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Does Culture Explain Everything? Sociology · Acedra
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Does Culture Explain Everything? Sociology
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0:00
I want to concentrate on this question that they raise: "Does culture explain everything?"
0:10
(255). In some ways, the reason they can pose this question is due to the success of anthropology at promoting the idea of culture. As I said, this is something that you've heard of--almost everybody around the world has heard of the word culture. The idea that our behavior is explained by culture is an important part of explaining our behavior. It's probably relatively rare to find people who want to explain all of our behavior these days by our biology or try to explain it by
0:52
where we live, our physical environment. A lot of people will at least say, "Oh yeah, there's culture." It's something you hear a lot, and in fact, it's become so popular that people use phrases like, "Oh yeah, well that's just their culture. That's just the way they do things."
1:11
It's kind of used in a very offhand way to explain all kinds of things, and then you don't have to ask any more questions because, "Ah, it's their culture. Good, move along."
1:26
I think that in many ways, anthropologists and Lavenda and Schultz are asking us to pause here and say that use of culture can be a little bit unhelpful or even, in some cases, you might say dangerous. So what do they mean here? They start to talk about the difference between what they call Culture with a capital C and cultures, plural (257). I think it's tricky to figure out what they're talking about because we're just starting this anthropology thing,
2:12
but it's basically that as we've been trying to talk about the idea of Culture with a capital C, it's something that makes us human. It's a general process by which we become the people that we are, and that's how we know people are different. It's not about our biological makeup; it's about the way in which we become human in a particular place.
2:41
But as you slide from that general idea--that big concept of Culture, the Culture with the capital C, the idea of it--into trying to figure out where there is a line between one culture and another, what kinds of culture groupings and what kinds of patterns we see, we can sometimes end up in a different place. We are trying to divide the world up into a whole bunch of little determining bounded entities that we're going to call culture. So a different way of thinking about
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it is: in the capital C version of Culture, we're thinking about culture as a process, as a verb, as something that we are always doing. In the idea of cultures, you start to think about it as a noun, as something that some people have as a property of them, which then determines their life.
3:50
In this section, if you remember in the last class, I told you that I was trying to use some of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's work in order to rework the concept of or re-introduce the concept of culture in this Lavenda and Schultz chapter. In the last class, we were basically drawing from his essay which they mentioned here, "Anthropology and the Savage Slot" (256), which talked about the emergence of anthropology as we did--as a discipline that was assigned all
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the basically non-European, non-U.S. American places to study. At a time when all the other disciplines--sociology, economics, political science--were studying their own societies, anthropology was assigned to study everyone else, which is why he calls it the savage slot.
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About 20 years after that very famous, and perhaps most famous essay that he wrote, Trouillot wrote another essay called "Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises" (256). For those of you who speak French or just know that word, he was saying that we needed to, as a discipline, say goodbye to culture. So what was he saying there?
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He was basically saying that in some ways, because of the success of that word--because it's used all the time and is used by all kinds of people to explain all sorts of things--that it wasn't helpful to anthropology anymore to keep using that word. Everybody had kind of taken it up already and were using it in a way that wasn't being helpful at explaining things anymore. Now, this did not work. We are obviously here still talking about a textbook chapter called
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culture. I have not been able to say adieu culture or goodbye to culture, but I will try to make five points about culture. Hopefully, when you use the word and when you hear the word, you can at least always think about these five points. We haven't been able to get rid of the word, so I'll try it here. The first point I would like to make--and this occurs in Lavenda and Schultz on page 256 where
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they talk about some of the changes within different societies and what makes for an authentic person in this society--is that culture is always changing. It's changing from each generation to the next. It's a very dynamic thing. It is always in process. So anytime someone--what you should not do is think of culture as something that is locked in time, as just a catalog of the traditions that are sort of unchanging and have never been examined by the people in that society.
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So we're hoping to avoid the idea that culture is something that simply determines our actions, that we don't have any influence over what is going on as we live our lives, that we don't become culture robots, so to speak.
7:32
Turning to someone who was writing and thinking before mainstream anthropology developed, this is actually a quote from earlier in the chapter. This is from someone writing in the mid-19th century. Today we would say "people" or "humans," but at the time he would say "men." "Men make their own history" (246). What our author is trying to say here--he's considered by many to be one of the premier social scientists--is that people are always responsible for actively creating
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and making their own history. But he added on a long caveat to that. So we make our own history,
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"but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under
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circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given
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and transmitted from the past" (246). What our author is trying to do here is to navigate a world in which we know that people are active, they make choices, they try to make decisions, they're not robots, but at the same time we're surrounded by the ideas that have been given to us, by the ideas that other people have that we have to respond to. So we make our own history, but we do not choose the circumstances into which we have been able to make it. Anybody know who wrote this?
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This is our old friend Karl Marx. Has anybody heard of him?
