The concept of culture fundamentally affects how we conduct a cultural study. It shapes our research questions, our sources of data, our analysis/interpretation, and our writing. So it is appropriate to begin this research guidebook with a discussion of the concept of culture. Since anthropologists invented the notion of culture, innumerable definitions and concepts have entered the literature of anthropology. My intention in this chapter is not to provide a comprehensive list of definitions, but to focus on concepts of culture that address people as interactive agents. After introducing various perspectives on the locus of cultureâwhere culture residesâI shift my focus of discussion to âself,â and then âothers,â both vital agents and participants in culture.
The Concepts of Culture
âIâm a typical American just like everyone else in this room,â a student of mine proclaimed with an air of certainty in her voice. Without flinching, another student declared that her âindividual cultureâ represents who she is. These are common statements that I hear from students of multicultural education when they are asked to define themselves culturally. Whether these statements accurately convey the meaning of âcultureâ will be discussed later. These statements represent two perspectives on culture. The first studentâs view associates culture with a group of people, in this case, Americans. Her statement implies that there is a definable American culture that she shares with other âAmericansâ who are identified by clear boundaries. Typical assumed boundaries for culture include nationality, ethnicity, language, and geography. In this case, she selected nationality and geographic boundaries to define her own people as âeveryone else in this [American college class] room.â
On the other hand, the second student considers culture from an individualâs point of view. To her, the definition of culture begins with her. Her belief, behaviors, and perspective define who she is. She does not articulate how her âindividual cultureâ overlaps with others and how different her individual culture is from others. Despite her lack of attention to relationships with others in the society, her focus on individuals draws our attention to the fact that people are neither blind followers of a predefined set of social norms, cultural clones of their previous generations, nor copycats of their cultural contemporaries. Rather, her perspective implies that individuals have autonomy to interpret and alter cultural knowledge and skills acquired from others and to develop their own version of culture while staying in touch with social expectations.
These two different perspectives of culture pursue answers to the same question that anthropologists have asked for over a century: âWhere is culture located?â De Munck (2000) expands the question: Is culture located âout there, in the public worldâ or âin here, in the private sphere of the selfâ? The question of cultural locus may inadvertently associate culture with something tangible to locate. This association is not intended at all. Although defining culture is a tricky business in our contemporary, complex society, as Agar (2006) agonizes, I do not relegate culture to the physical realm of cultural artifacts. Before delving into what I mean by culture, however, I will discuss how anthropologists have tried to answer this locus question because their answers have important implications for the later discussion of autoethnography.
Symbiosis of Culture and People
First, I need to establish a nonnegotiable premise: the concept of culture is inherently group-oriented, because culture results from human interactions with each other. The notion of âindividual cultureâ does not, and should not, imply that culture is about the psychological workings of an isolated individual; rather, it refers to individual versions of group cultures that are formed, shared, retained, altered, and sometimes shed through human interactions. These interactions may take place in âlocal communities of practiceâ in which âwhat particular persons do [is] in mutual influence upon one another as they associate regularly togetherâ (Erickson, 2004, p. 38). Gajjala (2004) would argue that face-to-face interactions are not a prerequisite to the creation of culture in a highly globalized digital age when interactions can be facilitated by digital means of communicationâsuch as e-mail, telephone, and the Internet. Her cyber-ethnographic study of listservs for South Asian professional women demonstrates that a cyber cultural community can be formed and undergo a transformation into something that is similar to a local cultural community. Whether interactions are conventional or alternative, the fundamental premise that culture has something to do with human interactions within a group is not challenged.
De Munck (2000) expresses the symbiotic relationship between culture and people as follows:
Obviously, one does not exist as a psycheâa selfâoutside of culture; nor does culture exist independently of its bearersâŚ. Culture would cease to exist without the individuals who make it upâŚ. Culture requires our presence as individuals. With this symbiosis, self and culture together make each other up and, in that process, make meaning. (pp. 1â2)
Resonating with this perspective, Rosaldo (1984) declares that we âare not individuals first but social personsâ (p. 151).
Although the premise that culture and people are intertwined may be indisputable, it does not produce an equally unequivocal answer to the question: âWhere is culture located?â This question has been entertained since the beginning of anthropology as an academic discipline, and answers are divided into two groups: one argues that culture is located outside of individuals, and the other that culture is located inside peopleâs minds. These two different orientations produce different implications as to how we treat the concept of culture.
Culture Outside Individuals
The first orientationâculture outside individualsâconsiders culture as a bounded whole, with which a group of people is defined and characterized. Individual differences are minimized at the expense of a coherent picture for the whole, and culture is seen to be observable and presentable as a public façade of a group. This view stems from the initial anthropological interest of studying other cultures by looking in from outside and is integrated into Kroeber and Kluckhohnâs classic definition of culture originally published in 1952. The added italics accentuate this perspective of culture:
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior, acquired and transmitted by symbols constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action. (1966, p. 357)
This âlooking-in-from-outsideâ perspective assumes that other cultures are observable. It creates the distance between anthropologists and local natives and, in turn, engenders the acute sense of difference and of clear boundaries between these two parties. As a result, anthropologists end up developing a sometimes essentialist and often exotic profile of culture to describe a bounded group of people, focusing on observable differences in custom, social structure, language, religion, art, and other material and nonmaterial characteristics. The oft-cited definition by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), who is characterized as âthe founder of academic anthropology in the English-speaking world and the author of the first general anthropology textbookâ (Harris, 1975, p. 144), also presents culture as a âcomplex wholeâ binding a group of people:
Culture ⌠taken in its wide ethnographic sense is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. (Tylor, p. 1)
Tylorâs definition illustrates the very point of this perspective, associating culture with an entire group of people.
De Munck (2000) identifies three versions of this culture-outside-individuals perspective: (1) âCulture is superorganic,â (2) âCulture is public,â and (3) âThe size, position, and strength of social networksâ affect the culture of a group (pp. 8â17). The first perspective, superorganic culture, still popular nowadays, postulates that a set group of people is identified with a culture and that culture has a life of its own, dictating, regulating, and controlling people to maintain inner-group âhomogeneity.â This perspective is illustrated by Benedictâs two renowned works. In Patterns of Culture (1934) she classified cultures by two typesâthe orderly and calm âApollonianâ type and the emotional and passionate âDionysianâ typeâand characterized Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest as the former and the Native American cultures of the Great Plains as the latter. Her notion of culture as a representation of a whole group also came through clearly in her discussion of Japanese ânational cultureâ in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). My first studentâs notion of âAmericanâ culture is not far from this perspective of superorganic culture. So is Springâs notion of the U.S. âgeneralâ culture that is expected to consist of âbehaviors, beliefs, and experiences common to most citizensâ (2004, p. 4).
The second version of the culture-outside-individuals perspective is argued by Geertz, who sees culture forming in the process of peopleâs interactive communication and meaning-making. Geertz (1973) holds that âculture is public because meaning isâŚ. [C]ulrure consists of socially established structures of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal conspiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer themâŚâ (pp. 12â13). For him, a personâs behaviors cannot be appropriately understood and responded to unless these behaviors are publicly exhibited and others correctly interpret their meanings using the standards familiar to both parties.
The third version of the culture-outside-individuals perspective is apparent in Thompsonâs work, according to De Munck (2000). Thompson argues that âensemblesâ of soci...