Unit-6-culture

Unit-6-culture

第六课

. Culture

文化

1

．

One of the interesting things 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 our 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 a 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.

2

．

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.

3

．

There is thus not “either

-

or” between nature and that

special form of nurture called culture. Culture determinism is as

one-side 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 law. It is

equally true that culture channels biological process

—

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

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Unit-6-culture

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 culture. 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 culture 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.

4

．

I have said “culture channels biological process.” It is

more accurate

to say “the biological functioning of individual is

modified if they have been trained in certain ways and not in

others.” Culture is created and transmitted by people. However,

culture, like well known concepts of the physical sciences, is a

convenient abstraction. One never sees gravity. One sees bodies

falling in regular ways. One never sees an electromagnetic field.

Yet certain happenings that can be seen may be given a neat

abstract formulation by assuming that the electromagnetic field

exists. Similarly, one never sees culture as such. What is seen are

regularities in the behavior or artifacts of a group that has adhered

to a common tradition. The regularities are due to the existence of

mental blueprints for the group.

5

．

Culture is a way of thinking, feeling, believing. It is the

group’s knowledge stores up (in memories of men; in books and

objects) for future use. We study the products of this “mental”

activity; the overt behavior, the speech and gestures and activities

of people, and the tangible results of these things such as tools,

houses, cornfields, and what not. It has been customary in lists of

“culture traits” to include such things as watches or lawbooks. This

is a convenient way of thinking about them, but in the solution of

any important problem we must remember that they, in

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Unit-6-culture

themselves, are nothing bur metals, paper, and ink. What is

important is that some men know how to make them, others set a

value on them, are unhappy without them, direct their activities in

relation to them, or disregard them.

6

．

“culture,” then, is “a theory.” But if a theory is not

contradicted by any relevant fact and if it helps us to understand a

mass of otherwise chaotic facts, it is useful. Darwin’s contribution

was much less the accumulation of new knowledge than the

creation of a theory which put in order data already known. An

accumulation of facts, however large, is not more a science than a

pile of bricks is a house. Anthropology’s demonstration that the

most weird set of customs has a consistency and an order is

comparable to modern psychiatry’s showing that there is meaning

and purpose in the apparently incoherent talk of the insane. In

fact, the inability of the older psychologies and philosophies to

account for the strange behavior of madmen and heathens was

the principal factor that forced psychiatry and anthropology to

develop theories of the unconscious and of culture.

7

．

A culture constitutes a storehouse of the pooled learning

of the group. A rabbit starts life with some innate responses. He

can learn from his own experiences and perhaps from observing

other rabbits. A human infant is born with fewer instincts and

greater plasticity. His main task is to learn the answers that

persons he will never see, persons long dead, have worked out.

Once he has learned the formulas supplied by the culture of his

group, most of his behavior becomes almost as automatic and

unthinking as if it were instinctive. There is a tremendous amount

of intelligence behind the making of a radio, but not much is

required to learn to turn it on.

8

．

The members of all human societies face some of the

same unavoidable dilemmas, posed by biology and other facts of

the human situation. This is why the basic categories of all culture

are so similar. Human culture without language is unthinkable. No

culture fails to provide for aesthetic expression and aesthetic

delight. Every culture supplies standardized orientations toward

the deeper problems, such as death,. Every culture is designed to

perpetuate the group and its solidarity, to meet the demands of

individuals for an orderly way of life and for satisfaction of

biological needs.

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