Cultural Anthropology

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chapter 1

What Is Cultural Anthropology?

• Understand the central purpose of anthropology

• Distinguish the field of cultural anthropology from the other subfields of anthropology

• Understand how anthropologists define culture

• List the principal characteristics of culture

• Distinguish human culture from culturally transmitted animal behavior

• Understand the key characteristics of culture in modern industrial society

GOALS By the end of the chapter, you should be able to do the following things:

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1.1 INTRODUCTION

“The objective of anthropology, I believe, is to seek a generous comparative but nevertheless

critical understanding of human being and knowing in the one world we all inhabit.”

(Ingold, 2007, p. 69)

In this chapter, we ask, “What is cultural anthropology?” American anthropology is a discipline composed of four subfields—cultural anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology. Cultural anthropologists study contemporary societies and social groups within a cross- cultural comparative framework. Cultural anthropologists are interested in how humans construct their lives on the basis of both learned traditions and new responses to a rapidly changing world. In this chapter we will explore the nature of cultural anthropology, but before doing so, we need to introduce the three other subfields of anthropology.

Linguistics, the study of language, has always been an important part of anthropology. Many anthropologists are interested in the relationship between culture and language. One of the earliest theories was the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that language determines the way we see the world—sometimes to our disadvantage. For example, the sign “Empty Fuel Drums,” where “empty” connotes “harmless,” may encourage careless behavior such as throwing down live cigarette butts, whereas in reality empty fuel drums are far more explosively dangerous than full drums. Anthropologists have collected a vast number of linguistic texts and knowledge over the past 150 years.

Physical anthropologists, often called biological anthropologists, study the evolution of humans and areas such as growth, nutrition, development, and disease. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, physical anthropologists typically measured the human body, and especially the head (craniometry), in their quest to discover human races. Present-day physical anthropologists study humans and nonhuman primates (for example, chimpan- zees), and ask difficult questions such as “What is the relationship between the evolution of the opposable thumb, brain, language, and tool making?” since these all appear to have co-evolved together. Physical anthropologists are also interested in our closest rela- tives, the Neanderthals. Forensic anthropology is a part of physical anthropology that has become well known through the novels of forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs and the TV show “Bones,” which is based on her writing.

Archaeology is the study of human prehistory—that is, human existence before the appear- ance of written records. The archaeologist’s objective is to recreate the ways people lived by excavating settlements, houses, ancient rubbish dumps, and burial sites. Archaeologists are interested in a wide range of topics, ranging from the prehistoric migration of peoples and the invention of domestication and agriculture to the significance of rock carvings and shamanism for understanding the evolution of the human mind (Whitley, 2009).

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1.2 DEFINING CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Cultural anthropology can be defined in a number of different ways. Here is a brief definition: Cultural anthropology is the comparative study of human cultures with the objective of deepening our understanding of the human condi- tion. As an academic discipline it stands in contrast to several other academic fields. Unlike the soci- ologist who studies his or her own society, and unlike the more closely related human geographer who studies the spatial characteristics of human society in all its forms, the cultural anthropologist traditionally focuses on the holistic study of small- scale social formations that characterize human life. These are often villages but also include other types of societies, such as bands, tribes, and pas- toral nomads, and increasingly, groups in modern society, from MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer On- line Role Playing Games) to communities within hospital and corporate settings.

Normally the cultural anthropologist chooses a particular group because she is looking for answers to questions that have arisen from research carried out by peers. Even though cul- tural anthropological research typically focuses on small-scale societies, the objective of research is always framed in the much broader comparative

APPLYING ANTHROPOLOGY 1.1

Technology and Language Consider how language influences culture and how culture influences language. Do you think that the rise of new technology and the coining of new words such as “n00b” (spelled with two zeros and meaning “a newcomer to an online game”) supports or conflicts with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language structures perception ?

According to a recent article in the Vancouver Sun, “Neologisms, or the coining of new words, used to take time to work their way into speech and writing but now, through the Internet, any bit of jargon may be repeated incessantly and go global within days. English is said to have acquired its millionth word in June 2009” (Julian, 2010, p. C6).

Questions 1. Think of words used in your culture, and consider how they influence your perception of people and

situations on a daily basis. How could the study of these words give you insight into your culture’s

values? 2. Is our culture what it is because of the words we speak and write, or are the words developed to

describe our ever-changing culture?

3. List and describe the words that reinforce your arguments about the origins of language and culture.

Anthropologists study everything from religion to gender relations with the objective of deepening our under- standing of the human condition.

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study of the human condition. Hence, cultural anthropologists study witchcraft and reli- gion, kinship and marriage, child socialization, economic systems, traditional medicine and healing, oral traditions, gender relations, social change, modernization and devel- opment, and many other aspects of society so as to answer questions concerning every- thing from human universals to the particularities of time and place that contribute to the uniqueness of a specific way of life.

Cultural anthropologists have traditionally studied cultures far removed from their own society, but as we noted above, this is changing. Today cultural anthropologists study school classrooms, laboratories, open-source software communities, social networking, human-computer interaction, hospitals and medical procedures, consumer behavior, business practices, industrial design, media, and problems of economic and social devel- opment. Cultural anthropology has always been a creative discipline, and over the last few decades several new research areas have emerged: gender, feminism, environment, and climate change. The study of environmental deterioration and the looming impact of climate change on vulnerable indigenous cultures is becoming particularly urgent.

1.3 STUDYING CULTURE

C ulture is a web of values, meanings, and behavior that is deeply embedded in our experience of daily life and shared with others who belong to the same group.

All humans are enculturated beings; that is, from the moment of birth, babies are inten- sively exposed to language, social interaction, clothing, toys, media, and food. Continuing for many years, these enculturation processes become the “taken-for-granted,” everyday experience, values, and behavior of the adult person. Food is important in all cultures, and food preferences can highlight key cultural values significant to understanding larger contexts of culture. For the Navaho and Apaches, for example, eating fish is disgusting, whereas for Amazonian Indians, fish is daily fare. Some Asian and Mexican cultures eat dogs, whereas some East Asian cultures regard milk consumption as revolting and equivalent to drinking mucus. One of the authors (Peter Laird) had the experience of being offered the roasted arm and hand of a blowpiped monkey. Shades of cannibalism! Without showing squeamishness, he politely declined the offer by explaining that he had already eaten.

