explain the meaning of culture according to tylor essay

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2 What is Culture?

Taylor Livingston

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

• Define culture.
• Compare cultural relativism, moral relativism, and ethnocentrism with examples of each.
• Describe emic vs etic perspective.
• List and explain the six aspects of culture.

Culture Some Definitions:

The first widely accepted notion of what exactly is culture was compiled by Edward B. Tylor. Tylor, a Quaker, school dropout, and British man who kept a fantastic beard throughout his life (see image), is often considered the father of cultural anthropology. He became interested in other cultures because he was encouraged to travel to warm climates for his tuberculosis. While this did nothing for his tuberculosis, it did a great deal for anthropology. Tylor traveled to Mexico and wrote about its peoples ( Lowie, 1917 ). From his experiences in Mexico and studies of other societies as a professor at Oxford (though he had no degrees), he compiled a definition of culture : “A complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, customs and other capabilities and habits acquired by people” (Tylor, 1871, p. 1).

From this first definition, the concept of culture has been expanded to include:

• Learned behaviors and symbols that allow people to live in groups.
• The primary means by which humans adapt to their environments.
• The way of life characteristic of a particular group of humans.

Examples of the first bullet include that official language (a collection of symbols) of the United States is English, which allows us to communicate. We share common symbols, such as a bright, red octagon that we have learned means “stop” that enables us not to crash our cars into each other. While an example of the second bullet is that we do not adapt to winter in Nebraska by increasing our stores of brown fat like other animals do, nor do we develop thicker hair on our bodies, like our cats and dogs do. We adapt by cultural means: we put on a coat, scarf, and mittens for outside and turn on the heat in our homes. The final bullet is a little trickier. What is “a way of life”? It’s all the bullet above, plus the knowledge and beliefs Tylor mentions. If we take football fans of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as a particular group of people, what might be some of their “ways of life”? Perhaps, it would include: wearing red or black clothing on game days with the word “Nebraska” or the symbol “N” on it, tailgating (consuming alcohol for those over 21 and eating all the things dipped in ranch dressing) in the parking lot of Memorial Stadium, gathering in the Railyard to watch the game, cheering when the players take a diamond-shaped ball across a large field into the opponent’s territory, and hearing a cannon sound when they do.

The Concept:

While definitions and examples of the parts of the definition may be easy to understand, the concept of culture can be difficult to grasp. Most likely because unless you have ever travelled out of the country or to a vastly different area of the country, you have not spent much time thinking about how the way you believe and how you do things are unique to a specific part of the world. This leads some Anthropology textbooks to compare the concept of culture to the water in which a fish swims. Sure, this is an apt analogy as most of us are unaware of the extent culture surrounds us and shapes our lives and we cannot live without it. But, culture has moral and historical underpinning that are not quite captured by the fish in water analogy. As a result, the example of American barbeque to illustrate the concept of culture and its six aspects:

Six Aspects of Culture

• Learned—taught by someone to someone else, usually parent to child. This process is called enculturation.
• Shared—groups share norms—the way things ought to be done—and values—what is true, right, and beautiful
• Symbolic—culture creates meaning; it is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves
• Patterned—practices make sense; culture is an integrated system—changes in one area, cause changes in others
• Adaptive—culture is the way humans adapt to the world; current adaptations may be maladaptive in the long term
• Changes—culture constantly shifts and transforms; it is not static

Barbeque: More American than Apple Pie

When referring to American barbeque, it is not hamburgers and hotdogs cooked on a gas grill, but meat cooked “low (over an indirect flame) and slow” (at least eight hours and as long as 18!). Legend has it the term “barbeque” comes from an Indigenous group, the Tainoused, from the Caribbean who likely cooked fish for an extended time over a wooden pit made with green wood (so as not to catch on fire) called a “barabicu” (or “sacred pit” in the Taino language). Christopher Columbus observed the practice and took stories of it back to Spain where the term became “barbacoa” ( KM, no date ; Suddath, 2009 ). Another Spaniard, De Soto, notes that around 1540 near what is now known as the state of Mississippi, he observes the Chickasaw roasting a pig over a “barbacoa.” Eventually, the practice of cooking meat “low and slow” makes its way to the American colonies and becomes known as “barbeque” ( Geiling 2013 ; Suddath, 2009) . This way of cooking meat lasts longer than British rule, as parties serving barbeque were held for several days, celebrating the conclusion of the Revolutionary War ( KM, no date ).

The practice of barbequing meat becomes most popular in the Southern states. Pork was the first meat used in this cooking practice, as pigs could be left free to roam and feed in the temperate Southeastern forest, while cows needed large amounts of cleared land, enclosures and feed. It is thought that barbeque would have been the preferred method to cook pigs because of the lean, tougher meat forest living and foraging would engender. By barbequing the pigs, the meat would become “fall of the bone” tender ( Gieling, 2013 ).

The South’s immigrants largely influenced the seasoning and dressing flavors of the meat. Early British settlers to the Colonies taste for tart seasoning likely influenced the vinegar-based seasoning of barbeque in Virginia and North Carolina, known as Carolina-style barbeque today (Gieling, 2013). This was likely the type of barbeque eaten at the celebrations following the winning of Revolutionary War and mentioned by George Washington as taking place on his plantation ( KM, no date ). In South Carolina, the large number of German and French immigrants influenced the addition of mustard to the vinegar sauce of barbeque. While in Memphis, access to a large port on the Mississippi River, created the “Memphis style” of barbeque, known for tomato-based barbeque sauce sweetened with molasses, which was imported from the Caribbean. Westward expansion brought the practice of barbequing to Texas, where German immigrants used the practice on their vast supplies of cattle, creating the Texas style of barbeque still around today. The Kansas City style of barbeque, which is the most common style of barbeque (what most people consider barbeque sauce—think about what you would receive at McDonalds, Burger King, or Chick fil A if you asked for barbeque sauce—it’s that style), blends the Texas tradition of using beef with the Memphis style of a sweet and tangy sauce (Gieling, 2013). Kansas City owes its unique blending of styles to Henry Perry, an African American man from Memphis who adapted his home city’s style of barbeque to the large beef meat packing industry in Kansas City when he moved to the area in 1907 ( Gieling, 2013 ).

Indeed, people of African descent have a long connection to the practice of barbequing as the likely cookers of much of the pork-based barbeque consumed in the Southern Colonies and later states were enslaved Africans. Later, many African Americans, like Mr. Perry, took this cooking tradition with them as they migrated out of the rural South to Northern and Midwestern cities during the Great Migration. By the middle of the 20th century, every city in the US had an African American owned and operated barbeque restaurant, cementing the connection between barbeque and African American culture ( Suddath, 2009 ).

Which style of barbeque one prefers is very contentious, especially in the American South, and often a result of what style is most familiar. For example, I am from South Carolina and have been eating mustard-based barbeque for most of my life. When I attended graduate school in North Carolina, I did not understand how people were referring to the  almost pure vinegar concoction the shredded meat was in as “sauce.” This was decidedly “wrong” in my opinion. Vinegar is an ingredient to a sauce, not THE sauce. Plus, a sauce is closer to a solid than a liquid! Similarly, when visiting Birmingham, Alabama, I was severed their version of barbeque sauce. While closer to an actual sauce than North Carolina style, it was mayonnaise-based! Surely, one cannot get more wrong than THAT!

The story of barbeque tells the story of America. From its origins in the Caribbean, witnessing in Indigenous cuisines to sauces based on immigrants’ tastes, and finally, it’s popularization through African American-owned restaurants, barbeque symbolizes the melting pot of America and illustrates the concept of culture. The practice is rooted in history, and what style of barbeque one believes to be the best depends on from which region they hail. Further, the story of barbeque illustrates the six aspects of culture:

Barbeque and the Six Aspects of Culture

Barbeque practices are learned :

Like culture, what iteration of barbeque is THE type of barbeque (Carolina, Memphis, Texas, or Kansas City style) is learned by children through the cooking or consumption practices of their parents.

Barbeque is also shared:

Whether you are in Newberry, SC or Charleston, SC, you know that when someone is serving barbeque, it is mustard-based.

