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0:03
Today's subject is the topic of culture, which is the most important idea that anthropology has given to the world. I don't think there's anything you could say that is a more important or more well-known idea that basically comes out of anthropology than culture.
0:36
It is a tremendously important idea--probably the key idea of anthropology. For most anthropology textbooks, we put it right
0:46
at the beginning and then right in the middle of the textbook, right after the archaeology section.
0:58
It remains today an incredibly important idea, but usually not for the reasons that we think about it as being important. We all know the term culture now. We all use it, we've all heard of it. It would be difficult to imagine
1:22
anyone almost around the world not knowing this term. There are six-year-old kids who, if you talk about how they eat or something, they'll say, "That's my culture." Everybody knows this term and it's tremendously important, but perhaps not for why we think it's important.
1:44
In Lavenda and Schultz and in many anthropology textbooks, we often try to make the term and the idea more complicated than it needs to be made because it's a fairly simple idea. People are like, "Well, what's the big deal with that idea?" So we give a lot of deep thoughts and ideas and concepts around it, making it more difficult to understand than it is. The reason it is important though is where it fits into our historical trajectory
2:21
in terms of how the idea was introduced into the world and what it was introduced against.
2:34
In this class, we're going to be looking at culture, but not exactly in the way that Lavenda and Schultz want us to. In some ways, we have to first understand what anthropologists were fighting against. Culture is anthropology's attempt to fight against something that they themselves had adopted for a while, which is the idea of unilineal evolutionism (LS, 181). That one society, as we've talked about at the very beginning of this archaeology unit, that "man the
3:19
hunter" inevitably evolves into "man the herder," "man the farmer," and into civilization, and that everyone is on a predetermined lockstep ascent from savagery or barbarism into civilization. We've tried in the archaeology unit to talk about how that's not historically true, but it's also simply a misrepresentation of what is going on archaeologically and historically.
3:53
The idea of culture is how anthropology positions itself against an earlier idea or explanation, which is in some ways still with us today, but not in the same way as it was 100 or 150 years ago.
4:17
Anthropology originally deployed the idea of culture because they were fighting against ideas that our human behavior was determined by our race or our biology, and that that is what accounted for human capacities, human potential, and for how humans talked and did things differently. So the importance of culture is not necessarily trying to understand exactly what it is, as much as it is trying to understand what it is not or what it is speaking against.
5:06
To do that, we are going to have to go deep into some archaeology and history that Lavenda and Schultz don't give us enough of. We're going to be going into some stuff that occurs between the end of the last chapter and the beginning of this chapter.
5:29
I'm also going to be drawing upon one of the smartest people I knew in graduate school,
5:41
the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. He wrote two essays that I'm drawing on here for my own idea of culture and how it is important to anthropology and to the world. Trouillot
6:05
appears later in Lavenda and Schultz in this chapter (LS, 256). His perhaps most famous essay is called "Anthropology and the Savage Slot." I'm also drawing on another essay that he worked on, which is called "Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises." I'm trying to work in some stuff from this historical record together with the insights of Trouillot, who brilliantly framed the place of anthropology and culture in relationship to what was going on in world history.
6:50
The reason we're doing this is if you remember back to the end of Chapter 7, we end with the Inca Empire and there's a picture of the khipu, the Inca knotted string which they use for record keeping. We have this extremely sophisticated large political empire in the Andes which has incredible technological feats. That's where we end Chapter 7 and our archaeology unit. Then the next thing you know, there's a guy on a snowmobile with a dog somewhere hunting up in the Arctic.
7:38
We need to know what happened between the Inca Empire with this khipu and the guy on the snowmobile. We need to know what happened between basically what we might call the year 1500
7:56
and around 1900 when the idea of culture was being introduced and the idea of anthropology in general was coming out. Up until this point in our reading, we've been doing a relatively chronological thing. We've been going from human evolution and bipedalism and Homo sapiens all over the place, and then we went through hunting and gathering, domestication, the rise of the ancient civilizations and the ancient states. But at this point, at around 1500, at around the time
8:39
when the Inca Empire is flourishing but about to be conquered, the chronology sort of disappears.
