultural sociology
The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology, as shaped
by early theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and with the growing
discipline of anthropology where researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies
for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the
legacy of the early development of the field is still felt in the methods (much
of cultural sociological research is qualitative) in the theories (a variety of
critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities)
and substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular
culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in
the field.
Cultural studies
In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism,
such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, developed Cultural Studies. Following
nineteenth century Romantics, they identified "culture" with consumption goods
and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing).
Nevertheless, they understood patterns of consumption and leisure to be
determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class
relations and the organization of production. In the United States, "Cultural
Studies" focuses largely on the study of popular culture, that is, the social
meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. The term was coined by
Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart
Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director. Cultural studies in this sense, then,
can be viewed as a limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of
consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as "Western
Civilization," or "Globalism."
From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with his colleagues
Paul Willis, *** Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an
international intellectual movement. As the field developed it began to combine
political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory,
media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum
studies and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this
field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to
matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender.
Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life.
These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching
television, or eating out) in a given culture. This field studies the meanings
and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically,
culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason.
Watching television in order to view a public perspective on a historical event
should not be thought of as culture, unless referring to the medium of
television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however,
schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends in order to "fit
in" certainly qualifies, since there is no grounded reason for one's
participation in this practice. Recently, as capitalism has spread throughout
the world (a process called globalization), cultural studies has begun to
analyse local and global forms of resistance to Western hegemony.
In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not only includes written
language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of
cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture.
Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a
cultural studies researcher not only includes traditional high culture (the
culture of ruling social groups) and popular culture, but also everyday
meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of
cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies,
based on the discipline of comparative literature and cultural studies.
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat
different versions of cultural studies after the field's inception in the late
1970s. The British version of cultural studies was developed in the 1950s and
1960s mainly under the influence first of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and
Raymond Williams, and later Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included
overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as 'capitalist'
mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of
the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of
early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for
example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.
Whereas in the United States Lindlof & Taylor said, "Cultural studies [were]
grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition". The American version
of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the
subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass
culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the
liberatory aspects of fandom. The distinction between American
and British strands, however, has faded. Some researchers,
especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field.
This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but
especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The
main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of
meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as
residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who
control the means of production (the economic base) essentially control a
culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist
cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance
themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single,
dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist
approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect
the meaning of the product. This view is best exemplified by the book Doing
Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which
seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the
meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and
art historian Griselda *** contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints
of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is influential
voices in the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the
field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.