Barbeque practices are patterned:

The Texas style of barbeque using beef instead of pork makes sense due to the large number of cattle ranches in the area; what happens in one area (economic) is also found in another (foodways).

 Barbeque is symbolic:

For many African Americans during the Great Migration, barbeque was a symbol (a short hand call back) to home and family–way to keep family and regional traditions alive in a new area.

Barbeque is adaptive:

The first Southern Colonists used pigs for barbeque because they were readily available in the area, applying the barbeque technique made this meat edible and a useful resource.

Barbeque practices change:

The addition of mustard to the sauce by South Carolina French and German immigrants changed the barbeque recipe to fit their pallet, based on the cuisine of their countries of origin.

Finally, my last paragraph on mustard-based barbeque sauce being the best and the standard by which other styles should be measured, is related to another aspect of culture— ethnocentrism , the idea that your culture’s way is the best way and every other way is wrong. This concept is what anthropologists try to argue against. Instead, anthropologists argue for us to practice cultural relativism when exposed to new ideas or practices. Cultural relativism is the opposite of ethnocentrism . Cultural relativism argues that the beliefs, values, and practices should be understood based on that culture’s reasoning and history, and not be judged against the criteria of another culture. Using our barbeque example, a cultural relativist would try all the different types of barbeque and attempt to understand the different styles based on the history and practices of the region. They can have a favorite style, but they do not think their favorite style is the best or only way to prepare meat.

Another form of relativism is moral relativism , which argues there is no universal system of right and wrong. What is considered “right” or “wrong” depends on the context (is relative) that that particular culture or historical time period. A moral relativist would argue there is no such things as universal human rights. Using a barbeque example, a moral relativist would argue the best and only way to prepare barbeque is whatever that region thought was the best, even if they murdered people to make the barbeque. If people in that region did not seeing murder and cannibalism as morally or ethically wrong, then it was not wrong. Anthropologists are not moral relativists, as all ascribe to a code of ethics (links to external site) that guide their practice based on the idea of universal human rights (links to external site) as set forth by the United Nations. While anthropologists may study groups, who practice cannibalism or female genital cutting, they do not believe these practices are morally or ethically correct. Instead, they attempt understand the culture’s reasons for such practices and not use their own culture’s standards and values in their evaluation.

The differences in ways of understanding cultural practices, whether from a perspective of someone of that culture or from someone outside of that culture bring us to the concepts of emic and etic perspectives. An emic perspective is the insider’s (how members of the culture) view and understanding of that culture’s practices, while an etic perspective is the outsider (how people who are not members of that culture) view and understand that culture’s practices. Consider these tweets from two different news sources:

Both are about banning the halal and kosher practice of slaughtering animals without stunning, but use different images with different connotations to illustrate this point. Why might that be? First, more information on the differences in animal slaughter is necessary: The halal method of slaughter requires an observant Muslim (someone who practices Islam) to slaughter the animal using a sharp knife to cut the arteries in the animal’s neck to maximize blood loss and swiftly kill the animal. The practitioner must say a blessing before the slaughter. The animal’s head must be facing toward Mecca. The kosher method is similar, also requiring a sharp knife to cut the arteries of the animal’s neck and the stating of a blessing by someone who is Jewish ( Aghwan and Regenstein 2019 ). The stunning method shocks the animal into unconsciousness before slaughter and uses different bleeding and cutting techniques to maximize blood loss. So which of these different methods is considered less harmful to the animal—stunning before slaughter or a swift cut to the main arteries? For many years, animal rights supporters have argued stunning is a more humane method, which led Belgian to pass a law excluding the religious exemptions of halal and kosher slaughter methods. While most halal slaughters do stun the animal before cutting, most slaughters making the meat kosher require that the animal not be stunned. Thus, the issue arises for the minority of halal slaughters not stunning the animal prior and most Jewish slaughters requiring the animal to not be stunned for the meat to be deemed kosher.

The tweets use of different images, one of a meat market and the other of sheep being slaughtered, speak to the different perspectives on this issue. Al Jazeera is a Middle Eastern based news media company, many of their audience practicing Islam, while the BBC is a European-based news media company, with many of their audience not practicing Islam. Al Jazeera may be demonstrating an emic perspective, portraying the court’s ruling of the ban with the image of a meat market to signal the normalcy of halal practices, while the BBC displays a gorier photo of halal slaughter to possibly signal brutality of the non-stunning methods, an etic perspective.

Another example of the etic perspective comes from a tweet by Patrick Gathara, a Kenyan reporter, cartoonist, and satirist:

As Gathara is not American, he reports on the American cultural practice of inauguration from an outsider, etic, perspective, referring to Joe Biden as an “opposition leader” and the ceremony as a “religious oathing ritual” and Washington DC as “home to sacred monuments to revered ancestors.” Nonetheless, Gathara’s description is not technically incorrect: Biden won the Presidency by defeating the incumbent, Donald Trump, making him the opposition; inauguration does have a religious element as US Presidents swear the Oath of Office on a Bible; and the National Mall does contain monuments to ancestors like the Lincoln Memorial, honoring Abraham Lincoln. However, the description does depict the ceremony of inauguration as strange, using terms (“opposition”, “religious”, “revered ancestors”) usually reserved for describing the practices of faraway, remote, Indigenous peoples, not practices of most powerful country in the world. This is not how someone who was American would describe the swearing in of the new President of the United States. This exactly Gathara’s objective as his Twitter account presents US and other Western nations’ news using the etic perspective (which is often derogatory and distancing/othering—see the BBC tweet’s image above to non-Western nations). How one views certain practices, depends on the perspective they are taking, be that emic or etic, ethnocentric, or culturally relative.

An anthropological perspective seeks to combine the emic and etic perspectives. It understands culture practices in a culturally relative way, which views culture as patterned, learned, shared, symbolic, adaptive, and ever-changing.

Key Takeaways

• What anthropologists call “culture”, knowledge, beliefs, and practices of a group of people, is all around us, but it can be difficult to see and understand because it shapes how we see the world.
• Viewing cultural practices from the insider’s perspective with a knowledge of context and history like that of a fish in water, is taking an emic view. Believing that your culture’s way of doing things is the only and best way to do things is called ethnocentrism.
• Culture is learned—taught by someone to someone else, usually parent to child. This process is called enculturation.
• Culture is shared—groups share norms—the way things ought to be done—and values—what is true, right, and beautiful
• Culture is symbolic—culture creates meaning; it is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
• Culture is patterned—practices make sense; culture is an integrated system—changes in one area, cause changes in others.
• Culture is adaptive—culture is the way humans adapt to the world; current adaptations may be maladaptive in the long term.
• Culture changes—culture constantly shifts and transforms; it is not static.
• Anthropologists use all these aspects of culture to try to understand the practices of another culture, which is called cultural relativism.

Geiling, N. (2013, July 18). The Evolution of American Barbecue. Retrieved December 18, 2020, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-evolution-of-american-barbecue-13770775/

KM (no d). The History of Barbecuing. Retrieved December 18, 2020, from https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/news/2019/6/the-history-of-barbecuing

Lowie, R. (1917). Edward B. Tylor. American Anthropologist, 19 (2), new series, 262-268. Retrieved December 17, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/660758

Suddath, C. (2009, July 03). Barbecue: A Brief History. Retrieved December 18, 2020, from https://time.com/3957444/barbecue/

Aghwan, Z. A., & Regenstein, J. M. (2019). Slaughter practices of different faiths in different countries.  Journal of animal science and technology , 61 (3), 111–121.  https://doi.org/10.5187/jast.2019.61.3.111

Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art and custom (Vol. 2). J. Murray.

cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people

evaluation of other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one's own culture.

the notion that the beliefs, values, and practices should be understood based on that culture’s reasoning and history, and not be judged against the criteria of another culture

the concept that argues there is no universal system of right and wrong. What is considered “right” or “wrong” depends on the context (is relative) that that particular culture or historical time period

the insider’s (how members of the culture) view and understanding of that culture’s practices

the perspective of the outsider (how people who are not members of that culture) view and understand that culture’s practices

An Introduction to Anthropology: the Biological and Cultural Evolution of Humans Copyright © by Taylor Livingston is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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3.2 The Winkiness of Culture

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Provide E. B. Tylor’s definition of culture.
• Distinguish natural behavior from cultural behavior.
• Describe deliberate and nondeliberate ways that people acquire culture.
• Explain how biological processes can be shaped by culture.