8:48
This happens in almost every anthropology textbook that I've used, and it's always between Chapter 7 and Chapter 8. It's always between the archaeology and the cultural part. I'm not sure why the chronology disappears there. Maybe
9:10
we're just saying, "Ah, that's what you learn in your world history classes or that's what you learn in history classes. We do anthropology, which is either archaeology--ancient stuff--or cultural stuff, which is the now snowmobiles. We don't do from 1500 to 1900." Now that may be true, and maybe that's why we leave it to history to do this, but I'm going to make a bet here that a lot of the stuff we're going to talk about from 1500 to 1900 you never learned in history class.
9:57
What I think we need, or I've been telling Lavenda and Schultz they need, is this chapter for a long time. This is their fifth edition. I've been telling them to put it in
10:10
for many editions, and they still haven't written it yet. It's the chapter that I want them to write between Chapter 7 and Chapter 8. So I've had to do it myself, which is Chapter 7 1/2:
10:25
What happened between the ancient civilization, the archaeology, and when anthropology comes out? So this is my world history in about 10 minutes--well, we'll go into the history part soon, but maybe 15 minutes of world history. Basically, in all of the archaeological stuff,
10:54
a lot of stuff was happening all over the world. There were people trading with each other and interacting. There were empires that came and went, cities came and fell, people developed their hunting techniques, and some people remained--I don't want to say they were stagnant, but they kept being hunters and gatherers. Different kinds of ecosystems developed and niche construction all over the world.
11:24
I actually gave this to you or represented this in the last class. If you remember, I did this whole thing with the gathering and hunting and the bands and the chiefdoms and tribes and the transegalitarian societies (LS, 228) come in, and then an empire comes up, another empire comes up, it fades away, an empire goes away, and another empire goes away. That's a lot of things happening.
11:51
If you surveyed sort of where things got exciting, where powerful urban areas developed, there's an interesting kind of thing that happens if you did a survey of this every 500 years. Later on, it's a text box that appears in Lavenda and Schultz. They look at a book called *Questioning Collapse* (LS, 359). It's actually written as a critique again of the collapse narrative of Jared Diamond that we looked at in the last class. What this book did is these archaeologists said, "Well,
12:37
what if we surveyed the most powerful and largest cities in the world at different time intervals?"
12:46
They said if we went back 1500 years, 500 AD or 500 Common Era, we should probably say the most powerful and largest cities in the world were in what is now Mexico, what is now Italy, and what is now China.
13:04
If we fast forward 500 years from there, or we go back a thousand years from here,
13:13
we'd find the most dynamic places to be in what is now Peru--if you remember we were talking about the rise of some Andean civilizations there--what is now Iraq, and what is now Central Asia.
13:28
And then they say, if we rewound 500 years ago to about 1500,
13:35
the places where it was happening and where urban life was the most sophisticated and developed were again in what is now China, what is now India, and what is now Turkey.
13:51
What's interesting here is that different places kind of come and go and develop, and there's not necessarily a "this happens" in different parts of the world. But it is also interesting that all during this time, in the years of the last 1000 years or so, those northern parts of Europe like
14:22
England and maybe northern France and those Scandinavian countries were in some ways pretty peripheral to the rest of the world. They didn't have these dynamic urban cities. It might be an exaggeration to say that they were seen as a barbaric backwater place, a place where you didn't want to go, but certainly when Caesar was marching armies up there from Rome, they thought that the people that lived up there were clearly not in the same civilized category as themselves.
