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Culture and Culture Change Contemporary Anthropology 110

Culture

 Most people rarely question their shared assumptions and traits until they encounter others who have quite different beliefs and customs.

 When people start to compare and contrast other cultures with their own to learn how they are different, they are beginning to think anthropologically.

 Culture can be understood as “the set of learned behaviors and ideas (including beliefs, attitudes, values, and ideals) that are characteristic of a particular society or other social group.” the set of learned behaviors and ideas (including beliefs, attitudes, values, and ideals) that are characteristic of a particular society or other social group

Culture Change

 Culture change is not unusual; throughout history, humans have replaced or altered customary behaviors and attitudes as their needs changed.

 Culture change may be gradual or rapid.

 Within the last 600 years or so, the pace of change has accelerated, largely because of contact between different societies.

Answers the questions:

 How should we do things?

 How do we make sense of the world?

 What is right and wrong?

 Culture produces a degree of consistency in behavior and thought among the people who live in a particular society.

Culture Is:

Culture Is:

 A cognitive map

 Categories, plans, and rules people use to interpret their world

 Norms (rules)

 Values – shared ideas about what is desirable and not desirable

 A set of interrelated processes (not a thing)

Characteristics of Culture:

 Shared

 Learned

 Adaptive

 Patterned (although imperfectly)

 Symbolic

 Cumulative

 Changing

Culture is:

 “A set of rules or standards that, when acted upon by the members of a society, produces human behavior that falls within the range of variation that the members find successful.”

 There are as many definitions and understandings of the word culture as there are theories to explain it.

Society

 A group of people who occupy a particular territory and speak a common language not generally understood by neighboring peoples.

 They may or may not correspond to countries or nations

The terms society and culture are not synonymous. Society refers to a

group of people; culture refers to the learned and shared behaviors, ideas,

characteristics of those people.

Subculture

 Commonly shared customs of a subgroup within a society

 Does not necessarily correspond to an ethnic group

 In every society studied by anthropologists—in the simplest as well as the most complex—groups do not all think and act the same.

Goth can be considered a subculture in the U.S.

Food Systems are Culture

 Humans eat because they must; but what and when and how they eat are learned and vary from culture to culture.

 Some things North Americans don’t eat that other cultures do: horse, dog, guinea pig, bugs,

Hindus, many of whom live in India, are generally vegetarian but are especially repelled by the idea of eating beef, for they view the

cow as sacred.

Enculturation

 Children learn about the traditions and behaviors of their society through a process called ENCULTURATION.

 Humans have by far the longest childhood of any animal, reflecting our great dependence on learned behavior.

 For some anthropologists, the concept of culture should not include the behaviors or the products of behavior.

 For Cognitive Anthropologists, culture refers to rules of behavior, and therefore, culture resides in people’s heads

Cognitive Anthropologists

Culture as Constraint

 French sociologist Émile Durkheim stressed that culture is something outside us that exerts a strong coercive power on us and constrains our actions and beliefs.

 Cultural constraints are of two basic types, direct and indirect.

 Although indirect forms of cultural constraint are less obvious than direct ones, they are usually no less effective

 breaching experiment is an experiment that seeks to examine people's reactions to violations of commonly accepted social rules or norms.

 An example is social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s experiments, such as the one in which a young, seemingly able- bodied researcher asked people to give up their bus seat.

Norms: Acceptable Behavior

Ethnocentrism

 The judgment of other cultures solely in terms of one’s own culture

 Our own customs and ideas may appear bizarre or barbaric to an observer from another society. We may think eating dogs is disgusting because of our cultural norms, but in India, where cows are sacred, our consumption of beef is considered disgusting.

 Anthropologists try to suspend judgment and try to understand how certain practice may function for a people

 Both ethnocentrism and its opposite, the glorification of other cultures, hinder effective anthropological study.

Cultural Relativism

 Cultural relativism is defined as the attitude that a society’s customs and ideas should be viewed within the context of that society’s problems and opportunities

 A Theory that proposes that each culture has value and that there is not a hierarchy of culture

 Culture can be explained in terms of itself

 The strong doctrine of cultural relativism includes being morally relativistic—suspending all judgment about behaviors the anthropologist believes to be wrong like slavery or torture.

 “A theory that asserts that there is no absolute truth, be it ethical, moral, or cultural, and that there is no meaningful way to judge different cultures because all judgments are ethnocentric” (Zechenter, 1997).

Ideals vs. Behaviors

 Anthropologists try to distinguish actual behavior from the ideas about how people in particular situations ought to feel and behave.

 Ideal cultural traits may differ from actual behavior because the ideal is based on the way society used to be.