In the last section, we referred to culture as a combination of materials, technologies, social relationships, everyday practices, deeply held values, and shared ideas. Nineteenth-century British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor defined culture as “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” (1873, 1:1). That’s a lot to include in one concept! If all of that is culture, then what about human experience and activity is not culture?

Consider this scenario. A student comes to class one day, and the instructor says, “I’ve decided that you’re all a bunch of failures and I’m flunking the entire class.” Imagine then that the instructor simply stands there after that announcement, blinking calmly as the class erupts in protest.

Now imagine that same scenario with one very slight difference. The instructor announces, “I’ve decided that you’re all a bunch of failures and I’m flunking the entire class.” Then, as the class erupts in protest, the instructor calmly blinks one eye, leaving the other eye open.

What just happened there? Blinking is a biological compulsion common to humans everywhere. Humans blink to keep eyes hydrated and clear of debris. Humans are born knowing how to blink; nobody has to teach us. On average, humans blink 15 to 20 times every minute. Without realizing it, people are necessarily blinking throughout every conversation, every social interaction, every activity during the day. The people we talk to and interact with are also blinking constantly, so often that everyone is accustomed to ignoring it. Blinking does not affect the perceived meaning of speech or actions.

But if someone deliberately blinks one eye, leaving the other one open, that’s a completely different matter. In fact, leaving one eye open makes a blink a wink. Winking is not a biological necessity. Humans are not born knowing how to wink, and it takes some practice to learn how to do it. Because it requires deliberate effort and people are not constantly doing it, winking can acquire special meaning in social interactions. In American culture (and many others), a wink often indicates that someone is joking around and that whatever they’ve just said or done should not be taken seriously. Of course, a wink can mean different things in different societies. Moreover, a wink can mean different things in the same society. If someone on a date takes their companion’s hand and gives a cute little wink, the person may have reason to hope the winker is not just joking around.

American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) used the example of winking to illustrate two important aspects of culture. First, culture is learned. Innate human behaviors—that is, behaviors that people are born with—are biological, not cultural. Blinking is biological. Acquired human behaviors—that is, behaviors that people are taught—are cultural. Winking is cultural. This means that cultural behaviors are not genetically inherited from generation to generation but must be passed down from older members of a society to younger members. This process, as you’ll recall from What is Anthropology? is called enculturation .

Some aspects of enculturation are deliberate and systematic, such as learning the rules of written punctuation in a language. At some point in an English speaker’s childhood, someone explicitly told them the difference between a question mark and an exclamation point. Most likely, they learned this distinction in school, a fundamental institution of enculturation in many societies. Religious institutions are another common force of enculturation, providing explicit instruction in cultural rules of morality and social interaction. Extracurricular activities such as sports, dance, and music lessons also teach children cultural rules and norms.

While a great deal of very important cultural content is deliberately conveyed in these systematic contexts, the greater part of culture is acquired unconsciously by happenstance—that is, nobody planned to teach it, and no one made an effort to consciously try to learn it. By virtue of growing up in a culture, children learn what certain actions and objects mean, how their society operates, and what the rules are for appropriate behavior.

Going back to the cultural notion of home, did anyone ever explain to you why your childhood home was structured in a certain way? Did anyone ever point out the cultural assumptions about gender and family built into your house? Probably not. Now, imagine that you were taken away from your parents as a baby and adopted by a family far away, with a very different way of life situated in a very different environment. With your adoptive family, you might have been raised in a very different kind of home. Growing up, your everyday habits, activities, and expectations would have been shaped by the setup of that home. Living in that house, you would have wordlessly absorbed a set of assumptions about family, gender, work, leisure, hospitality, and property. And all of it would seem quite natural to you.

Many forms of culture are passed down through a combination of deliberate and unconscious processes. Perhaps when you were a child, someone told you what a wink was and showed you how to accomplish one; or perhaps you just witnessed a few winks, figured out what they meant from their contexts, and then learned how to accomplish one through trial and error. Geertz pointed out that there are two important aspects to winking: the meaning and the action. As both are learned, both are cultural. But perhaps more importantly, both the standardized action of winking and the assumed meaning of this action are commonly known among members of a group. That is, culture is shared.

Consider another aspect of human biology: dreaming. People in all societies dream, and no one has to teach them how to do it. Dreaming is biologically innate and spontaneously performed. Biological researchers hypothesize that dreaming helps the human brain process daily stimuli and convert recent experiences into long-term memories. As a biological necessity for brain health, dreaming is natural, not cultural.

But why do people dream in stories? And why are those stories so often confusing, even troubling? In many cultures, people are perplexed by their dreams, never really knowing what the objects and situations they dream about are meant to indicate—or if they have any meaning at all. In other cultures, however, dreams are recognized as arenas of spiritual communication with supernatural beings. In Ojibwa culture , young people are encouraged to fast for up to a week in order to bring on special visionary dreams (Hallowell 1992; Peters-Golden 2002, 188–189). In such dreams, a young person may be approached by a guardian spirit who imparts knowledge for successful hunting, warfare, or medicine. People are discouraged from discussing the meaning of these dreams, but young people are taught to expect and anticipate this kind of dream, and they know how to interpret the content of such dreams without discussion. The widely shared ability to dream such dreams and the shared knowledge to understand their content makes dreaming profoundly cultural among the Ojibwa.

Summing up, when an element of human experience or behavior is learned and shared, we know it is an aspect of culture. That delineates the concept of culture to some degree. However, the variety of things that are learned and shared by humans in groups is still quite enormous, as indicated by Tylor’s rambling list (knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, etc.). Instead of thinking of culture as one vast hodgepodge of things, it’s helpful to break that hodgepodge into three basic elements. These basic elements of culture are understood to come together in larger combinations, or aggregates.

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1 What is Culture?

Suggested focus.

Here are some questions and some tasks to guide you in your reading of the chapter. If you can address everything on this list, you will be off to a good start.

• Simply stated, what is culture?
• How has the meaning of the word changed over time? Trace its evolution over the centuries.
• Contrast Sir Edward Tylor’s 19th century view of culture with that of Franz Boas at the beginning of the 20th century. How are they similar? How are they different?
• What is the significance of Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s classic work published in 1952?
• List the seven themes that seem to capture the scholarly literature on culture. Which theme(s) do you find most compelling?

Culture, simply defined

Trying to settle on a simple definition of culture is not an easy task. Maybe you will feel the same as you work your way through this chapter. You will see, for example, that the idea of culture has changed many times over the centuries and that in the last 50 years, scholars have made the idea more and more difficult to understand. But in this chapter, I will try to offer the simplest definition that seems reasonably up to date. Scholars might object that this definition is too simple, but I hope it will be useful for the purpose of furthering cross-cultural understanding. In that spirit, we shall regard ‘culture’ simply as a term pointing to:  

all the products of human thought and action both material and non-material, particularly those that exist because we live in groups.

Or to repeat the same idea in a slightly different way:

culture consists of all the things we make and nearly everything that we think and do, again, to the extent that what we make, think and do is conditioned by our experience of life in groups.

The first thing to emphasize is that we are not born with culture, like we are born with blue or brown eyes, or black hair. We are born into culture, and we learn it by living in human social groups. The way this idea is often expressed is to say that culture is something that is transmitted from one generation to the next. This is how we become ‘enculturated.’

But we humans are clever animals, so although much of what we make, think, and do is a result of the cultural environment into which we were born, not every material object that a person may make, or every thought, or every action is the result of enculturation. Think about it for a moment. While much of what we call culture is transmitted from generation to generation, new items of culture are invented from time to time. That is to say, sometimes, some of us make things, think things, or do things that are new and different. We are then either honored as innovators or even geniuses, or we are punished as heretics or criminals, or dismissed as eccentric, depending on how open or how closed our societies are to change.