Culture is not only expressed by food preferences but also by the way we eat. In America, holding the fork in the right hand is good table manners, whereas in Australia it is con- sidered too casual and lazy except when eating salad, dessert, or cake. In traditional Poly- nesian society, the utensils used in cannibalism were kept separate from utensils used for daily meals. Several TV series have explored viewers’ culinary boundaries between what is edible and what is disgusting. The job of the cultural anthropologist is to understand the larger context within which the “yuk” factor and the “delicious” factor make sense. How they make sense is almost always culturally specific. The “yuk” factor is a dead giveaway of core culinary cultural values, which we express in aesthetic—and sometimes religious—judgments. Jews and Muslims do not eat pork, and Hindus do not eat beef. Anthropologists have written extensively about food in books such as Marvin Harris’s Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (1998).

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Culture runs deep, and our “gut reaction” to disgusting food is experienced as personal and visceral, although it is cultural and most probably shared by all people in our own group. When we speak, we are unaware of the complex rules of grammar employed to convey meaning. In the same way, culture, like language, is public and shared, and the role of the cultural anthropologist is to observe, interpret, and uncover the “grammatical rules” that make our lives meaningful as members of a sociocultural group.

What Is Culture?

The concept of culture lies at the core of cultural anthropology. In 1952, A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn published the results of a survey on the use of the term culture that yielded 164 definitions. Just as many definitions of culture probably are used by today’s anthropologists. Most cultural anthropologists do not explicitly define what they mean by culture in their work. We therefore need to turn to the history of cultural anthropology to gain a sense of the different usages of the term “culture.”

Many anthropologists trace the concept of culture to the definition proposed by E. B. Tylor in his book Primitive Culture (1871/2010), where he states: “Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, 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 mem- ber of society” (p. 1).

Tylor’s definition was couched in an evolutionary framework that ranked culture from so-called primitive to modern European industrial society. During the same period Her- bert Spencer in England and Lewis Henry Morgan in upstate New York also developed theories of social evolution. Herbert Spencer used analogies drawn from Charles Dar- win’s theory of evolution. Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” to describe the dynamics underlying social transformation from simple groups to modern states charac- terized by the complex division of labor and diverse institutional forms such as govern- ment. Just as Darwin described how animal species evolved physically to adapt to their environments, Spencer pointed out how human social groups also evolved new cultural adaptations that allowed them to survive environmental challenges.

Morgan was a major contributor to the development of cultural anthropology outside the academic environment. His Ancient Society (1877), which has never been out of print, was a landmark study of social evolution based on extensive ethnographic research with the Iroquois of New York and other Native American groups. Morgan’s evolutionary view held that certain Western societies were the epitome of social development, and that all other societies could be placed in a hierarchy from barbarism to civilization. Morgan founded the field of kinship studies and based his evolutionary model on the transforma- tion of kinship, family, and social organization. Although most modern cultural anthro- pologists reject evolutionary interpretations, Morgan’s pioneering ethnographic research has proved to be particularly valuable.

Modern academic cultural anthropology was established in America by Franz Boas at Columbia University and in Britain by Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred R. Radcliffe- Brown. Boas initially earned a Ph.D. in physics in Germany, and not long afterward switched his interests to the relationship between perception and environment in the

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field of geography. German geographers of that time were divided into two main camps: those who thought that cultural variation was environmentally determined, and those who thought it was caused by cultural diffusion. Environmental determinists originally theorized that climate determined people’s cultural values, making assertions such as “people who live in the tropics are lazy.” Determinism added support to the racist “lazy native” ideology that supported colonialism. Similarly, these theorists held that the cold, bracing climate of Europe created cultures that were vigorous, energetic, and expansive, and by implication, morally superior. Modern environmental determinism has a more pragmatic than ideological focus; for example, today’s determinists hold that the ban on eating pork by Muslims and Jews has more to do with the climatic unsuitability of pig raising in hot, arid regions than with the theological rationale that pigs are “unclean.” Simply, environmental determinism takes the view that cultural values held by people often hide the real material conditions (pigs don’t thrive in arid climates) underpinning the culture.

Diffusionist theory holds that some cultural change can be explained by cross-cultural bor- rowing of ideas, values, stories, legends, and material objects such as art, designs, tools, and foods. For example, patterns of diffusion can be plotted along trading and migration routes. Some forms of diffusion are extremely rapid and transforming, such as the adop- tion of horses by Native Americans of the Great Plains.

In 1881 Boas traveled from Germany to Baffin Island, Canada, and carried out a research project that examined the relationship between Inuit migration patterns and the envi- ronment. He came to the conclusion that culture was a more significant determinant of Inuit behavior than the geography of their habitat. Boas concluded that the environment acted more as a constraint than as a contributor to the “creative elements in cultural life” (Boas, 1966, p. 306). By this, Boas meant that the environment may set constraints, such as excluding pigs from the diet because of unsuitable climate as we saw above, but the envi- ronment by no means determines that pigs are defined as being an “unclean,” prohibited food.

In 1885 Boas came under the influence of Adolf Bastian (in Lowie 1937), who rejected environmental determinism and postulated the “psychic unity of mankind” as the basis for understanding variations in human culture. Bastian believed that all humans were endowed with the same psychophysiological “elementary ideas” expressed through universally shared cognitive, intellectual, and adaptive capabilities. These “elementary ideas” interact with local conditions such as history, environment, and other cultures to produce “folk ideas” that today would be called culture. Bastian thought that the study of folk ideas from many cultures would lead back to identifying universal elementary ideas. To use an analogy with language, modern linguists have spent many years attempting to identify the universal cognitive processes that explain how all humans acquire language and are able to speak fluently at a fairly young age. Their aim is to discover the abstract universal grammar (elementary ideas) underlying the actual grammars (folk ideas) of all the world’s languages (cultures).

Over several years Boas formulated a theory of culture that became known as histori- cal particularism. That is, cultural variations such as differences between Pacific North- west First Nations peoples he studied, could be explained by referring to the unique cir- cumstances of economy, tribal relations, geography, and technology within which they lived. Holding to the view of the psychic unity of humankind, a view held by probably

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all anthropologists today, Boas sought to understand culture by studying how all the dif- ferent facets from art to kinship formed an integrated and coherent whole. Boas rejected using environmental factors to explain the unique characteristics of Pacific Northwest cultures. He also downplayed the significance of diffusion from other cultures.