15:02
So something happens in the last 500 years which gives the advantage to the European countries, especially in the north, and is the reason why we're doing this whole thing in English right now. We're not doing it in Urdu,
15:30
we're not using Quechua to teach this class. Something happened. For the most part, the global languages at least have been languages like Spanish and English, and now we're starting to adjust ourselves to a new reality, but for a long time these were the big languages. So again, if we go back about 500 years ago, if you remember, our archaeologists tell us that people in Europe were trying to get to and get the stuff from these dynamic cities which
16:19
were in Turkey and India and China at the time. A lot of these places were part of the expansion of what was the Islamic Empire. What had happened is after the death of Muhammad, there was a large,
16:39
rapid expansion of a very big Islamic Empire. This was in some ways seen at the time as the most developed and the most civilized place you could be. They had preserved the ancient Greek texts, they had the best mathematicians--as we know from Arabic numerals, which are our own numeric system, which we adopted in part because Roman numerals are really not good for multiplying and dividing. So mathematics, and also a lot of our agricultural techniques, they introduced or brought from
17:30
basically from India into the West the cultivation of what they called as-sukkar,
17:39
which is an Arabic word for what we know then got adopted in Spain as azúcar
17:47
and eventually translated into English as sugar. A lot of the sugars and spices and other things that the Europeans really wanted were basically controlled by this far-reaching empire. Even more interesting is that this empire controlled parts of Europe including what we know now as Spain and Portugal, or the Iberian Peninsula, and into southern France. This was kind of one of the things that was happening--when different European powers were trying to reach Asia, they
18:28
were finding their way blocked and the Silk Road blocked by some of these political developments.
18:41
This is the Iberian Peninsula in 1491. It's what we call the place which is now the countries of Portugal and Spain. I chose the year 1491 because, as we all know, what happens in 1492...
19:04
Christopher Columbus. Well sort of. Christopher Columbus, officially is wandering over and chancing upon some islands in the Caribbean in 1492. But if you actually lived in the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, that would not have been the most important thing that was happening for you,
19:31
in part because that was in October and he didn't get back and he didn't really know where he was anyway. That's why he called people names that didn't belong to them at all. 1492 was also, or perhaps at least more importantly for people who lived on this peninsula, the fall of the Kingdom of Granada. You can see it down there--it was the last Muslim kingdom that ruled over this part of what is now Spain. The Portuguese, the people who would later
20:08
call themselves Portuguese and Spanish (at the time they more identified with their kingdoms of Castile and Aragon), had banded together to kind of push back the Islamic Empire and re-establish
20:24
Christian rule over this area of Spain. So in 1492 was the expulsion of the Muslims from Europe, and it also marked the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. It started the Spanish Inquisition, which basically said you must become Christian or you must leave.
20:50
What happens is that these two tiny countries--they weren't even countries yet--based
21:00
upon their oceanic exploration and their trade routes, and in some ways their religious fervor, you might say, to sort of spread Catholicism, end up creating these enormous empires.
21:25
We ended with the Inca Empire, which at the time was a much bigger place than either Spain or Portugal. It had an enormous road network, it was more linguistically unified
21:38
under the Quechua system, it was an impressive civilization. But it ends up falling to
21:50
Spanish explorers. And of course, the Portuguese in various parts of Africa, in what is now Brazil, in India, in the Philippines, and in Asia, they set up these trans-oceanic empires. They were also beginning, as we talked about in the last class, as these European explorers were going out, they were encountering a much wider diversity of political and economic systems than they had known before. So people were coming into contact with each other. It's not that they didn't
22:34
know that there were people who were different--people had always been exploring and trading with each other--but these two worlds, what we call the New World and the Old World, or Eurasia and the Americas, were coming back into contact after centuries of separation.
22:56
In the last class, I think I mentioned that Lavenda and Schultz talk about people who have speculated about the Anthropocene, that era
23:09
in which human activity becomes extremely important on Earth. Some people have said, "Well, let's go back to agriculture and the state," or about 10,000 years ago. Other people have said, "No, it's up like 1950 in the atomic revolution." Other people have said, "No, it's the Industrial Revolution, that's when it really all starts." Some people have suggested that it actually happened when the Americas and Eurasia come together.
23:44
The reason they've suggested that is because we have this trans-species contact between things like corn and potatoes and tobacco, as we've talked about, going into the Old World, while the New World gets horses and cows and wheat. So you have this massive trans-oceanic shift of crops and also of people. You have, in the Americas, the decimation of the Indigenous population and, as we'll talk about, the massive influx of people from Eurasia and from Africa.