Of course, few things are ever entirely new. For the most part, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Still, suppose some clever person creates a completely unique tool to serve some entirely personal purpose of no interest or use to another living person. Then by our definition of culture (above), that tool would seem to have all the marks of culture except one; it would play no role in the life of any group. The same would go for an idea. Any idea not shared by one’s fellow group members would not seem to belong to culture. And similarly, a completely idiosyncratic practice marks a person as merely different, if not strange, not as a person participating in a shared cultural practice.

Having proposed a brief, simple and fairly modern definition of culture that not every scholar of culture would find satisfactory, let us next survey some of the complications one finds in academic studies of culture.

Brief history of a concept

Since this discussion is intended for an international audience, it is important to know that the English word ‘culture’ does not refer to a universal concept. In fact, it may not even have direct counterparts in other European languages closely related to English. For example, even though the German word ‘ Kultur’ and the Polish word  ‘kultura’ resemble the English ‘culture’, there are important differences in meaning, and in more distant languages like Mandarin Chinese  (wen hua),  we might expect the differences to be even greater (Goddard, 2005). What this means is that if you are a speaker of Mandarin, you cannot rely on a simple translation of the term from a bilingual dictionary or Google Translate.

Scholars often begin their attempts to define culture by recounting the historical uses of the word. As Jahoda (2012) has noted, the word ‘culture’ comes originally from the Latin, colere, meaning “to till the ground” and so it has connections to agriculture. Now for historical reasons, a great many English words have Latin and French origins, so maybe it is not surprising that the word ‘culture’ was used centuries ago in English when talking about agricultural production, for example, ‘the culture of barley.’ Gardeners today still speak of ‘cultivating’ tomatoes or strawberries, although if they want to be more plain-spoken, they may just speak of ‘growing’ them. Moreover, biologists still use the word culture in a similar way when they speak of preparing ‘cultures of bacteria.’

Later, in 18th century France, says Jahoda, culture was thought to be “training or refinement of the mind or taste.” In everyday English, we still use the word in this sense. For instance, we might call someone a cultured person if he or she enjoys fine wine, or appreciates classical music, or visiting art museums. In other words, by the 18th century, plants were no longer the only things that could be ‘cultivated’; people could be ‘cultivated’ as well.

Still later, culture came to be associated with “the qualities of an educated person.” On the other hand, an uneducated person might be referred to as “uncultured.” Indeed, throughout the 19th century, culture was thought of as “refinement through education.” For example, the English poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold (1896, p. xi) referred to “acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world.” If Arnold were still alive today, he would no doubt think that the person who reads Shakespeare is ‘cultured’ while the one who watches The Simpsons or Family Guy is not.

Near the end of the 19th century, the meaning of culture began to converge on the meaning that anthropologists would adopt in the 20th century. The English anthropologist, Sir Edward Tylor (1871, p. 1), for instance, wrote that:

Culture, or civilization … is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, laws, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

Notice that Tylor viewed culture as synonymous with civilization, which he claimed evolved in three stages.

CAUTION: Today we generally regard Tylor’s theory as mistaken, so please do not get too excited about the details that follow, but according to Tylor, the first stage of the evolution of culture was “savagery.”  People who lived by hunting and gathering, Tylor claimed, exemplified this stage. The second stage, “barbarism,” Tylor said, described nomadic pastoralists, or people who lived by tending animals. The third stage, the civilized stage, described societies characterized by: urbanization, social stratification, specialization of labor, and centralization of political authority.

As a result, European observers of 19th century North America, noticing that many Indian tribes lived by hunting and gathering, thought of America as a “land of savagery” (Billington, 1985). Presumably, tribes that farmed and tended sheep were not savages but merely barbarians. But by this definition, many early English settlers in North America, as well as some populations still living in England, in so far as they lived mainly by farming and tending animals, could rightly be called barbarians. In fact, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, many ‘cultured Europeans’ did regard Americans in the colonies as barbarians.

Now just to be clear, Europeans were not the only people with an inflated sense of their own superiority. In China, those living within the various imperial dynasties thought of people living far away from the center of the empire  as barbarians. Moreover, they regarded everyone outside of China as barbarians. And this included the British.

But let’s return to Sir Edward Tylor and the elements that he identified as belonging to  culture–knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, laws, customs, and so on. This view of culture is certainly not far from 20th and 21st century views. But contemporary cultural scholars find Tylor mistaken in equating culture with civilization. Among the first scholars to drive this point home was Franz Boas.

Franz Boas and the birth of American anthropology

Franz Boas is widely regarded as the father of cultural anthropology in the United States. Boas was a German of Jewish heritage (though from a not religiously observant family). Educated in Germany, Boas was exposed to two competing intellectual traditions, the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences). Boas embraced both, as a student of physics on the one hand and geography on the other. In 1896, Boas immigrated to the United States (Liron, 2003). Without the contributions of Boas, American anthropology might have developed very differently.

Unlike the British scholars of the time, Boas insisted that the study of culture should be based on careful observation, not speculation, which was the tendency of writers like Matthews and Tylor. Boas spent many years studying Native American cultures, and over the course of his career, he collected volumes of information on linguistics, art, dance, and archaeology. Boas’ studies convinced him of the sophistication of Native cultures, so in contrast to Tylor, Boas and his students rejected the idea of indigenous cultures as inferior stages along the route to civilized refinement presumably represented by “Western” cultures (Franz Boas, 2017).

In fact, Boas is responsible for a number of tendencies in American anthropology:

For one thing, as we have just suggested, Boas rejected the idea that culture was something that evolved within societies by stages from lower forms to higher. Instead, he argued that culture was a historical, not an evolutionary development. Boas insisted that cultural ideas and practices diffused across groups who were living in proximity and interacting within similar environments. For Boas cultural developments were in many ways just accidents of history (Franz Boas, 2017).

Moreover, Boas was a vehement opponent of the scientific racism of the era (Liron, 2003). Scientific racists pushed the idea that race was a biological characteristic and that it was possible to explain human behavior by appealing to racial differences. During the 19th and 20th centuries, scientific racism had many proponents, not just in Europe and North America but as far away as China and Japan (Dikötter, 1992). Many anthropologists in Boas’ day busied themselves in activities like describing and measuring the skulls of various groups of people and using this data to draw conclusions about the intellectual and moral characteristics of people. Boas, however, conducted his own studies of skeletal anatomy, and argued that the shape and size of the human skull was greatly affected by environmental factors like health and nutrition (Franz Boas, 2017).

For better or for worse, Boas is also responsible for transforming culture into a count noun, or a noun with both singular and plural forms. Before Boas, culture was an abstract idea, like beauty, knowledge, or love—which are not things we think of as being countable in the way that tables or chairs, or books are. But after Boas, one could refer to “cultures,” that is, groups sharing a common set of ideas, beliefs, practices, etc.

Finally, we also owe the notion of cultural relativism to Franz Boas. Cultural relativism is the idea that cultures cannot be objectively evaluated as higher or lower, better or worse, right or wrong. From the perspective of the cultural relativist, cultures can only be judged on their own terms. For the cultural relativist, the job of the anthropologist is to understand how a culture works, not to make aesthetic or moral judgments about other cultures. (Cultural relativism though was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it may have helped students of culture combat their own ethnocentrism. After all, most of the practices of any given culture are surely neither right nor wrong relative to those of another culture but only different. On the other hand, a cultural relativist would be forced to admit that there was nothing morally wrong with chattel slavery as practiced across wide regions of the country in 19 th century America. That idea clearly offends the moral intuitions of most contemporary Americans.)

Franz Boas had an extraordinary influence on American anthropology. He not only introduced important ideas and methods but also nurtured a generation of students that would turn anthropology into a thriving and popular academic field. Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, and Margaret Mead were just a few of Boas’ most well-known students (Franz Boas, 2017).

