Cultural Anthropology
1. Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
The concept of culture has a rich theoretical and historical heritage. Perhaps the most influential definition, the one that is most widely cited and that has had the greatest impact on the development of the field, was given by the British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in 1871. Tylor said that culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Tylor conceived of culture as a cluster of objective facts. This is, he saw culture as distinct from the people who hold it. This assumption lies underneath the way most North Americans use the word culture. We often speak of a foreign culture or the culture of impoverished inner city residents, meaning by this a specific set of beliefs, values, and habits. Tylor saw each of these sets as systems that exhibit their own internal coherence. He also felt that it is essential for the anthropologist to document and describe as many of these specific cultures as possible, and he gave high value to the comparative method, that is, the comparison of one culture with another.
Culture counts, and no account of our world is complete without an understanding of culture and how it shapes human ideas, aspirations, and actions. Yet in an age of fast and tumultuous change, the very nature of culture has become problematic. Culture is at the heart of who we are and what we do. Yet, arguably, our species has developed and spread over the earth because humans are the most adaptive of all creatures, possessing an unmatched ability to change their habitat. The paradox of human existence is that cultural traditions, which can bind people together, perpetuate patterns of life and communicate deeply held values and symbols, are also the very things that set human groups apart from one another. Culture is a paradox: it is a product of our humanity, yet it separates us from the rest of nature.
2. Theoretical Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology
A. History: Late 19th – Early 20th Century This theory starts from the view that attempts to explain the various elements of society, culture, and social phenomena in terms of their function (what they do, how they affect society as a whole, and their contribution to the stability of the whole society). The best known proponents of this theory are Bronislaw Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Herbert Spencer. Malinowski conducted his fieldwork in the Western Pacific, while Radcliffe-Brown covered work from the UK, Africa, and the Pacific. Durkheim and much earlier Hobbes have also been cited as early proponents. It is argued that the theory was a product of its time – influenced by the major changes taking place in economic, social and colonial structures. Structural-Functionalism and the theories and their theorists to a great extent are concerned with the values and structures made evident by their contrast with what is abnormal in an attempt to explain the world in its current state and not the process of change. It should be noted that the theory is often viewed as unsophisticated in the context of its disregard of the individual and agency. The texts and theories sometimes elaborate an analogy between the biological organism with its various integrated systems and the world being some type of super organism. This can verge on a weak reading of determinism often with a teleological prediction that what is for now abnormal will functionally adapt to what is then normal. This weak determinism has been understood as implying that what actually happens must happen and might never have been averted (cf Radcliffe-Brown) and may not be beneficial to many societies. This stands in stark contrast to Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown’s searches for practical functioning solutions in societies compared to the dogmatic explanations of institutional facts such as legal definitions correlated with totemic rituals. Nonetheless, the data, methods, and conclusions can be fascinating in uncovering the significance of phenomena even if the interpretations can be seen as misguided from a modern and alternative viewpoint.
3. Methods and Approaches in Cultural Anthropology
The second field of inquiry in cultural anthropology usually involves a more in-depth and intensive study of a specific culture. This is sometimes called ethnography or field work because it often requires the anthropologist to spend a long period of time in the actual physical presence of the culture being studied. The ethnographer seeks to understand and describe a culture on its own terms through the study of local languages, by living with the people and participating in their lives, eating their food, sleeping in their beds, and learning to see and understand the world as the members of the studied culture see and understand it. This empathic understanding is valuable in and of itself but also can yield unanticipated insights into the culture being studied that can generate new comparative-hypothetical theories. It is quite often the case that bewildering or disturbing behavior in a culture being studied becomes meaningful when one has learned enough about the culture to see the world as its members see it.
The first field of inquiry in cultural anthropology is exploration into ethnology, the study of the specific cultural traits of a society. A cultural trait is the attempt to learn and understand what people have done, how they do it, and why they do it. Known for its basketry, the Papago Indians of southern Arizona provide a simple example. By making a detailed analysis of the techniques and designs of Papago basketry, and by comparing the baskets with those of neighboring societies, the ethnologist can draw conclusions about the relations between the basketry methods and Papago world view, and between Papago culture and the cultures of its neighbors. Ethnologists and others engaged in cultural anthropology often have sought to discern the general principles of how cultural traits are integrated into a complete cultural system.