In retrospect, Boas’s explanations seemed to have missed one very important variable: the extraordinary impact of European settlement and intrusion of the American and Cana- dian states. Boas ignored the disruptive intrusion of Western culture, commercial inter- ests, and missionaries since they were outside the scope of his interests and research.

However, Boas’s attention to the specific beliefs, social relations, myths, stories, and material artifacts of a particular society published in the context of cultural relativism (described later in this chapter) was an effective counter to the evolutionary, material- ist (environmentally deterministic), and diffusionist theories that dominated discussions of how and why societies could be so radically different. Boas used anthropology in the public arena to refute racism, anti-Semitism, and other pseudobiological theories used to diminish the full human status of marginal communities and even nation-states. How- ever, Boas was primarily interested in how participants within a culture understood and thought about their own culture. This approach reflects Boas’s early career interest in how people see themselves and their environment, and presages the dominant form of anthro- pological inquiry today.

Boas trained the first generation of American academic cultural anthropologists, who in turn established anthropology departments in many universities and colleges throughout the United States. Anthropology books published between 1900 and 1950 in the United States were almost all written by Boas or by his students. Boas’s students went on to develop their own theories of culture, and one—Margaret Mead—became a public icon.

Bronislaw Malinowski’s intensive fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands established partici- pant observation as the core method of social and cultural anthropology. As the term sug- gests, participant observation involves long-term field residence by the anthropologist, who lives as much as possible as a member of the host society. (Participant observation is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2.) Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) firmly established his reputation as a fieldworker, rarely surpassed even 96 years after he entered the field in Melanesia in 1914. For Malinowski, society was a structure of interrelated parts, such as kinship groups, political office, patterns of reciprocity, and economic activities. The job of the anthropologist, based on long-term fieldwork, was to explain how each of these parts functionally contributed to the maintenance of society by meeting human needs.

In 1925, Margaret Mead, a student of Boas and Ruth Benedict (who had also been a stu- dent of Boas), set out for the Pacific to explore the life of adolescent girls in Samoa. Mead’s research was addressed to one of the central controversies in cultural anthropology that is still relevant today, the nature-nurture debate. The nature-nurture debate asks the ques- tion: What is the relative contribution of genes (nature) or culture (nurture) to the makeup of a person? In the context of female adolescence in America, Margaret Mead sought to understand the life of Samoan adolescent girls. Her objective was to answer the question of whether the turbulence of female adolescence in America was also evident in the lives of Samoa girls. She discovered that Samoan girls had a sexually carefree adolescence, indi- cating that culture and not developmental biology determined the character of adolescent

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behavior in both societies. Her book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) vindicated the Boasian position that cultural differences could be explained without resorting to biology. The book also created a public stir and made a significant contribution to changing sexual behavior in America. In the 1950s and 1960s Margaret Mead became a public icon and in 1979 was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The public profile of anthropology was certainly raised by Margaret Mead’s publications on Melanesian and Asian sexuality. In 1971, the University of Chicago awarded author Kurt Vonnegut an M.A. in anthropology for his novel Cat’s Cradle (1963). He had been an unsuccessful M.A. anthropology student at the University of Chicago because he chose a thesis topic well outside the conventions of the time. Another author, Michael Crichton, was an anthropology graduate who spent time teaching at Cambridge University. The profile of cultural anthropology was raised again recently with the election of President Obama, whose mother was an applied anthropologist specializing in third world socio- economic development.

Despite widespread stories of feral children raised by wolves, to be human means to be raised by other humans, and that means learning the shared values, language, knowl- edge, know-how, and sociability of one’s own kin group and the wider society. All these different aspects are what cultural anthropologists mean by the term culture.

Cultural Universals

Most cultural anthropologists have the view that all humans participate in a common underly- ing humanity, but they disagree on the relative contributions of biology and culture, or in more popular terms, nature and nurture. Anthropolo- gists have focused most of their research on the study of cultural variability, with the idea that grasping the fullest range of human culture will inevitably lead to universally valid knowledge of what it means to be a culture-bearing human. The anthropological interest in universals has always been present and is exemplified by two 20th-century theorists, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Donald Brown.

Humans have always lived in kin-based groups, and Lévi-Strauss’s first major book was The Ele- mentary Systems of Kinship (1949). He argued that the universal incest taboo requires men to obtain wives by exchanging their daughters or sisters with the daughters or sisters of the men of another group. The universal incest taboo gives rise to a basic social division differentiating between mar- riageable persons and blood relatives who are not allowed to marry each other.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was the founder of French structural anthropology. He sought to identify the mental logic by which humans construct their sociocul- tural worlds.

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Groups of wife-givers and wife-takers form alliances that endure from generation to generation, and this basic universal imperative has given rise to the many different types of kinship systems that still exist in most parts of the world today. Complex systems of kinship, such as those found in modern society, also involve marriage that is regulated by the incest taboo in such a way that men must find spouses who are not their daugh- ters or sisters. Complex systems define whom you cannot marry while leaving marriage a matter of personal choice. In the United States, some people regard first-cousin mar- riage as bordering on incest, whereas others do not, as in the expression “kissing cous- ins.” Thirty U.S. states prohibit first-cousin marriage, but it is held in the highest regard in many other cultures. Many countries legally specify kin that a man or woman cannot marry. In Scotland a man cannot marry his sister, niece, mother, aunt, grandmother, great-grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, or great-granddaughter, but he can marry his first cousin!

In The Savage Mind (1968), Lévi-Strauss outlined his theory that the human intellect operated in the same way across all cultures, only differing in the style of thought. He was particularly interested in classificatory systems used to order social groups. Many small-scale societies such as Aboriginal Australia and Aboriginal America used natu- ral categories such as birds, mammals, fish, and insects to name their groups. So we have, for example, Bear Clans, Eagle Clans, Otter Clans, and Cockatoo Clans standing in specific kinds of relationships with each other. Early anthropologists called this totem- ism, but Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that these widespread systems of social classifica- tion revealed universal classificatory faculties of the human mind, as Brown (described below) also states.

Lévi-Strauss wrote Mythologiques, a four-volume study of mythology with the arresting titles of The Raw and the Cooked (1983b), From Honey to Ashes (1983a), The Origin of Table Manners (1990b), and The Naked Man (1990a). Beginning with a focus on indigenous American mythologies, Lévi-Strauss charted the transformation of key mythic themes from culture to culture, making fascinating connections between widely dispersed societies across North and South America. Lévi-Strauss thought that by studying how identifiable clusters of mythic themes change from one society to another, he would be able to identify the universal thought processes under- lying different versions of the same or similar myths.