Later 20th & 21st century developments

Academic interest in culture flourished in the 20th century and still continues today. Scholars who try to define the subject often begin with the classic work of Kroeber and Kluckhohn who in 1952 reviewed over 160 definitions  from the literature of their day. And as if 160 definitions were not enough, Kroeber and Kluckhohn went on to offer their own:

Culture consists of patterns … of … behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional, … historical … 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.  (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952: 181)

Since Kroeber and Kluckhohn, scholars have continued to revise old definitions and invent new ones. A recent survey identified 313 definitions in the scholarly literature comprising seven distinct themes! These included definitions framed in terms of:

• Structure/pattern – culture as a system or framework of elements (e.g., ideas, behavior, symbols, or any combination of these or other elements)
• Function – culture as a means for achieving some end
• Process – culture as an ongoing process of social construction
• Product – culture as a collection of artifacts (with or without deliberate symbolic intent)
• Refinement – culture as individual or group cultivation to higher intellect or morality
• Group membership – culture as signifying a place or group of people, including a focus on belonging to a place or group
• Power or ideology – culture as an expression of group-based domination and power

(Faulkner, Baldwin, Lindsley & Hecht, 2006: 29-30)

Given so many themes, you might feel like agreeing  with Jahoda (2012: 299) who complained that:

more than half a century after Kroeber and Kluckhohn, and a literature that could easily fill a sizeable library, the most striking feature of these definitions is their diversity.

But perhaps this laundry list of themes need not be confusing. Perhaps they are not even as inconsistent as they might seem. I am reminded of the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

Six blind men confronting an elephant for the first time, came away from the experience with six different descriptions owing to their different angles of approach. One blind man, reaching up to touch the animal’s broad side, concluded that the elephant was like a wall. Another man running into a leg, decided that an elephant was like a tree. A third man seizing the elephant’s trunk, proclaimed the elephant to be a snake, while the fourth man grasping the tail, declared the elephant to be more like a rope. Meanwhile, a fifth man grasping the ear was sure the elephant was like a fan, while the sixth man encountering a tusk was equally sure the elephant was a spear. Only by bringing all of the separate parts of the elephant together could anyone hope to acquire a complete and coherent impression of an elephant. Perhaps culture is a bit like this. Our concept of it is enriched when we are able to see it from many different angles.

Still maybe some of the themes of Faulkner and colleagues seem more basic than others, so in rounding out this chapter, I attempt a final synthesis bringing together the simple definition with which I started the chapter and relating it to the seven themes of Faulkner et al.

Final reflections

How does the simple definition of culture offered at the beginning of the chapter intersect with those of Faulkner and colleagues? If you go back and review the simple definition carefully, you will see that it encompasses items 1 and 4 from the list, with a nod to item 6 as well. It emphasizes that culture is a product of human making. It allows that those products can be material artifacts, or merely expressions of cognitive activities, i.e., thoughts, or both. A story passed along by word of mouth is a product of thought. Retelling the story to an audience is an action. A story written down on a scroll or printed in a book means that the thoughts of the story-teller are preserved in material form. In emphasizing that culture consists of elements, we have tried to reduce those elements down to two basic categories: thought and action. In later chapters, we will expand upon each category.

Our definition does not rule out the possibility that some elements of culture, what we call material culture, can remain long after the people that produced it are gone, e.g., stone tools from prehistoric times. On the other hand, it implies that material artifacts do not come into being without human intervention. Somebody made the stone tools. And it leaves open the possibility that some elements of culture are behavioral; in other words, they are performances that require no props, e.g., shaking hands in greeting. Finally, my simple definition acknowledges that in so far as people are not solitary animals but live in groups, culture is a collective phenomenon. We will revisit all of these themes in the chapters that follow.

As for definitions that emphasize culture as a function or culture as a process, my definition is silent. I would say, of course, one can look at culture from a functional point of view, or one can emphasize the processual aspects of cultural phenomena. But are these not secondary considerations? Don’t they follow only after some initial observation and description? We find a stone arrow head buried in the ground. Isn’t the first order of business to gaze in wonder at the object, to describe it and name it? Of course, we soon want to know: What was this used for? What was its function? In what ways does it fit together with other objects? And how was it made? And knowing full well that crafting a tool requires learning, we wonder, how did novices learn this craft, by what process? But in the interest of brevity, I have purposely tried not to cram every conceivable qualification into the basic definition.

Looking over Faulkner et al’s list for other items about which our opening definition is silent, we also note the preservation of one of the oldest notions of culture, culture as refinement. With the career of Franz Boas freshly in mind, we might imagine that Boas would wonder how such an anachronism appears in our modern context. (An anachronism is something old-fashioned, something belonging to an earlier time and place than the one portrayed.) However, while Tylor may have been wrong to think that the culture of Native Americans or Africans was rudimentary compared to that of Englishmen, perhaps we should not be too quick to banish the idea of refinement as an integral aspect of culture. One could well imagine our stone-age tool master, for instance, becoming better and better at the craft and teaching others the finer points of arrowhead making. Indeed, human culture may have built into it the urge to perfection, and so the idea of culture as refinement need not necessarily be an elite pretension of either Western (or imperial Chinese) “high society.”

Finally, there is the idea that culture is an expression of group-based domination and power. In my first reflections on this theme I was inclined to say that surely this does not reflect the most basic definition of culture but is instead an observation about a dynamic that might come about when populations grow and splinter into multiple groups that inevitably vie with each other. (Come to think of it, isn’t that exactly what a study of Neolithic China will reveal.)  And so I may be forced to acknowledge that perhaps culture as power and domination over others deserves a more prominent place in my scheme of things, but for now I will have to leave things stand as they are, i.e., incomplete.

To sum it all up, the English word, “culture,” has a long history, and it has also undergone many modern developments. In contemporary discourse, it continues to be used in all the old ways, even as it has acquired new meanings. It is a product of human thought and action. Some products are tangible and some are not. Culture is learned. Culture is passed from one generation to another. Sometimes culture is invented anew. Culture is the instrument by means of which humans both adapt to the physical environment and regulate their lives in groups. Culture is not fixed once and for all but changes in response to changing circumstances. Culture can be a source as well as an instrument of conflict. Culture is complicated.

Application

For further thought and discussion.

Keep in mind the proposal of Faulkner, Baldwin, Lindsley and Hecht that scholarly definitions of culture tend to fall into one (or more) thematic categories:

• Group Membership
• Power/Ideology

For each group of passages below, name the category from above that best describes the theme that the passages suggest.

Group 1: Culture as  _______________

• the moral and social passion for doing good; it is the study and pursuit of perfection, and this perfection is the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality (Harrison, 1971)
• the attainment of higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations (Gramsci, 1981)

Group 2:  Culture as  _______________

• what happens when people makes sense of their lives and the behavior of other people with whom they have to deal (Spindler and Spindler, 1990)
• how information is transmitted, particularly in teaching and learning (Bonner, 1980)

Group 3: Culture as ________________

• a community or population sufficiently large enough to be self-sustaining, i.e., large enough to produce new generations of members without relying on outside people (Jandt, 2016)
• people who share learned patterns of behavior (Winkelman, 1993)

Group 4: Culture as  ________________

• a contested zone in which different groups struggle to define issues in their own interests (Moon, 2002)
• a field on which a cacophonous cluster of diverse voices plays itself out (Shore, 1996)

Group 5: Culture as  ________________

• the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving (Samovar and Porter, 1991)
• an organized group of learned responses characteristic of a particular society (Linton, 1955)
• a commonly shared system of symbols, the meanings of which are understood on both sides with an approximation to agreement (Parsons, 1964)

Group 6: Culture as  ________________

• that which gives people a sense of who they are, of belonging, of how they should behave, and of what they should be doing (Harris & Moran, 1996)
• means and mechanisms through which the general biological nature of the individuals comprising the society is regulated, their behavior is programmed and directed … (Markarian, 1973)

Group 7: Culture as _________________

• the artifacts that are produced by society, e.g., clothing, food, technology, etc. (Barnett & Kincaid, 1983)
• popular production of images . . . as part of a larger process which . . . may be called popular culture (Fabian, 1999)

Arnold, M. (1896). Literature and dogma. (Preface). New York, NY: The Macmillan Co.

Baldwin, J. R., Faulkner, S. L., Hecht, M. L. & Lindsley, S. L. (Eds.), (2006). Redefining culture: Perspectives across the disciplines. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Billington, R. A. (1985).  Land of savagery, land of promise: The European image of the American frontier in the nineteenth century.  University of Oklahoma Press.

