Chapter 3, What is Culture?

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Tylor’s Definition and Its Implications

“The most famous definition of culture was published in 1871 by that giant figure in the history of anthropology, Edward B. Tylor…’Culture’, he said, ‘is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.'” (p. 31)

“What does a culture have that a society does not?”  (p. 32)

“We now examine three of them [the terms from Tylor’s definition] in a somewhat wider context:  the term ‘complex whole,’ which points  to the order of culture; the term ‘acquiring,’ which points to the process of culture; and the term ‘morals,’ which points (with the help of art and custom) to the goals of culture.”  (p. 35)

“Let us state a general proposition.  Wherever you view it — on a worldwide scale or in a small community or even as one family — every culture consists of three interrelated dimensions:  order, process, and goals.  It is impossible to think of any culture without all three.”  (p. 35)

The Order of Culture

“Cultures may be constructed, first of all, in terms of spatial models.” (p. 36)

“The total effect [of flying above the city of Boston, for instance] is that of a complex whole that we view, as it were, ‘horizontally’ from above.” (p. 36)

“But this simple spatial model [concentric, horizontal circles] is incomplete until we recognize that the widening circles are not in fact merely horizontal.  Cultures are ‘vertical’, too, in that their orders extend up and down as well as sidewise.  If we think of our model now as a kind of elaborate cake, we at once perceive that cultures consist of layers or strata — of people living above and below one another — and we can view their different habits, beliefs, arts, morals, and practices only by slicing the cake.  It symbolizes the fact that people live on different levels according to their prestige, income, kinship patterns, class status.”  (p. 37)

“But, actually, Boston as an American subculture has a fascinating history, too.  A physicist might say that it is in a ‘space-time continuum’ — that it is not three-dimensional, after all, but four-dimensional.  Culture, in short, has a past, present, and future as well as horizontal and vertical structure.” (p. 37)

“As we shall see, all cultures evolve through time in some form or other, although anthropologists argue with one another about exactly what evolution means to the temporal order of culture.”  (p. 38)

The Process of Culture

“Process is really the aspect concerned with the dynamics of cultural change.”  (p. 38)

“Let us try to exemplify this contention by recalling an earlier one — that the central process of culture is acquiring.  Anthropologists often use the term enculturation to characterize this process.  A child becomes enculturated as he gradually acquires the beliefs, morals, habits, and other characteristics of the culture into which he is born, and as he then adapts and modifies them to suit the changing space-time continuum of his own cultural experience.”  (p. 38)

“Enculturation, however, is manifested in a number of more specific processes, one of the most important being acculturation — the process by which members of one culture acquire some of the characteristics of another culture through contact — usually direct continuous contact over a fairly long period of time.” (p. 38)

“Also fundamental is the process of assimilation.  When acculturation continues so long and so persistently that you can no longer distinguish one culture, or even some phase of that culture, from another, then we say that assimilation has occurred.”  (p. 39)

“Bostonians whose ancestors came to America in the eighteenth century are more assimilated than many Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans, although one also finds in both these groups examples of fairly complete assimilation.  In speech, for example, the younger generation of Irish-Americans have lost so much of the brogue of their grandparents that only an expert might detect their original culture by listening to them.  Yet, in some of their customs and values they are by no means completely assimilated.  As a matter of fact, Irish-Americans have made a deep acculturative impress upon the remainder of the Boston subculture through their political acumen and the power of their religous organizations.”  (p. 39)

“Why has there been so much unrest on that great continent [Africa]?  Part of the reason, surely, is the boomerang effect called nativism — a process resulting from the attempt of one culture to impose itself too rapidly upon another culture.  Especially in South Africa, the nativist reaction to foreign culture is one of resistance, hostility, and violence.”  (p. 40)

“Of great importance to teachers is the realization that one becomes enculturated by no means merely in a verbal or intellectual way, but viscerally, muscularly, emotionally.  One acquires the habits of cultural membership not in the mind alone, but in habits of action and practice.”  (p. 40)

The Goals of Culture

“The first problem is whether every culture has its own unique goals that belong to it alone, or whether there are some goals that cut across and are common to many cultures.  Here is the cultural version of the old problem of relative and universal values.”  (p. 40)

Using the example of James Michener’s novel Hawaii, “the relativist is one who says we must evaluate every culture by its own goals and not by our goals.  If we judge the morals of the indigenous Hawaiian culture by our values, we commit the fallacy of ethnocentrism — of assuming that all ethnic groups should be praised or blamed according to whether they reflect our own central values.”  (p. 41)

“In any case, does it follow from the fact of any universal values that they are also necessarily desirable — that they are worth believing in?  That is to say, is it not one thing to describe values scientifically, as anthropologists try to do, but quite another thing to show that these values are worth committing ourselves to — that they are goals we can wholeheartedly fight for?”  (p. 42)

“Suppose we agree that there is a sense in which ‘all men are brothers’ and, hence, that brotherhood is a kind of universal value.  But how desirable is it really?  The test of its desirability lies in whether we in the United States, for example, would be willing to join with people of other nations in a common form of political organization where traditional relativistic values are, at least in part, abrogated in favor of the universal value of world citizenship.”  (p. 42)