Applying culture as comfort to you

12

We Weren’t Born to Be Random: Culture as Comfort

Humans, having freed themselves from the limitations formerly imposed by biology, have burdened themselves with many more.

—Edward T. Hall (1990: 43)

Now that you are more familiar with where the concept of culture comes from—its different meanings and so on—it is time to jump right into the main purpose of this book: explaining how and why we learn culture and what knowing more about that means for our lives. To figure out how we learn culture, we have to think about what we are born with. Think about any newborns you have met in your life. What can they do without anyone’s help? Are they born complete blank slates, or do they arrive equipped with some innate abilities? Take a moment now to contemplate your responses to these important questions before going on to read the rest of this chapter.

As you may know, human infants are born with fewer survival skills than those of many other species. They cannot move around, feed, or clean themselves, and certainly can- not escape danger. Human babies are born completely dependent upon others for survival and lack even basic abilities such as being able to see distances, regulate their body tempera- ture, or move their arms and legs intentionally. Compared to newborns from other species who typically acquire these abilities in hours, days, or weeks after birth, human babies take months. As I explain later, human infants are actually born very immature in order for their heads to fit through the birth canal (Dunbar 2010). We do, however, arrive with a very powerful tool for survival: our capacity—indeed our drive—to learn culture—and this capacity is rooted in our biology. However, “culture is neither nature nor nurture, but some of both. It combines inheritance and learning in a way that cannot be parsed into genes or environment” (Richerson & Boyd 2005: 11). We have evolved powerful brains that enable us to speak language, interpret each others’ symbols, interact in patterned ways that distinguish our group from another’s, and all the other abilities involved with what we lump together as “culture.” Much, but certainly not all, of this development takes place in early childhood, from birth to about kindergarten. In short, we are not born with culture, but must acquire it quickly very early on in life. We learn so much cultural knowledge during these years, yet,

2 C h a p t e r

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as adults, we can remember little to nothing about these lessons. No wonder culture has a mysterious quality; no wonder it seems as if we inherit culture from our genes.

Children are born with little cultural knowledge but with an infinite ability to learn. I say “little” because it turns out that in the womb toward the end of their gestation, babies are already beginning to acquire cultural preferences. For instance, they hear people speak- ing and begin to process the sounds that will become their native language (Bader-Rusch 2003: 101). They can recognize the voice of their mother and others whom they have heard speaking regularly (Small 1998). Recently, I went to the hospital to meet one of my stu- dent’s babies who was born eight weeks premature. The tiny boy, named Felipe, was on a respirator to help him breathe and it was irritating him. But whenever he heard his father or mother’s voice he showed great excitement by kicking his spindly legs and thrashing his tiny arms, even though there was plenty of other noise and commotion in the intensive care area. So, little Felipe clearly had begun to learn things about his family while in the womb; but compared to the huge amount of cultural knowledge he would learn after birth, what he acquired in utero is miniscule. Felipe’s responses are a good reminder as well that people learn to relate to each other in ways specific to our group, not in ways specific to our spe- cies. Babies come into the world having to learn not only basic functions and survival tools, but also the ways of the people they grow up around. As children learn these ways, as they become socially integrated, they grow comfortable in the cultural environments they are exposed to and frequently fearful of unfamiliar environments. Think back for a moment about experiences you have had with small children. Have you ever seen them shrink from unknown people—what some psychologists refer to as “stranger anxiety” (Hahn-Holbrook, Holbrook, & Bering 2010). Most likely you have had this type of experience with a toddler. She will hug her parent’s leg when she meets you because she doesn’t know you. She, to jump ahead a moment, can’t interpret you yet and, thus, predict what you’ll do. She doesn’t

Mom, Who Is That?

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14 Chapter 2 • We Weren’t Born to Be Random: Culture as Comfort

know you as well as she knows her caregivers. Therefore, she cannot immediately read your body language and categorize you as friend or foe. So she clings to familiar people and shows anxiety with those who are unfamiliar. That’s the very crux of human life—and of my approach to culture.

Seeing Culture through a Different lenS

If we are not born with a cultural imprint, what are we born with that helps us to know how to behave in different circumstances? This is an important question, one for which there are no sure answers, but there are vigorous debates. What we know is that we are born with just a few genetically programmed behaviors that do not appear to be influenced much by experience; these are typically called reflexes and instincts. We have some uncon- ditional reflexes such as blinking when something comes toward our eye or recoiling when we touch something hot. And we have a few “chain reflexes” such as sucking and breathing, which we usually do without consciously controlling them. The term “instincts” is often used to signify more complex behaviors than reflexes; the word is a shortcut to avoid big controversies over what people (or other species) can and cannot change about ourselves, what we are programmed to do versus what results from the interaction between genetic predispositions and developmental experiences. Bird migration patterns and nest-building behaviors are good examples of bird “instincts.” Birds of the same species do not migrate to the exact location nor do they build exact replicas of each other’s nests, but the patterns are very similar. In everyday speech, it is common to hear people making references to people’s “instincts” and to doing things “instinctively,” but this is often misleading. For example, imagine a journalist interviewing a runner about her performance in a particular race and the runner responds, “I don’t think about it. It’s just instinctive.” What the runner means is that she does not have to consciously think about what she does. She has become an expert in the particular context of running, so most of what she does is subconscious. That is dif- ferent from an instinct because instincts are behavior patterns common to all members of a species. Arguably a good example of an instinct among humans is precisely our drive to find patterns, to find social order in the world around us. The beauty of this instinct, however, is that it does not produce identical behavior but, in contrast, allows us to adapt to widely ranging environmental and social conditions.

Instincts and reflexes are a smaller percentage of our genetic predispositions than for most species that depend on them overwhelmingly for survival; the vast majority of species on Earth have little to no childhood learning period but must be able to survive with minimal assistance from the moment they are born (van der Elst 2003). Human children, in contrast, spend many years learning how to live as those around them. Why?

Humans have evolved to depend less on the genetically programmed, highly inflex- ible behaviors called instincts and depend more on the plastic, flexible, learned behaviors we have come to call culture. That does not mean genes play no role in our lives; genes are critical in all species’ existence. We just have evolved genetically to depend much more than other species upon learning and this makes us more flexible. Species whose young learn how to behave after birth are better able to survive changing environments; species ruled by pro- grammed, innate behaviors are at a greater risk of extinction when their life circumstances change. At some point in our evolutionary past, it must have been better for our survival to trade the predictability and constancy of instincts and reflexes for culture. Biological anthropologists and other scientists debate this point, but the current wisdom is that around 300,000 years ago, dramatic and frequent fluctuations in the climate of certain areas of Africa

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Chapter 2 • We Weren’t Born to Be Random: Culture as Comfort 15

were probably the instigator (Boyd & Richardson 2005). Most of our human ancestors lived there, and they either adapted to these rapid changes through natural selection or died out. At some point around this time, a group or perhaps groups of our ancestors evolved in a slightly different direction due to the pressures on their survival from all these changes in climate. They became smarter and more adaptable than humans before them; they were better at culture than the others. These ancestors—our own species of Homo sapiens—then began leaving Africa, adapting to climates all around the world and out-competing other humans they encountered along the way. There are important lessons from this research on our evolution for our understanding of culture.