Dikötter, F. (1992).  Discourse of race in modern China.  Stanford University Press.

Faulkner, S. L., Baldwin, J. R., Lindsley, S. L.  & Hecht, M. L. (2006). Layers of meaning: An analysis of definitions of culture. In Redefining culture: Perspectives across the disciplines.  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Franz Boas. (2017, June 2). In  Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia .

Goddard, C. (2005). The lexical semantics of ‘culture’. Language Sciences, 27 , 51–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2004.05.001

Jahoda, G. (2012). Critical reflections on some recent definitions of ‘‘culture.’’ Culture & Psychology, 18 (3), 289–303.

Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.

Liron, T. (2003). Franz Boas and the discovery of culture. Senior Honors Thesis, Amherst College.

Tylor, E. B. (1871/1958). The origins of culture. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.

Image Attributions

Image 1: “ Edward Burnett Tylor ” by The GNU Project is licensed under  CC BY-SA 3.0

Image 2: “Franz Boas” from the Canadian Museum of Civilization is licensed under Public Domain-1923

Image 3: “ Blind monks examining an elephant ” from Wikimedia Commons is licensed under Public Domain-1923

Speaking of Culture Copyright © 2018 by Nolan Weil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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3.1: Development of Theories on Culture

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ANTHROPOLOGISTS AS STORYTELLERS

People throughout recorded history have relied on storytelling as a way to share cultural details. When early anthropologists studied people from other civilizations, they relied on the written accounts and opinions of others; they presented facts and developed their “stories,” about other cultures based solely on information gathered by others. These scholars did not have any direct contact with the people they were studying. This approach has come to be known as armchair anthropology . Simply put, if a culture is viewed from a distance (as from an armchair), the anthropologist tends to measure that culture from his or her own vantage point and to draw comparisons that place the anthropologist’s culture as superior to the one being studied. This point of view is also called ethnocentrism (discussed in Chapter 2).

Definition: Armchair anthropology

An early and discredited method of anthropological research that did not involve direct contact with the people studied.

Early anthropological studies often presented a biased ethnocentric interpretation of the human condition. For example, ideas about racial superiority emerged as a result of studying the cultures that were encountered during the colonial era. During the colonial era from the sixteenth century to the mid–twentieth century, European countries (Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Dutch Republic, Spain, Portugal) asserted control over land (Asia, Africa, the Americas) and people. European ideas of wrong and right were used as a measuring stick to judge the way that people in different cultures lived. These other cultures were considered primitive, which was an ethnocentric term for people who were non-European. It is also a negative term suggesting that indigenous cultures had a lack of technological advancement. Colonizers thought that they were superior to the "Other" in every way.

Armchair anthropologists were unlikely to be aware of their ethnocentric ideas because they did not visit the cultures they studied. Scottish social anthropologist Sir James Frazer is well-known for his 1890 work The Golden Bough: A Study of Comparative Religions . Its title was later changed to A Study in Magic and Religion , and it was one of the first books to describe and record magical and religious beliefs of different culture groups around the world. Yet, this book was not the outcome of extensive study in the field. Instead, Frazer relied on the accounts of others who had traveled, such as scholars, missionaries, and government officials, to formulate his study.

Another example of anthropological writing without the use of fieldwork is Sir E. B. Tylor’s 1871 work Primitive Culture. Tylor, who went on to become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in 1896, was an important influence in the development of sociocultural anthropology as a separate discipline. Tylor defined culture as “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.” [1] His definition of culture is still used frequently today and remains the foundation of the culture concept in anthropology.

Tylor’s definition of culture was influenced by the popular theories and philosophies of his time, including the work of Charles Darwin. Darwin formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species . Scholars of the time period, including Tylor, believed that cultures were subject to evolution just like plants and animals and thought that cultures developed over time from simple to complex. Many nineteenth century anthropologists believed that cultures evolved through distinct stages. They labeled these stages with terms such as savagery, barbarism, and civilization. [2] These theories of cultural evolutionism would later be successfully refuted, but conflicting views about cultural evolutionism in the nineteenth century highlight an ongoing nature versus nurture debate about whether biology shapes behavior more than culture.

Both Frazer and Tylor contributed important and foundational studies even though they never went into the field to gather their information. Armchair anthropologists were important in the development of anthropology as a discipline in the late nineteenth century because although these early scholars were not directly experiencing the cultures they were studying, their work did ask important questions—questions that could ultimately only be answered by going into the field.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species . London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859.

Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Customs . London: Cambridge University Press. 1871.

IMAGE CREDITS

Figure 3.1.1. Sir James Frazer, 1933, under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3.1.2. Drawing of a Mother and Child in Malaysia From Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization, E.B. Tylor, 1904, under Public Domain.

Figure 3.1.3. Edward Burnett Tylor by The GNU Project licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

• Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Customs (London: Cambridge University Press, 1871), preface. ↵
• Lewis Henry Morgan was one anthropologist who proposed an evolutionary framework based on these terms in his book Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1877). ↵

Adapted From

"The Concept of Culture" by Priscilla Medeiros, Women’s College Hospital and Emily Cowall, McMaster University. In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology , 2nd Edition, Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges, 2020, under CC BY-NC 4.0 .

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Peter Melville Logan, “On Culture: Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture , 1871″

Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture articulates one of two major theories of culture to emerge around 1870. His theory defines culture in descriptive terms as the “complex whole” that makes up social ideas and institutions, and in this it helped to establish anthropology as a recognized science. Tylor’s ideas were closely related to those published about the same time by Matthew Arnold, who defined culture as a humanist ideal that society should strive for.

Figure 1: Engraving of Edward Burnett Tylor

While a foundational figure in cultural anthropology, Tylor thought about culture in radically different terms than we do today. He accepted the premise that all societies develop in the same way and insisted on the universal progression of human civilization from savage to barbarian to civilized. Nowhere in his writing does the plural “cultures” appear. In his view, culture is synonymous with civilization, rather than something particular to unique societies, and, so, his definition refers to “Culture or civilization.” In part, his universalist view stemmed from his Quaker upbringing, which upheld the value of a universal humanity, and indeed Tylor’s refusal to accept the concept of race as scientifically significant in the study of culture was unusual in Victorian science.

The biology of evolution was explained by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859), and he expanded his finding to include human evolution in The Descent of Man (1871), which was published the same year as Primitive Culture . While Darwin concentrated on biology, Tylor focused solely on the evolution of human culture. In this, he participated in a lengthy philosophical tradition explaining human development from its beginning to the present day. This speculative practice extends back to classical antiquity. In De Rerum Natura ( The Way Things Are ), recounting the even earlier ideas of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE), the Roman poet Lucretius (99-55 BCE) told the dramatic story of a turbulent primal earth that generated all forms of life, including giant humans, who would slowly come together to create social groupings. Lucretius was particularly concerned with the development of beliefs about supernatural beings, which he viewed as anthropomorphic attempts to explain the natural world. In medieval Europe, Lucretius’s ideas were largely forgotten in favor of the Christian account of human origins in Genesis. But by the eighteenth century, philosophers proposed new, secular accounts that minimized the story of Genesis. In Scienza nuova (1744; The New Science ), the Italian Giambattista Vico (1688-1744) proposed a theory of human origins that incorporated many of Lucretius’s ideas, including the gigantic stature of early man, and he reiterated the anthropomorphic explanation for the rise in beliefs about gods. Indeed, the first of Vico’s 141 axioms explains the importance of human self-projection as a means of explaining the world around them: “By its nature, the human mind is indeterminate; hence, when man is sunk in ignorance, he makes himself the measure of the universe” (75).

Enlightenment philosophers like Vico typically divided the development of human culture into three distinct stages. While his stages depended on the increasing sophistication of language over time, in De l’esprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of Law s), the French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) used three static stages defined less by time than by geography and the effects of climate: savagery (hunting), barbarism (herding), and civilization. The French ideologue Marquis de Condorcet (1743-94) used ten stages, but he saw them as more dynamic than did Montesquieu. In Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795; Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind), Condorcet took a developmental view of social progress linked to the development of human reason over time. Condorcet was particularly significant to the thinking of Tylor’s defining predecessor, the French philosopher of science Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42; Positive Philosophy ) proposed three similarly dynamic stages premised on the growth of reason: the theological stage, dominated by superstition; the metaphysical, where spiritual thinking was replaced by political allegory; and the positivist stage of scientific reason. Comte’s philosophy was popularized in Britain in 1853 by Harriet Martineau’s condensed translation.

