Culture

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

Nevertheless the development of a notion of culture has from the beginning been driven hard from behind by the intellectual struggle against attempts to explain human behaviour and human variety using purely natural scientific means. It is therefore impossible to understand the concept ‘culture’ clearly without reference to its opposing concept, ‘nature’. In a wider perspective this struggle is but a fragment of the greater conflict over human nature which has been so pervasive a feature of intellectual life in the North Atlantic societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For as the assurance of the natural sciences grew, and as more of the living world fell under their confident surveillance, so a conception of nature began to grow that was to be subject to an increasingly authoritative style of enquiry, which we know today as biology. The burning question then became: to what extent do humans fall into nature and therefore under the sovereignty of biological explanation? For some—and this is as true today as it was in the last century—the sway of such explanation was to be total. For others in *sociology and related disciplines, however, humans and human society participate in a different order of existence altogether.

In the province of intellectual endeavour that became anthropology, the province concerned with human diversity, the struggle for a distinct science of humanity was led by *Franz Boas (1858–1942) in the United States. To Boas we owe the creation of both the cultural anthropological attitude and the very profession of cultural anthropology itself. When he began work in the 1880s, Boas found in place a theory hardly fifty years old, but already very elaborate, which purported to explain the different varieties of people, their customs, and their apparently different mental capacities by reference to *race. The race theory was firmly anchored in the new science of biology by evolutionary ideas which suggested that some races were more primitive than others, and therefore more animal-like, or ‘theromorphic’, in bodily form, mental ability, and moral development.

The theory measured each race against the supposedly most advanced, the Northern Europeans.

Boas broke the evidently seamless simplicity of this theory. He showed that bodily form is not linked to language or to any of the matters we associate with culture: attitudes and values, customs, modes of livelihood and forms of social organization. He argued that there is no reason to think that other ‘races’ (or, more accurately, other ways of life) are less moral or less intelligent than Northern Europeans, and so there is no single standard for evaluation. Moreover by his own strenuous example he showed that different cultures could, and should, be the object of intensive field research which would reveal forms and patterns in human life that were hitherto unsuspected. These patterns are so various, he argued, that they could not have arisen from a uniform process of social or cultural evolution but must rather be the fruit of complex local historical causes.

These ideas were set out in Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911, but they were elaborated in the next generation by Boas’s large and brilliant group of students, which included †Edward Sapir, †Alfred Kroeber, †Margaret Mead, and †Ruth Benedict, and by their students in turn. On this view, human culture is marked by its extreme plasticity, such that human beings, possessing everywhere much the same biological heritage, are nevertheless able to sustain kaleidoscopically differing sets of values, institutions and behaviours in different cultures. Yet if culture seems to this extent arbitrary in its variety, its possession is central to the human constitution, for without culture—without some learned collection of language and habits of thought and action -human beings could most literally not live. These ideas were well in place by the publication of Benedict’s Patterns of Culture in 1934. To achieve Leslie White’s just-so story of 1958 only a slight extra stress was needed, to the effect that humans are ‘symboling’ and classifying creatures, creatures who possess meaning. These ideas were hugely successful. They became the pons asinorum, the bridge separating those who understand anthropology from those who do not, and they serve even today as the entry to what grew into a vast professional academic discipline in the United States.

This is the complete article, containing 704 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).

View More Summaries on Culture