So what is culture? A solid, commonsense definition for culture is “socially learned and transmitted information” (Brown 2008: 5). While this definition is broad enough to include certain activities that have been observed among non-human species (such as chim- panzees, elephants, porpoises and even whales), in this book I consider only culture among people. From the definition, then, culture is about interpersonal relations. It’s about learn- ing how to conduct ourselves in ways that others can interpret and understand. However, I emphasize that we don’t really think consciously about doing culture; rather, we feel culture. When we are socially integrated to the point where we both understand others and they understand us (not just in terms of spoken language but also our gestures, expressions, etc.), we “know” this by feeling comfortable. Thus, while culture is about knowing particular ways of thinking and doing; we don’t think about what we do culturally on a day-in-and-day- out basis. We just do what is normal for us and when we do, we feel comfortable. A strange thing about culture, however, is that we rarely are aware of feeling comfortable when we’re in our cultural comfort zones; rather, we are much more likely to feel our cultural discom- forts. What’s a cultural discomfort? You might know what I mean through the expression “feeling like a fish out of water.” When was a time in your life that you felt that you did not understand others around you? Typically this happens when we go into an unfamiliar social context. In a moment you will do a Planned Pause about such an experience and what it was like for you. What did you feel? Explain what happened, how you felt strange, and then reflect for a moment on what probably caused you to feel cultural discomfort.

When we’re outside our cultural comfort zones, we typically feel uneasy, awkward, stressed, anxious, and sometimes afraid. When that happens, I suggest checking in with your “cultural discomforts.” Feel anxious in a particular setting? You are probably moving into a cultural space you’re either not familiar with or one where you aren’t culturally fluent. You don’t know exactly how to behave, so you probably watch others around you quite closely. Maybe you become a “fly on the wall,” observing others but only as you wait for a good opportunity to fly away. When we feel cultural discomforts we often feel foolish or even stupid. We don’t know how to act like the people around us. Why are we/they different? Next time you experience a cultural discomfort, focus first on how you feel and what it is specifically that you don’t know that makes you feel uneasy. Are people speaking a language you do not understand, and thus you fear they might be making comments or even jokes about you? Or are they speaking the same language as you but using some jargon you do not know? Maybe you understand what they say but do not recognize things they are doing, such as their gestures, the way they are dressed, or their jokes? When you’ve learned some of the differences between what you do and what they do, focus in on someone you can observe who seems completely at ease in that environment. This person is probably culturally fluent in that context (while you are not). Study that person and observe how he or she acts with ease. You’ll learn the most about this “culture” by observing people who navigate it easily and by figuring out why you don’t.

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Now, on the other hand, whenever you feel confident and at ease, you are probably in the center of one of the cultural spaces of your life where you have a lot of experience. You’re in a cultural comfort zone. You just don’t think about it that much because you are comfortable. You only take notice when you feel uncomfortable, and everyone else does too. That’s the way culture is; we do not pay attention to that which for us is normal; we pay most attention to that which is different. This is why we all become ethnocentrists. Yes, we all learn to see the world through the particular lenses of our society. We don’t typically see our behaviors and habits as just as strange as those of others; rather, we see what we do as normal and what others do as different or, perhaps, strange or even wrong. We just do not tend to think about this consciously. That is why being around small children is so refreshing; they have yet to learn the higher-order social filtering that older children and adults apply. They just call it like they see it. A case in point is my 5-year-old niece, Katie. We were playing with her bilingual (Spanish-English) doll, Dora, recently. When its talk button is pushed, the doll alternates between languages. Katie only knows English. When the doll spoke in Spanish

P l a n n e D Pa u S e 2 - 1

C h e C k i n g i n w i t h M y C u l t u r a l D i s C o M f o r t s

Instructions: Identify an experience in your life during which you felt awkward because you did not know the culture of the people around you. You felt like a fish out of water. Write a paragraph describing the experience and then a second paragraph analyzing it. For the analysis explain why you felt strange. Also explain what happened. Did you stay and adapt or leave? Did the other people try to help you integrate (feel comfortable) in that environment? Why or why not?

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once, I repeated the words in Spanish and then said to Katie, “Dora speaks Spanish.” Katie didn’t miss a beat and responded, “Yeah, but she speaks regular [i.e., normal] like us too.” Katie has a profoundly strong sense of her cultural patterns—and they are not just any pat- terns, they are what’s normal and comfortable in her life. Her mind is perfectly capable of continuing to learn new languages and a whole host of cultural knowledge, but she’s already happily ensconced in her cultural comfort zones. In short, become more aware of what you take for normal because it is much more likely to be particular to you and others like you than to be normal for our entire species.

So now reflect back on the experience you wrote about a few moments ago. You wrote about feeling like a fish out of water, like you were outside your cultural comfort zone. Would you like to return to that same feeling? My experience with most people, myself included, is that we avoid feeling culturally uncomfortable. We say we like new experiences and meeting new people, but we rarely go outside our cultural comfort zones without being pushed to do so. Why? Because when we’re outside our sphere of compe- tence we feel awkward, clumsy, even dumb. People, especially adults, don’t like to feel these feelings. We are supposed to be experts, not newbies. So what do we do? We avoid cultural discomforts. There are, of course, some individuals, and even some classes of people (such as cultural anthropologists like myself who spend large quantities of time studying people whose comfort zones are way different from ours), who don’t mind cultural discomforts and perhaps even enjoy them. That is fine once you have already mastered a set of culturally appropriate knowledge and behaviors that allow you to survive and feel confident in your context. However, that’s not the situation of newborn babies.

