The Cultural Approach to History

Caroline F. Ware

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839744013
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The volume written by the renowned historian, Caroline F. Ware, investigates the impact that changes in society and culture that can influence the writing of history and the way in which the past is evaluated.
"As Louis Adamic has pointed out, it is to Ellis Island rather than to Plymouth Rock that a great part of the American people trace their history in America. More people have died in industrial accidents than in subduing the wilderness and fighting the Revolution. It is these people rather than the frontiersmen who constitute the real historical background and the heroic tradition of the mass of urban Americans.
The attempt to write American history from the bottom up started a generation ago with the study of the frontier; it has recently extended into the study of local communities and culturally homogeneous regions. In the still unexplored history of the non-dominant cultural groups of the industrial cities lies the story of an emerging industrial culture that represents the dynamic cultural frontier of modern America."

PART ONE: TECHNIQUES OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

SOME MAJOR conceptual tools with which to apply the cultural approach to the field of history are considered in this section. The first chapter discusses the concept of culture as used by the anthropologist; the next two chapters discuss many of the same concepts from the point of view of the social psychologist.

Both viewpoints are essential; they supplement rather than compete with each other; they represent different points of focus in a totality in which, both would agree, no dividing line exists. The cultural anthropologist focuses on the society; the social psychologist focuses on the individual in that society. But both recognize that there can be no division between society on the one hand and the individual on the other. Society does not exist apart from the individuals who compose it; the individual is what he is by virtue of the society of which he is a part. Both cultural anthropologist and social psychologist are concerned with the process by which culture shapes individuals and is at the same time a product of their activity. The cultural anthropologist looks at the process in terms of the patterning of culture; the social psychologist views the same process in terms of the impact of the cultural processes on the individual and his reactions thereto. The two meet in the concept of “personality,” the “individual-in-society.”

SOCIETY AS VIEWED BY THE ANTHROPOLOGIST{3} — GEOFFREY GORER

SOCIAL anthropology is the study of human beings, living together in society, and of their culture.{4} I should like to emphasize the four concepts posited in this sentence. Anthropology is concerned with human beings—that is to say, with a certain type of animal. As an animal, man has certain biological needs and tendencies, which are imposed by his physiological make-up, and certain biological rhythms imposed by his physiological growth. Among the biological needs common to human animals can be listed the necessity for man to feed himself, to reproduce himself, to control the immediate environment, and to live in groups. Among the biological tendencies can be listed intercommunication through speech, dreaming, and an attempt to understand the immediate and remote environments.

Anthropology is concerned with people living together. Except from the point of view of methodology, anthropology is not concerned with the isolated individual per se. It is concerned with the relations between individuals and between groups. To understand the motives of interpersonal relations in a given society, it may be helpful to concentrate careful attention on the behavior of individuals, and also to understand at what points, or for what types of character, social pressure may become intolerable. Anthropology may also concentrate attention on individual deviants and maladjusted people. Fundamentally, however, anthropology is concerned with the behavior of groups.

Thirdly, anthropology is concerned with human beings living together in society. The unit with which anthropology is primarily concerned is the discrete society. Although I believe that every anthropologist would assent to this definition, nevertheless the concept of society is one of the vaguest and the most unsatisfactory in the whole discipline. I shall revert to some of the questions raised by it later. Meanwhile, I would suggest that at least the following criteria are necessary for a group of people to qualify as a society:—the group must be able to maintain and reproduce itself over a period of more than one generation; its members must demonstrate types of behavior and attitudes common to all the members of the group and not shared in their entirety by the members of any other group. All the members of the society must have a common language or dialect. In highly developed states the political and societal groups (nations) are by no means always identical; one political unit may be made up of two or more societies, and a single society may be divided politically into two or more states. When such situations do occur, the society or portion of a society which is incorporated into the larger political group is inevitably influenced by this event, and the anthropologist should take this influence into account; but whereas for most modern historians the political state is the fundamental unit to be studied, for anthropologists the fundamental unit always is—or at least should be—the society.

Anthropology is, then, the study of human beings living together in society, these human beings having certain biological needs and tendencies. But, unlike other animals, the ways in which these needs are fulfilled are not conditioned entirely by genetic instinct and the impact of the environment. Different groups of people have evolved different approved ways of gratifying these needs for the individuals who make up the group and have made a selection in favor of some of these methods and against other alternatives. In every human society, therefore, there are the same basic biological needs and tendencies, and specific local methods of gratifying these needs.

