2 The Culture Concept

Some of you may have seen the movie The Matrix (1999) starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss. It was the first film in The Matrix Trilogy. The film describes a future in which reality perceived by humans is actually the Matrix. It is a simulated reality created by machines. The heat and electrical activity of human bodies are used as energy. Reeves plays Thomas Anderson, a computer programmer, who goes by the hacker name “Neo.” He tries to rebel against the machines when he learns this, along with others who have been freed from the Matrix. Neo meets Morpheus, played by Fishburne, who is a leader of human forces of Zion, a last human city. He once lived inside the Matrix until he was freed. Now, the Agents, or those who appear to be human but are actually created by machines, that protect the Matrix, consider Morpheus to be dangerous because he wants to free others from the Matrix. In one scene of the film, Morpheus offers Neo a choice of a red bill and a blue pill. The red one will reveal the truth about the Matrix, that what he knows as life is just a simulated reality, and the blue will allow him to return to his former life without knowing the truth. Neo chooses to take the red pill, but before he does, Morpheus tells him about the Matrix. Morpheus’ monologue goes like this: “You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life—that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?” Neo responds, “The Matrix.” Morpheus continues, “Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” A little later Morpheus says, “Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.” After swallowing the red pill, Neo’s reality completely changes as he wakes up in water hooked up to a machine that captures his body’s energy to keep the Matrix going.

The Matrix is considered one of the best science fiction films with box office success worldwide. In 2012, it was added to the National Film Registry for preservation.  Scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and film have analyzed The Matrix, drawing attention to how elements of the film raise critical questions about human society and nature. The Matrix as described by Morpheus—the simulated reality in which Neo lives and works—in some ways can be likened to the culture concept in anthropology. Like the Matrix, culture is all around you, but you do not always recognize this, as culture is not tangible or visible. We can never get outside of culture, however. There are ways to subvert or challenge culture, or create a counter-culture, but the fact remains the same: culture is always present and affects how we operate whether we realize it or not.

Culture can be defined as a “system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behaviors, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people” (Guest 2016, 33). Culture is also described as the complex whole of collective beliefs and practices. In reality, culture is a contested term in anthropology, as there are multiple definitions, each being revised and adapted as the world and society change. Additionally, culture must be flexible enough to adapt and transform to biological, physical, and environmental changes, and vice versa. This is how humans have survived for centuries. Early on in anthropology, culture was thought of as being like an island. When anthropologists from places like Europe or the United States traveled to other countries to conduct their research, the assumption was that they were entering a culture completely different from their own that was bounded and timeless . This understanding of culture has come to be discarded, as it bears too many traces of the colonial circumstances under which it was developed. It also does not account for culture contact or change over time. Globalization, anthropologists have pointed out, is not all that new; it has just become intensified and taken on different forms in more recent decades with the development of new technologies, transportation, and communications.

Culture is learned and shared, but the idea that culture is a coherent whole has also been critiqued by anthropologists. This definition does not permit people within a single society to hold different beliefs. A good example of this comes from studies of cultural competence, which is a buzzword in health care in the United States. Cultural competence  is not defined “precisely enough to operationalize in clinical training and best practices” (Kleinman and Benson 2006, 1673). Culture is important in health care settings. It can influence the treatment and diagnosis, but often in medicine, culture is reduced to a “technical skill” that professionals can master. Arthur Kleinman and Peter Benson (2006) state, “This problem stems from how culture is defined in medicine, which contrasts strikingly with its current use in anthropology—the field in which the concept of culture originated. Culture is often made synonymous with ethnicity, nationality, and language” (1673). Kleinman and Benson (2006) offer the example of a ‘Mexican patient’ who is “assumed to have a core set of beliefs about illness owing to fixed ethnic traits. Cultural competency becomes a series of ‘do’s and don’ts’ that define how to treat a patient of a given ethnic background” (1673). This notion that societies are isolated and cultures are static is precluded by anthropologists because it can lead to stereotyping. Not everyone who identifies with a particular group will hold the same beliefs, and so the culture concept has to be malleable enough to allow for this diversity within culture. Kleinman and Benson (2006) suggest that culture is made up of a multitude of components and can affect all parts of our lives.

Cultures can and do change to meet shifting needs or due to transmission. For example, a village may lose a source of food, which means that how resources are distributed among community members may change. Anthropologists have pointed out that the local and global are intimately intertwined and the boundary between the two domains may not exist in reality. The global not only trickles down to the local, but the local can also shape the global. This means that cultures respond to global forces and vice versa. Some anthropologists have proposed that maybe it would be better to think of culture as “patchwork of beliefs and practices from both local traditions and the wide range of global culture” (Lavenda and Schultz 2000, 25). However, this also leads us to the question of how local people may retain their culture in light of globalization. The common assumption is that globalization will eventually make everything, everywhere the same, as it erases differences, but, local groups may try to retain their culture in light of this: “local communities are also actively working to reshape counters with globalization to their own benefit: fighting detrimental changes, negotiating better terms of engagement, and embracing new opportunities” (Guest 2017, 27). Anthropologists do not disagree that broader global forces shape everyday life even at the local level, but it is important to remember they do so in nuanced, and uneven, ways .

