Pablo Avila
Mary Fjeldstad, Instructor
CSE0099.0181
March 29, 2007
Vocabulary chart
Key Word
Paragraph
Meaning
1. legacy
1
Heritage.
2. cliques
2
3. insistent
3
4. abhorrent
4
Hateful, detestable.
5. gait
5
The way a person walks.
6. Instantaneous
6
Immediate.
7. poignant
9
A group of people who keep
others out.
Persistent, to keep on doing
something.
Deeply moving, highly
emotional.
Others?
8. Query
3 and 6
Question.
Culture
1. Kluckhohn states that the term culture can have two different meanings, depending on the
context. What does culture mean in ordinary speech? What does culture mean to an
anthropologist?
On one hand, Culture in ordinary words means to have read a lot, and be prepared to talk about
any topic at any moment; also, a man of culture is the person who is familiar with history,
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literature, philosophy, etc. Also, a cultured person is who can speak languages others than his
own. On the other hand, to an anthropologist culture means to be human, that is, to be human is
to be cultured. There is a culture to which we all belong as human beings, and then, we have the
specific cultures such as Russian, American, etc.
2. a. Many people feel that the way we eat, drink, marry, walk, and talk are somehow
“instinctual” or “natural.” Give some examples from the text that contradict this.
When the author tells us about how an American woman can think about the marriage, she finds
hateful the idea of sharing her husband with other women; on the contrary, a Koryak woman
finds so selfish the idea of restricting her husband to other women (paragraph 4), that tells us
about the different concepts of being married in different cultures. A very good example to
answer this question is the one the author gives on paragraph 6, he tells us about a woman who
gave her guests rattlesnake, and the answer was immediate and different among people from a
different culture.
b. Explain what Kluckhohn means by his description of people’s reaction to eating rattlesnake:
“A biological process is caught in a cultural web.”
I think there are different reactions on some people when they try or taste something that they do
not eat on their culture, sometimes there are some typical foods and drinks, and even ways of
eating that make a big difference between many cultures all over the world. I think what the
author was trying to tell is that many people react at different ways when they share those typical
ways of eating with others from different cultures.
3. Kluckhohn cites many institutions that have been found in every single one of the hundreds of
cultures that have been studied. How does he explain the presence of so many similarities among
the peoples of the world?
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There are some biological reasons that keep cultures on the same line, all human beings
experience birth, helplessness, illness, old age, and death. For that reason, we have the same
basic experience that enriches our lives on our culture and that is why cultures have many
similarities among people from all over the world.
4. Explain what Kluckhohn means by his final point, “the facts of nature also limit culture
forms.”
Nature makes human beings different one from the other; however, there are some basic patterns
that keep cultures at the same level, on the same line. All cultures come from the same point; the
biological potentialities. Finally, we all experience the same process of living, and that is why
they are the same at bottom.
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