The other side of culture consists of everything that changes, is learned, and shared within society and is not biologically inherited. To study this aspect of culture, cultural anthropologists have developed a variety of methods and approaches from the methodical pinpointing and description of specific cultural traits to the in-depth, minute recording of all facets of a culture, to comparative studies of different cultures, and finally to the formulation of theories to explain the differences and similarities among cultures.
4. Cultural Diversity and Variation
Murdock’s ethnographic atlas: F.G. W. Richardson has contended that the comparative method used by social anthropologists is structurally no different from that used by animal behavior ecologists and that it is fruitless for social anthropology to ignore the fact that it is a branch of zoology. While this claim may be more contentious, doubtless a major source for Richardson’s view is the work of the late George P. Murdock who sought to establish the existence of correlations between aspects of culture by means of computing global cross-cultural samples of sociocultural and environmental variables. With his pupils, Murdock painstakingly coded vast amounts of ethnographic data on a worldwide sample of pre-industrial societies for a wide range of variables measured at various levels of generality. A significant product of this effort in respect of the application of the comparative method to the study of culture is the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University, a substantial bank of information on the world’s cultures and on the different items of cultural phenomena comprised of a wide range of ethnographic sources.
Cross-cultural research methods: Studies of human behavioral universals have frequently taken the form of surveys of a restricted number of traits or features taken from a broad cultural sample. The capability that has been shown to be crucial in the spread of modern humans from Africa to occupy all of the earth’s habitable continents is the capacity to exploit a diversity of habitats by means of learned and socially transmitted adjustments. A consequence of this is the vast array of cultural diversity in the world today. Remote sensing has afforded cross-cultural researchers the means to accumulate a huge amount of detailed and objective information on the resource bases of different human societies, their technological strategies, and their material cultural remains.
One important issue in the identification of the limits to potential human cultural diversity is the extent to which our various cultural capacities and propensities are universal and to what extent they are the product of historical and environmental factors that have led to the diversification of human cultural patterns. This issue can only be resolved through the comparative study of cultural diversity and cultural regularities.
In strong opposition to this “cultural determinism,” or insistence that culture has the power to shape human biology, Leslie White (1949) argued that “it is the biological nature of man that creates patterns of culture.” White, Morton H. Fried, and other social anthropologists of this school argued that culture is only a superficial overlay grafted onto human nature.
The core issue in this once enduring but now reviving tradition of thought is the relationship between culture and human biology. Linton (1945) insisted that culture has its roots in human biology.
5. Applications of Cultural Anthropology
Since the inception of applied anthropology, the methods and principles of cultural anthropology have been used to solve practical problems in human communities. The use of anthropological knowledge for practical purposes has accelerated in recent years, with employment opportunities increasing in such areas as public health, community development, and marketing research. Application of anthropological ideas and techniques outside of academic and research settings is a result of two major developments which occurred in the United States and the United Kingdom after World War II. The first of these was a realization that anthropologists had accumulated a vast store of information about different ways of life, but had done little to integrate this information into the knowledge of humankind. The second development was an increasing difficulty for academic and research institutions to absorb and support all the graduates turning out of anthropology programs, and a resultant interest on the part of anthropologists in finding new careers. In response to these conditions, anthropologists began to seek work outside of academia, and simultaneously, to produce more practical and policy-relevant research. A major factor in the push toward application was the inherent dissatisfaction that many researchers felt about the narrow focus of their research, and the lack of consideration given to the needs and problems of the people whom they had studied. In short, anthropology and anthropologists have changed. Many have broadened their agendas to bridge the divide between research and public understanding, and to create more inclusive understandings of human problems at all levels. This shift has done much to close the artificial gap between academic and applied research, and has made a strong case that all anthropological research, whether it aims to be practical or not, should consider how it can benefit the people it is concerned with.
