CULTURE

MODULE 2
• “Culture is a way of seeing things, a way of thinking. Culture is a way of
making sense. Culture is what prevents some people from ever thinking
that crickets could be classed as “food”. Culture is also what fills our head
in the process of thinking in a particular way… There is materiality to
culture. It is embodied and enacted.” (Engelke 2018, pp. 27-28).
• “Culture is a system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts,
and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people.
Culture includes shared norms, values, symbols, mental maps of reality,
and material objects as well as structures of power in which our
understanding of the world is shaped, reinforced, and challenged.
Ultimately, the culture that we learn shapes our ideas of what is normal
and natural, what we can say and do, and even what we think.” (Guest
2016, p. 33)

Source: Guest 2016; Guest 2018; Engelke 2018

• “the culture that we learn has the potential to shape our ideas of
what is normal and natural, what we can say and do, and even what
we can think.” (Guest 2018, p. 36)
• It is not biologically determined. It is discursive.
Culture is Learned and Taught
Source: Guest 2018
Culture is Shared Yet Contested
Source: Guest 2018
Culture is Symbolic and Material
Source: Guest 2018
Norms
• Refers to ideas or rules about people’s behavior towards situations
and each other
• What is “normal” and “appropriate”
• Not necessarily written down
• Learned
• May be contested and changed

Source: Guest 2018

Values
• ”Fundamental beliefs about what is important, what makes a good
life, and what is true, right, and beautiful.” (Guest 2018, p. 39)
• Reflects standards guiding people’s behavior and goals that people
deem important for themselves, their families, and their community
• These are powerful tools.

Source: Guest 2018

Symbols
• Things that represent something else.
• Symbols may change meaning over time and from culture to culture.

Source: Guest 2018

Mental Maps of Reality
• “Cultural classifications of what kinds of people and things exist, and
the assignment of meaning to those classifications”

• Source: Guest 2018

Ethnocentrism, Cultural
Relativism, and Human Rights
Ethnocentrism
• The belief that one’s culture is the norm or even superior.
• It is the tendency to use one’s own culture to judge and evaluate the
culture of another.

Source: Guest 2018

Cultural Relativism
• Understanding a group’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural
context.
• The assumption is that shared norms, values, beliefs, and practices make
sense to the participants in a culture.
• The anthropologist’s task is first to understand a culture’s internal logic and
system of meaning.
• The anthropologist seek to represent the diversity of human life and
culture with objectivity, accuracy, and sensitivity.
• Different from moral relativism.

Source: Guest 2018

The Development of the Idea of
Culture
Early Evolutionary Frameworks
• Early anthropologists posited that all cultures evolve through the
same sequence of states known as unilineal cultural evolution.
American Historical Particularism
• The idea that cultures develop in specific ways , not uniform
processes, because of their unique histories.
• Anthropologists need to understand the history of particular societies
to understand how they developed.
• Culture shapes human life. Anthropologists explore the unique
development of each culture.
Functionalism
• Emerged in the early 20th century and associated with Bronislaw
Malinowski
• Focuses on social institutions and their relationship in the social system
through the analogy of organism.
• ”Functionalist analyses examine the social significance of phenomena, that
is, the function they serve a particular society in maintaining the whole”
(Porth et al. n.d.).
• According to Malinowski, individuals have physiological needs and
instrumental needs that are met by social institutions. Institutions have
members, a charter, a set of norms or rule, activities, material apparatus,
and a function.

Sourch: Porth et al. n.d.; Barnard 2004; Eriksen 2001

British Structural Functionalism
• Associated with AR Radcliffe-Brown
• Structural functionalists viewed societies as living organisms. Through fieldwork they sought to
analyse each part of the “body”
• Each part of society, such as kinship, religious, political, and economic structures, fit together and
had its unique function with the larger structure.
• Society worked to maintain an internal balance or equilibrium to keep the system working.
• Individuals don’t have much influence. They are only recipients of statuses or roles.
• Social structure was defined as the sum of mutually defined statuses in a society. It is composed
of social relationships that made up a society.
• Each institution had a function that upholds the maintenance and cohesion of society.
• Individuals are a social product.

Source: Eriksen 2001; Guest 2018

Culture and Personality
• Associated with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead
• Benedict argued that cultures had a distinct personality traits, which are
present in cultural symbols and categories. She asserted that there are two
personality types: Dionysian cultures (extroverted, pleasure-seeking,
passionate) and Apollonian cultures (introverted, harmonious, puritanical,
tempered, and peaceful).
• Benedict saw cultures as perfectly consistent.
• Cultural differences are macropsychological.
• Mead’s interest was on the socialization of children to understand cultural
variations in personality.

Source: Eriksen 2001

Structuralism
• Founded by Claude Levi-Strauss who was interested in how the
human mind functions – how it create connections and order the
world in particular ways; focuses on the structures of the brain.
• Binary oppositions – people order the world with the help of
contrasts. However, there are intermediaries that has a relationship
between the two contrasts but transcend them.

Source: Eriksen 2001

Interpretive anthropology
• Associated with Clifford Geertz.
• Geertz’s idea of “thick description” states that good ethnographic account
must include a lot of contextual description for the ethnographic data to be
understandable. It also needs an analysis of the deep cultural meanings of
cultural activities.
• He asserts that the entire analysis of ethnography has to be interpretive.
• Cultures are texts that can be read. They are integrated through native
concepts and meaningful categories. They are expressed through
meaningful communication.
• Seemingly straightforward actions can convey deep meanings.

