understanding culture

Understanding Culture

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.

T

o

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,

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 tow. 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.

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, sneezi

ng, 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 reg

ulated by culture. It is a biological

fact that some types of berries are poisonous; 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 form 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.

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