2 Chapter 2: Culture

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Discuss what culture is and how it works, by referring to its characteristics
• Identify the variety of cultures that you belong to
• Understand the importance of cultural relativism for the study of culture

Anthropologists study all aspects of culture, but what exactly is “culture”? When we (the authors) first ask students in our introductory anthropology courses what culture means to them, our students typically say that culture is food, clothing, religion, language, traditions, art, music, and so forth. Indeed, culture includes many of these observable characteristics, but culture is also something deeper. Culture is a powerful defining characteristic of human groups that shapes our perceptions, behaviors, and relationships. Culture is a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways.

One reason that culture is difficult to define is that it encompasses all the intangible qualities that make people who they are. Culture is the “air we breathe”: it sustains and comprises us, yet we largely take it for granted. We are not always consciously aware of our own culture. Nineteenth-century British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor defined culture as “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” (1873, 1:1). That’s a lot to include in one concept! If all of that is culture, then what about human experience and activity is not culture?

Consider this scenario. A student comes to class one day, and the instructor says, “I’ve decided that you’re all a bunch of failures and I’m flunking the entire class.” Imagine then that the instructor simply stands there after that announcement, blinking calmly as the class erupts in protest. Now imagine that same scenario with one very slight difference. The instructor announces, “I’ve decided that you’re all a bunch of failures and I’m flunking the entire class.” Then, as the class erupts in protest, the instructor calmly blinks one eye, leaving the other eye open.

What just happened there? Blinking is a biological compulsion common to humans everywhere. Humans blink to keep eyes hydrated and clear of debris. Humans are born knowing how to blink; nobody has to teach us. But if someone deliberately blinks one eye, leaving the other one open, that’s a completely different matter. In fact, leaving one eye open makes a blink a wink. Winking is not a biological necessity. Humans are not born knowing to how to wink, and it takes some practice to learn how to do it. Because it requires deliberate effort and people are not constantly doing it, winking can acquire special meaning in social interactions. In American culture (and many others), a wink often indicates that someone is joking around and that whatever they’ve just said or done should not be taken seriously. Of course, a wink can mean different things in different societies. Moreover, a wink can mean different things in the same society. If someone on a date takes their companion’s hand and gives a cute little wink, the person may have reason to hope the winker is not just joking around.

Characteristics of Culture

American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) used the example of winking to illustrate two important aspects of culture. First, culture is learned. Innate human behaviors—that is, behaviors that people are born with—are biological, not cultural. Blinking is biological. Acquired human behaviors—that is, behaviors that people are taught—are cultural. Winking is cultural. This means that cultural behaviors are not genetically inherited from generation to generation but must be passed down from older members of a society to younger members. This process is called enculturation.

Some aspects of enculturation are deliberate and systematic, such as learning the rules of written punctuation in a language. At some point in an English speaker’s childhood, someone explicitly told them the difference between a question mark and an exclamation point. Most likely, they learned this distinction in school, a fundamental institution of enculturation in many societies. Religious institutions are another common force of enculturation, providing explicit instruction in cultural rules of morality and social interaction. Extracurricular activities such as sports, dance, and music lessons also teach children cultural rules and norms.

While a great deal of very important cultural content is deliberately conveyed in these systematic contexts, the greater part of culture is acquired unconsciously by happenstance—that is, nobody planned to teach it, and no one made an effort to consciously try to learn it. By virtue of growing up in a culture, children learn what certain actions and objects mean, how their society operates, and what the rules are for appropriate behavior.

Many forms of culture are passed down through a combination of deliberate and unconscious processes. Perhaps when you were a child, someone told you what a wink was and showed you how to accomplish one; or perhaps you just witnessed a few winks, figured out what they meant from their contexts, and then learned how to accomplish one through trial and error. Geertz pointed out that there are two important aspects to winking: the meaning and the action. As both are learned, both are cultural. But perhaps more importantly, and Geertz’ second important aspect of culture, both the standardized action of winking and the assumed meaning of this action are commonly known among members of a group. That is, culture is shared.