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What'd he do? If I say Karl Marx, what do you say? [a student]: Communism. Communism or, well, socialism, I guess. Yeah, I mean, he's the author. So Karl Marx is probably most famously--Karl
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Marx and Friedrich Engels--most famously known as the author of the *Communist Manifesto*.
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You know, at the time the *Communist Manifesto* was written, he never actually saw communism come into existence or socialism come into existence. That happened much later with the
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Russian Revolution. He was actually active in places like France, Germany, and England.
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But he was promoting this idea of the communist revolution. This phrase from Karl Marx, or this idea from Marx, was basically after some of those movements had been crushed and didn't work out, and so he was trying to figure out what had happened. So this was kind of one of the ways that he was wrestling through people trying to do things but being in some ways bound by the conditions or the circumstances which were around them.
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This is not the revolutionary Karl Marx; this is the reflective Karl Marx wondering
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why the revolution didn't happen and if it ever would and how it would come to be. But apart from the politics of this, he's given us a very interesting way of thinking about--before the idea of culture came about--a very interesting way of thinking about how people act in the world, but they act in a way which is in some ways inherited from the past.
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So that's number one. Second point about culture: We often describe culture as something that needs to be self-contained, as sort of isolated.
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I would say that culture is formed mostly through looking at what other people are doing, interacting with other people, oftentimes defining ourselves against what other people are doing, and borrowing things, transforming them (257). It is often difficult to figure out where one society or culture begins and where another ends. We may try to build some wall between, you know, places that eat Mexican food and places that eat Tex-Mex food, but most of the time people
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are interacting with each other. Very difficult to keep people from borrowing and interacting and
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meeting each other and trading things around and creating funny versions of another society. We often form our own identity not because we're looking inward, but because we're looking at others and either saying we're like people or that we are unlike those people. Truly isolated people
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usually don't last for very long--I mean people groups. This usually--if people get isolated on islands and in mountain ranges where they're not able to interact and trade with people, it usually isn't very good for their long-term survival. We are a very interactive species. We like to move around a lot. We like to trade. We like to talk to each other. We're not always nice to each other, but we're often looking over at other people in order to figure out what we would like to do.
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Third point about culture is that there is a lot of variation within any society
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(257). So I think that we can maybe see this most if we think about people that want to make generalizations about us. If I start talking about the Hartwick student culture and I start talking about how, you know, all the Hartwick students--and I either have something good to say or something bad to say--you would rightfully object and say, "Well, wait a second, there's some students who are doing this and some students are doing that." And that is true
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not only of our own societies, the places in which we live, it is true of other people as well. When we look around the world, there's always going to be people who maybe disagree with the mainstream of whatever is going on in their society, or don't feel like they fit in, or don't believe the religion that they've been brought up in.
15:07
So what I'm contrasting here is this idea that everybody in a particular society is all the same or homogeneous. There's always going to be some heterogeneity or different points of view within any different social grouping or a different society. Or as Lavenda and Schultz put it here, they are talking about a controversial practice that goes by different names. Probably the least controversial name would be female circumcision.
15:44
And what they are saying is that there might be--if you look within a society, you can often find different perspectives and points of view, not just from the outside but within it. So if you are thinking about a practice that is something that you want to change, you don't always have to enforce a point of view from the outside. You just have to support the people from the inside who have a different perspective on things. As they put it, "alternatives to
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a controversial practice might already exist *within* the cultural tradition" (256). So I think this is a good lesson for all of us when we think about political--you know, making political alliances and diplomacy. It's not so much that you're looking to impose on someone else, it's that you want to foster alternatives within a different society, alternatives that might be suppressed but nevertheless
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exist. So we should not fall into a thing that culture is always making everyone the same.
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The fourth point is that anytime you talk about culture,
17:02
you are often going to be talking about a situation--and I guess that follows from the last point--in which certain points of view are going to be empowered and others are marginalized.
17:17
So whenever we talk about culture, we can't forget that within a society there's going to be unequal access to resources, to representations, to the idea of how things should be. What we do not want to do is to use culture as an excuse or a justification for inequality (257). Now this is a little bit abstract, so I want to give you an example,
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which is going back to the Meredith Small article. There's a box here by--he's actually a pediatrician--Edward Tronick, and he's trying to get the doctors or the people who
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he is instructing to be more sensitive to the ways in which people have different cultural practices of raising children. Including that in many societies, people who were younger than we think they should be are often tasked with caring for their younger siblings. So, you know, people that are eight or nine years old might be caring for somebody who's two or three years old. And so what he says is, . . . pediatric residents must make sure children are cared for responsibly.
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So we don't want to be irresponsible here. But then he says this: "I know I have helped residents broaden their views when their lectures on good mothering are replaced by such comments as 'What a gorgeous baby! I can't imagine how you manage both work and three others at home.'"