Tracing the Culture Concept: Social Evolution

Starting in the early 19th century, “European business interests initiated a concerted search for markets. This process led to European imperialism in Africa, Asia, and Oceania” (Gezon and Kottak 2012, 210). We can think of imperialism as the “policy of extending the rule of a country or empire over foreign nations and taking and holding foreign colonies” (ibid.). We may associate imperialism with the expansion of European empires, but imperialism dates back even further. For example, the Incas overtook land and peoples in South America in the 12th century, with their capital being in Peru, in an attempt to increase wealth and status and to expand their land holdings (Murphy and Klaus 2017). The culture concept in anthropology has evolved since anthropology became a codified academic discipline in the 19th and 20th centuries in Europe and North America. The culture concept is contested because it developed out of colonialism given anthropologists first studied groups colonized by European countries. Colonialism  can be defined as “the political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time” (Gezon and Kottak 2012, 210). These groups were considered to be different from, and even less than, the Western imperial powers that brought them under their political and economic control. Imperial powers of Europe viewed new geographic regions as a means to further their influence and to exploit rich natural resources , such as in Africa, for profit. You may have heard or read the phrases “White Savior” or the “Savior Complex,” which refer to whites helping non-whites in an egocentric manner. These terms are used in combination with colonialism, primarily associated with the 15th to early 20th centuries, but some may argue that they can also describe activities in the present, like Volontourism, which brings together “volunteer” and “tourism.” It may also be termed volunteer travel or volunteer vacation. Some may argue that volontourism is a form of neo-colonialism since it tends to make institutions or companies in the sending countries, mostly in the First World, wealthier, and makes volunteers feel good about themselves, but the practice may not have such positive impacts in the receiving countries, mostly in the developing world.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was a British sociologist. It was Spencer, and not Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who invented the phrase, “survival of the fittest,” which we will return to shortly. He authored The Principles of Sociology, a foundational text in modern sociology. Spencer’s ideas have been critiqued heavily since his time, but some social scientists have argued that his work was misinterpreted. It is thought that Spencer equated survivability with innate qualities. Social and racial inequalities were due to the “survival of the fittest.” Spencer drew on Darwin, a British naturalist and biologist best known for his research in the Galapagos Islands and his claim of human evolution, or that humans and animals have overlapping ancestry: “Diversity of biological species resulted from gradual change over time in response to environmental pressures” (Guest 2016, 42). Darwin traveled to South America and around the globe on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836, collecting materials that he would use to formulate his theory of natural selection. His famous book, On the Origin of Species, was published two decades later in 1859. Based on his observations, Darwin suggested that organisms will adapt to their environment, and those that do not adapt, may not survive. Darwin used the finches of the Galapagos Islands to develop this theory, although it is said that he did not particularly think much of these birds while there in 1835, and did not take very detailed notes on them. In The Voyage of the Beagle (1845), Darwin wrote, “One might really fancy that, from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” When Darwin went to the Galapagos, he collected nine finch species, but only identified six of them as finches because the others possessed such different characteristics than what he thought was a finch. When he returned to London, he showed the finches to an expert, who said they were in fact finches. These finches had different beak shapes, sizes, and colors, but they aligned with his notions of adaptation and natural selection: “ground finches have deep and wide beaks, cactus finches have long and pointed beaks (low depth and narrower width), and warbler finches have slender and pointed beaks, reflecting differences in their respective diets. Previous work has shown that even small differences in any of the three major dimensions (depth, width and length) of the beak have major consequences for the overall fitness of the birds” (Abzhanov et al. 2006, 563). While there is debate about the common ancestor of the different finch species, it is usually assumed that the ancestors came from Central or South America; however, it is not exactly clear as to why they came to the Galapagos Islands (Sato et al. 2001). Darwin did not possess a great deal of knowledge about finches, but concluded that they had a common ancestor and had all evolved into specialized finches that each fulfilled a role in the archipelago.