Imagine cultural discomfort in the extreme. An easy way to comprehend this feeling is to picture yourself suddenly being dropped off on a completely different planet, with creatures that communicate with each other and seem to understand and obey each other, but in ways that are incomprehensible to you. How would you feel? Probably scared out of your wits! Your mind would be racing: What will these creatures do to me? Will I survive? You are at their complete mercy and have no way of negotiating with them. You cannot read their gestures or their facial expressions to tell if they are serious, joking, or something else altogether. Of course as an adult being dropped off into a new context, you would be aware of the differences because you have known a world where you fit in. You could, for example, try to figure out these creatures’ way of life. You could see if some of them are in charge, interpret how they treat others, and then guess what they might do with you. You could look and see if they have any behaviors, such as a smile (assuming they have faces), that appear to have equivalents in human society and then guess how to behave in ways that will—hopefully—spare your life.

Seeing Culture through an infant’S eyeS

Now transport your thoughts to newborn babies. When a baby is born he arrives into an unknown world and is at the complete mercy…of strangers! He has no knowledge of another culture for comparison and few genetically programmed skills to help him survive. Survival is about learning to behave according to the ways of his caregivers. He has absolutely no other choice. Luckily, babies are born to interact (Bloom 2010; Fogel 1993; Giddens 1979; Gopnik 2009; LeVine & Norman 2001; Raeff & Benson 2003; Todorove et al. 2011; Tomasello 1999); some even go so far as to characterize people as “interaction engines” (Levinson 2006). That makes sense since we are, after all, a social species. Humans take social interaction to a new

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18 Chapter 2 • We Weren’t Born to Be Random: Culture as Comfort

level, however. We must be hypersocial in order to learn the vast amount of knowl- edge necessary to operate in the many different, and changing, cultural environ- ments that humans occupy.

If you think about it, you’ll likely agree that babies have an enormously complex task that they accomplish in only months—figuring out the social system around them. They have to interpret facial expressions, body language (such as how far apart people should be physically when speaking and how to sit “properly”), and spoken language; they need to learn all the routines of daily life and, arguably most important, whom to trust and whom not to trust. Moreover, each new place and interaction (a store, the doctor’s office, a visit to relatives, etc.) adds more complex- ity to what babies must learn. What are the cultural rules governing this space? Are they the same as those at home or are they different? Do the people behave similarly to or differently from people I already know? Do they seem nice or should I fear them?

At the same time they are collecting cultural experiences, babies must also develop their ability to control their muscles, to direct their hand–eye coordination, and a host of other physiological tasks. No wonder brain activity consumes 60 percent of babies’ energy and they sleep through most of their early weeks and months. They need time to process and store all their learning in their brains (Meltzoff et al. 2009). Studies show that by age 2, children are only on about the same level as 2-year-old chimpanzees and other apes in their understanding of their spatial and physical worlds, but they are much further ahead in social skills such as learning, communicating, and reading others’ intentions (Dunbar 2008; James 2008; Tomasello 2008). Some even argue that the social skills needed to live in groups (e.g., knowing about each other, realizing that others think differently, and even being able to tell stories that communicate broader social lessons) provided evolutionary forces that expanded the brain—particularly the frontal lobes of the neocortex, the outermost layer of the brain. As we acquire these social skills, we learn to relate, as we commonly hear people say, “instinctively,” with others; that is, behaving without thinking consciously about how to behave—as in the case of the runner discussed earlier. But this is not the realm of true instincts; our language just confuses us. Rather, when we do not have to think consciously about how to act, we are in our cultural comfort zones. Young children are least shy around those with whom they feel comfortable. They are most shy when they interact with new people, whose behavior they are not yet able to understand and therefore predict.

As we interact, we practice our social skills and become more expert and more com- fortable. The great irony of a cultural species, however, is that as we become more com- fortable in particular cultural contexts and traits, we lose some of our infinite birthright flexibility. This is the most fundamental and profound of human dilemmas:

Human Interaction Engines: Toddlers.

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Humans’ Fundamental Cultural Dilemma: Growing up human requires us to arrive into the world completely ready to learn any cultural practices, yet, over the course of our lives, we learn to navigate specific cultural spaces. As we learn to navigate these spaces, we grow comfortable in them and with the people who share them with us. Simultaneously and unintentionally, we build and retain borders around our cultural comfort zones that we rarely cross. Other people do the same so that we end up with differences that are real, that we not only act upon but feel, but that we have also created. That is, these differences are not set in stone—but they feel to us as if they were. In short, we are born without cultural blinders but we quickly and inevitably acquire them. We must travel from infinite cultural possibilities into narrower cultural realities. We unintentionally trade flexibility for predictability and uncertainty for comfort.

Culture, then, is about comfort.

When using this phrase, I specifically do not want to leave you with the impression that becoming culturally comfortable is the same as being right or moral. I am not talking about right and wrong; rather, I’m referring to how we become comfortable with particu- lar practices and beliefs because we are exposed to them early in life. People can and do become comfortable behaving and thinking in ways that others may find objectionable; simple examples include preferential treatment of boys over girls or physical punishment of children who misbehave. These occur in many societies and are viewed as “normal” (i.e., culturally comfortable) and also as morally appropriate whereas other societies can and do find them objectionable on cultural and/or moral grounds. This book is not about morality; I mention morality here only because as I explain how we become culturally comfortable I know some readers might think this justifies any culturally comforting practices. I am a cultural relativist in that I argue that people’s practices should be viewed and understood within their cultural context before they are judged; but I am not an extreme relativist who finds no practices objectionable.

As creatures of comfort, children as well as adults shy away from uncomfortable situ- ations. Young children are more flexible because their cultural comforts are still not firmly established and, quite literally, etched into their brains. Adults are still flexible but, as the saying goes, it is harder to get old dogs to learn new tricks. There are physiological as well as psychological and emotional reasons for this, as you’ll see shortly. In the next section, you will see how this inevitable yet unintentional trade-off—cultural flexibility for cultural order—takes place.

from newborn noviCe to traineD toDDler: aCquiring Cultural Comfort

Over a century ago, psychologist William James wrote that babies leave the womb only to be thrust violently into “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” As you will see, he was both right and wrong. What he meant was that newborns abandon the dark, tight, sensory-limiting space of the womb for the bright, open, and sensory-stimulating space of society. We swaddle them to recreate the physical comforts of the womb and we surround them with dependable caregivers whose repeated actions begin the process of culturally ordering this vast social space. Children arrive into this social space prepared in several fundamental ways to become culturally competent. As discussed earlier, children are born with some predispositions or “readinesses” to interact with others, to look for and infer

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patterns from what they observe so they become selective in what they pay attention to, and to store these patterns in their brains (Bjorklund 2000; Enfield & Levinson 2006; Haith & Benson 1998; LeVine & Norman 2001; Martin, Ruble, & Szkrybalo 2002; Rogoff 2003; Saffran et al. 1996). From my perspective, the key piece of informa- tion here is that social life is patterned, not random, so babies are born to detect and reproduce these patterns. Humans’ behavior is patterned and is thus highly intelligible and predictable, but we have to learn these pat- terns. (Hence, the world is not exactly the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that Wil- liam James portrayed.)

