什么是Culture

-

Kluckhohn, C. (1965),

Mirror for Man

, Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications

Culture

One of the interesting thins about human beings is that they try to understand themselves

and their own behavior

. While this has been particularly true of Europeans in recent times,

there is no group which has not

developed a scheme or schemes to explain man

’

s actions. To

the insistent human query

“

why?

”

the most exciting illumination anthropology has

to

offer is

that of

the concept of

“

culture

”

. Its explanatory importance is comparable to categories such

as evolution in biology, gravity in physics,

and disease in medicine. A good deal of human

behavior can be understood, and indeed predicted, if we know a people

’

s design for living.

Many acts are neither accidental nor due to personal peculiarities nor caused by

supernatural

forces nor simply

mysterious. Even those of us who pride ourselves on our individualism

follow most of the time a pattern not of our own making. We brush out teeth on arising. We

put on pants

–

not a loincloth or a grass skirt. We eat three meals a day

–

not four or five or

two. We sleep

in bed

–

not in a hammock or on a sheep pelt.

I do not have to know the

individual

and his

life history to be able to predict these and countless other regularities,

including many in the thinking process, of all Americans who are not

incarcerated

in jails or

hospitals for the insane.

All men undergo the same poignant life experiences such as birth, helplessness, illness, old

age, and death. The biological potentialities of the species are the blocks with which cultures

are

built.

The

facts

of

nature

also

limit

culture

forms.

No

culture

provides

patterns

for

jumping over trees or for eating iron ore.

There is thus no

“

either- or

”

between nature and that special form of nurture called culture.

Culture

determinism

is

as

one-sided

as

biological

determinism.

The

two

factors

are

interdependent. Culture arises out of human nature, and its forms are restricted both by

man

’

s

biology

and

by

natural

laws.

It

is

equally

true

that

culture

channels

biological

processes

–

vomiting, weeping, fainting, sneezing, the daily habits of food intake and waste

elimination.

When

a

man

eats,

he

is

reacting

to

an

internal

“

drive

”

,

namely,

hunger

contractions consequent upon the lowering of blood sugar

, but his precise reaction to these

internal stimuli cannot be predicted by physiological knowledge

alone.

Whether a healthy

adult feels hungry twice, three times, or four times a day and the hours at which this feeling

recurs is a question of culture. What he eats is of course limited by availability, but is also

partly regulated by culture. It is a cultural fact that a few generations ago, most Americans

considered tomatoes to be poisonous and refused

to eat

them. Such selective, discriminative

use of the environment is characteristically cultural.

In a still more general sense, too, the

process of eating is channeled by culture. Whether a man eats to live, lives to eat, or merely

eats and lives is only in part an individual matter

, for there are also cultural trends. Emotions

are physiological events. Certain situations will evoke fear in people from any culture.

But

sensations of pleasure, anger

, and lust may be stimulated by cultural cues

that would leave

unmoved someone who has been reared in a different social tradition.

I have said

“

culture channels biological processes.

”

It is more accurate to say

“

the biological

functioning of individuals is modifies

if they have been trained in

certain ways and not in

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