Source: Eriksen 2001; Guest 2018

Culture and Power
Power
• The ability or potential to bring about change through action or influence,
either one’s own or that of a group or institution.
• This may include the ability to influence through force or threat of force.
• It is everywhere and individuals participate in systems of power in complex
ways.
• Power reflects stratification or the uneven distribution of resources and
privileges. As a result, some people are able to participate more fully in the
culture than others.

Source: Guest 2018

Power and Cultural Institutions
• Culture includes powerful institutions created by people to promote
and maintain their core values such as schools, religious institutions,
media, family, medicine, government, courts, police, and the military.

Source: Guest 2018

Culture and Hegemony
• The ability to create consent and agreement within a population
• Cultural institutions, such as media, schools, and religion, have the power
to shape, often unconsciously, what people think is normal, natural, and
possible. This affects the scope of human interaction and interaction.
• In the hegemony of ideas, some thoughts and actions become unthinkable,
and group members develop a set of “beliefs” about what is normal and
appropriate that come to be seen as natural “truths”.
• Michel Foucault and the book Discipline and Punish

Source: Guest 2018

Human Agency
• The potential power of individuals and groups to contest cultural
norms, values, mental maps of reality, symbols, institutions, and
structures of power.
• Power is not absolute, and dominance is not complete.

Source: Guest 2018

Agency and Society
• Raymond Firth suggested – from his ethnography in Tikopia – that people
freely relate to norms. They also have to improvise and make their own
decisions in order to act. Hence, they can modify social structure.
• According to Fredrik Barth, social phenomena can be understood through
individuals, their actions, and their relationships. He talked about
transactions between agents.
• Society as discursive and constantly negotiated.
• Bourdieu and the theory of practice. Bourdieu was interested in power and
how it is distributed differentially in society causing unequal choice. He
married the idea of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. According to him, people
choose but do not choose freely as it is mediated by a doxic habitus.

Source: Eriksen 2004

More about culture
• ’Culture’ as product of history
• Culture identities as ‘dynamic, fluid and constructed situationally in
particular places and times’ (Wright 1998, p. 9)
• ‘’Cultures’ are not, nor ever were, naturally bounded entities’ (ibid.)
• Culture as a system of interactions that result into a cultural logic
• Culture, however, is a contested (i.e. fields of power, resistance, etc)
‘process of meaning-making’ (ibid.). It is also negotiable.
Problematique
• Fixed people into areas which the West could colonise and intervene in.
• ’Cultures’ that were studied were embedded in forms of power and control
(i.e. orientalism, CIA and social science)
• It was used to justify prejudice, xenophobia, ethnic cleansing, exclusion (as
in South African apartheid)
• Boundedness, territoriality, discreteness, fixity of culture in a particular
‘homogenous’ group within a bounded space
• Did not account for transnationalism, mobility, arbitrariness of space
• Homogenised ‘culture’ by focusing on the ‘authentic culture’
• Defined characteristics, which are unchanging
• Defined culture in terms of checklists
Biology vs Culture
Nature vs Nurture
• Culture and environment have roles in shaping our lives and bodies,
which produces variety across cultures.
• “shared biological needs do not ensure shared cultural patterns”
(Guest 2018, p. 54).
How is culture created?
• “Culture does not emerge out of the blue. It is created over time,
shaped by people and the institutions they establish in relationship to
the environment around them.”
The creation of culture
- Capture of symbols and meanings through dominance (the dominant can
define hegemonic definitions and perspectives) – e.g. the idea of a nuclear,
heteronormative family (as a social construct)
- Three stages:
- (1) seizing power to redefine symbols that guide particular view of the
world, norms, behaviour, and what constitutues as ‘reality’ (e.g. Catholic
church and LGBT; Duterte and drugs)
- (2) norms, perspectives, doxa are institutionalised and ’works through non-
agentive power’ (Wright 1998, p. 9)
- (3) ’a key term which carries a new way of thinking about one aspect of life
enters other domains (outside the activities of the state) and becomes a
diffused and prevalent way of thinking in everyday life.’ (ibid.)
Culture and Consumption
• Tied with capitalism and the goal to keep the economy growing.
• Culture of consumerism includes norms, values, beliefs, and
institutions. This has become commonplace and accepted as normal.
The desire to acquire consumer goods to enhance one’s lifestyle has
been cultivated by this culture.
• This is reinforced by advertising. It is a powerful tool of enculturation.
Culture and Globalisation
• Diffusion of cultures
• Syncretism
• Participation in global culture
• Cosmopolitanism and exposure to different peoples, ideas, and
products
Group Activity
• Identify things that you own such as electronics, school supplies,
clothing, accessories, cosmetics and grooming items, mode of
transportation, household furnishings, and appliances (you may add
more).
• Answer the following question: Are there differences based on
gender, age, race, or ethnic identity? Where were things made, and
what does that suggest about globalization? What did all of these
things cost (expensive or cheap)? Identify the things that you bought
because of need and those because of want. For all the items you
identify as things you want more than what you absolutely need, ask
yourself how the desire to acquire them was aroused and cultivated.
Barnard, A 2004, History and Theory in Anthropology, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Eriksen, TH 2004, What is Anthropology?, Pluto Press, London.
Guest, KJ 2016, Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age,
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York.
Guest, KJ 2018, Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age [2nd
edn], W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York.
Porth, E, Neutzling, K & Edwards, J n.d., ‘Functionalism’, Anthropological Theories,
Department of Anthropology, The University of Alabama, accessed 13
August 2018,
<http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Function
alism>.
Wright, S 1998, ‘The Politicization of ‘Culture’’, Anthropology Today, vol. 14, no. 1,
pp. 7-15