Darwin shocked European society at the time of his writing given that he disputed the idea that God created all humans and animals (Creationism) with his claim of human evolution. Before Darwin’s theory, and even after, Europeans believed the Earth was relatively young. For instance, the Archbishop Ussher (and Irish archbishop, 1581-1656) looked through the Old Testament of the Bible (prior to Jesus Christ ) and concluded based on the events and people’s lives that the earth was created in 4004 B.C. His 17th century calculation put the Earth at just about 5,600 years old. (To be more specific he stated the Earth was created on October 22nd.) Like Ussher, John Lightfoot (British clergyman, 1602-1675) claimed the Earth was younger in in The Harmony of the Four Evangelists: Among Themselves, and with the Old Testament (1644). He proposed that the Earth was created in 3928 B.C (Moore 2008, 327) based on his reading of the Bible. Darwin’s theory of evolution did not fit either of these proposals. The Earth had to be older in order for modern humans to have evolved, as adaptation via natural selection—having the right traits to survive in the environment—takes time.

Darwin was influenced by the book Principles of Geology (1830) written by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell. Lyell countered other geologists and Christian Europe who suggested the Earth was formed and took shape by catastrophic events (e.g., Noah’s Flood) by arguing that the Earth’s surface has been formed through numerous small changes over the course of many, many years. If we look at the stratigraphy, there are too many layers to the Earth for it to be young, as was thought at the time. The processes that shaped the Earth still occur today and are according to natural laws. While there may have been a more intense times of change, they have slowed down and remained steady for a very long time. Some scholars argue that Lyell did not account for the possibility of disastrous events, for instance, a meteor or comet impact may have caused the dinosaurs to go extinct, but what they do agree on is that Lyell’s time frame was much more appropriate for Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Darwin’s ideas of evolutions have been said to be misused by social scientists in the 1800s. Remember that this was a time of European expansion and the building or retention of colonies overseas in places like South America, Asia, and Africa. Spencer used Darwin’s biological model to try to explain social differences. For him, the groups of people who survived and thrived were the ones who were innately superior, meaning they were born with qualities that made them rise to the top. We may call this Social Darwinism or Social Evolution. Who do you think Spencer thought was innately superior? He said the Europeans. After all, they were the ones expanding their empires across the globe, had developed new machines as well as new methods of transportation and communication, had a structured government in place. For Spencer, superiority and being of a higher status was something that particular people—those who are White and Western European—were born with, which also meant that you could not take it away from them. What we start to see here is the development of the concept of unilineal evolution, in which all societies are to go through the same stages and eventually will become “civilized” like Europeans: “cultures would naturally evolve through the same sequence of stages” (Guest 2016, 42). We might think of this as one line, with societies starting at the left and moving to the right.

Spencer was not the only one who ascribed to unilineal evolution. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) was an American anthropologist known for his work on kinship and Native Americans. Morgan was very interested in social structure. One of his most well-known texts was Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). In it, he suggests that human progress and development is based primarily on food production. The process is uniform across societies and cultures. They progressed through three phases: Savage, Barbarian, and Civilized. Savage was associated with hunter-gatherers or foragers; this included many aboriginal peoples. Those groups who practiced a form of agriculture were considered Barbarian. And then, civilized referred to a more urban society that practiced advanced agricultural techniques or manufactured goods, such as Western Europe: “Cultures that had not developed into a ‘civilized state’ of modern nations in the late nineteenth-century industrial age were deemed primitive—either they had not reached their full potential or they had declined from a previous civilized state” (Davis 2010, 45). Morgan (1871) also had an interest in the construction of family and “inferred different social relations from distinct kinship systems and then arranged them on a continuum from ‘most primitive’ to ‘most civilized,’” (Moore 2004, 24) with promiscuity being considered primitive and monogamy being associated with civilization. Morgan’s studies of social evolution influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, proponents of communism who we will return to later in this resource. Marx passed away before completing a book on Morgan and Engels, “credited Morgan with having independently formulated the Marxist materialist conception of history” (N.A., 1973).  Morgan’s notion that methods of food production and the development of technology will progress over time has been accepted generally , but his ideas about the family and relationships has been disregarded by anthropologists.

One of Morgan’s contemporaries was British anthropologist Edward Burnett (E.B.) Tylor, who was born in Surrey, England into a Quaker family; his father was the owner of a brass foundry and was well off. Tylor travelled to Havana, Cuba in 1856 and then onto Mexico with an ethnologist (a scholar who compares cultures) to collect artifacts (Larsen 2013). Tylor is the author of Primitive Culture (Volume 1 appeared in 1871), which is credited in helping to establish anthropology as a recognized science. In Primitive Culture, Tylor (1871) writes, “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action” (1). Tylor made comparisons across cultures, and given he discovered parallels among some cultures, he believed that anthropology’s objective was to uncover the laws that dictated human thought and practices. He, like Morgan and Spencer, believed in uniformity in that all societies would pass through the same stages.