To say that a group of people shares a culture does not mean all individuals think or act in identical ways. One’s beliefs and practices can vary within a culture depending on age, gender, social status, and other characteristics. Further, an individual is not bound by culture; they can conform to it or not, and work to change the culture if they choose. Still, members of a culture share many things in common.

Much like art and language, culture is also symbolic. A symbol is something that stands for something else, often without a natural connection. Individuals create, interpret, and share the meanings of symbols within their group or the larger society. For example, in U.S. society everyone recognizes a red octagonal sign as signifying “stop.” In other cases, groups within American society interpret the same symbol in different ways. Take the Confederate flag: Some people see it as a symbol of pride in a southern heritage. Many others see it as a symbol of the long legacy of African enslavement, segregation, and racial oppression. Thus, displaying the Confederate flag could have positive or, more often, negative connotations. Cultural symbols powerfully convey either shared or conflicting meanings across space and time. Culture being symbolic captures these beliefs, but belief within culture refers not just to what we “believe” to be right or wrong, true or false. It also refers to all the mental aspects of culture including values, norms, philosophies, worldview, knowledge, the categories we have and use, and so forth.

Anthropologists studying culture are interested in the whole of humanity, in how various aspects of life interact. One cannot fully appreciate what it means to be human by studying a single aspect of our complex histories and societies. Instead, culture is all-encompassing, and must be studied holistically. By using a holistic approach, anthropologists ask how different aspects of human life influence one another. For example, a cultural anthropologist studying gender roles in the southern United States would need to consider economic factors, family structures, laws regarding gender, religious trends, and media representations, among other things. These different aspects of culture influence one another, because they, and culture is integrated.

Culture constantly changes in response to both internal and external factors, it is dynamic. Some parts of culture change more quickly than others. For instance, in dominant American culture, technology changes rapidly while deep seated values such as individualism, freedom, and self-determination change very little over time. Yet, inevitably, when one part of culture changes, so do other parts. This is because nearly all parts of a culture are integrated and interrelated. As powerful as culture is, humans are not necessarily bound by culture; they have the capacity to conform to it or not and even transform it.

While culture is central to making us human, we are still biological beings with natural needs and urges that we share with other animals: hunger, thirst, sex, elimination, etc. Human culture uniquely channels these urges in particular ways and cultural practices can then impact our biology, growth, and development. Culture is interrelated with biology.

Humans are one of the most dynamic species on Earth. Our ability to change both culturally and biologically has enabled us to persist for millions of years and to thrive in diverse environments. In this way, we can say that culture is evolutionary, as it has shaped our evolution

Cultures and “subcultures”

Individuals may belong to various cultures simultaneously. Traditionally, according to many social scientists, the “dominant culture” of a society is the one exemplified by the most powerful group in the society. Taking the United States as an example, Andersen, Taylor and Logio (2015: 36-37) suggest that while it is hard to isolate a dominant culture, there seems to be a “widely acknowledged ‘American’ culture,” epitomized by “middle class values, habits, and economic resources, strongly influenced by . . . television, the fashion industry, and Anglo-European traditions,” and readily thought of as “including diverse elements such as fast food, Christmas shopping, and professional sports.” Philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Appiah (1994: 116) is more pointed, emphasizing America’s historically Christian beginnings, its Englishness in terms both of language and traditions, and the mark left on it by the dominant classes, including government, business, and cultural elites.

In contrast to the dominant culture of a society, are the various “subcultures,” conceived as groups that are part of the dominant culture but that differ from it in important ways. Race and ethnicity can be important bases for the formation of such cultures. Other commonly mentioned bases include geographic region, occupation, social or economic class, and religion. While these cultures are often smaller in terms of numbers or less dominant in the society, they are equally important subjects for anthropological study. Indeed, many anthropologists have stopped using the term ‘subculture’ because these cultures are in no way inferior to any other, or indeed to the dominant culture.

There is also an alternative way of looking at group membership, grounded in the concept of identity rather than of culture, that aims to capture the diverse and dynamic ways that individuals experience belonging to various cultures, though it often critiques a more static view of culture than most anthropologists have today.