Donald Brown (2004) notes that hundreds of universals have been identified. A few univer- sals listed by Brown are myths, body adornment, division of labor, kinship systems, and wariness or fear of snakes. According to Brown, these are found in all cultures, and he calls them absolute universals.

Brown notes that some universals are complex. “Ethnocentrism and romantic love are examples: both are best understood as complexes or syn- dromes rather than simple traits or behaviors” (2004, p. 48). Ethnocentrism is viewing one’s own

Totemism, or the practice of naming groups by certain mammals, birds and fish, was prominent among Aborigi- nal peoples in Australia and America. Lévi-Strauss saw this form of wide- spread social classification as an indi- cator of the universal classificatory faculties of the human mind.

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culture as superior to all other cultures. Brown further develops his classification of uni- versals into four types: near universals such as fire and keeping domestic dogs; condi- tional universals such that if a culture values handedness it usually chooses the right hand; statistical universals such as using the word for “little person” in unrelated languages to name the pupil of the eye; and universal pools such as the limited set of semantic contrasts such as sex and generation used to describe the kinship systems of most societies.

Cognitive anthropologists have searched for uni- versals by studying the way people classify plants, animals, and colors. Berlin and Kay (1969) com- pared color terms in many societies. All societies distinguish black and white, with red coming next. If there is a named fourth color, it is what they call “grue,” a blue-green color. Overall, eleven universal colors were identified. In Ethnobiological Classifica- tion: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies (1992), Berlin adds further support for cultural universals by demonstrating that human classification of natural species shows a consistency transcending cultural differences.

Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism is a concept devised by Boas as a response to the evolutionary theories advanced by Spencer, Morgan, and Tylor. Cultural relativ- ism, as used by anthropologists today, has several different meanings based on the idea that all cul- tures are worthy of study and that all cultures are inherently equal in expressing the full humanness of people. As we saw above, early anthropologi- cal theories were premised on the inherent superi- ority of certain Western societies that were seen as the historical pinnacle to which all other societies ultimately aspire. Boas sought to refute the idea of the uniform unfolding of human history, not just by advocating cultural relativism but also by resorting to historical particularism, which falls within the second sense of cultural relativism, which is discussed below.

How do anthropologists approach the study of a culture that is very different from their own culture of origin? The term cultural relativism is used in three different ways by contemporary anthropology.

Consider This Consider the written history of the United States of America and more specifically the topics, the people, and the procedures used to write this his- tory. In what ways do the historical information as well as the process by which the information is judged to be “textbook-worthy” reflect upon the values and ideals deemed important by American society?

Ideas about beauty vary from culture to culture. Among the Mursi, lip discs and enlarged ear lopes are considered beautiful. Adults have both.

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First, cultural relativism is a moral stance that requires anthropologists to suspend moral and ethical judgments when interacting with a culture different from their own. The moral distance created allows the anthropologist to have a clearer view of social behavior that might otherwise be repugnant, such as infanticide and cannibalism. However, this form of cultural relativism is severely limited; could you take a morally relative view of Nazi crimes against humanity or the indignities and humiliations of racism?

Second, cultural relativism is a methodological strategy that allows the anthropologist to pay specific attention to the uniqueness of a culture. This form of cultural relativism ensures that the anthropologist studies a culture in its own terms. Before starting field- work, the anthropologist must read all the relevant books and journal articles, but by the same token, the anthropologist must be on guard against imposing outside categories on the host culture in which she is working. A trivial example is not assuming that color terms used by the English-speaking anthropologist refer to color categories used by infor- mants to describe, for example, the colors of foliage in a tropical rain forest. People living in tropical rain forests are more likely to use a wide range of colors beyond the English speaker’s repertoire of color names, unless that person is a textile dyer who can identify 15,000 colors or more. Even native English speakers have difficulty deciding whether cer- tain colors are green or blue. In some Asian cultures the English terms black and indigo are referred to by only one word. This form of cultural relativism results in deep, rich, and profoundly respectful descriptions of cultures that form the majority of ethnogra- phies in cultural anthropology. This is in large measure a fulfillment of Boas’s historical particularism.

Third, the strongest meaning of cultural relativism stands in stark opposition to cultural universals. We can call this “epistemological cultural relativ- ism,” because the anthropologist takes the posi- tion that cultures are unique and therefore knowl- edge about different cultures is almost inherently not comparable. Cultures are seen as unique con- figurations of moral imperatives, meanings, and behavior, a view held by many anthropologists, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Epistemological cultural relativism treats cultures as the outcome of historical and material pro- cesses, and treats humans as historically explain- able products of these processes.

Finally, this form of cultural relativism can extend to the extreme of regarding cultures as isolated and sealed off from the wider world, which was largely the situation before World War II for many indigenous communities. This view is untenable in a globalized world where, for example, most Malaysian Orang Asli (Aboriginal) adults have cell phones, motorbikes, and ready access to TV, popular culture, and even the Internet, as do many of the cultures studied by anthropologists today.

While cultural relativism urges one to consider cultures from an isolated per- spective, this view is largely untenable in an increasingly globalized world.

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In referring to this extreme form of cultural relativism, H. S. Stein states, “Within this framework, the cross-cultural comparative method and any search for universals becomes morally, aesthetically, epistemologically, ontologically, and methodologically untenable. Such an effort is often regarded by relativists as an extension of imperialist hegemony” (Stein, 1996, p. 283).

Stein is stating that some anthropologists regard cultures as manifestations of meanings and values that are so unique as to be inherently noncompara- ble. In the realm of language, it would be equivalent to stating that languages are not translatable except in a crude, makeshift way.

Cultural relativism is held by most anthropologists as a necessary condition for maintaining the integ- rity of a research project and the studied commu- nity. Cultural relativism not only ensures nonjudg- mental openness to the life ways of other cultures, but allows the researcher to more fully grasp the complexities of what it means to live in a culture dif- ferent from the researcher’s own culture of origin. In

brief, cultural relativism is both an ethical imperative and a research strategy honoring the integrity and fullness of other people’s cultures.

Emic Versus Etic Perspectives

The etic/emic contrast was invented by linguist Kenneth Pike to describe two ways of understanding language. The etic approach is the outsider’s description of, for example, the sounds of a language. This approach does not require any prior knowledge of the language, since its objective is to provide a concrete description of sounds that can be pro- nounced by anyone who knows the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). In contrast, the emic approach aims to describe a language from the inside and therefore requires the researcher to have a speaker’s knowledge of the language.

Anthropologists borrowed the terms emic and etic from linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s to distinguish between insider and outsider views of a culture.

An emic view attempts to describe the rules by which people express and understand their own culture. A simple example is asking people how they classify plants and ani- mals, or different kinds of illnesses. More than listing names, this method can enable the anthropologist to build a model, like a “mind map,” of the classificatory principles lying behind the names. It is assumed that this model or mind map is a part of the person’s cultural repertoire.

An etic view is a method for discerning elements and patterns in a culture that are uni- versally valid for all cultures. Etic constructs include the Linnaean system used to clas- sify the living world, and concepts used in modern medicine. For example, the concept of disease—such as tuberculosis or AIDS—is an etic concept because we can apply it to

Consider This On December 10, 1948, the Univer- sal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations. The Declara- tion specifies a legal framework that protects the authenticity and integrity of all known cultures. This raises inter- esting questions of whether certain controversial cultural practices such as capital punishment are breaches of human rights. What do you think?

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any culture. In contrast, illness is an emic term because it is often culturally specific, such as running amok (murderous raging) in Malaysian culture, susto (usually experienced as spirit attack) in Latin America, and “fright” in Caribbean Creole English (Quinlan, 2010). These illnesses are called culture-bound syndromes and tend to resist etic analysis.

There are many problems with the etic/emic con- trast, not least being the analogy made between lan- guage and culture. Language is a relatively homog- enous system, whereas culture encompasses many different elements and meanings. Furthermore, the distinction is ideologically unpalatable, as it confers universal objective status on, for example, Western medicine and scientific taxonomy. Post- modern anthropology would argue that modern medicine and scientific taxonomy are Western emic constructs and that the term etic is an ethnocentric misnomer. Postmodern anthropology rejects con- ventional anthropological knowledge and consid- ers it little more than a subjective view backed up by the authority of the ethnographer and academic traditions.

Holism

Holism in anthropology is defined in two differ- ent ways.

First, holism refers to anthropology as a discipline that focuses on all aspects of human life. As Kot- tak states: “It studies the whole of the human con- dition: past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture” (2007, p. 2). The four sub- fields of anthropology reflect the holistic nature of anthropology.

The second meaning of holism refers to field research. An anthropologist typically observes all facets of life in the society being studied. Even

if the focus of the research is on traditional healing, the anthropologist will also collect data on kinship and family life, economic activities, house design, social relations, and religious beliefs and practices. A holistic approach allows the anthropologist to contex- tualize the interpretation of cultural data, and by doing so, to attain a greater under- standing of how a culture is meaningfully integrated. For example, observing who par- ticipates in healing rituals can tell us a lot about religious ideas, kinship and social solidarity, gender relations, resource use, knowledge of medicinal plants, and political authority in the local group.

A major aspect of holism in anthropol- ogy is field research.

Consider This Is it possible to truly view a culture without being influenced by the cul- tural constructs of our own culture? In describing a Cuban baseball game, for example, are we able to acknowl- edge its cultural importance within Cuban culture without comparing it to what we already know and under- stand about American baseball? What are the positives and negatives of this approach to studying culture?

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?section 1.4

1.4 FIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE

Anthropologists use many different theories of culture, but five common themes stand out. Culture is adaptive, learned, normative, cumulative, and subject to change. Adaptative Capacity

The fields of cultural anthropology that place heavy emphasis on the adaptive capacity of culture are cultural ecology, economic anthropology, and environmental anthropology. Focusing on the exchange of energy and information between society and the environ- ment, these approaches emphasize the material processes that make up the infrastructure of society. For example, aboriginal Malaysians (Orang Asli) quickly adopted motorcycles, cell phones, and chain saws, which enabled them to increase their income and access to food under rapidly changing circumstances created by forest logging and land clearing. Motorcycles beat walking for 20 miles to the provision shop, and allow wild game to be marketed to middlemen before spoilage. Motorcycles also increase the frequency of intercommunity interaction, thus changing social dynamics. Pre-pay cell phones further increase social interaction and facilitate the coordination of pickups of wild game and forest products such as rattan. Chain saws allow people to make saleable fence posts and planks from “windfall” trees in protected forest reserves, which one of the authors (Peter Laird) also observed in a national park in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

All societies must adapt to their environment if they are to survive. Colonialism, imperial- ism, and globalization have created radically new environments for many of the world’s cultures. “Adapt or perish” is the challenge facing many cultures, and pressure to adapt is increasingly urgent under the impact of environmental destruction and climate change.

Learned Aspects of Culture

We have seen that humans are subject to enculturation from birth. Culture is learned, so we are mostly “on the same page” as other members of our group. Psychological anthropol- ogy is the field that studies enculturation, or how humans learn to become members of a culture. Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were founding contributors to the culture and personality school in cultural anthropology. Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) draws on ethnographic examples from several disparate cultures and demonstrates how these cultures selectively reinforce distinctive patterns of personality and patterned behavior. Cultural relativism was a key feature of Benedict’s comparative description of cultures.

Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946) was a prod- uct of her work during World War II. In it, she attempted to interpret glaring contradictions, as seen by Westerners, in Japanese culture and personality. In discussing Japanese propa- ganda that stressed the superior strength of their spirit over the Allies’ material values, she states: “Their tenets have been bred into the Japanese by certain taboos and refusals, by certain methods of training and discipline, and these tenets are not mere isolated oddi- ties.” (1946, p. 26) The Japanese believed that they were fighting a war against a materially corrupt civilization and that their spirit would triumph over Western materialism. Every

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?section 1.4

Japanese defeat in the war was claimed to be a victory of the Japanese spirit. Benedict’s objective was to write a book, at the request of the U.S. Office of War Information, about Japanese culture and behavior that would be of use to the war effort and the postwar military administration of Japan. All of her research was carried out in the United States with Japanese informants, since fieldwork in captured Japanese territories and postwar Japan would have been too difficult and too late; the book was urgently needed by the conclusion of the war.

Benedict’s book is an excellent example of anthropology at a distance that describes the dynamic relationship between enculturation and Japanese cultural patterns. Benedict’s books are still in print and have been translated into many languages.

Enculturation has been studied by many anthropologists since Benedict’s pioneering pub- lications on culture and personality. Benedict and Mead were founding contributors to the culture and personality school in cultural anthropology, whose adherents focused on exploring the relationship between culture and individual personality.