It becomes clear in Primitive Culture that Tylor was also influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Margaret Hodgen (1931), an American sociologist writes, “Darwin’s attention in the Origin of Species was directed toward living things whose present variety was currently ascribed to change and the appearance  of the organically new…Tylor’s attention, on the other hand, was directed not toward living things, but toward human culture…Hence, while the concept of survival solved a problem for Darwin, and referred to the living, the new, organically fit, appropriate, consistent, and harmonious; survival in culture remained for Tylor a problem to be solved, and referred to the non-living, the old, the culturally unfit, inappropriate, inconsistent, and illogical” (308). Tylor recognized that we needed history in order to explain the present. There were beliefs and practices that existed previously that continued to exist in the present day. This was known as “survivals:” “In short, whenever it becomes desirable to account for existence among contemporary human beings of ideas or actions which bear a more logical, significant, and harmonious relationship to earlier systems of ideas or culture, the illogical and inharmonious ‘misfits’ are called survivals” (Hodgen 1931, 307-308). Perhaps Tylor is most well-known for his work on religion. He suggested that people will draw on religion to provide explanations for events that happened that were sometimes beyond their control. Tylor saw animism, the belief in spirits, as the earliest form of religion, “and thus as a synonym for the indispensable essence of religion” (Larsen 2013, 475). It was an attempt by those considered primitive to explain things. Then after animism comes polytheism, the belief in multiple gods, and then after polytheism, comes monotheism, the belief in one God. Monotheism was the end of cultural and religious development, or the highest stage. However, we must take into account that superstitions and the belief in spirits continue to exist; “the Catholic attitude to saints on high is no different from ancestor worship—or polytheism—or idolatry” (Larsen 2013, 471). Tylor was skeptical of religion, but did not see atheism (no belief in god) as an answer either. At the end of his proposed progress, we find a “Supreme Being as the ultimate fruit of human cognition, and a rational religion that looks like Tylor’s minimalist Quaker upbringing. Although never explicitly stated as such, cultural progress means the gradual elimination of paganism” (Josephson Storm 2017, 99).

Tylor is seen as promoting anthropology as a science. He proposed a definition of culture that is generally accepted today, although there are variations. In Primitive Culture (1871) he writes, “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole, which include knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (1). Anthropologists agree that culture is comprised of all of these things listed by Tylor, but generally do not see culture as a complex whole, as there is often much diversity within a culture. The theories of social evolution proposed by the likes Spencer, Morgan, and Tylor have been critiqued as creating bigotry and justifying colonialism as they ultimately identify Europeans—an in particular Western Europeans—as the most civilized, according to the criteria upon which the scales are based. Given the time period in which they were writing, unilineal evolution was seen as a reason for why Western European countries needed to colonize other parts of the world. They were going to help those societies, which were often viewed as being poverty-stricken or violent or having widespread hunger, achieve the same level of development as them. In a sense, social evolution was a justification for colonialism since Europeans would be able to “rescue” or “save” non-Western peoples. You may have heard of the phrase “white man’s burden,” which refers to poem of the same name written by Rudyard Kipling in 1899 about the Philippine-American War that was seen as legitimizing colonialism.

Countering Unilineal Evolution with Cultural Relativism and Historical Particularism

The above anthropologists are examples of armchair anthropologists.  Tylor did not conduct any fieldwork, for instance, in the societies he was theorizing about. Another example is Sir James Frazer, a Scottish anthropologist. He is most known for his book The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religions (1890). The second edition was re-titled so that the subtitle was A Study in Magic and Religion. This book was an extensive comparative study of mythology and religion from various parts of the world, but it was not based upon fieldwork conducted by Frazer. Rather, he drew from travel logs, missionary accounts, and the writings of government officials and fellow scholars to develop his theories and the text. The book was heavily influential, and controversial, and is still required reading today for many anthropology students, but later lost some of its influence when anthropologists moved to focusing more on conducting their own empirical studies rather than on creating grand theories based on others’ recollections.

Franz Boas (1858-1942) is known as the Father of Modern Anthropology and the Father of American Anthropology and placed a dual emphasis on fieldwork and the creation of theory. Boas arrived in the United States from Germany in 1886. Robert H. Lowie (1947) recalls, “Two years after the doctorate [which he received in 1881] came the crucial expedition to Baffinland, ostensibly in the interests of geographical exploration, but ushering in a new era in Boas’s life and in the history of Eskimo ethnography. Homeward bound, Boas paid his first visit to the United States and to New York” (304). On his return from a subsequent trip to British Columbia, Boas decided to remain in the United States. In 1887, he became the Assistant Editor at Science . In 1896, he began lecturing at Columbia University. That same year, he was also named an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, a position he held until he resigned in 1905. A few years later, he became the first professor of anthropology at Columbia. During his tenure there, he trained students such as Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber who founded the anthropology program at the University of California, Berkeley, Fay-Cooper Cole who started the anthropology program at the University of Chicago, and Ruth Benedict.  Boas was undoubtedly one of the most influential people in anthropology in the first part of the 20th century. Boas stressed the importance of conducting research first before creating theories, as compared to some earlier scholars who developed grand theories that were to be applied universally even though they may not have conducted fieldwork. He served as the third president of the AAA from 1907-1908. Herbert Lewis (2001) writes, “The reputation of Franz Boas as a scientist declined in the decades after his death in 1942, but his reputation as a champion of human rights and an opponent of racism remained intact…Franz Boas was passionately and consistently concerned about human rights and individual liberty, freedom of inquiry and speech, equality of opportunity, and the defeat of prejudice and chauvinism. He struggled for a lifetime to advance a science that would serve humanity, and he was as much of a humanitarian in private as he was in public” (447).

