What does it mean to be human?
Culture
1. Is the concept of
“human” a cultural
category?
2. How much of
what we are is due
to our culture?
1. Is “human” a
natural category,
just out there in
the world?
2. How much of
what we are is due
to our biology
1. Is “human” a cultural category?
• To reason intelligibly about these questions, we’ll
need to learn more about the “culture” concept -- and
that’s the purpose of today’s class.
• To reason intelligibly about these questions, we’ll
need to learn more about the “culture” concept -- and
that’s the purpose of today’s class.
• But an initial observation: the parallel here to the
“brown eyes/blue eyes” problem.
• To reason intelligibly about these questions, we’ll
need to learn more about the “culture” concept -- and
that’s the purpose of today’s class.
• But an initial observation: the parallel here to the
“brown eyes/blue eyes” problem.
- Is “human” something picked out by different
peoples around the planet?
• To reason intelligibly about these questions, we’ll
need to learn more about the “culture” concept -- and
that’s the purpose of today’s class.
• But an initial observation: the parallel here to the
“brown eyes/blue eyes” problem.
- Is “human” something picked out by different
peoples around the planet?
- How is the term actually used by people?
• To reason intelligibly about these questions, we’ll
need to learn more about the “culture” concept -- and
that’s the purpose of today’s class.
• But an initial observation: the parallel here to the
“brown eyes/blue eyes” problem.
- Is “human” something picked out by different
peoples around the planet?
- How is the term actually used by people?
• These are questions we can study. In fact,
anthropology insists that we study them.
Note:
Many people have heard that various American
Indian peoples have a auto-designation of the group
that translates as “human being.” The Cheyenne
Indians, for example, are said to call themselves the
“human beings.”
Since this course is about discernment in relation to
real world phenomena, helping you to make
judgments about what you see, hear, read, let’s look
at one popular culture representation -- the move
“Little Big Man” from 1970.
1970 American movie: “Little Big Man”
“The ‘Human Beings’ my son, they believe
everything is alive, not only men and
animals, but also water, earth, stone, and
also the things from them like this hair…”
“But the ‘Whitemen’, they believe
everything is dead, stone, earth, animals and
people, even their own people….
that is the difference.”
The concept of “man” = “human being”?
• Geertz’s article uses one of the existing
definitions, but challenged within feminist
interpretations as encoding an implicit bias:
man (man) n., pl. men (men).
1. An adult male human being.
2. A human being regardless of sex or age; a
person.
“… all men are created equal.”
• Used in the American Declaration of
Independence -- 1776
• A product of Enlightenment thinking and
discourse.
• Questioned in the 19th century.
- Did it include “women”?
- Did it include non-property holders?
- What about “slaves.”
2. What is culture and how much
of what we are is due to our
culture?
General definition of culture = those ways
of (1) behaving in the world (including
speaking); (2) cognizing the world
(including beliefs); and (3) valuing the world
insofar as they are socially learned, socially
transmitted.
Concept of “replication of culture” and of the “trait.”
~
=
e' 1
e1
A
B
C
e1 = element of culture; referred to in the older
literature as a cultural "trait." Examples of traits:
a song, a myth, a basket weaving style, a belief, a
technique for hunting, a hair style, etc., etc. A way
of speaking: Valley Girl talk. “Excellent” from
“Wayne’s World.”
Second
Nature
It was not easy for thinkers to tease apart
the transmission of culture (as social
learning) from biology (as genetic
learning).
We have the classical notion, going to
back to Cicero, of "second nature". The
medieval dictum was: consuetudo altera
natura est, translated repeatedly into
English as "habit (or custom) is second
nature."
Note that one question surrounding the
taboo article is: how much of athletic
performance is linked to training
(second nature) versus genes (nature)?
Conflation of
nature and
culture
But the idea of custom was
nevertheless conflated with
nature in practice, precisely
because (as mentioned in the first
class) the pathways of culture and
genes are often the same ones -namely, family relationships.
Partly for this reason that we'll be
talking about marriage and
descent later in the semester.