While Enlightenment thinkers and Comte referred to the development of “society” or “civilization,” the nineteenth-century German social philosopher Gustav Klemm (1802-67) used a novel term for his discussion of human development. In his Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit (1843-52; The General Cultural History of Mankind ), he substituted the word Kultur for “society” (Williams 91). Nonetheless, Klemm, like his predecessors, considered human culture or civilization as a single condition. The exception was the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), whose unfinished Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man) insisted on cultural relativism, arguing that there was too much variety to view all human societies as part of the same unilinear process.

Tylor’s method did not appear ex nihilo , then. He adopted Klemm’s term, “culture,” as preferable to “civilization.” Most significantly, he used Comte’s three stages wholesale, but he substituted Montesquieu’s terminology of “savage,” “barbarian,” and “civilized” for Comte’s ungainly “theological,” “metaphysical,” and “positivist.” To these, he added a practical method for studying humanity, and this emphasis on scientific objectivity within ethnographic practices differentiated his work from that of his predecessors. “Evolutionary Anthropology,” as Tylor’s Victorian method was called, dominated British ethnography until the end of the nineteenth century. In his most influential work, Primitive Culture , he spelled out two major contributions to anthropology: he defined culture clearly as an object of study for the first time, and he described a systematic method for studying it.

His science of culture had three essential premises: the existence of one culture, its development through one progression, and humanity as united by one mind. Tylor saw culture as universal. In his view, all societies were essentially alike and capable of being ranked by their different levels of cultural advancement. As he explains in a later essay:

the institutions of man are as distinctly stratified as the earth on which he lives. They succeed each other in series substantially uniform over the globe, independent of what seem the comparatively superficial differences of race and language, but shaped by similar human nature acting through successively changed conditions in savage, barbaric, and civilized life. (“On a Method” 269)

The earliest stage of savagery featured largely in Tylor’s study of culture; the term itself derives from the Latin for forest-dweller, and at the time it had both neutral and positive connotations as well as the negative ones that remain today. Societies within each stage have superficial differences masking their fundamental similarity, and the anthropologist’s job is to identify the latter. Determining where the group stood on the hierarchical ladder of cultural development provided the context for interpreting all aspects of the society by comparing it with others on the same rung around the world. One of the most prominent consequences of this logic was the familiar practice in Victorian museums of displaying together all objects of one type from around the world, arranged to illustrate the intrinsic cultural evolution of a musical instrument, bowls, or spears, for example. A cursory glance at most illustrated anthropological books from the time, such as Friedrich Ratzel’s The History of Mankind (1885-86), demonstrates the same principle at work.

The progression from savage to civilized did not occur evenly or at the same pace in every society, but the distinct stages were always the same, much as the growth of the individual from infant to adolescent to adult takes a similar form in different places. The association this analogy created between primitives and children was roundly rejected in anthropology at the turn of the century, but in the meantime it created a sense that Victorians were confronting their infant selves in what they regarded as primitive societies. In this sense, the science of anthropology was not just about the study of other, largely colonized people; it was also about the connection between modern life in Europe and its own earlier stages, and this meant that anthropology had much to teach the British about their own society. Tylor argues that elements of early culture continue on in later stages as “survivals.” Superstitions, nursery rhymes, or familiar expressions (“a pig in a poke”) often are illogical and unintelligible. Such aspects of modern life, he argues, are survivals from mythology or rituals that served a purpose in the past but had lost their meaning over time, even as the practice itself continued. To Tylor, the most apparently insignificant aspects of Victorian life were critical to anthropology. Survivals were “landmarks in the course of culture. . . . On the strength of these survivals, it becomes possible to declare that the civilization of the people they are observed among must have been derived from an earlier state, in which the proper home and meaning of these things are to found; and thus collections of such facts are to be worked as mines of historic knowledge” ( Primitive Culture 1:71). Reuniting survivals with their lost meaning was the key to understanding the true nature of the primitive mind.

Ultimately, understanding the perceptions and working of that primitive mind was the object of anthropology. His central premise was the doctrine of psychic unity: the belief that all humans are governed by the same mental and psychological processes and that, faced with similar circumstances, all will respond similarly. The principal of psychic unity explained the appearance of identical myths and artifacts in widely disparate societies. While acknowledging two other possibilities—that each society could have inherited the trait from a common ancestor, or that each came into contact with one another at some point and learned it from the other—he argued that “independent invention” was the most frequent cause of such coincidences.

The defining trait of the primitive mind was its inability to think abstractly. Because numbers are abstractions, counting was limited to the concrete number of fingers or toes, for example, followed by “a lot.” Language was nonexistent. For the same reason, primitives were unable to group similar objects into abstract categories—all trees, or rocks, or flowers, for example. Instead, the primitive saw only individual trees, without understanding categories like a forest, because of their abstract nature. This was above all a concrete world, one in which each object had a unique identity or personality that could not be replaced by any other. Primitives were thus immersed in a world of singular objects. At the same time they were unable to comprehend events, like thunder, in a logical fashion, because they lacked the power to construct abstract natural laws. Instead, primitives projected their emotions onto the world around them as a means of explaining natural events. In response to the threat posed by thunder, for example, the primitive invents an angry supernatural being to explain it. When a tree ceases to bear fruit, the tree’s spirit must be unhappy. Tylor called the primitive belief in spirits “animism,” a term that continues in use today, and thus he follows a long tradition of imagining early humans as dominated by supernaturalism.

Like Comte, Tylor held that the progress of culture was a slow replacement of this magical thinking with the power of reason. He produced a narrative of human evolution that begins with a global supernaturalism in the savage stage. Supernaturalism coexists with the development of language, laws, and institutions in the barbaric stage. In advanced civilizations, like Tylor’s own, reason and scientific thinking predominate. This is not a rational utopia, by any means. Magical thinking persists in the present; the primitive tendency to imagine objects as having a life of their own exists even within the most civilized gentleman, who might think in a moment of frustration that a broken watch was inhabited by an evil spirit. Tylor did not imagine modern culture in idealist terms, but, ever the Victorian, he did view it as fundamentally better than that of primitive culture.

Evolutionary anthropology remerged in the twentieth century, as early as the 1930s but more influentially later in the century, and it continues today. Unlike its Victorian variant, evolutionary thought now emphasizes multi-causality, the interaction of multiple events to account for the development of societies, as well as the presence of multiple paths in the development of particular cultures. In both of these regards, Tylor’s central concepts of the uniform primitive mind, the single evolutionary path through three stages, and the universality of one human culture remain decidedly Victorian in their outlook, telling us more about the nineteenth century and its own culture, than they do about contemporary anthropological thought.

Peter Melville Logan is Director of the Center for the Humanities at Temple University, where he is a Professor of English. He is the author of Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (2010),  Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (1997), and Editor of The Encyclopedia of the Novel (2 vols.), 2011.

HOW TO CITE THIS BRANCH ENTRY (MLA format)

published July 2012

Logan, Peter Melville. “On Culture: Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture , 1871.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History . Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net . Web. [Here, add your last date of access to BRANCH].

WORKS CITED

Boas, Franz. “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthroplogy.” Science 4 (1896): 901-08. Print.

Comte, Auguste. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte . Trans. Harriet Martineau. Vol. 2. 2 vols. London: John Chapman, 1853. Print.

Stocking, George W. “Matthew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the Uses of Invention.” Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology . New York: Free Press, 1968. 69-90. Print.

—, ed. The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911: A Franz Boas Reader . New York: Basic, 1974. Print.

—. Victorian Anthropology . New York: Free Press, 1987. Print.

Tylor, Edward B. “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions; Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 18 (1889): 245-72. Print.

—. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom . 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1873. Print.

Vico, Giambattista. New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations . Ed. Marsh, David. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1999. Print.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society . New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Print.