Through is fieldwork-first methodology, Boas developed the theory of cultural relativism, defined as “understanding a group’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural context, without making judgements” (Guest 2017, 43). Boas and his students were highly critical of unilineal evolution: “The Grand Scheme of unilinear evolution as it was developed in the nineteenth century, placing Western European and American civilization at the pinnacle of humanity, was vigorously attacked by the Boasian school, and the theory of cultural relativism was forged in the heat of many long theoretical battles in the discipline” (Caulfield 1969, 183 quoted in Hitchens 1994, 237). Boas was a champion of human rights and of nurture (or culture) over nature (or biology). People learn and are molded by culture from birth (enculturation). They cannot exist without culture, as it is part of human development. His stance went against broader public and political discourses in the United States about race and immigration in the early 20th century. The History Channel documents that when Ellis Island in New York opened in 1892 as an immigration entry point, a great change was taking place in U.S. immigration. Fewer arrivals were coming from northern and western Europe—Germany, Ireland, Britain, and the Scandinavian countries—as more and more immigrants poured in from southern and eastern Europe: “Among this new generation were Jews escaping from political and economic oppression in czarist Russia and eastern Europe and Italians escaping poverty in their country. There were also Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Greeks, along with non-Europeans from Syria, Turkey and Armenia. The reasons they left their homes in the Old World included war, drought, famine and religious persecution, and all had hopes for greater opportunity in the New World.”

A changing demographic caused anxiety within the predominantly white Anglo America: “the Boas school attacked the fundamental tenets of white supremacy by showing with solid empirical studies that race, language and culture were not coextensive entities and that there was no innate racial inheritance guaranteeing the white man’s natural right (or duty) to rule” (Caulfield 1969, 183 quoted in Hitchens 1994, 237). In 1908 the United States Immigration Commission asked Boas to conduct a study comparing the physical characteristics of immigrants. “One of the most remarkable of the facts brought to light is the changes undergone in head form  by the descendants of Hebrews and Sicilians” (S.E. 1913). The 17,821 immigrants and their children in New York City (Gravlee, Bernard, and Leonard 2003, 126) who Boas studied included: “Bohemians,” “Poles,” “Hungarians,” “Slovaks,” “Hebrews,” “Sicilians” and “Neapolitans” (Boas 1912, 546). Boas determined that the heads of American-born children differ from those of their immigrant parents. Boas concluded, “American-born descendants of immigrants differ in type from their foreign-born parents. The changes which occur among various European types are not all in the same direction. They develop in early childhood and persist throughout life,” and he suggested that the “influence of American environment makes itself felt with increasing intensity, according to the time elapsed between the arrival of the mother and the birth of the child” (1912, 530). Boas signaled that there is a correlation between the body and the American environment.  Boas was not clear as to why exactly this happened, and his observations and methods of measurements came under attack by some, but he reminded his readers, “It will, therefore, be seen that my position is that I find myself unable to give an explanation of the phenomena, and that all I try to do is to prove that certain explanations are impossible…changes of form. It may be that new statistical investigations in other types of environment may give us a grouping of these phenomena which suggests certain groups of causes, clues that can then be followed up by biological methods–it is certainly asking too much to expect the solution of this problem from one series of observations” (1912, 555-556).

This study sparked Boas to be known as ‘the man who did more than any other to lay the ghost of racism in scientific disciplines’ (Gossett 1997, 450 quoted in Gravlee, Bernard, and Leonard 2003, 125). His work pushed against scientific racism, but it was also controversial, as it challenged much of the scholarship and public discourse on race and biology at the time. Boas published his data for another study Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man (1928) as a response to his detractors: “He recognized that his finding was ‘so surprising and unexpected that it requires the most thorough-going criticism before being accepted as definitely established’” (Gravlee, Bernard, and Leonard 2003, 127). Decades later, anthropologists Clarence Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William Leonard (2003) returned to Boas’ data set, which had never fully been analyzed and interpreted. They write of their analysis of the data, “Using methods that were unavailable to Boas, we test his main conclusion that cranial form changed in response to environmental influences within a single generation of European immigrants to the United States. In general, we conclude that Boas got it right. However, we demonstrate that modern analytical methods provide stronger support for Boas’s conclusion” (2003, 125). Boas represents a significant shift in how anthropologists thought of race (race will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5). His approach was integrated in that he drew on all four-fields of anthropology to demonstrate that everyone is fully human (biological anthropology), all societies have complex cultures (cultural anthropology), no cultures are timeless or static (archaeology), and groups have a fully functioning language (linguistic anthropology). His theory of cultural relativism “was a well-elaborated theoretical position that wove together Boas’ ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological and biological research” (Weiss 2016).

With Boas we see a shift in American anthropology to the model of multilinear evolution and a challenge to the very broad generalizations scholars in North American and Europe were making about culture. Multilinear evolution suggests that no one group is more evolved or superior to others, but rather, all cultures will follow their own paths. Whereas unilineal evolution could be pictured as a straight arrow, Boas’ theory may look like a bicycle wheel, with a hub and then spokes reaching in all directions. Each culture is based on its own unique history. This school of thought championed by Boas is known as historical particularism. In his paper The Limitations of the Comparative Method in Anthropology (1896), Boas notes there are similar beliefs and practices across cultures, but that does not mean that we can compare them (as the saying goes “apples to apples”) because their origins may differ: : “cultures arise from different causes, not uniform processes” (Guest 2016,  43). Boas (1896) writes, “It follows from these observations that when we find an analogon of single traits of culture among distant peoples, the presumption is not that there has been common historical source, but that they have arisen independently” (901). He was against making broad generalizations about culture. He argues, “before extended comparisons are made the comparability of the material must be proved” (Boas 1896, 904). For Boas, it was the anthropologist’s job to discern why they have come to exist in different places at particular times: “the object of our investigation is to find the processes by which certain stages of culture have developed” (Boas 1896, 905).

The multilinear model proposed by Boas has been revised in more recent years given the changes that have occurred in the world and subsequently in how we think about culture. If we think of how a bike wheel is usually drawn, the spokes tend not to be touching each other. Boas’ model may not have fully accounted for cultural contact or diffusion leading to paths becoming intertwined with each other, or at least crossing over one another. Nonetheless, Boas was a central figure in debates about race and immigration in the United States (and elsewhere), “correcting prejudices about racial inferiority and evolutionary perspectives of culture. And he positioned himself as an expert able to advise on these issues at the highest political level” (Weiss 2016).

Anthropologists as well as social scientists and scholars in the humanities have leveled critiques at cultural relativism. It comes with challenges as a theory and as methodological approach. One of the biggest arguments against cultural relativism is that it does not permit us to critically examine or condemn practices if we are to understand or accept them solely within the culture and not weigh them against those of another culture. Paul Schmidt (1955) asks, “Are factual judgements as well as value judgements relative to cultural background, or are only value judgements so affected?” (780) There is often a slippage between cultural relativism and moral relativism even though these two concepts are not synonymous. Kenneth Guest (2017) notes, “Anthropologists may at times struggle with situations in which the cultural practices they are studying do not match their own ideas of fairness and justice. The commitment to a research strategy of cultural relativism does not, however, require anthropologists to ignore their own sense of right and wrong, disregard international standards of human rights, or defend the cultural practices of a particular group” (43). Whereas cultural relativism is “an analytical position,” moral relativism can be defined as “a philosophical position which says there can be no universal standards of justice and morality, because every culture is entitled to hold its own view on the nature of right and wrong” (Mulhare 1995). Philosopher James Rachels (1999) argues, “there are some moral rules that all societies will have in common, because those rules are necessary for society to exist” (622, original italics), such as those concerning murder, while others are culturally variable.  The AAA pointed out that international standards such as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) are fall too much in line with underlying ideas of European imperialism, and thus, could perpetuate imperialism. In the end, anthropologists must decide how they will employ international standards of human rights in their own fieldwork and writing.

The Cultural Concept outside of American Anthropology

Let us return to the fields of social anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology is associated with Boas and the American tradition. Social anthropology, as discussed in the previous chapter, is associated more so with European anthropology. Whereas American anthropology is interested in culture, even in the abstract, European anthropologists had an interest in the structure of society and how societies continued to exist. This shows the difference between society and culture. European and North American anthropology shared the culture concept in the earlier part of the twentieth-century, both drawing on E.B. Tylor’s (1871) definition. Boas (1930) wrote, “Culture embraces all the manifestations of social habits of a community, the reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the products of human activities as determined by these habits” (79, cited in Dianteill 2012, III). The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), who spent most of his career at the London School of Economics (LSE) and became a British citizen in 1931 (was born in Austro-Hungarian Empire) had a great influence on the development of British social anthropology and is credited as being the creator of participant observation: the cornerstone method of cultural anthropology in which anthropologists gather data through by living among the people they are studying, learning the language, and participating in everyday life (more on participant observation and the work of Malinowski in the Trorbriand Islands later in the resource). Malinowski (1931) defined culture as, “The social heritage is the key concept of cultural anthropology. It is usually called culture…Culture comprises inherited artifacts, goods, technical processes, ideas, habits and values (621, quoted in Dianteill 2012, III). Both anthropologists, located on either side of the Atlantic, propose a robust definition of culture that includes materials, traditions, practices, rituals, and beliefs. Boas and Malinowski, as well as the subsequent schools of anthropology that they helped found, agree that culture is at the heart of anthropology, but they differed “not in the conception of culture, but rather in the way it is studied” (Dianteill 2012, IV).

As opposed to Boas, who is known for historical particularism, Malinowski is associated with functionalism, which has an interest in social cohesion and how different parts of society function and contribute to the greater whole. Malinowski’s theory of functionalism centers on the ways that cultural elements will meet the needs of individuals and keep society going. Malinowski argued that all people have biological needs, such as food, reproduction, and shelter, that must be met by social institutions and culture. The cultural will serve the biological but will never be equated to it—he was not advocating biological determinism (Dianteill 2012). Malinowski also suggested that humans have other types of needs, such as economic stability, knowledge acquisition, and political organization, that must be met by social institutions and cultural elements. For example, biological reproduction can be met through marriage and family, which have their own cultural patterns and rules. Once the needs of individuals are satisfied through culture, they will be able to make (more substantial) contributions to society.

Malinowski focused on how the cultural and social worked to fulfill individual (biological) needs, but A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955), a British social anthropologist, focused on social structures and how they interacted together to sustain society over time. His theory came to be known as structural functionalism. Radcliffe-Brown viewed society as an organic whole, but the ultimate goal of the social structures was to maintain society. Structural functionalism sees each part of society like an organ in a living organism. Each performs its own duty to keep the organism functioning. One part cannot be studied independently from the others, which means that society is able to preserve itself only through the interactions among the different parts. Radcliffe-Brown maintained that societies need internal stability to survive, but as opposed to society, he did not see social structures as only existing to serve human needs. He focused on how they functioned to serve greater society. Similar to Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown saw the family as the main building block of society. The family unit serves multiple functions: it can instill cultural values into children (part of enculturation, the process of learning culture); provide political, social, and economic statuses, such as class; and produce new members of a society to replace those who have died. These patterns will repeat themselves over time by being passed on from one generation to the next, thus maintaining society and its stability.

Theories of functionalism spread to anthropology in North America during the first part of the twentieth century. In fact, Malinowski was teaching at Yale University when World War II began. He remained there until his death of a heart attack in 1942 and is buried in Connecticut. Functionalism eventually lost its popularity. The approach was critiqued for viewing cultures as static and systematic and not being able to give explanations for social change. Functionalism also was not able to offer why society will develop a specific type of social institution as opposed to another. However, functionalism did highlight that culture is not only abstract and comprised of beliefs or ideas, but rather, it encompasses particular practices and social institutions that help to structure everyday life and enables human societies to exist and continue.

Students of Boas

Boas trained a number of anthropologists at Columbia University who went on to make a name for themselves in the discipline and developed specific approaches to studying culture. They adopted his relativist method in their own work. Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) was one of his first female students, as Boas was said to be very supportive of women in academia. Benedict is most well-known for her book Patterns of Culture (1934) in which she compares three societies: the Zuni (Southwestern United States), the Kwakiutl (Western Canada), and the Dobuans (Melanesia). In it, Benedict “argued that, from the vast array of humanly possible cultures, each particular culture develops on a limited number of ‘patterns’ or ‘configurations’ that dominate the thinking and responses of its members. Each culture develops a distinctive set of feelings and motivations that orients the thoughts and behaviors of its members” (Peoples and Bailey 2012, 77). Benedict linked culture and psychology, arguing that culture influenced personality. She suggested that members of each of the societies she studied tended to have similar personality traits owing to the cultural context. Behavior is not biological, according to Benedict, it is taught. Benedict’s argument was groundbreaking and remains highly influential, but some anthropologists have leveled critique in that it makes too broad of generalizations given that the traits she recounts may belong only to a sub-set of the culture. Nevertheless, Benedict was praised for her empathy. She offered evidence that values and morality make sense in terms of cultural systems and should be respected rather than judged. Her argument also lends itself to discussions of races, as she demonstrates behavior and personality are not linked to genetics, but to culture. Benedict became a professor at Columbia University and one of her students was none other than Margaret Mead.

Mead is a well-known figure even outside of anthropology. In 1976, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, the city of the first women’s rights convention in 1848. In 1979, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by then President Jimmy Carter. Mead did not just write for academic audiences. She had a regular column in the women’s magazine Redbook. In 1978, she wrote a piece for Redbook, “A Proposal: We Need Taboos on Sex at Work.” This came after broad discussions and activism on sexual harassment in the workplace. Mead’s daughter, Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson, retired from her position as Clarence J. Robinson Professor Anthropology and English at George Mason University in 2004.

Mead followed Boas in that she was interested in nature versus nurture in shaping human experience. In her ethnography, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Mead focused on adolescence. In the United States, adolescence was seen as a fraught and difficult time for youth, and if that was universal due to biology, then it would be the same challenging time for adolescents around the world. In Samoa, Mead found sexual freedom amongst youth, as opposed to the repressed and rigid sexuality of American adolescents. This, she proposed, is due to significant role that enculturation plays in shaping personality, character traits, and actions. Mead highlighted the complex relationship between biology and culture and how it can shape human experience. Over the course of her anthropological career, Mead challenged assumptions that biology determines one’s gender and sexuality and that the color of one’s skin can determine intelligence and physical ability, among other things. Mead was highly critical of racial intelligence testing undertaken by the army, for instance. In her article, “The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology,” she critiqued the methodology stating that the tests did not take into account the test taker’s social status and linguistic ability and that it was not possible to define race by a few set categories. Mead was influential as well as controversial, as her work demonstrated that what it means to be male or female varies cross-culturally and that even traits or behaviors that are seen to have strong biological origins are culturally shaped.

The Symbols and Meanings of Culture

The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) conducted fieldwork in North Africa as well as Southeast Asia: “It was indeed a founding mother, Margaret Mead, who taught him and his first wife, Hildred, all she knew about Bali, thereby launching Geertz on to the tiny island which he turned into half of his world-historical subject-matter” (Inglis 2006). Geertz emphasized that culture is constructed of symbols, which are shared amongst people and need to be learned. Symbolic anthropology was developed in the 1960s and progressed through the 1970s with Geertz.  It is critical that these symbols are interpreted within their social and cultural contexts. These symbols are recognized generally by people within the culture, which for Geertz, is why anthropologists must conduct ethnographic fieldwork. Like Mead, Geertz saw the importance of enculturation, as people will learn these symbols and their respective meanings. We can think of a symbol as “something verbal or non-verbal, within a particular language or culture that comes to stand for something else” (Gezon and Kottak 2012, 23). People are not always aware that they are learning or absorbing culture, as this process can also be unconscious.

Geertz was a proponent of the interpretivist approach, in which “anthropologists are to explore culture primarily as a symbolic system in which even simple, seemingly straightforward actions can convey deep meanings” (Guest 2017, 47). For Geertz, “culture is not a model inside people’s heads but rather is embodied in public symbols and actions” (McGee and Warms 2003, 524). Symbolic anthropology is often interested in things like rituals and myths; the meanings behind them can give us a greater understanding of the workings of culture. Geertz is well-known for his 1973 essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” in which he describes a cockfight that he observed in Bali in great detail. Geertz talks about the selection of the birds, how handlers will prepare them for the fight, the actual cockfight itself, and the aftermath. For Geertz, the cocks are an extension of the male handlers’ masculinity and the events and interactions during the cockfight enable us to see power dynamics and social status at work within Balinese culture. It is much more than just a cockfight, which was a common occurrence.

Geertz undertook thick description, which he contrasts to thin description in his book The Interpretations of Cultures (1973). He uses the example of a twitch and a wink to illustrate this difference. On the surface, these are the same movements of the eyelid (thin description), but a wink means something depending on when and where it occurs. This is thick description. Geertz famously discusses “webs of significance” in which practices are situated, and it is the anthropologist’s job to try to better understand these webs. We can do that through thick description, or “looking beneath the surface activities to see the layers of deep cultural meaning in which those activities are embedded” (Guest 2017, 47). The cockfight, for Geertz, is embedded within “webs of significance” that can only be examined through careful description that aims to reveal them. Geertz writes, “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (1973, 5). Actions, even routine or mundane ones, are not just actions done in and of themselves, but they are symbols of deeper meanings and cultural significance.

The interpretivist approach has served as a framework for more recent research in anthropology and many contemporary anthropologists have adopted parts of it. However, one main critique of Geertz’s approach is that it does not account for power relations within a culture or the processes by which cultural symbols and meanings have come to be. It could be stated, “Geertz does not help us with understanding how a particular community’s system of meaning is embedded within larger political, economic, and theological system whose significance can only be understood by examining the historical and social processes of change that shaped and legitimated such a system” (Asad 1983 cited in Pavey 2005, 40). This gap has led anthropologists to question who creates the symbols, or makes them become significant for a culture, and which group’s meaning or interpretation becomes the dominant one. As we will see throughout discussions in this resource, culture is not innocent of power relations or of larger economic, social, or political systems in society, but must be studied and understood within the context of all of these.