What is the relationship of social
parenthood to biological
transmission?
The latter part of the 19th century
and the first half of the 20th century
saw an explosion of interest in the
variability of habits and customs
around the globe. Careful
observation of local patterns,
coupled with a growing awareness
that people could acquire new
habits by virtue of social interaction
and learning (migration), led to the
concept of culture.
Explosion of
interest in
culture
“C”ulture ------------> “c”ulture
The prior notion of culture, going back to the
early 19th nineteenth century, was of Culture
with a capital "C." This is the idea of culture as
cultivation. Only some ("cultured") people had
it. Edward Burnett Tylor in 1871 referred to
"Primitive Culture." Especially in the early
twentieth century in Germany and in the U.S.,
the term "culture" came to be employed for
socially transmitted habits among the various
peoples around the globe. There was a
proliferation of interest in culture, in this sense.
Unilinear
evolution
How did researchers make
sense of the diversity of
customs? Prior to late
nineteenth century, societies
organized into unilinear
evolution schemes (for
example, the stages of band,
tribe, chiefdom, state; or
savagery, barbarism,
civilization; or primitive
communism, feudalism,
capitalism, true communism).
The idea was that every
"people" had to pass through
the same stages.
The idea of unilinear evolution
preceded Darwin, and is distinct
from the Darwinian evolution
discussed by Prof. Mann. The
latter is not unilinear, but treelike and branching. The notion
of unilinear evolution was
associated with the conflation of
genetically and culturally
transmitted learning.
Assumption that a "people" had
to pass through the various
stages. Was this an evolution in
their biology or their culture?
The distinction was not clearly
made.
Unilinear and
non-unilinear
evolution
Diffusionism
rejects unilinear
evolution
The idea of cultural diffusion
arises with the rejection of
unilinear evolution in
anthropology in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Diffusion
involves invention of a cultural
trait (for example, the plough or
the wheel), and then its copying,
through processes of replication,
by neighboring people.
Invention spreads in wave-like
fashion. Hence, by plotting the
occurrence of traits on a map,
can figure out where the center
of diffusion was.
Trait frequency
diminishes with distance
from the locus of
invention
Locus of
invention
Geographical diffusion
of culture traits
Culture area
concept
As opposed to evolutionary
stages, diffusionism introduced
the idea of the culture area, a
geographically defined region
within which intensive sharing
of cultural traits has occurred.
Many traits clinal (as Dr. Mann
described in the case of
genetics), so that boundaries
cannot always be readily
distinguished. The culture area
concept is a way of dividing up
the globe into regions based on
the diffusion of traits, but the
boundaries are not sharp.
Culture and
linguistic
drift
Diffusionism assumed that
invention of traits was extremely
difficult and that replication was
easy. In fact, culture tends to
change as it is replicated, and it is
extremely difficult to replicate traits
with precision. Language (like
culture generally) changes through a
process of drift over time, as Dr.
Liberman will tell us about
subsequently. The notion linguistic
drift first developed by the
anthropologist and linguist Edward
Sapir. The notion of cultural drift
develops shortly thereafter. Sapir's
ideas prior to the development of
the concept of genetic drift (by
Sewall Wright) in biology.
As traits or elements are
transmitted, they tend to be
reshaped in conformity with other
aspects of culture carried by people.
Hence, the culture within a group
tends to exhibit certain
characteristic patterns or styles or
structures. These observations gave
rise to the notion of a culture as a
structured whole, shared throughout
a group of people. Culture, in this
sense, is the property of a group.
Cultures as
internally
structured
“We are, in sum, incomplete or
unfinished animals who complete or
finish ourselves through culture..." (49);
"Between what our body tells us and
what we have to know in order to
function, there is a vacuum we must fill
ourselves, and we fill it with information
(or misinformation) provided by our
culture" (50);
"Our ideas, our values, our acts, even our
emotions, are, like our nervous system
itself, cultural products — products
manufactured, indeed, out of tendencies,
capacities, and dispositions with which
we were born..." (50).
Clifford
Geertz
Is he right to
downplay the
concept of
“human”?