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2 The Culture Concept

This is an adaptation of:

Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Second Edition) 

by Nina Brown, Thomas McIlwraith, Laura Tubelle de González

Chapter Authors :

Priscilla Medeiros, Women’s College Hospital

Emily Cowall, McMaster University

Presentation Slides by James Sera

Discovering Cultural Anthropology shares and adapts this work under the CC BY-NC 4.0 copyright license

Learning Objectives

• Compare and contrast the ideas of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.
• Describe the role that early anthropologists Sir James Frazer and Sir E. B. Tylor played in defining the concept of culture in anthropology.
• Identify the differences between armchair anthropology and participant-observer fieldwork and explain how Bronislaw Malinowski contributed to the development of anthropological fieldwork techniques.

Identify the contributions Franz Boas and his students made to the development of new theories about culture.

• Assess some of the ethical issues that can arise from anthropological research.

THOUGHTS ON CULTURE OVER A CUP OF COFFEE

Do you think culture can be studied in a coffee shop? Have you ever gone to a coffee shop, sat down with a book or laptop, and listened to conversations around you? If you just answered yes, in a way, you were acting as an anthropologist. Anthropologists like to become a part of their surroundings, observing and participating with people doing day-to-day things. As two anthropologists writing a chapter about the culture concept, we wanted to know what other people thought about culture. What better place to meet than at our community coffee shop?

Our small coffee shop was filled with the aroma of coffee beans, and the voices of people competed with the sound of the coffee grinder. At the counter a chalkboard listed the daily specials of sandwiches and desserts. (Coffee shops have their own language, with vocabulary such as macchiato and latte . It can feel like entering a foreign culture.) We found a quiet corner that would allow us to observe other people (and hopefully identify a few to engage with) without disturbing them too much with our conversation. We understand the way that anthropologists think about culture, but we were also wondering what the people sitting around us might have to say. Would having a definition of culture really mean something to the average coffee-shop patron? Is a definition important? Do people care? We were very lucky that morning because sitting next to us was a man working on his laptop, a service dog lying at his feet.

Meeting Bob at the Coffee Shop

Having an animal in a food-service business is not usually allowed, but in our community people can have their service dogs with them. This young golden retriever wore a harness that displayed a sign stating the owner was diabetic. This dog was very friendly; in fact, she wanted to be touched and would not leave us alone, wagging her tail and pushing her nose against our hands. This is very unusual because many service dogs, like seeing eye dogs, are not to be touched. Her owner, Bob, let us know that his dog must be friendly and not afraid to approach people: if Bob needs help in an emergency, such as a diabetic coma, the dog must go to someone else for help. We enjoyed meeting Bob and his dog, and we asked if he would like to answer our question: what is culture? Bob was happy to share his thoughts and ideas.

Bob feels that language is very important to cultural identity. He believes that if one loses language, one also loses important information about wildlife, indigenous plants, and ways of being. As a member of a First Nations tribe, Bob believes that words have deep cultural meaning. Most importantly, he views English as the language of commerce. Bob is concerned with the influence of Western consumerism and how it changes cultural identity.

Bob is not an anthropologist. He was just a person willing to share his ideas. Without knowing it, though, Bob had described some of the elements of anthropology. He had focused on the importance of language and the loss of tradition when it is no longer spoken, and he had recognized that language is a part of cultural identity. He was worried about globalization and consumerism changing cultural values. With Bob’s opinions in mind, we started thinking about how we, two cultural anthropologists, would answer the same question about culture. Our training shapes our understandings of the question, yet we know there is more to culture concepts than a simple definition. Why is asking the culture concept question important to anthropologists? Does it matter? Is culture something that we can understand without studying it formally?

In this chapter, we will illustrate how anthropology developed the culture concept. Our journey will include the importance of storytelling and the way that anthropology became a social science. Along the way, we will learn about some important scholars and be introduced to anthropology in North America. Let’s begin with our discussion of storytelling by taking a look at Gulliver’s Travels .

STORIES AS A REFLECTION ON CULTURE

Stories are told in every culture and often teach a moral lesson to young children. Fables are similar, but often set an example for people to live by or describe what to do when in a dangerous situation. They can also be a part of traditions, help to preserve ways of life, or explain mysteries. Storytelling takes many different forms such as tall tales and folktales. These are for entertainment or to discuss problems encountered in life. Both are also a form of cultural preservation, a way to communicate morals or values to the next generation. Stories can also be a form of social control over certain activities or customs that are not allowed in a society.

A fable becomes a tradition by being retold and accepted by others in the community. Different cultures have very similar stories sharing common themes. One of the most common themes is the battle between good and evil. Another is the story of the quest. The quest often takes the character to distant lands, filled with real-life situations, opportunities, hardships, and heartaches. In both of these types of stories, the reader is introduced to the anthropological concept known as the Other . What exactly is the Other ? The Other is a term that has been used to describe people whose customs, beliefs, or behaviors are “different” from one’s own.

Can a story explain the concept of the Other? Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is about four different voyages that Gulliver undertakes. His first adventure is the most well-known; in the story, Lemuel Gulliver is a surgeon who plans a sea voyage when his business fails. During a storm at sea, he is shipwrecked, and he awakens to find himself bound and secured by a group of captors—the Lilliputians—who are six inches tall. Gulliver, having what Europeans consider a normal body height, suddenly becomes a giant. During this adventure, Gulliver is seen as an outsider, a stranger with different features and language. Gulliver becomes the Other.

What lessons about culture can we learn from Gulliver’s Travels ? Swift’s story offers lessons about cultural differences, conflicts occurring in human society, and the balance of power. It also provides an important example of the Other. The Other is a matter of perspective in this story: Gulliver thinks the Lilliputians are strange and unusual. To Gulliver, the Lilliputians are the Other, but the Lilliputians equally see Gulliver as the Other—he is their captive and is a rare species of man because of his size.

The themes in Gulliver’s Travels describe different cultures and aspects of storytelling. The story uses language, customary behaviors, and the conflict between different groups to explore ideas of the exotic and strange. The story is framed as an adventure, but is really about how similar cultures can be. In the end, Gulliver becomes a member of another cultural group, learning new norms, attitudes, and behaviors. At the same time, he wants to colonize them, a reflection of his former cultural self.

Stories are an important part of culture, and when used to pass on traditions or cultural values, they can connect people to the past. Stories are also a way to validate religious, social, political, and economic practices from one generation to another. Stories are important because they are used in some societies to apply social pressure, to keep people in line, and are part of shaping the way that people think and behave.

Anthropologists as Storytellers

People throughout recorded history have relied on storytelling as a way to share cultural details. When early anthropologists studied people from other civilizations, they relied on the written accounts and opinions of others; they presented facts and developed their “stories,” about other cultures based solely on information gathered by others. These scholars did not have any direct contact with the people they were studying. This approach has come to be known as armchair anthropology . Simply put, if a culture is viewed from a distance (as from an armchair), the anthropologist tends to measure that culture from his or her own vantage point and to draw comparisons that place the anthropologist’s culture as superior to the one being studied. This point of view is also called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is an attitude based on the idea that one’s own group or culture is better than any other.

Early anthropological studies often presented a biased ethnocentric interpretation of the human condition. For example, ideas about racial superiority emerged as a result of studying the cultures that were encountered during the colonial era. During the colonial era from the sixteenth century to the mid–twentieth century, European countries (Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Dutch Republic, Spain, Portugal) asserted control over land (Asia, Africa, the Americas) and people. European ideas of wrong and right were used as a measuring stick to judge the way that people in different cultures lived. These other cultures were considered primitive, which was an ethnocentric term for people who were non-European. It is also a negative term suggesting that indigenous cultures had a lack of technological advancement. Colonizers thought that they were superior to the Other in every way.

Sir James Frazer is among the founders of modern anthropology.

 Armchair anthropologists were unlikely to be aware of their ethnocentric ideas because they did not visit the cultures they studied. Scottish social anthropologist Sir James Frazer is well-known for his 1890 work The Golden Bough: A Study of Comparative Religion s . Its title was later changed to A Study in Magic and Religion , and it was one of the first books to describe and record magical and religious beliefs of different culture groups around the world. Yet, this book was not the outcome of extensive study in the field. Instead, