How Culture Works

Paul Bohannan

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780029045053
• eBook ISBN: 9781451602296
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Provides a step-by-step blueprint of cultural dynamics, defining the boundaries between matter and life, life and culture, and animal culture versus human culture. With all these basic concepts the author sets the stage for a renewal of anthropological enquiry.

Part I

Culture in the Natural World

Culture is as natural as life. We shortchange ourselves if we view culture as artifice to be opposed to nature. On the other hand, we must separate cultural information from genetic information. The two are in no sense opposed; indeed, the confusion arises because they are so totally commingled in our experience. In the course of growing up, we learn culture as ways to exercise our genetic capacities.

We cannot deal with culture as long as we oppose it to nature rather than accept it as an integral part of nature, or as long as we confuse it with our genetic endowment (which some biologists still do) or with God’s will (which some fundamentalists of all faiths always have).

When we finally learn to deal with culture as part of the natural world, but a part separable from our biology, we can question it, ask how it works, take advantage of parts of it, and learn to avoid some of its manifestations, just as we deal with any other natural phenomenon.

Chapter 1

Matter, Life, and Culture

People are subject to constraints that arise from the rules of matter, the rules of life, and the rules of culture. Matter is what everything in the universe is made of, including us—the elemental constituents of human bodies follow the rules of chemistry and physics. Until life is added, matter is inert.

The biological condition imbues matter with qualities that are absent in nonliving matter. Life is a way of organizing matter. It transforms matter, but does not in the least affect the principles according to which matter works.

Living matter can be transformed yet again—by culture. Culture transcends and enriches matter and life but does not change the way physics, chemistry, or biology work. Culture emerges from life just as life emerges from matter.

The rules of culture are extensions of the rules of matter and life, just as the rules of life are extensions of the rules of matter. If the rules of matter failed to apply, we could not exist, even as rocks. If the rules of life did not apply, we would be inert. Dead. And if the rules of culture did not apply, we would be exiled from the abundant world we know—without tools and without meanings. Like dinosaurs.

Scientists know a lot about the physics and chemistry of matter. Not enough, of course, but quite a bit. Scientists are fast learning a lot about biology. Not yet enough, but the human genome will be mapped within a few years, which is taking biology to a new level.

We know a lot less about culture. But we know enough to begin to define a set of rules that it follows, just as surely as matter follows its rules (discovered by physicists and chemists and geologists), or as living things follow their rules (discovered by biologists). The rules of culture are far more complex and infinitely more abstract and subtle than the rules of physics or biology, subtle and difficult though those may be. Worst of all, the search for the rules of culture is hampered by the irony that people cannot even think about culture except through the categories of thought that we have learned from the culture we grew up in and the one in which we have been trained. We must make gigantic efforts to step outside our culture-laden views. We must struggle to examine our own culture in the same framework as every other culture. But of course we can examine other cultures much more easily, because we can see their differences from our own. It is every anthropologist’s conviction that if we can see many views at the same time, we may be able to transcend the limited view of culture that is allowed us by any single culture, including our own.

Alfred Kroeber in 1917 used what at one level would seem to be the very apt word superorganic to refer to the cultural realm.1 However, the problems anthropologists faced in 1917 were far different from our own—his long article deals with the inclination of many late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century scholars to give biological answers to what, it was becoming clear, were actually cultural questions and to distinguish race, language, and culture.

Life, to sum up, adds processes to the way matter works. And culture adds further processes that refine the processes of living matter. Several traps are already evident:

• Separating culture from life, which Boas and Kroeber were able to do, does not mean that the two are in totally different realms and certainly not that culture can override biological requirements and laws.

• It is true that cultural evolution is the means by which acquired characteristics can be “inherited.” Because culture is malleable, as life forms are not (or were not until the ongoing genetic revolution), it is easy to overestimate the malleability of culture as compared to life. Seeing the way biological evolution and cultural evolution interlink remains a major problem in our own day.