The gratification of these needs can be regarded on two levels. There is the directly materialist level, at which level each society has its own methods of deriving food, shelter, and so forth from the environment by means of the technology at its command. This is usually called the material culture.

On a more abstract level these needs are given symbolic elaboration by means of ritual, mythology, and belief; and this symbolic elaboration is addressed not only to the gratification of the basic biological needs, but also to a great deal of other human behavior. By “symbolic elaboration” is meant all the behavior, both nonverbal and verbal, which is commonly manifested by all members of a society on any given occasion, and which is in excess of the minimum necessary for the attainment of the goal they are pursuing. With this concept, it is possible to present all the knowledge and beliefs about the immediate and remote environments which are held in any society at a given time, and also the preferences and avoidances enjoined on the members of this society.

These preferences and avoidances of different types of conduct and of different methods of getting satisfaction are not biologically inherited. They are implanted by training both conscious and unconscious, but overwhelmingly unconscious; and this training takes place throughout the life of every individual who is born into the group, with special emphasis on the earlier and formative years. It is this non-biological complex of preferences and avoidances, of formalization, interpretation, of symbolic elaboration, and of material equipment which is commonly referred to as a culture.

Culture, which was our fourth point, can be described as the non-biological attitudes and the patterned norms of expected behavior which are statistically common to the members of a society. All the technical equipment, all the rules which regulate individual and group behavior—either formalized or unformalized—the economic systems erected for exchanges of goods and services, the legal system, the social organization of methods of government, the art and ritual, the religion and superstitions of the group, are all part of the culture of that group.

In the combinations and permutations of these different facets of life, each culture is unique; but because cultures are carried by human animals who vary very slightly all over the world, societies all have certain traits in common.

From the earliest time, and in the most primitive groups of which we have any record, there has always been a certain division of labor within the society. It would seem as though these divisions were originally biologically imposed, the primary differentiations being the differentiations between man and woman, and between the mature and the immature.

The relative immobility imposed on the mother through her pregnancies and through the necessity for caring for young infants seems to have established the immediate difference between the man as food gatherer and the woman as food preparer. In some of the most primitive societies this is still the fundamental differentiation in labor.

Concurrently with division of labor between the sexes, there has always been a division of labor between different age groups. The immature and the old have not the strength and skill necessary, in the greatest number of environments, to maintain themselves, and consequently the mature have always had to make some extra effort to support the immature and the feeble. It seems, also, that if and when societies come into close and hostile contact with neighboring societies, offensive and defensive fighting and plundering take place. On account of their biological strength, the fighting is mostly entrusted to young men, whereas women and older men have to look after the food and safety of the rest of the population. The fighting was done by one portion of the society for the benefit of the whole, and consequently the non-fighting portion of the society had to exert extra effort to maintain the fighters.

With the elaboration of culture, that is to say, with the increasing ability to control and modify the environment, certain skills were developed which, because of their difficulty or elaboration or time-consuming qualities, demanded the partial or complete withdrawal from the search for food of some members of the society, who became specialists. Although the majority of these specialized skills are founded on the elaboration of the material culture, not all of them are. The urge to understand and control the immediate and remote environments produces professional explainers, medicine men and priests. In this way occurred the third differentiation with the society—the differentiation based on skills.

Here there should be noted a situation which appears to be universal, but which has never been adequately explained. As soon as differences in occupation and skill are established, these occupations and skills are placed in an honorific hierarchy. Some occupations are deemed to be more worthy of deference than others. At the moment we have little evidence as to how this invidious distinction, to use Thorstein Veblen’s phrase,{5} arises. Some argument might be made that those occupations which give the greatest narcissistic or libidinal satisfaction—those which demand the most conspicuous skill or give the most direct pleasure—are singled out for distinction. But this does not seem to be necessarily so on any overt level. Neither cow-milking nor water-carrying can be considered to provide any immediate psychological satisfaction; yet these are honorific occupations among the Toda{6} and the Hindu{7} respectively.

There do seem, however, to be two generalizations of fairly wide applicability: men’s occupations are generally considered to be more honorific than women’s, and historically old skills more honorific than new ones. The emphasis on men’s skills can, I think, be connected with the fact that symbolic elaboration would appear to be predominantly a masculine trait: that man, with his biological leisure, and perhaps also with a fundamental jealousy of the life-giving functions of women, has a general tendency to attempt to establish his superiority by other criteria.