 We have the cultural ideal of monogamy, but some people cheat on their partners. Also, some individuals openly practice polyamory, or having multiple sexual partners although it is not the ideal in U.S. culture.

Culture is Behavior

 Behavior: observed activities, or material products of behavior

 Culture: that which is not directly observed, but “abstract” values, beliefs, techniques that people hold and use to interpret experience and generate behavior related to everyday life, survival and reproduction

Discoveries and Inventions

 Discoveries and inventions, which may originate inside or outside a society, are ultimately the sources of all culture change. They can be ideas or objects.

 Innovation can be unintentional (an accumulation of small changes) or intentional.

The first wheel wasn’t used for transportation, but invented as a potter’s wheel and was believed to have existed

around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia. The first chariot appeared around 3200 BC in

Mesopotamia and was adopted by almost every civilization.

Cultural Diffusion

Diffusion: the borrowing of one society of a cultural trait belonging to another society as a result of contact between the two.

1) Direct contact (ex: use of paper)

2) Intermediate contact (ex: the alphabet)

3) Stimulus diffusion (knowledge of a trait of another culture stimulates the invention of a local equivalent) The Cherokee syllabic writing system

was created by Sequoya and is a classic example of stimulus diffusion

Forms of Culture Change

 Acculturation: The process of extensive borrowing of aspects of culture in the context of superordinate-subordinate relations between societies. It usually occurs as the result of external pressure.

 Globalization: the massive flow of goods, people, information, and capital across huge areas of the earth’s surface.

 Ethnogenesis: the creation of new cultures – usually occurs in the aftermath of violent events

Revolution

 Revolution is usually the violent replacement of a society’s rulers.

 Rebellions almost always occur in state societies where there is a distinct ruling elite

 As in many revolutions, those who were urging revolution were considered “radicals.” But, they can become cultural heroes.

Sudanese Protests of 2019. Here a young woman leads protesters in a chant calling for revolution in

Khartoum, Sudan. Non-violent protests have lead to the ousting of the ruler of 30 years, Omar al

Bashir. (photo by Lana H. Haroun)

Revolution Cont.

Conditions that may give rise to rebellion and revolution:

1. Loss of prestige of established authority

2. Threat to recent economic improvement

3. Indecisiveness of government

4. Loss of support of the intellectual class

The Zapatista Rebel Movement in Chiapas, Mexico is

comprised of primarily indigenous people and women participate in the leadership.

Globalization

 Globalization: the ongoing and substantial spread of goods, people, information, and capital across wide expanses of the earth’s surface.

 The process of globalization has resulted in the worldwide spread of cultural features, particularly in the domain of economics and international trade.

Features of Globalization

 Cultures have become more commercial, more urban, and more international.

 People on the move: employment has become more important, and kinship less important, as people travel to and work in other countries and return just periodically to their original homes.

 More cultural uniformity: people are increasingly sharing behaviors and beliefs with people in other cultures.

 Increase in life expectancy, literacy, and the expansion of the middle class.

effects of globalization.

Globalization

• Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology.

• Anthropologists care about this process has profound effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world.

 Maintain that because of free trade, local and national cultures are allowed to extend beyond geographic and political boundaries therefore increases the variety of products and cultures available in all nations.

Proponents of Globalizaiton

Critics of Globalization

 Point to the rapid loss of local languages, art, and music as direct consequence of globalization; local and national cultures have been ‘crowded out’ by western popular culture as depicted in music and movies.

 Globalization can lead to negative outcomes, such as increased wealth inequality, the loss of indigenous culture and land, and anthropogenic climate change.

Ethnogenesis: The Emergence of New Cultures

 Ethnogenesis is the creation of a new culture.

 It usually occurs in the aftermath of traumatic events, such as depopulation, relocation, enslavement, and genocide.

 The Maroons of Jamaica are descended from people stolen from Africa who fought and escaped from slavery and established free communities in the mountainous interior of Jamaica during the long era of slavery on the island. They share culture and became integrated with the Native Taino people.

Queen Nanny, a warrior leader of the Winward Maroons, is a national

hero in Jamaica.

Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp

 The Great Dismal Swamp Maroons were freed and escaped slaves who inhabited the marshlands of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina.

 Although conditions were harsh, research suggests that thousands lived there between about 1700 and the 1860s

A late 19th-century depiction of fugitive slaves in the Great

Dismal Swamp

No Monoculture

 Worldwide diffusion of a culture trait does not mean that it is incorporated in exactly the same way among societies, and the spread of certain products and activities through globalization does not mean that change happens in the same way everywhere.

 Although we may be more culturally intelligible to one another, this does not mean that there will be a single global culture in the future. Local practices are usually maintained and integrated with newer practices.