Normative Standards: Ideal Versus Real

All cultures have ideal values by which they expect their members to live. These are nor- mative, prescriptive rules that characterize a culture’s value system and are easily elicited from people. However, there is almost always a discrepancy between these ideal values and how people actually behave. What people should do and what they actually do are often very different.

“Thou shalt not steal” is a statement of ideal moral behavior, as is “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” “No sex before marriage” is also a statement about ideal behavior. All cultures have normative sets of values that prescribe how people should behave under all circum- stances. Many ideal forms of behavior are summed up in maxims such as “a stitch in time saves nine.” Before the 1970s, the ideal family consisted of a white, middle-class, stay- at-home wife/mother, a working husband/father, and two children, if one is to believe TV sitcoms. Larded with consumer advertising, these shows in effect told the majority of Americans that their lives, in reality, did not measure up to these highly valued ideals. Ideal images of everything from fashion and food to love and lifestyles flow from the media in great profusion.

We are surrounded by ideal models of athletic prow- ess, celebrity status, body images, career aspirations, and so forth. Some ideal values are motivating and inspiring, while others cause serious dissonance when their prescriptions are opposed to a person’s own moral values. Ideal fashion images can distort a person’s body sense, leading to chronic psycho- logical problems. The tension between ideal and real behavior can be a source of great distress, as when men lose their jobs and can no longer meet the expectation of being, for example, the family “breadwinner.”

Consider This Can you think of any other examples of how real behavior varies from the cul- tural ideal in American culture?

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?section 1.4

Cumulative Development

In one sense, all cultures are the cumulative outcome of changes in everything from val- ues to economy over a long period of time. In a second sense, all cultures have developed processes whereby information is stored—whether in genealogies that go back hundreds of years, in stories that fade from history into legend, or in libraries and computers.

The fundamental distinction in the information reten- tion capacity of a culture is between literacy and oral- ity. In oral traditions, people have developed elaborate techniques to remember information from generation to generation. In some nonliterate cultures, specialist singers can sing for day after day recounting heroic stories or great journeys that play out against a wide, ecologically vivid landscape. In Aboriginal Australia, for example, people enact Dreamtime myths that spir- itually recreate the journeys of ancestor beings who formed the sacred mountains, deserts, waterholes, and creeks along songlines that connect together dis- tant stretches of landscape.

Literate cultures accumulate vast amounts of information through writing, recording, and data storage in computers. Books and written docu-

ments were the dominant form of cumulative storage prior to the invention of photog- raphy, audio recording, film, and computers. Today the Internet is a vast repository of human culture in its most complex and variegated forms. The Internet is available every- where in the industrial world and, in the developing world, wherever people have access to telecommunications. All cultures are becoming members of the globalized world, and the digital divide grows smaller year by year. These processes are creating new challenges to the anthropological definition of culture.

Culture Change

The study of culture change is an important field in cultural anthropology. All cultures change over time for many different reasons, and there are hundreds of field studies describ- ing the changes that can and do occur. Traditionally, culture change was caused by warfare, epidemics, resource depletion, trading, the diffusion of cultural values and artifacts from neighbors, environmental change, and innovations by individual members of a culture.

Social change is also implemented by government agencies and NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations, such as Oxfam and World Vision), with the objective of improving people’s lives. Changes can include the introduction of more productive agricultural practices, improvements in product marketing, creation of new sources of income and jobs, exten- sion of small-scale credit, and numerous other forms of assistance that can, for example, give women financial independence and lead to subtle changes in gender relations.

In Aboriginal Australia people enact Dreamtime myths that spiritually recreate the journeys of ancestor beings.

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?section 1.5

Today globalization, environmental destruction, and climate change are important con- tributors to culture change. In China, hundreds of millions of people have moved from rural areas to industrial zones and cities in search of new lives. The same process applies to many developing countries. Population growth and changing weather in the Sahel region of Africa has led to widespread starvation, just as the over-farming of prairie led to the dust bowl in the United States in the 1930s, the destruction of Oklahoma farms, and mass migration of “Okies” to other states.

Culture change is an ever-present process in all cultures. Causes of change range from external forces that radically alter a culture to changing resources such as the availability of the horse for precontact northern plains Native Americans. Some social change is a radi- cal autonomous response from a society under immense pressure, such as the ghost dance religion studied by James Mooney (see Chapters 2 and 4). Another powerful response to devastating cultural change was the emergence of the great Seneca prophet and visionary Handsome Lake (1735–1815) in upstate New York. Handsome Lake’s unique synthesis of traditional culture with new ways of responding to the severe depredations of colonial- ism and warfare allowed the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy to culturally and morally transform themselves. Beginning in 1799, several visionary experiences led him to formu- late a new religious worldview that was written down and called the Code of Handsome Lake. The Code is still observed today.

1.5 IS CULTURE LIMITED TO HUMANS?

The answer to the question of whether culture is limited to humans depends on our definition of culture. Frans de Waal, a primate behavior specialist, states: If culture is the transmission of habits and information by social means, it is widespread in nature. Animals may have no language or symbols; but they develop new technologies, food preferences, communication gestures, and other habits that the young learn from the old (or the other way around). As a result, one group may behave quite differently from another, and culture can no longer be claimed as an exclusively human domain (2001, p. 177).

De Waal (2009, p. 5) observes that for chimpanzees,

it is not hard to recognize the pillars of morality in their behavior. These are summed up in our golden rule, which transcends the world’s cultures and religions. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” brings together empathy (attention to the feelings of others) and reciprocity (if others follow the same rule, you will be treated well, too). Human morality could not exist without empathy and reciprocity, tendencies that have been found in our fellow primates.

Defining the boundaries of human identity is very much a human preoccupation that extends well beyond cultural anthropology. Desmond Morris’s book The Naked Ape (1967) was very popular, as are the books of Frans de Waal, the latest being The Age of Empathy:

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?section 1.5

Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009). De Waal argues that we share a core of evolutionary fea- tures with several primate species, all of which have been shown to display behavior learned from fellow group members. One of the most famous examples involves the macaques (mon- keys) of Koshima Island, Japan, which started washing sweet potatoes in seawater in 1953. This behavior continues to the present, in which no contemporary macaques have any knowledge of the original deceased innovator. That is, washing sweet potatoes, as well as the quickly spreading behavior of raw fish consumption first observed among macaques in 1979, clearly expresses one of the fundamental features of culture, which is the social transmission of behavioral patterns from one member of a social group to another member. These observations indicate that questions con- cerning human culture are inextricably linked to questions of human origins, and to the relations between humans and other animals.