Globalization, Lifestyle, and Global Culture

Globalization is a word commonly used in public discourse, but it is often loosely defined in today’s society (much like the word “culture” itself). First appearing in the English language in the 1940s, the term “globalization” is now commonplace and is used to discuss the circulation of goods, the fast and furious exchange of ideas, and the movement of people (Steger 2013). Despite its common use, many people do not define and treat globalization the same way. Some consider it as simply an economic issue while others focus more on the social and political aspects. But the fact that globalization impacts so many aspects of contemporary life make it an ideal topic of study for anthropologists, who pride themselves on taking a holistic, all-encompassing approach to culture.

Globalization most certainly changes the landscape of contemporary social life and has had a profound impact on contemporary cultures. Yet it would be a mistake to think of globalization as a state that emerges without human agency. In most cases, people make decisions regarding whether or not they want to adopt a new product or idea that has been made available to them via globalization. They also have the ability to determine the ways in which that product or idea will be used, including many far different from what was originally intended.

While some aspects of globalization are best studied at the societal level, others are best examined at smaller scales such as the trends visible within specific social classes or even individual choices. The concept of lifestyle refers to the creative, reflexive, and sometimes even ironic ways in which individuals perform various social identities. Within this framework, the rise of a consumerist economy enables individuals to exhibit their identities through the purchase and conspicuous use of various goods and services. Globalization has increased the variety of goods available for individuals to purchase, media for them to consume, and ideas for them to espouse—as well as people’s awareness of all of these—thus expanding the range of identities that can be performed. In some situations, identity is an individual project, with conspicuous consumption used to display one’s sense of self. People have opportunities to choose between global styles of clothing, music, cuisine and more to express themselves and contrast themselves with others (this can raise issues of cultural appreciation vs. cultural appropriation though!).

Cultural Relativism (versus Ethnocentrism)

The guiding philosophy of modern anthropology is cultural relativism—the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their culture rather than our own. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor do they view other ways of doing things as inferior. Instead, anthropologists seek to understand people’s beliefs within the system they have for explaining things.

The opposite of cultural relativism is ethnocentrism, the tendency to view one’s own culture as the most important and correct and as a measuring stick by which to evaluate all other cultures that are largely seen as inferior and morally suspect. As it turns out, many people are ethnocentric to some degree; ethnocentrism is a common human experience. Why do we respond the way we do? Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we believe what we believe? Most people find these kinds of questions difficult to answer. Often the answer is simply “because that is how it is done.” People typically believe that their ways of thinking and acting are “normal”; but, at a more extreme level, some believe their ways are better than others.

Ethnocentrism is not a useful perspective in contexts in which people from different cultural backgrounds come into close contact with one another, as is the case in many cities and communities throughout the world. People increasingly find that they must adopt culturally relativistic perspectives in governing communities and as a guide for their interactions with members of the community. For anthropologists, cultural relativism is especially important. We must set aside our innate ethnocentric views in order to allow cultural relativism to guide our inquiries and interactions such that we can learn from others.

Terms You Should Know

Culture

Enculturation

The Characteristics of Culture: Learned, Shared, Symbolic, All-encompassing, Integrated, Dynamic,  Interrelated with Biology, Not bound, Evolutionary

Globalization

Lifestyle

Cultural Relativism

Ethnocentrism

Study Questions

1. What are the characteristics of culture? How do they fit together to describe how culture works?
2. How many cultures can you belong to? How do you demonstrate that belonging?
3. What is the relevance of cultural relativism outside of anthropology in contemporary life?

References

Anderson, M. L., Taylor, H. F. & Logio, K. A. 2015. Sociology: The essentials, 8th ed.  Stamford, CT: Cengage.

Appiah, K. A. 1994. Race, culture, identity: Misunderstood connections.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

Steger, Manfred. 2013. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1873. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

A Derivative Work From

Brown, Nina, et al. 2020. Perspectives, an Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition.

Hasty, Jennifer, et al. 2022. Introduction to Anthropology,

Weil, Nolan. 2017. Speaking of Culture.