The greater social esteem of old skills as against new ones would seem to reside in human biological conservatism. It would seem as though, to the human animal, learning new habits is a painful process, only to be undertaken in the face of a dilemma, when abstention is threatened by punishment or loss. If such a sentiment is universal, it would appear that in any society those people who are in the less honorific positions, or else the maladjusted, are forced by social pressure to do the requisite new learning for the rest of the society. Consequently, the new skill, when it is first acquired, is acquired by a group in the society already qualified as less honorific, though the roles may be subsequently modified.

There are two possible methods of recruiting specialists. They may be chosen either through manifestations of potential ability or through hereditary training. In most of the known societies in which there are specializations demanding life-long application, the latter mode has been used. Where this has occurred, there has been established within the society a subgroup with habits and attitudes different from those of the majority of the population. With such hereditary specialization arise the germs of a class system.

The varying groups which make up a society have each their own role to play or function to fulfill in the total society of which they are members.

It is indeed possible and practical to view a culture as the sum of the functions of its component groups, and this viewpoint, which is technically known as functionalism, has been very fully developed by Professors Radcliffe-Brown{8} and Malinowski.{9} Such a methodology is admirably fitted for the cross-section description of a given culture at a given time. I would suggest, however, that it is not by itself adequate to describe developments through time.

I have already said that all societies are divided into groups. The behavior, ideas, and aims of the different groups are always contrasted to a certain degree, and varying emphasis is given to the importance of each group. With the progressive elaboration of material and nonmaterial culture, more facets are added to the complex making up the culture, and the culture becomes the sum of the distinct and partly contradictory behavior, ideas, and aims of these contrasting groups. A useful term for the varied behavior, ideas, and aims of each group is the “ethos” of the group, which Sumner has defined as “the sum of the characteristic usages, ideas, standards and codes by which a group is differentiated and individualized in character from other groups.”{10}

The ethos of the group supplies the secondary motivations and types of choice for biological actions and provides symbolic elaboration and rationalization for non-biological actions and attitudes. Most interpersonal relations within the society, and the vastly greater part of the relations between societies are determined by the prevailing ethos within the different societies or groups. In any given moment in the course of existence, a culture can be described as the algebraic sum of its group ethoses.

These ethoses do not habitually carry equal weight. Most generally there is one predominating ethos, by and large a male ethos, to which the varying underlying ethoses are subordinated. It is theoretically possible, however, that two or more ethoses may be of equal importance in a society viewed internally. It is perhaps necessary to state categorically that the predominating ethos is not necessarily the ethos of the statistically largest group. It is the ethos of that group receiving the greatest amount of deference within a society which is predominant, and it can quite conceivably be held by only a very small portion of the population. An obvious example of such a predominating ethos, which was almost certainly not shared by the majority of the population, would be the knightly ethos of medieval Europe.

In the most primitive societies it is usually legitimate to speak of the ethos of the predominating group as the ethos of the culture. But with successive elaboration there will inevitably arise an increasing number of subgroups whose ethoses will, to a greater or lesser extent, contradict the ethos of the predominating group.

Most contemporary anthropology consists inevitably in a cross-section description of a society over a relatively short period of time, since there are few occasions when either extant records or repeated field trips make it possible to trace the development of the different facets of a culture through a period of time. Such descriptive cross sections may be spoken of as a synchronic view of society, as opposed to a diachronic view, which would give a description of modification and alteration through time.

The contrast between these two approaches is relative and not absolute. Even in a synchronic view, a certain amount of attention is paid to the explanations given by informants of modifications from remembered or legendary earlier epochs; and even a diachronic account would have to start with a synchronic description. The difference between a diachronic view of society and history as it is normally written is a question of the type of concepts employed.

An anthropological study does, or at least should, have a more unbiased statistical approach than that used by historians. A normal historical view is overweighted in favor of those groups having influence and deference, and inevita...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: TECHNIQUES OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS
• PART TWO: CULTURAL GROUPS
• PART THREE: CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS
• PART FOUR: THE CULTURAL ROLE OF IDEAS
• PART FIVE: THE DYNAMICS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
• PART SIX: SOURCES AND MATERIALS FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURAL HISTORY