24:30
The geologists say that in 1610, there's actually a register in the geological record that this was kind of because of the decimation of so many people, especially the farmers in the
24:48
Americas. The levels of CO2 actually reached the lowest point in recorded history. This is like the coolest point also, and from this time forward, you can see the drop off of CO2 levels, but from here on it's been basically kind of warming up ever since. Again, I put a question mark there.
25:16
I mean, there's debate about where exactly we want to mark off this period or even if we should, but what I'm trying to get at is how enormous this shift is in human history when these
25:32
continents again come back together and the effect that this had on world history.
25:41
A couple things happen--well, a lot of things happen, but I want to highlight a couple things that happen in the Americas. The Spaniards often were looking for gold
25:53
and other things, often land and people to labor for them. Famously, some of the first came for gold. There wasn't later--there wasn't a ton of gold in the Americas, although they did take a lot from the Incas and others. A little later, and this is a book jacket
26:16
quote from a book called *Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World*, what happened in Potosí is that they had a huge supply that had to be mined of silver. It is silver--basically this one,
26:36
well, it's a pretty big mountain, but it's a pretty small place--gets
26:41
put into all of these trade routes in Asia, those places that the Europeans were trying to get to. So the silver really injects a whole new dynamic into the world economy.
26:54
As our book jacket by Kris Lane says here, this place becomes a legendary city. Everybody knows about it. If you were in Istanbul in Turkey or in Beijing in China, everybody's heard of Potosí. Like I said, where is Potosí?
27:23
It's the silver city that changed the world.
27:33
It's in what is now highland Bolivia. So there's a city that changed the world, provided half the world's silver, was famous all over the world,
27:53
and we've never heard of it. We don't even know it's there. There's a painting of Potosí in 1758. You can see the sort of regular grid design at a time when--I mean, this is before the cities in the--there weren't even cities in the United States to speak of. We have people from all over the world coming here, and being brought here to labor, to seek the wealth of that place. It was actually a city that at its time was larger than London.
28:34
It was one of the largest cities of the world. It's been called the first city of capitalism,
28:41
and a lot of people believe that the dollar sign, our dollar sign, is actually a derivation of the Potosí mint sign that marked the Spanish pesos that were minted from Potosí. So hugely influential in revitalizing or vitalizing the trade routes, and the silver from Potosí would play an enormous role in transforming the world economy.
29:16
Also here, or I mean a little bit later I should say,
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partially the Spaniards and partially the Portuguese, but also increasingly with the participation of northern Europe--so from Britain and France and the Dutch--begin to enslave a tremendous number of Africans, about 10-12 million in total, and bring them mostly into the Americas and mostly to work on plantations. This map shows us the scale so that you can see where people were brought to in
30:08
what kinds of numbers. One of the things you'll notice here is that North America was kind of a small player in how many enslaved Africans were brought. In fact, this kind of has to do--if I talk about plantations and slavery, what do we usually think about in the United States?
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What image comes to mind? What are they growing?
30:42
We think about the South, and what's our association? Cotton.
30:51
You know, that was important. It was a thing, it was a deal, and it was important in the United States, certainly important for U.S. history. But the vast majority, the vast majority of enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean--Jamaica,
31:11
Santo Domingo, Cuba--and to Brazil in order to plant and harvest and cut sugarcane.
31:22
That was the main driver of this trade. Like I said, it's not that nothing happened in what was North America, but it was actually a pretty small part, probably less than 5% of the overall trade, which for the most part was geared toward sugar plantations and the production of sugar.
31:55
This is a picture of cutting the sugarcane, which is an enormously difficult task and it was
32:08
very back-breaking. One of the things that killed people the most was actually cutting the sugar cane. So this is from Saint-Domingue, and this was a French colony.
32:26
It produced an enormous quantity--it was one of the richest colonies in the Americas, in the Caribbean. It produced enormous quantity of sugar, but also of coffee, indigo, cotton. As they say here, at one time in its heyday, it was producing as much as Brazil and Jamaica combined, a very small island. Anybody ever been to Saint-Domingue?