How do infants become experts so quickly? How do they go from newborn neophytes to elementary school experts? This is a very complex process or set of pro- cesses that researchers are only beginning to understand. The publications on this fascinating topic are growing astronomi- cally within academic circles. The informa- tion being produced is too vast, and is often

presented in too-technical language, to cover here. Therefore, I do not go into great detail about the literature in this area, for it would take volumes. Rather, what I will do is refer- ence the findings that are widely accepted and, to my mind, most important without using technical terms or academic language. After boiling down a lot of material I have come up with five critical puzzle pieces to understanding how and why we learn culture. Before I list them and then discuss them in some depth, I openly add in a caveat to say I do not research babies myself and thus am synthesizing others’ research. Moreover, I interpret their work through an anthropological lens most scholars studying how we learn culture (i.e., encul- turation) do not use. Therefore, the way I understand the research and fit together the pieces of this interesting puzzle reflects my own theorizing. Scholars formulate theories as we try to understand phenomena. Given the new and dynamic nature of research and information in the areas I synthesize, what I argue may be even more speculative than usual, although it is informed speculation. Speculation, as neuroscientist Ramachandran (2011: xvii) argues, “is nothing to be ashamed of: every virgin area of scientific inquiry must first be explored in this way. . . . We need to roll out our best hypotheses, hunches, and hare-brained, half-baked intentions, and then rack our brains for ways to test them.” With a few notable exceptions such as (Domínguez et al. 2009; Domínguez et al. 2010; Lancy 2010; Lende & Downey 2011; LeVine & New 2008), anthropology has not been at the forefront of understanding enculturation since the 1970s. I believe anthropology’s broad understanding of the human condition can add more to this inquiry.

In this book my goal is to relate how people learn in general to the specifics of learning culture. Researchers address aspects of learning culture such as learning gender, race, and nationality, but what I am aiming for is a more basic, more general model of how we learn

Babies Learn By Observing Others.

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what we call culture. Here is my argument in five pieces that I fit into the overall puzzle I’ve been studying about how people learn culture. At this point in the book I make my case outright but as I go forward I explain each in greater depth. Some of my assertions parallel those of other scholars and some, especially in the area of theory of mind, vary from oth- ers’ ideas. In sum, the following is how I’ve synthesized and interpreted a wide variety of scholarship and translated it into language that I hope is accessible to you:

1. Babies are biologically predisposed to interact with others and also to look for those interactions to be patterned (Gopnik 2009; Martin et al. 2002; Rogoff 2003; Todorov et al. 2011). That is, people evolved as a social species in which interaction varies greatly from group to group, so we are born to interact but have to learn how to interact in the ways particular to those around us.

2. Babies’ social interactions with caregivers are replicated into everyday routines that organize their social world into patterns (so, indeed, babies find what they are looking for) and these are stored in the brain as nerve connections (e.g., Bruner et al. 1966; Eliot 1999; Gopnik 2009; Kitayama & Uskul 2011).

3. Patterned interactions with others, coupled with what have come to be called “mirror neurons” in our brains, generate babies’ ability to understand that others have differ- ent perspectives. Without this ability, we could not interpret others’ behaviors and empathize with them (what psychologists and neuroscientists frequently term “theory of mind”) (Brooks 2011; Domínguez et al. 2009; Ramachandran 2011; Rizzolatti et al. 1996; Tomasello 1999). To me, however, being able to interpret and empathize with others serves a more critical function—that of being able to predict others and thus trust them. When we trust people, we can, albeit unconsciously, predict how they will behave and when we share culture we also are able to subconsciously predict their behavior.

4. When we can predict others, this reduces the brain’s cognitive load as a baby or an adult does not have to calculate every observation anew (e.g., “Is this new person going to be nice to me or a danger to me?”), which would take up a lot of the brain’s energy and effort (Donald 1991; Fiske & Taylor 2008).

5. Trust is felt emotionally as comfort. This last piece is the thesis of this book and reflects my particular perspective and contribution to the overall project of understanding what culture is and how we learn it. Researchers are discovering that we really do feel comfort because under certain conditions our brains release chemicals called neuro- transmitters (e.g., oxytocin and vasopressin) that create in us the sensation of comfort. Trust is not just any emotional comfort, however. It is emotional comfort that reflects cultural patterns.

ConStruCting the Puzzle of how babieS learn Culture

Let’s look at these different puzzle pieces and how they fit together in greater depth. The first essential piece to fit into the puzzle is the understanding that humans are

predisposed to interact (Boyd & Richerson 2006; Gopnik 2009; Hrdy 2009). This is our biological inheritance and the foundation upon which we build cultural interactions. Over- whelmingly, babies are born to interact socially, although we do not all interact to the same degree. For example, it is commonly recognized now that the social abilities of people with autism are compromised in complex and varying ways (Ramachandran 2011; Trevarthen

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et al. 1998). Moreover, with some people we interact intensely and with others we inter- act more sporadically. Intensive interaction between babies and their primary caregivers is commonly referred to as “attachment” (Bowlby 1988; Harwood, Miller, & Irizarry 1995; Konner 2004; LeVine & New 2008). The idea is that babies become so close emotionally to some people with whom they interact that this is similar to being physically attached. Monkeys and apes are born able to attach to their mothers physically by clinging to their bodies (Small 1998). They spend their infancy physically as well as emotionally attached. Human babies cannot cling physically to their mothers as strongly, but they still attach psy- chologically and emotionally. Physical touch as well as social interaction are key to human attachment. Since the 1960s when John Bowlby first introduced the concept of attachment, psychologists have come to argue that human babies must bond with at least one other person in order to develop normally. Among anthropologists who study baby–caregiver relations cross-culturally, the universality of attachment is debated, particularly the assump- tion that babies attach overwhelmingly to their mothers (Lancy 2010; LeVine & Norman 2008; Stryker 2010). In many if not most societies, babies are cared for by many people in the course of a day (Weisner and Gallimore 1977). Thus, attachments are likely to be multiple. To my mind, the important issue is not how many people a baby interacts with or whether this constitutes attachment. Rather, the key is that babies learn through intense interactivity with others how to interpret and predict those people’s behavior, and this ability to predict them—instead of having to interpret each person anew every time the baby comes into con- tact with that person—produces psychological and emotional comfort—trust. Newborns are completely dependent upon others for their survival, but it is by internalizing daily routines with others that they come to feel comfort rather than fear. What kinds of routines help produce cultural comforts?