All scientists (even physicists) deal with all three kinds of processes: the processes of matter, those of life, and those of culture. Physicists are as limited by their culture (for example, in selecting problems or when challenged by wrong-headed assumptions within their culture) as anyone else. Any scientist can, of course, create a specific problem or set of problems that excludes one, or even two, of these trouble spots. But the scientist must learn not to sneak in by the back door those very premises and ideas that he has thrown out the front door. Those scientists who get caught in the trap of taking for granted their “objectivity” and who think that they have “overcome” their biases are ripe for letting those very biases slip unconsciously into the structures of their problems or into the way they read their results. Every scientist who announces the results of his or her investigations thereby inserts them into a human context—and had better read his or her culture and biology as clearly as his or her physics. The fact that the culture and the biology were not stated in the problem does not mean that they are not present in it.

Matter is difficult to define because there is nothing more basic to reduce it to. Life, being even more difficult to define, was at one time called “a mystery.” Defining culture has proved all but impossible. Yet we know what culture is, just as we know what life and matter are. All three are what we might call rock-bottom perceptions—they cannot be definitionally simplified.

THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN MATTER AND LIFE

If we focus on the categories matter and life, we can readily understand the distinction between living things like trees and birds and nonliving things like rock. However, if we focus on the boundary between the quick and the inert, problems arise. Viruses exist more or less on that boundary—they are inert substances until they drift inside a living cell, whereupon they take on some of the qualities of living things. Just so, difficulties emerge when we focus on the boundary between life and culture. Woodpecker finches in the Galapagos use what we can only call a tool to dig grubs out of holes in trees. Is that culture?

The special characteristics of living things are easy to grasp.

• Living things are, first of all, feedback systems. They experience their environment as stimuli, and then adapt to those stimuli.

• Living things metabolize. They absorb substances from the environment, turn parts of them into usable energy, and expel the rest back into the environment.

• Living things move. Sap mounts the stems of plants; flowers open and close. Sponges circulate seawater within themselves to extract nutrients. At the other extreme, caribou migrate. Some migratory birds travel as much as 20,000 miles each year. Human beings have become globe-trotters, now on the verge of spacefaring.

• Living things grow. They begin as germs or seeds. By predictable processes of growth, they increase in size and acquire specialized functions. Matter is eternal, although it may be turned into energy and back again. Life, on the other hand, is a collection of many lives. Every life has a beginning and an end, for all that life itself goes on.

• Living things can reproduce. Reproduction may take place sexually or asexually—bacteria reproduce asexually, plants such as geraniums can grow from slips (but, it can be argued, that is not reproduction strictly speaking); female lizards of some species in harsh environmental circumstances are capable of asexual reproduction, creating what amount to clones of themselves.

These five characteristics define life—biologists may wish to add others, but none will deny these. A visual summary, as in Figure 1-1, is helpful; it also helps to give us the feel of flowcharts.

Figure 1-1 Matter Turns into Life

THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN LIFE AND CULTURE

The characteristics of the life/culture border are even more complex than those of the matter/life border. They seem to be structured as a chain, even a pyramid. Each characteristic joins the characteristics of its own foundation to become the foundation for subsequent links.

Behavior is a basic link that can be added to the life chain as it stretches toward culture. Again, its boundaries are vague. The movement of a heliotropic plant as it turns toward the sun is certainly movement. But is it behavior? Most animals have specialized organs in order to achieve various kinds of behavior such as walking or communicating. Obviously it is a matter of definition. The line between mere reflex and behavior cannot be defined, except pedantically. Anybody who tries instantly makes a pedant of himself, and just as instantly will be refuted by somebody with a different flavor of pedantry. That is called academic life.

Learning is the next advance. Cultureless creatures like insects get all the information required for their behavior from their genes; in the language of computer science, they are said to be “hardwired.” For them no learning is involved, only certain environmental conditions are required. A tick can remain on grass or other vegetation until the right stimulus is perceived—usually the odor and temperature of a living animal. The tick attaches itself to the passing animal and its life course continues. Neither learning nor conscious awareness is required to be a successful tick—and so ticks have no culture.

Learning is a process of perceiving and then repeating some modes of behavior that enhance life. The capacity to learn is often superadded to behavior in the animal kingdom. Like behavior or movement, its several characteristics may be present separately, but one way to define learning is to say that these characteristics must all be present at the same time.