32:58
This extremely rich and profitable French colony in the Caribbean--now
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it's called Haiti. It's on the other side of the Dominican Republic. That island was called Santo Domingo. Haiti, or Saint-Domingue,
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was the site of the first and only successful slave revolution which established an independent country and freed themselves from this system. Again, we've never heard about it. If we hear about Haiti, we think about people in poverty and an earthquake and something.
33:50
This was an enormously profitable colony for the French, and it was also one of the only times in history--and it blew people's minds--that the people who were enslaved were able to form their own government and establish independence from France. If you click on that link
34:15
I copied there, it's an article about how important the Haitian Revolution was for something we probably have heard about, which is the Louisiana Purchase. You've heard about that in school, right? Jefferson and Napoleon--the only reason the Louisiana Purchase could be made was because Napoleon basically lost Haiti, was unable to keep what was a profitable part of the French colonies. So he basically said, "Screw it, I'm going to sell this to the
34:50
Americans because I got wars to fight here in Europe." So he sold it on the cheap. But if it hadn't been for the Haitian Revolution, there would have been a very different relationship between that territory that the French held from New Orleans up--a pretty large band of territory there that Jefferson was able to make. Again, I'm doubting that we hear about the Haitian Revolution when we're reading about the Louisiana Purchase. You can yell at me if I'm wrong.
35:26
To summarize, we've now reached up until about the 1860s, about the time that Darwin is coming out with his natural selection ideas. The ideas of evolution are coming out. Remember, there's no anthropology yet. I mean, some people are thinking about it, but not really. There's no anthropologist, there's no academic anthropologist to speak of. So up through this time, what has happened? We've had the Spanish and the Portuguese
36:01
move people around, move all kinds of people into different places, establish new crops and species all over the world. And then this silver from Potosí revitalizing the world economy.
36:17
We've had sugar plantations in the Caribbean and in Brazil take what was once this exotic thing that was extremely expensive, that only the elites, the rulers could have--azúcar,
36:33
and again note the Arabic origins of that word--into the mass-produced commodity that it became, where it became a part of everyday life for the working classes.
36:48
The European Industrial Revolution was actually built on these earlier episodes of being able to extract silver and other resources from the Americas, and the labor that came from slavery and from being able to provide people with cheap calories in the form of sugar, also coffee and tea, which were stimulants--soft drugs, you might say--of this whole industrial revolution.
37:27
Now in the process of industrialization, we tend to have forgotten about these earlier episodes. We forgot about where it came from. That's why we've never heard where Potosí is. We don't know about Haiti. We don't know the importance of these areas.
37:48
And so in this time period, the world became arranged or the world was arranged as a kind of hierarchy of races and social groups, where the Europeans, especially the top of the Europeans, were thought that they were--or were basically in charge of the system. And then you had other people arranged in terms of their contribution to the system. And then they had the great idea to explain what was going on in the world by that very racial arrangement.
38:32
So it's kind of this circular argument in which you've set up a system of inequality based on race and social standing, but then you use race in order to say, "Well, that's the reason why things are the way they are, because we're obviously the ones who are meant to be superior.
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That's the way it is." And so by the time any anthropology is even starting to think about things, we're sort of already stuck in a very hierarchically organized world in which people believe that their racial qualities are also responsible for how people are hierarchized or how they are organized in the world. So if we go back to
39:38
this notion that we saw at the beginning of this unit about biological race, and we talked about how biologically we can talk about skin color and other features as being gradually varying over geography and clinal, during this colonial period, because of the population movements and putting together people who had been in some ways geographically separated, we came up with this idea that there are three or four or five different
40:13
races of the world. And we got those ideas from the very places that people came from. And as we mentioned, other people were kind of left out of the hierarchy here.