The second piece to the puzzle of learning culture is how repeated activities in eve- ryday life—routines or, in anthropological terms, rituals—between babies and caregivers create culturally specific social contexts of predictability. The first routines are very small- scale social interactions between baby and interactors—the rituals of feeding, bathing, dressing and changing, being picked up and carried, being burped and rocked to sleep, and so on. Although these activities are common to most societies, how they take place (and with what materials) varies greatly, thereby producing culturally specific rituals. For example, in her ethnography on raising babies among the Beng people of the Ivory Coast in West Africa, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb (2004: 107–112) details the elaborate bath- ing and dressing rituals mothers go through with their infants every day. Each morning before dawn and before they breastfeed their babies, mothers heat water and prepare an enema to train the babies to defecate at this time. Then the infants are bathed, followed by each mother carefully cleaning and polishing her baby’s jewelry items (bracelets, necklaces, anklets, etc.). Next, she applies lotion to sooth the baby’s skin and then uses mixtures of medicinal leaves to paint protective designs on the baby’s head and body. I did not go to such lengths when my daughter, Sophie, was an infant but I did bathe, dress, and feed her in similar ways most of the time.

These routines, these sequences that are repeated similarly time and again, create in the infant what some researchers refer to as “participatory cognition” (Fogel 1993: 122–129). This means that we learn and remember through participating directly in activities with others. Even very young infants perceive these sequences as patterned. The patterned interactions of life’s small routines add up to knowledge, predictability, and comfort—culture. For example, a baby kicks his feet and, just by luck, they hit a dangling mobile hanging overhead. The next time he sees the mobile he “knows” to kick it again. Babies learn most, however, when they

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Chapter 2 • We Weren’t Born to Be Random: Culture as Comfort 23

interact with other people. Imagine a very young infant lying on her back and her mother grasping her hands to pull her up into a sitting or standing position. The first time this hap- pens, the baby’s head flops backward because she doesn’t expect this to happen to her; she struggles to pull her heavy head up so that it catches up to her body. The next time, however, the baby recognizes the interaction, reacts to the soft tug on her arms, and pulls on her mother’s hands in order to assist movement and lift her head up. This is sometimes referred to as “co-regulation,” a term that researcher Alan Fogel (1993) uses to convey how we interact through mutually adjusting to each other. If the baby struggles to pull up, her mother either waits for her to finish her co-regulation or gives her some support behind her head or back. This microsocial interaction is about learning to mutually adjust to each other; these adjust- ments take some effort each time the activity is repeated until the baby knows exactly what to do. Ah, mini cultural competence! Moreover, these behaviors become so routine that neither the baby nor the mother has to think about them. Instead, they are carved into the circuitry of their brains. Multiply this process by thousands of different repeated activities and you get a sense of how we learn culture.

Hopefully you will be aware of an unusual yet commonsensical approach to learn- ing communicated in the past few paragraphs. I am by far not the first person to point out that we humans learn primarily through interactions with others, rather than just listening to others and copying what they say or do. We learn primarily through participation—a realization made quite some time ago by the famous Russian psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky, not through having someone lecture to us. Particularly for those readers who either sit in lecture halls a lot or teach students, this finding will make total common sense and not be earth-shattering. What I believe is radical, however, is our newfound ability to understand how our interactions build our brain circuitry and how this constructs what we commonly call culture. This is the arena of neuroscience, particularly social neuroscience (Todorov et al. 2011). So, learning is not just social; it is also environmental, physiological, psychological, and emotional. As we interact with our physical and social environments, these repeated activities become wired into our brains over time (Kitayama & Uskul 2011). (Some psy- chologists refer to certain learned information as “procedural memory” in that we package together a set of information about how to do something and then just access that procedure when we need to.) Once the circuits are built strongly, we typically go on automatic, losing direct awareness of these activities. We aren’t born with much brain wiring, but we need to build nerve connections to survive in our social surroundings. As we learn routines we feel them as comfort and trust; we can predict what people will do based on past experiences. While this is especially the case with those we know, we also subconsciously expect that other people will behave similarly. This is what figuring out the cultural patterns of our social world is all about—making subconscious inferences from our direct experiences to everyone and everything else. This mechanism begins to explain how cultural competence quickly becomes cultural ruts that are hard to break out of—a point I will return to soon.

It is through mutually choreographing the small routines of early life, these most intimate of cultural spaces occupied by baby and closest caregivers, that familiarity grows. These are the routines that young children love. Have you ever noticed how toddlers enjoy doing the same activity over and over and over again without getting bored? Have you ever wondered why they never seem to tire of watching the same movie or reading the same book or hearing you repeat the same story? You get bored to tears but the kids love that story! And they never tire of singing the same songs or playing the same games. Whenever I’m around preschoolers I teach them a game involving a little song I sing while tickling their back. Kids love this game and invariably ask me to repeat it over and over again. Recently, I played with

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a 3-year-old and she loved it so much that she occupied me for nearly an hour; each time I finished she’d wink and say, “Again!” When videos and DVDs came along, children started to watch movies and TV shows over and over at home. I recall Sophie was 2 years old when the movie The Lion King came out. There was great public concern that the death of the baby lion’s father would be scary for young children, so many parents, including myself, watched the video with our children the first time and maybe several times after that. But as the kids watched for the fifth and then the tenth and then the one hundredth time, we no longer worried because the scene was no longer new. The death now was not shocking but predictable, normalized through repetition. Why would this be important? For a small child whose daily life will involve novel and thus potentially scary events, something that is repeated over and over provides just the right opportunity to figure it out. Most importantly, it becomes predictable. In the case of The Lion King, the kids learned what would happen and it was no longer scary to them. The novelty had become routine.

The third piece of the puzzle about learning culture, then, is that familiar routines teach children how to interpret others and, in so doing, help the children to predict sub- consciously what others will do. A classic type of routine is imitation or mimicry. Young children, as you may well know from personal experience, are experts at copying what they see others do. Some time ago, psychologist Andrew Meltzoff found that even minutes after birth babies can imitate what they see, such as someone sticking out his tongue. This type of data is strongly suggestive that the ability to mimic is innate. But that is not the whole story by any means. Starting as early as nine months, children are able to actually understand that other people think differently than they do. As mentioned earlier, this ability is often referred to by scholars studying this really dynamic field as theory of mind because children learn other people’s models of the way the world is, other people’s ways of thinking and doing, and then model themselves after these others’ behaviors. This, of course, is critical to cross-cultural learning but young children are primarily learning that other people around them do not think or act exactly the same as they do. This ability to see others as different

Babies Love to Imitate.