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And it is true, I do not want people criticizing people who are parents, single parents who are trying to manage. We do not want to be critical of that. However, I am not necessarily convinced that that person who has to work and care for four kids
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is necessarily happy about that situation. She might say, "Look, doctor,
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I need some child care help around here. You know, it would really be nice if I didn't have to be busting my butt at some job and worried about four kids at home." So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that we shouldn't confuse something that people are trying to do to manage with "Oh, that's their culture. They love having nine-year-olds take care of three-year-olds." Maybe they don't. Maybe they
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would really like it if we had some sort of system that helped people out on that scale. But due to the circumstances in which they're in, they're trying their best there. So sometimes we should not use culture as a justification for the things that are going on in our society.
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Let's see, this is a puzzle for you. I'm not sure if this will work. So what I'm going to say is the culture shouldn't be another way of saying--and then there's a blank there. So if you are using a term, a cultural term, which
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is deterministic, that is to say, if you're thinking about a group of people and you're like, "Aha, that's their culture, that's why they are the way they are, they can't help it, they're in that culture," and if it has a boundary around it, and you're like, "Ah, I can see them there, they are--you can see their group here, there, you know, you look over there on that side of the tracks is where the people of that culture live," or on that side of the wall,
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and if it's also that, you know, "Well, you know those people on that side of the wall, they're all the same, you know how they are, it's their culture,"
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and if that becomes a justification for an inequality between those--"Well, yeah, you know
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they like to come here and work for us because, you know, they're just hard-working people."
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If I do all those things,
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what may as well I be saying instead of using the word culture? What does that sound like?
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[a student]:
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Their beliefs? Well, I guess I'm using this term to indicate that their beliefs are sort of set in stone and can't be changed.
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All right, let me try a different way. What is it that the term and the idea of culture was trying to replace as an explanation for human difference? [a student]: Race. Excellent! Yay, we did it! So what I'm basically saying is, if your idea of culture--if you're going to use a cultural term and you're going to say, "Well, all the--" I have to use it, I'm trying to figure out a neutral term here. How about my own: "All the Italians are, you know,
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that's the way they are because they grow up, you know, in that place in the world, and they become, you know, so they're so Catholic, that's why they have so many babies, and they can't help it." You're not going back completely to the race determinism, but you're getting pretty close. Because you're bounding people into a group, you're saying that they're all basically the same, and then you're justifying whatever relationship you have with them.
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You're using "cultural," but you may as well be saying "race." And so if you're doing that, just back off for a second and say, you know, is this helpful for me to think about people in this way? If it's not, you might as well use a different term or rethink it.
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The fifth point is about cultural relativism, which is simply that, as we've talked about before, we use cultural relativism to understand where people are coming from, to understand and try to make sense of their practices (254). That does not mean that we approve of everything that anyone does in any society. So we may indeed look into U.S. society and talk about the reasons why people want to have giant child care strollers and wean their
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babies and give them Coca-Cola from an early age. That doesn't mean we think that's a great idea.
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We might understand what's going on there, and we may want to be able to explain what's going on, but it doesn't necessarily mean we approve or we're like, "Oh yeah, everybody does what they want, just culture, man." Cultural relativism--it's
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also not an easy way out in the sense of saying, "Aha, the reason they did that is because their culture, so the culture is wrong, so we have to change it." Again, it goes back to the idea: look within that society, look at the range of behaviors, remember that the culture does not determine what we do. We think about these things. We may not think about them all the time, but we can start to think about them.
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And so what Lavenda and Schultz say about cultural relativism is it's not an easy way out. It's actually a very difficult or--I think they call it a "hard-nosed perspective" to take, because you have to try--or "tough-minded philosophy." You have to try and figure out where someone is coming from and to what extent you're able to identify with that, but also to what extent you may want to adjust either your behavior or ask people to reflect on their own behavior. So
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it's actually a starting point for understanding what's going on, and it should make things more complicated and not necessarily explain or give license to whatever it is people want to do.
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And so they end this chapter--as I've said before, I'm not sure that this is the greatest endorsement for anthropology. People don't like things that are going to complicate their lives, but here they go. They say: "So anthropology is guaranteed to complicate your life" (258). Why?
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Because they say it doesn't allow us, once we've seen how other societies work, we can't just retreat into our own ethnocentrism. We have to try and figure that out. And so they say there is no going back to ethnocentrism when the going gets tough because you have to try to understand people and understand yourselves from this other point of view.
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So they do, at the very end, say that it can give you a broader understanding of society, culture, and history and help you construct more realistic and authentic ways of coping with those complications. But it does complicate our easy ideas about how people relate to each other,
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or what things that we might have considered certain about different ways of life. And so, like I said, I'm not sure that this is the greatest plug for anthropology: "Come be an anthropology major! It's guaranteed to complicate your life!" But I think it's an important perspective on this idea of culture and human difference.
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