These types of observations are seen by many anthropologists as challenges to anthropologi- cal definitions of human culture. Evolutionary anthropology and sociobiology tend to be far more accepting of establishing connections with primate behavior, whereas many cultural anthro- pologists see these links as expressing the cultural universal of anthropomorphism; that is, project- ing human qualities onto nonhuman species. Moreover, anthropologists such as Crapan- zano (2004) have criticized anthropology for adopting the facade of certain natural sci- ences, thereby subverting its status as a human science.

If we focus on animal and human behavior, we can, as de Waal observes, understand common themes. Yet if we focus on human culture from prehistory to the present, we are overwhelmed by the creative capacity of humans for which there is little evidence in the animal world. This in no way detracts from the beautiful biological creativity observed in the natural world (see Carroll, 2007). What distinguishes human culture above all from animal behavior is the human capacity for imagination and its shared material and imma- terial creations which, for good or ill, give humans the ability to make sense of their lives beyond the here and now (see Crapanzano, 2004). The huge range of human cultures and languages, and the stunning capacity of humans for innovation, attests to the autonomous nature of culture, which stands upon but apart from our biological heritage.

Culture isn’t limited to humans. Japanese macaques, for example, have developed social norms, food prefer- ences, and a particular fondness for hot springs.

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?section 1.6

1.6 AWARENESS OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

In small-scale societies, it makes sense to talk about culture in a singular sense. In con-trast, to describe national cultures, such as American culture, means paying attention to race, social class, and ethnicity as factors that contribute to the wider sense of Ameri- can identity. This applies to almost all large industrial and developing countries as well. Race, ethnicity, class, and gender are also politically charged terms and part of a wider public debate that has deeply influenced anthropological agendas.

Ethnocentrism

We saw that Brown identified ethnocentrism as a cultural universal. Almost all people regard their own culture as somehow embodying what it truly means to be human. The consequence is that other cultures are seen as in some way lacking in morality, techni- cal prowess, religious piety, political sophistication, educational standards, personal hygiene—the list is unending. There are different degrees of ethnocentrism, ranging from mild joking about differences to forms that are dehumanizing and deadly. Some cultures are only slightly ethnocentric, whereas others are deeply antagonistic and disparaging toward outsiders.

The concept of ethnocentrism was first used by the Yale sociologist William Graham Sum- ner in his book Folkways (1907). Sumner invented the word ethnocentrism to describe and criticize U.S. imperialism, particularly the Philippine-American War, which followed the Spanish-American War of 1898–1902. Ethnocentrism is not simply a harmless casual view that regards one’s own culture as superior to others. Recent deadly expressions of ethno- centrism include the Serb massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica (July 1995) and the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda (1994). We can see that ethnocentrism is expressed in many ways, from political ideology to ethnicity and religion.

Ethnocentric stereotypes are present in the mass media and popular culture, often by omissions that diminish the humanity of minority groups. For example, NCAA president Myles Brand states: “We’re not anywhere close to where we need to be in football. I’m encouraged that coaches of color are appearing as finalists for positions, but seven out of 119, that’s just too darn low” (NBC Sports, Sat., Jan. 6, 2007).

Yet, ethnocentrism can have a positive social value. As cultural anthropologist John Bod- ley states:

The pride and defiance of numerous tribal peoples in the face of forced culture change are unmistakable and have often been commented on by outsiders. The ability of these cultures to withstand external intrusion is related to their degree of ethnocentrism, or to the extent to which tribal individuals feel self-reliant and confident that their own culture is best for them. The hallmark of such ethnocentrism is the stubborn unwillingness to feel inferior even in the presence of overwhelming enemy force (1990, p. 22).

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?section 1.6

Ethnocentrism can also be positively expressed in sporting events such as the World Cup soccer tournament with its raucous displays of energetic sentiments, cheering, and national colors on flags and clothing. Ethnocentrism is a particularly interesting topic to study simply because the solution to the immense number of global problems facing humanity will require deep understanding of other cultures if there is to be any chance of real success.

Race

Race and racism have been topics of anthropological study since Boas’s publications refut- ing the connection between human biology and human culture. In 1952 Lévi-Strauss’s Race and History was published by UNESCO. In it, Lévi-Strauss pointed out that race is a cultural construct that has no basis in biology. If one travels from Europe to China, the physical appearances of people change almost imperceptibly from European to Chinese. Similarly, if one travels from Southern Africa to Europe, the same phenomena of minute incremental change is observable from the Bantu peoples of Southern Africa to Scandina- via. The starting points are random, and we could just as easily begin in Egypt and end in Sri Lanka. Historically, the concept of race is a recent phenomenon that emerged with the bringing together of peoples from diverse regions through imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. The physical appearance of peoples from different parts of the world varies, but the differences in beliefs and behaviors are only explainable by reference to sociocultural values, meanings, and behavioral patterns.

Race is culturally constructed by selectively choosing phenotypical features such as hair texture and skin color as markers that identify a person as belonging to a “race.” In turn, races are said to express distinctive cultural values and social behavior. Racism is the use of these stereotypes to subordinate a group of people within a power hierarchy. Racial stereotypes are frequently institutionalized, such as segregation in the southern United States, and often rejected, as by antidiscrimination laws enacted during the 1960s. Race is an ascribed social status; that is, membership is by birth. In principle, President Obama could have opted to be white, but racial stereotyping in America determined that he is African American. All things being equal, President Obama is no more black than white, and his heritage is Anglo-Kenyan. Growing up in America he could have opted for Anglo- Kenyan identity, but instead he chose an African American identity that bears no relation- ship to his Anglo-Kenyan background. Since President Obama, as a natural-born U.S. citizen, decided to live in the United States, he in fact had only two choices available: Anglo-Kenyan or African American. In Brazil, President Obama could belong to probably 30 or 40 different racial categories. In Haiti, President Obama would be considered white because his mother was white.

President Obama’s identity is a legacy of racism in America, where in some states having one black great-grandparent and seven white great-grandparents would automatically label a person as black. Nazi Germany used a similar system to determine Jewish identity.

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?section 1.6

Ethnicity

The term ethnicity only entered the anthropological literature in the late 1960s, with the publication by Fredrik Barth of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969). Ethnicity is a descrip- tive term that is used in a number of different ways.