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from us is the foundation for self-awareness (Goleman 2006; Ramachandran 2011). How do you know who you are unless you know who you are not? We are both similar and yet different. Similarity is critical to emotional connections with others. This seems to be the rationale behind the metaphor of the mirror used with mirror neurons. As we look at others particular neurons in our brains, the mirror neurons, fire as if we, ourselves, were doing what they are doing (or thinking). In the ongoing and fascinating research on mirror neurons in the past decade and a half or so, one key finding is that our brain’s mirror neu- rons will fire when we watch someone else doing something, as if we were doing it ourselves (Pascual-Leone et al. 2005). We “feel” others’ pain emotionally even if we do not physically. We, thus, can relate more appropriately to others. When the mirror neuron circuits in the parts of the brain where social learning is most active malfunction, however, the result is various forms of autism (Ramachandran 2011: 141).

Researchers associate mirror neurons with humans’ enhanced ability to mimic and understand what others do (model their behavior and even recognize their intentions) (e.g., Domínguez et al. 2009). Other species have mirror neurons so these neurons are not unique to our species—in fact, they were first identified among macaque monkeys (since doing experiments on human brains is highly regulated), but our species has not only more such neurons but also connects them into mirror neuron circuits that involve more of our brain areas than other species. In short, we are definitely superior in these abilities and research seems to document that we have abilities other species do not. And there are infinite applica- tions of these abilities, particularly our ability to understand others’ intentions—important to everything from engaging in warfare to formulating chess strategies to recognizing when a child is going to do something dangerous.

The way I understand the importance of mirror neurons, however, is a bit differ- ent than that of neuroscientists and other researchers. For me, the key is not empathy nor ability to imitate—although these are very important—but predictability. When we understand others and model ourselves after them, we have a formula for shared cultural comforts. But what is missing is the fact that we humans live in three time dimensions: past, present and future. Although our interest in the future varies a lot among peoples, we are all aware of the future and to greater and lesser degrees obsess over it. Why? We know it exists but we cannot control it—at least not fully. What we cannot control yet which influences us can cause us a great deal of stress and this is not helpful to our brains, particularly, I argue, the brains of young children, which are absorbed in very complex learning processes. So, for me, culture provides a great deal of predictability. When people act and think in predictable ways to those around us, our brains do not have to spend a lot of energy interpreting them. Rather, we “know” what they are doing and likely to do. In this way predictability is a cornerstone of trust, and thus of culture as comfort. Given that most of what people do is patterned, the key is to identify these patterns and then to store them in our brains as cultural knowledge.

Cultural learning, then, depends on turning “new” into “known.” That which is known is stored in memory circuits as predictable. For example, once you observe a tossed ball fall to the ground, the next time you expect it to behave the same way. It is thus predict- able. Luckily, children are extremely adept at this type of learning and they need to be good at turning new into known. They pay attention most to what is new or novel, at least until it becomes predictable. Since we are not born with many biologically innate routines, the everyday life of newborns is full of novel experiences, but only for a short while. Research with infants documents how remarkably quickly babies identify patterns in behavior; they are what we could call “pattern hungry.” For example, the video series The Baby Human

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(2003) documents how researchers do experiments with infants as young as a few months old. The researchers measure how fast babies learn patterned events by showing them an activity several times. A typical activity would be to place infants a few months old in front of a puppet theater where they watch a puppet pick up a block and move it from one loca- tion to another. The babies focus their attention intently at first because this is a novel thing to observe. However, after the activity has been repeated a couple of times the babies lose interest; they have learned that pattern. Once they uncover a routine they become bored. They know what to expect. When the puppet appears again, they look away. But when the activity is changed such that the results are not the same, the baby shows puzzlement, inter- est. For example, the puppet moves the object to the opposite side of the stage from before. You can imagine the baby realizing, “Oh, this is new!” so she pays attention.

brain aCtivity: Converting the new into the Known

Novelty is thus the counterpart to routine. Even adults are most interested in what’s new; we are bombarded with information all day long but what do we pay attention to? The “news.” What is newsworthy? Ironically, what typically makes the news is atypical. Most people don’t murder but most murders make the news. People are generally law abiding, but news programs focus on crimes. So whether we are babies or seniors, we are disproportionately interested in what’s new and largely ignore what is routine. This is an important trait because recognizing newness is critical to learning culture whether as a child or an adult.

Fortunately for us, our brains convert the novel into the known very quickly. If that were not true, our brains would have to go through many more calculations than they do even when we encounter someone or something known. Imagine if you had to figure out who a person was each time you met her; imagine if you had to go through all the cultural calculations to figure out if this is a person whom you could trust. That would take huge amounts of the brain’s calculating effort—just like it does with very young children. As I explain in more detail later in this chapter, repeated experiences get stored in our memory so that we do not have to recalculate everything the next time we encounter something similar. That is, our brains take a shortcut to where we stored the memory about that similar experience. This saves us from dedicating so much energy and brain computing time to this task. Since the brain siphons off a disproportionate share of energy, taking shortcuts is important and would have been a key evolutionary advantage. This is the fourth puz- zle piece to learning culture. Without knowing it, our brains recognize the similarity and jump to what we “know” about it. Novelty has become knowledge (and, as you might have guessed, this is why we so easily stereotype as well). We know how to act and think in the ways that others can interpret and that make us all feel comfortable. This is how we get to emotional comfort through cultural acquisition, the fifth and final piece of the puzzle I’m putting together here.

Of course, learning culture is not equally easy for all of us. Autistic children are among those who struggle most. If your child is autistic, this perspective on culture could be particularly useful. There is no one type of autism. Although children with autism enjoy varying degrees of sociability along the autism spectrum, they commonly have a hard time understanding that other people do not think exactly as they do—theory of mind—which most nonautistic children begin to develop by the end of their first year (Tomasello 1999). Children with autism, for example, almost never invent imaginary companions like non- autistic children do. These imaginary companions help kids learn to think from others’ perspectives (Gopnik 2009). Their brains do not process social information in the same way