40:29
I guess I should mention, because in some ways what we're seeing now in terms of, you might be wondering, "Well, what's the deal with the anti-Asian racism that we're seeing?" In some ways, the Asians too were grouped into this category of being brought to the Americas in different ways in order to labor but not to be allowed to be citizens. So it's fine if the Chinese are working on the railroad,
41:00
but the moment they're done with the railroad, you want to send them back to China. And so a lot of people were brought in in order to do various jobs, but people were very reluctant--that
41:15
would be an understatement--people refused to grant citizenship if they could help it to the people that they wanted just to work for a while and go back to wherever they were from. And so we have these populations that were brought in by hook or by crook, by force into the Americas in order to do certain things, but not in order to be a part of this system, which was basically run by the European-American elites.
42:04
All this stuff has happened between the end of Chapter 7, the Inca Empire, and the time that anthropology starts thinking about and going and thinking about other people and becoming an academic discipline. Anthropology doesn't get started until about 120 years ago, around 1900. I mean, some people probably in the 1880s, and some people maybe would say the 1920s, but around that time--fairly recently and after all this other stuff has happened.
42:44
So anthropology comes out in various places, but it basically comes out in several northern European places. So it isn't around for the Spanish and the Portuguese empires--those have kind of come and gone. Not even around for the Dutch. But it comes out more later among British anthropologists and French anthropologists who would go and study the people in the British Empire in Africa, for example, or the French
43:19
Empire again in Africa and Asia in different places. And it also emerges in the United States
43:28
where people would, for the most part, began studying Indigenous peoples or Native American groups. And then later on, as the United States acquired a great deal more power than it had before, U.S. anthropologists would come to also be dominant in the world.
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I am abbreviating the history of anthropology, and you didn't come here for a history of anthropology class, but I'm just trying to say here's where anthropology emerges, which as you can tell is also in the places that are kind of at the top of the empire system at the time.
44:10
And so what Trouillot has argued is that when he says "the Savage slot,"
44:18
what he means is that here you have this academic discipline which is assigned to study everybody outside of the main centers of power. And so the anthropologists were sent out into different places, all of which were kind of grouped into this idea of not being civilized or being the savages. And so if you have disciplines like sociology and economics, political science, those disciplines for the most part studied themselves. If you were a
44:55
French sociologist, you studied in France. If you were a British economist, you studied in
45:02
the UK. The same thing in other places. And it's only really in some ways it's anthropology for the most part that is sent out to study all these other people. And the central question, again, for this hierarchy that was created for the United Statesians and the Europeans at the time is, "Why are these people like that? Why are they so--what
45:31
makes them weird? What makes them not like us?"
45:35
And as we talked about, the most common explanation at the time was that, "Well, we'll measure their heads and we'll measure their skin and we'll measure their tongues, and that's going to tell us what kinds of languages they can talk." Or, "Well,
45:56
maybe they're the way they are because certain people grow bananas, and people that grow bananas have a certain social structure." And these things were kind of sometimes linked together. So the idea is, "Well, if you grew up in the tropics, then there's no seasons. And if you have all the bananas that you want and you're in the tropics, then you're not going to develop the same kinds of ideas." And so everything was arranged as this kind of hierarchy.
46:27
As we've talked about, it was a hierarchy that was arranged because of an economic need and because of an economic and political inequality. But then that very inequality was used to explain why people were the way they were and why some people were
46:45
called developed and some people were called primitive. And again, this completely overlooked the fact that the very development that some people had was based on their exploitation of the resources of others who were then left and forgotten when the resources dried up.
47:11
So anthropology comes in, and as it is rooted in European and North American academia, is hardly immune from these ideas. As we saw, some of the first anthropologists were the ones who kind of came up with the idea of unilineal evolutionism or participated in this very hierarchy. But eventually, with people like Boas and others, anthropology said those ideas were wrong--that
47:45
race and environmental determinism were not the explanation for human difference.
47:52
That the differences that we perceive in our thought and in our behavior
48:00
are due to this other thing which anthropologists called culture.
48:06
Now, they did not invent the word culture. The word culture was already in the vocabulary. It was usually applied at the time in the same way in some sense as we have it now, of someone who "has culture." So it was actually at first assumed to be a property of the cultured or the elite. What anthropology said is no, culture is something that everybody has, and in fact, it is the primary way in which we become human and in which we become
48:52
particular human beings in relationship to each other.
48:58
Like I said, the concept of culture is actually pretty easy. It's perhaps more important to understand what it's talking against. So I'm going to reduce, as Trouillot does, I'm going to reduce the culture concept to two parts. The first part is simply that when we look around the world, people have patterns in how they behave. As Lavenda and Schultz put it, "related cultural beliefs and practices show up repeatedly
49:32
in different areas of social life" (LS, 242). So our belief about God, for example, will then translate into religion and also our holidays. If you believe in a certain kind of God, then you're going to be celebrating this weekend that something big happened. So this then organizes your temporal schedule and we take a couple days off, usually a week in the good old days.
50:08
So the idea here is simply that we have patterns for our behavior. Pretty simple, but it's basically speaking against the idea--I mean, there are people who have proposed that human beings are just a bunch of individuals walking around randomly doing things, and if you add it all up together, then that's what they do. What the culture concept says
50:34
is that it is not just summing up our individual behaviors, but our behavior is structured by
50:43
those around us and by the people who lived before us. And it's also structured by--and
50:51
this is something that is kind of perhaps more interesting, cool, and sophisticated--it's structured by our material culture, the kinds of stuff that we have and create in order to
51:07
express ourselves culturally, but also it shapes the way in which we move, behave, do things.
51:19
This is what the French sociologist-anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu calls a habitus
51:28
(LS, 242). It's a kind of structured environment. We might consider it in some ways a form of niche construction in which people make things and then that shapes our behavior and our bodily form and things. As I'm looking at you now, I'm just thinking about people sitting in chairs,
51:47
and that is actually--you wouldn't know it, but it is a learned bodily habit. There are different societies, especially in the old days--now we've made chairs all over the world--but you know, there were societies in which you would squat, and you would grow up squatting, and it would be perfectly normal to sit through a two-hour class just squatting, and you'd feel fine.
52:17
We've learned something else. We learned to have, as the people from squatting society say about us, our legs hanging down. We learn to sit with our legs hanging down, and so our material culture
52:31
sort of has a feedback loop with our habits and our patterns. I'm also thinking about, for those of you who read *Our Babies, Ourselves*, and how in the United States, we like to keep our babies in separate rooms to sleep in separate cribs, and we don't want to hold them too much. Why do we
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keep them in separate rooms? What are we trying to teach them?
53:18
Independence. We want them to be independent. We also want to be independent of them. You don't want them bothering you all the time, right? We have this high value, we think, on the independence of our children. So we create these separate rooms and then these giant strollers. You're walking down the street, it's like a rolling SUV. You've got a ton of space around the kid and a Coke bottle right there for you to drink. Our material culture, our habitus, is about
53:51
reinforcing this idea of being a U.S. person who takes up a lot of space and needs a lot of room.
54:01
All right, so that's the first part. There's actually only two parts to the culture concept. Part two:
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Where do we get those patterns from?
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We learn these patterns. We absorb them from our environment, from our peers. What is called socialization or enculturation. We absorb it. We don't really--by the time we get to school, it's already almost all in us already. It's not necessarily a formal learning thing. It happens as we're growing up.
55:10
The reason this is so hugely important is that it means that our patterns that we learn are not going to be determined by our physical biology, and they're not going to be determined by if we're banana eaters or wheat growers or on snowmobiles. Now, that's not to say that our biology and our physical environment isn't hugely important. It is, and we don't want to lose sight of that. We talked about human biological variation,
55:46
and we don't want to lose sight of the things you can grow in different areas of the world. But it's not determining of our language, our beliefs, our actions in any place. So the crucial two parts of this are that we see patterns in human behavior, but we learn those patterns. We don't get them from our race. And so the way things are structured--ah yes, there it is--that socialization and enculturation. We don't recreate culture every time a new generation comes. We
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inherit a lot from our forebears, and then we elaborate on that, and we learn it with our peers.
56:33
Now, culture is also going to involve some degree of human consciousness. That is to say, it's not--I mean, there's a lot of things that we absorb without thinking about them, but there's a lot of things that we do bring to our attention and think about, especially in the sense of what Lavenda and Schultz and others call symbolic coding.
58:36
We interpret the world based on our symbolic understanding. We see patterns even where there may not be patterns. This is something that is present in some of our primate cousins but is especially overbuilt in the world of human beings. So it makes possible this idea of culture.
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For anthropologists,
59:29
we tend to see the world in terms of what Lavenda and Schultz and others call holism, that people as individuals and as a society are interconnected, and the things like religion and economics and politics are "knotted together" (LS, 248). We also see, and this is an insight of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, that it's not that culture is an add-on to a natural human being. If we take away what we might consider the culture part, as Geertz put it, there wouldn't be
1:00:09
any functioning human being there (LS, 249). We basically have co-evolved from very early on.
1:00:20
We've co-evolved with our tools, with our material culture, with our niche construction, such that culture or our patterns are the way that we become human. There's no such thing as a kind of
1:00:35
basic human who doesn't have culture. That would be in some ways impossible. So the way anthropologists have tried to see this is that we are biocultural
1:00:49
creatures, that we are at one and the same time doing our symbols and our patterns. Those also affect our biology, as we've talked about, and we also transform our environment around us. That's where again we can talk about the habitus in our material culture and the kinds of
1:01:10
things that go into our bodily habits as well as our material life as a society.
1:01:20
The other important idea here, or we basically end
1:01:30
this part of the chapter, is how anthropology then developed this idea of cultural relativism,
1:01:40
which is again a pretty basic idea. It kind of is like the saying that you shouldn't judge someone until you've walked a few miles in their shoes. It's the same way with cultural relativism. It's basically an attempt to make sense of what people are doing
1:02:02
from their own point of view, from their own terms. Cultural relativism is what anthropology is trying to argue for in opposition to what we call ethnocentrism, or "the belief that one's
1:02:21
own way of life is natural or correct and, indeed, the only true way of being fully human"
1:02:32
(LS, 250). So basically, what we're saying is we all become human in a particular way. We all learn certain patterns of becoming human. So when we get judgy with each other, just be careful about that. Be careful because we've learned a particular way of being human, you've learned a particular way of being human, and other people have learned different ways. And that's not necessarily--it isn't that one person has all the right answers.
1:03:08
In its ideal sense, cultural relativism makes us aware of different possibilities of life, things that we could not have imagined, that we see people doing. And if we open ourselves up to those, it can foster or invite a more tolerant position about the things that people are doing. I want to caution though, and we're going into the second part of that chapter, that that doesn't mean we just say anything goes and everything is okay.
1:03:42
It's not philosophical relativism. It's a way of trying to understand what people are doing from their own point of view, but that doesn't necessarily mean we approve of all of those behaviors. Just because we understand why people have giant strollers walking down the street doesn't necessarily mean we think that is a great idea in human life. But we might understand where that impetus comes from. So we want to
1:04:14
contrast that with what we might call moral relativism or the "anything goes" perspective.
1:04:22
What this adds up to is basically a quote from an early anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, someone who wrote the book *Patterns of Culture* back in 1934, originally a poet and a writer, student of Franz Boas. There's some debate about whether she actually said these words, but it sums up her kind of approach to anthropology, which is that it's not so much about trying to get the scientific stuff out of every bone and dental fragment, but "to make the world safe for human differences."
1:05:08
She was writing at this time in the 1930s between the two wars--they didn't know there was going to be another war yet--and she's basically writing at a time when things were very unsafe for human differences and would become increasingly intolerant.
1:05:28
What Benedict believes, and it goes back to, I hope, what we've been learning from Trouillot and others, is that the idea of culture
1:05:39
is launched against these other ideas which would try to homogenize, try to
1:05:49
un-diversify the world's population, try to impose one system of values upon the rest of the world.
1:05:59
It is hardly a fulfilled idea--it's hardly been done. This world is still not exactly safe for human differences. But it was seen as a kind of goal of some of these early anthropologists.
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