Ethnicity can be a self-ascribed term, such as using Hispanic to denote membership in a category of people who share specific cultural values, experiences, and language. The term ethnicity suggests a minority status in a host society, and it is not usually applied to groups who consider themselves more autonomous, such as Native Americans or First Nations peoples. As Bodley states: “In many respects, use of the term national minori- ties or ethnic minorities undermines the legitimate claims of indigenous peoples to local autonomy” (1990, p. 59). This is true because the term itself implies subordinate status.

Ethnicity cross-cuts social class, so that members of an ethnic group are distributed across all social classes. To be Irish in New York 120 years ago usually meant being working class. Ethnic groups are frequently immigrant groups, and these groups tend to merge initially with the working class of the host society, then over time to migrate into other social classes. To be African American does not indicate social class as such, although most African Americans, like most white Americans, belong to the middle class or lower class.

An ethnic group may be culturally diverse. As Zenner states: “Thus, the Druze in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel share a particular religion and a history of persecution and dissimulation, but they are similar to their national neighbors in language and secular culture” (1996, p. 393).

Ethnicity is often a choice. For example, in Malay- sia people can be Indian in one context, and self-identify as Malay in another context. People whose parents are of different ethnicities can affil- iate with either or both parents’ ethnic group(s) or opt for membership in an entirely new one. Greek Americans can be ethnically Greek at an Eastern Orthodox Church Easter celebration, but identify as Anglo American at their place of work.

Class

When asked what class they belong to, most Americans answer, “middle class.” Social class is both a subjective judgment of where a person fits in the social hierarchy, and an objective mea- sure typically determined by income. It is assumed that income reflects educational achieve- ment and access to medical resources, nutritious food, and numerous other services that affect the quality of life. In his influential book Social Class in America (1949), the anthropologist Wil- liam Lloyd Warner divided U.S. society into working class, middle class, and upper class, with additional subdivisions into upper middle class and so forth. Social hierarchy has always been a strong interest of anthropologists, and Warner’s study turned the anthropological focus on the United States. In a recent study, Hertz states: “While few would deny that it is possible to

While the “American Dream” is still attainable in today’s competitive age, people today are more likely than they were 30 years ago to remain in the class they were born into.

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?summary

start poor and end rich, the evidence suggests that this feat is more difficult to accomplish in the United States than in other high-income nations” (2006, p. 2).

The life prospects of the working poor in all societies are limited in comparison with those of the upper class, who have a surplus of power, prestige, and money. The New York Times ran a series of articles on class in America titled Shadowy Lines That Still Divide. Commenting on mobility trends, the authors state: “. . . so it appears that while it is easier for a few high achievers to scale the summits of wealth, for many others it has become harder to move up from one economic class to another. Americans are arguably more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born” (Scott & Leonhardt, 2005).

Five years after this series of articles was published, the economic situation in the United States dramatically deteriorated. Some commentators are talking about the demise of the middle class, with unsustainable debt loads, underwater mortgages, and rising unem- ployment. The coming decade could see a fundamental change in the class structure of America.

Gender

Gender (gender is cultural, whereas sex is biological) came to the attention of anthropolo- gists with the rise of feminism as a political ideology that sought redress for the many forms of prejudice suffered by women. The quest for gender equality stems from the late 19th-century women’s movements. Most of the early anthropologists were men, which effectively limited their understanding of female life in the societies they studied. Although female anthropologists were in the minority, they made significant contribu- tions to the study of gender and culture. These pioneering scholars included women such as Margaret Mead, discussed previously, and Ruth Landes, who researched and wrote about the lives of Native American women in books such as Ojibwa Woman (1938).

Gender studies is now a mainstream part of cultural anthropology. The feminism of the past decades has resulted in landmark studies, such as Henrietta L. Moore’s Feminism and Anthropology (1988), in which she argues for a specifically anthropological approach to understanding the role of women. In contrast to proponents of ideological feminism, Moore argued that gender was a cultural and social category that had to be determined culture by culture. That is, anthropologists needed to take into account the emic character of gender and not simply compare cultures using gender as an ideologically imposed cat- egory drawn from Western political agendas.

All cultures are worlds of gendered meanings, values, and behavior. In some societies, the division between male and female structures the entire culture, from architecture to religion, from food acquisition to rituals. In these cultures, we can speak of a women’s culture and men’s culture that are quite distinct. In other cultures, gender may have a lower profile or include a third gender. Gender is not limited to male and female, but may include additional genders such as transgender, found in traditional cultural groups such as the Hijra of India and the Two-Spirit People of Native North America, as well as in mainstream industrial society.

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CHAPTER 1 • WHAT IS CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY?questions

SUMMARY By now you should have a good idea about the origins and nature of cultural anthropol- ogy and the concept of culture. We have seen that anthropologists have a wide range of views about the nature of culture. Some anthropologists are interested in cultural univer- sals, whereas others focus on the unique features of particular cultures. Nevertheless, all anthropologists take a holistic view of culture.

Some of the characteristics of culture can be seen as adaptations of a society to its envi- ronment. We also discussed how culture is learned at a young age and becomes a part of every person’s taken-for-granted view of the world. Culture exists as both ideal values and behavioral pathways, which can often conflict. We also saw that culture is dynamic and is subject to change. The discussion of whether culture applies only to humans leads to the very interesting question of where to draw the boundary between humans and animals. We also discussed the nature of cultural prejudice and looked at how the study of culture in modern complex society draws in other important concepts like race, ethnic- ity, class, and gender. The next chapter focuses on how anthropologists study particular cultures.

QUESTIONS 1. What are five cultural values that are important to you? 2. Is it difficult to distinguish cultural values from personal values? 3. Do shared cultural universals give you an understanding of people in other

cultures? 4. Does knowledge about another culture help you to understand your own culture? 5. Does a deep understanding of your own culture help you to understand another

culture? 6. Given the power of enculturation, do you think people can hold etic views? 7. Name three important beliefs you hold. Are these beliefs ideal or real? 8. Not everything in a culture changes at the same rate. Based on your experience,

which cultural beliefs or values change slowly, and which ones change more rapidly?

9. Why are humans so interested in answering the question, “Do animals have culture”?

10. Is it possible for a person not to hold ethnocentric values? 11. How would you describe the main characteristics of your own ethnic group? How

do these characteristics differ from those of other ethnic groups?

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