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people without autism do (Ratey 2002; Tomasello 1999; Trevarthen et al. 1998). They seem to have greater difficulties cutting through all the information coming at them in order to detect and store social patterns. In some cases, such as among the small percentage of people with autism who are savants, their brains focus on one area, producing incredible numeric, artistic, memory, or other abilities, but they cannot engage in social interactions that most people handle with no problem. Perhaps the most famous savant is the character played by the actor Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man, a man who cannot hold a conversation with someone but can instantly do complex mathematical feats. This makes sense in the context of what you have been learning here: learning to interpret other people takes a lot of brain power. Children without autism learn this skill for those with whom they come to share culture early in life and then apply the shortcuts or schemas to new people they meet and to those they know. Children with autism, however, appear to lack this ability and thus, for them, each new face is another interpretive task to tackle. Something too exhausting to handle repeatedly and thus often it is better to avoid eye contact. Providing simple, very recognizable patterned behaviors appears to be useful, particularly for facial expressions. I have heard from parents of children with autism that their kids enjoy Japanese anime movies and the television program Thomas the Tank Engine precisely because the charac- ters’ emotions are very starkly displayed and thus easier to interpret than most humans’ faces. This anecdotal information is confirmed by some scholars. Rendering faces and facial expressions more intelligible through exaggeration or simplification is often done for young infants. Where I live children’s toys often have simple, exaggerated facial features (e.g., Mickey Mouse and face-oriented mobiles) and adults—at least in the United States—often smile more intensively than normal when interacting with infants and speak with simpler, exaggerated tones (what is often referred to as “Motherese”). I argue that such culture work helps babies identify patterns faster and thus aids them to find comfort in reading others’ expressions correctly.

As we appreciate how important detecting, interpreting, practicing, and imposing patterns are to our sense of comfort, we gain new insight into how to handle the special

Thomas the Tank Engine and Friend: Note Their Easy-to-Interpret Facial Expressions.

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challenges autistic children and their families face. This is one concrete application of view- ing culture as comfort. Now take a moment and reflect on what you have learned in this chapter and the book so far, and consider how it might affect the ways in which you interact with young children in the future. How might this awareness affect your parenting or your understanding of how you were parented?

learning Culture iS not memorization: Culture iS Creative but alSo orDerly

While it is true that most babies discern patterns in others’ behavior, they do not simply memorize and repeat what they have experienced. Yes, they do imitate others but they do not only repeat what others do. They learn culture as patterns, as the rules to their social order, but they do not stop with repeating these patterns (imitation). Rather, they also learn to apply them in new ways. That’s a mouthful so let me turn to concrete examples. One excellent example is how children learn language. It’s easy to think that children learn language by memorizing what they hear. This makes sense as children are often taught words this way. A parent points to an object and pronounces its name, and then encourages the child to repeat what was said. Some time ago, however, linguists, most notably Noam Chomsky, observed that young children do not learn language merely through memoriza- tion of what they have heard. Yes, they memorize words’ pronunciation and meanings but they learn grammar by detecting its rules (patterns) and applying these rules to generate sentences that they have never heard before. The evidence against memorization and for learning and applying the rules of language is easily seen in the “mistakes” young children frequently make when, in English and other languages, they use irregular verbs and plurals. A toddler is often heard making a mistake such as by saying, “Mama, I saw two sheeps!” or “Daddy, I goed to school today!” These examples illustrate how children learn the rule (to make a plural in English add an s to the end of a noun) and do not just memorize what they hear others say (in which case they would say “sheep” and not “sheeps”). Research indicates that babies in the womb are already learning the cadences, the regularities, if not yet the grammar of their parents’ native language(s), and that when they are born, they can already discern this language from unfamiliar languages to which they are exposed (Mehler et al. 1978; Small 1998; Werker et al. 1981). For example, in an experiment by Mehler et al. (1978) newborns were allowed to suck on a pacifier wired to a tape recorder and the babies were given headphones to listen to people speaking. If a baby sucked for a particular amount of time, the voice of the baby’s mother reading a story would come through the headphones; if the baby sucked a short time then another voice read the story. Babies quickly learned the patterns and sucked longer to hear their mothers’ voice. Clearly, in the womb they could differentiate among voices and begin to detect patterns in spoken language. They recognized the sounds associated with their mothers’ speech but also were even picking up the more subtle patterns to what will become their native language such as intonations and gram- matical rules. Additional experiments by Mehler and colleagues show newborns will suck their pacifiers harder if exposed to people speaking the native language correctly versus just saying words in random order or speaking a language the infants were not exposed to in the womb. All of this is foundational to their being able to speak the language later. They pay attention to and learn the simple rules first (e.g., how to conjugate regular verbs but not necessarily the irregular ones; how plurals are formed in most cases). Then, they apply these rules when they speak.

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So very early in life, we learn specific words and what they signify such as “ball” and “spoon” and “mommy.” We also learn that putting words together into sentences is not random but patterned. We learn and apply grammatical rules (although we don’t know grammar consciously until we are taught it in school). When we have words and grammar, we can start making sentences we have never heard. Even the earliest sentences that tod- dlers speak are not mere repetitions of sentences they have heard; they use their language tools to create their own sentences (Gopnik 2009). So we are both creatures of habit and habit creators.

Creativity is extremely important for adapting to changing life circumstances—we can invent new ways to do things; we can figure out ways to solve problems that arise during our lives. This is one of the reasons why young children play and experiment; they try dif- ferent ways to do things in order to learn how they work (Gopnik 2009: 88). However, our ability to innovate and change is tempered by the comfort of the known. We can change, but change is increasingly difficult as we grow comfortable culturally. In fact, every day we participate in reinforcing our cultural comforts but, on average, much less frequently in changing them. Why?

I answer this question by pointing out that while we need to be able to innovate and change, to survive from birth we must integrate into the social world into which we are born. Social integration is built upon repeated routines, upon patterns in what people say, think, and do. When we learn these we integrate socially—we become like those around us—and we experience our integration as comfort. Comfort derives from “knowing” what to do, what’s right and wrong in our social world, so that we actually don’t have to figure it out consciously. Early on, as we’ve seen with children and language, we figure out first the main rules; later on we learn the more subtle rules and the exceptions to rules. And as we learn the rules we apply them. Young children actually apply rules more rigidly than they exist in “real” life. They are little rule enforcers.

Finding the patterning in human interactions (cultural routines and the familiarity, comfort, and predictability they bring with them) is so important to the human experience (and to human survival, I would add) that children have been shown to actually impose patterns when they are missing or ambiguous. A classic case of this is children’s experiences with pidgins. “Pidgin” is the term used to describe a mixture of two languages that results when adults who speak different languages are in prolonged contact and need some limited means of communication for activities such as trading (Bickerton 1981; Ramachandran 2011; Senghas 1995). Adult speakers blend the two languages in a hodgepodge of commu- nication styles that suffices for getting things done. But for children exposed to a pidgin, this linguistic mixing is too haphazard, too unpatterned; they need rules that are black versus white before they can learn that much of life is gray. The work of various scholars indicates that when exposed to the vagueness of pidgins, children spontaneously develop rule-based grammars and transform the pidgin into what is referred to as a “creole language,” or a full- fledged language with its own grammatical rules. They create clear-cut rules where pidgin offers ambiguous rules and they impose this clarity in the form of a new language.