Because it involves perception, learning is one aspect of a feedback mechanism, which may in fact be a hierarchical series of feedbacks, in which the results of the lower stratum form the comparator for the next higher stratum.2 Some animals have more layers in their learning mechanism than others. For example, birds like the mockingbird learn to sing a wide variety of songs and keep learning new songs throughout their lives. Other birds learn some songs, but only during a limited period of time, after which their repertory is set. Still other birds don’t learn songs at all—they sing out of their hard wiring. Any bird’s capacity to learn songs is governed by the information in its genes. Primates, and especially human beings, are especially good at learning.

Choice may be added to the repertoire of abilities by a subset of those who learn. Many animals have the capacity to make choices—they must, at some points in their lives, choose one path instead of another if they are to behave at all. Their decision as to which path they take determines their fate.

Choice can be constrained in many ways: by the nature of the purposes to be served, by the conditions of a specific environment, or by the demands of other members of the same species or of other species in the environment. Among human beings, so much capacity to choose has been introduced into the hard wiring that sometimes the hard wiring seems (falsely) to have disappeared.

Culture, finally, may be superadded once behavior, learning, and choice are in position. Culture is a combination of the tools and the meanings that expand behavior, extend learning, and channel choice. The experiences of one animal can, with culture, be made useful to neighbors and descendants. A cultured animal like a human being, when faced with a choice, is likely to have some information about the probable results of each of the options.

However, there is more to it. The young of many birds and mammals are instructed by their elders. Bluebirds appear to teach their young to fly, not just to encourage them to have a go. Cats learn hunting techniques from their mothers. But cultured species can transmit information to one another even more effectively: because they have an external store of information on which to draw.

Culture is like a prosthesis—it allows the creature to extend its capacities and to do things that its specialized body cannot otherwise do. Chimpanzees are not genetically equipped to get termites out of their mounds, although all of them like to eat termites (as do some human beings). Chimps can, however, make termite-fishing sticks to do it. The stick is a cultural extension of the chimpanzee. It is a tool. Before Jane Goodall discovered chimpanzees making tools, culture was usually said to be the prerogative of human beings. But now either we had to stop defining culture by mere tool use or else we had to extend the idea of culture to other creatures. Then, when those Galapagos woodpecker finches were also discovered using tools, it became obvious that some signs of culture—simple tools—may be far more widespread than the original definers of culture had ever dreamed.

Human beings are hardwired to learn culture; nevertheless all culture is learned. Not a single piece of culture anywhere is itself hardwired into people. Human choices are made, within the limits of hardwired reflexes, on the basis of the biological capacities to choose and act, as well as on the culture-based capacity to reason.

Culture is indeed tools. But it is also meaning. And that fact complicates the definition of culture. The immense human capacity for choice leads to many different satisfactory solutions to the challenges of living. Not unlimited solutions, but an immense number. An act can have a different meaning in different contexts or to different peoples. Where do the apes and woodpecker finches fit in now?

The cultural meanings instilled in human beings standardize their choices just as readily, but not as unalterably, as hardwiring. People, when they are young, learn that some edible substances are food while others are not. They can extend and alter what they define as food by choice or necessity; nevertheless some people will flatly refuse to eat perfectly edible things because they have not previously defined them as food. (Being an anthropologist requires that you be able to eat anything edible that is put in front of you—but some of them won’t.)

Such cultural limiting carries some risk. Limiting our choices may undermine or even disallow our human—indeed, our animal—capacity to choose. Such limits impose a sort of unchosen choice. Whenever a cultural tradition rules out the inclination or the right to choose, the result may save time, provide security, and create a group of like-minded creatures—however, it can also lead to catastrophe. For example, specific standardizations of choice may not work if the environmental situation changes—if weather patterns change, you have to give up old choices and turn to new ones. If the policies of governments change, we may have to give up a lot of old ways. Whenever we do not leave the way open for learning to change our prescribed choices, our specific cultural directives can be...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Road Map
• Part I. Culture In The Natural World
• Part II. Cultural Dynamics
• Part III. Working with Culture
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index