From disorder we create order. We subconsciously trade flexibility for predictability, for the comfort that comes with order. Still don’t believe me? Let me provide you with a classic example—sex.

For reasons that are still somewhat mysterious, people do not have a sexual season like almost all other animals have. Among dogs, the sexual season is referred to as “going into heat.” Humans, however, can have sexual relations any time of the day, month, or year whereas almost all other species engage in sexual activity only during specific periods when

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30 Chapter 2 • We Weren’t Born to Be Random: Culture as Comfort

females are fertile. So, what do we do with all this flexibility? We impose lots of rules upon it. We define when it is appropriate to have sex (such as after marriage, after menstruation but not during, etc.), who can have sex (such as restricting children and teenagers from engag- ing in it), where it is appropriate to have sex (certainly not in the classroom with everyone present, etc.), and so on. The cultural rules governing sexual activity vary widely from society to society, but every people imposes rules onto humans’ biological flexibility for having sex. That’s the critical lesson of culture. We create our own order, but there is a trade-off with flexibility. As we order ourselves culturally and find comfort therein, we lose some but not all of our flexibility. In short, and to repeat the quote by the famous anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1990: 43) that appeared at the beginning of this chapter, “Humans, having freed themselves from the limitations formerly imposed by biology, have burdened themselves with many more.”

Conclusion

Learning culture, then, is about seeking, finding, reproducing, inventing, and imposing order onto human life. We evolved biologically to enable great cultural flexibility; that is, we were born to be flexible but we weren’t born to be random. People create social order and young children must learn this social order by interacting with others. This is essentially what I understand cul- ture to be—our ability to create and impose order on the social world we live in. This does not mean we are liberated totally from our biology, our genes, but we have a great deal of input into how we interact with our biology and our environ- ment. Humans are born with incredible abilities to adapt to any circumstances, but we are born so dependent we could not survive without others’ assistance. These others behave in patterned ways that babies are born to detect, learn, and apply. We thus are obligated to interact with others and play by their rules. (Yes, this means that power is intimately related to culture.) It makes sense, then, that even beginning in the womb we are learning these rules. In early childhood we con- centrate on perfecting the simple rules and it is only after we gain competencies that we begin to experiment a bit beyond the rules, particularly with people whom we trust. Know any toddlers? They are rule lovers.

As a toddler, Sophie helped me see the importance of patterned or rule-based behavior among young children deeply involved in learn- ing culture and in becoming socially integrated. One example was when she complained exten- sively about one of her schoolmates in daycare.

His name was Hans and he was the child of a Chinese mother and a Dutch father. It took him a bit longer than the monolingual kids to speak, but by age 3 or so, he was able to speak three lan- guages and speak each to the correct person. Hans loved playing dress-up and his favorite item was a tutu donated by one of the teachers who had been a dancer. Each day he would pull the tutu off of the dress-up clothing rack and put it on. He then would wear it all day. This upset Sophie and the other girls to no end because it did not fit what they felt boys should wear. At home, Sophie complained repeatedly that “Boys do not wear dresses!” She refused to approve of his behavior until the last year of daycare when her under- standing of the rules of gender had become more sophisticated than simple black and white.

Another highly rule-bound context Sophie and her friends were involved with for hours each day at preschool was an elaborate game they called “family.” As its name suggests, this game consisted of playing the roles of par- ents and children in a family. The kids refused to allow any gender switching; only boys could be daddies and sons, and girls were limited to the roles of mommies or daughters. When I asked Sophie why girls could not be fathers or brothers, she would answer matter-of-factly that this was impossible. Girls are girls and boys are boys. She also refused to wear anything but dresses during her daycare years—but this changed immediately when she entered kindergarten. For her and for many children, breaking rules and accommo- dating ambiguity could only be attempted after

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Chapter 2 • We Weren’t Born to Be Random: Culture as Comfort 31

mastering the rules. As parents know, children save their worst behavior (which often involves breaking the rules) for their parents. This is because children place the most trust in the peo- ple they are closest to; children can risk offend- ing those people because they know they won’t be “excommunicated” from their comfort zones for their actions. A total stranger is much riskier, at least until the child can see that the stranger behaves in normal (interpretable, predictable) ways, much like other people he knows. But how easily can children make these determinations?

While this chapter has focused on how we learn cultural order and find comfort in that order because, subconsciously, it makes most social interactions predictable, I do not want to imply that all human activities are oriented toward reproducing the social order. Yes, when people experience disorder (as with pidgin lan- guages or times of war), we often impose order by inventing new rule-bound behaviors. We see this with children’s play as well. But we are also endowed with incredible creative abilities such as our imaginations. We can speak sentences we have never heard before, imagine worlds we have never seen, invent new ways to do things, and so on. We can also continue to learn culturally even as we view ourselves as having a particular cul- ture. We retain cultural flexibilities, but we are also very much creatures of habit and comfort. This is, to my mind, the greatest conundrum of the human condition.

This chapter has focused on the fact that as humans, we are not born with culture but must learn a huge amount of culturally specific knowledge to survive and thrive among those in our society. We are born very plastic and so can be molded—and mold ourselves—into any cul- tural shape; yet, as we take shape we trade much of this plasticity, this cultural flexibility, for the

comforts of being formed. An obvious lesson in all of this is the impact of early infancy and child- hood experiences on who we later become. Now it is appropriate to take some time to apply your newly acquired “culture as comfort” knowledge to real life. How can this knowledge be put into practice to help your life or another person’s? Why is taking this new culture as comfort per- spective useful?

Sophie Performing Preschool Gender.

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32 Chapter 2 • We Weren’t Born to Be Random: Culture as Comfort

P l a n n e D Pa u S e 2 - 2

a p p l y i n g C u l t u r e a s C o M f o r t t o r e a l l i f e

Instructions: Imagine that you are a cultural expert in a particular social environment tasked with helping some people who are not. Describe below in your first paragraph this social environment—a context that is familiar to you but which is unlikely to be familiar to everyone (such as your workplace, a particular hobby you participate in, a sporting event you attend, or even eating a meal with your family). Why is this context culturally comforting to you? In a second paragraph, explain how what is culturally comfortable for you is likely to be uncomfortable to others and provide two suggestions for how you could assist newcomers feel culturally comfortable in this context. Make sure you refer to the concepts and ideas developed in this book.

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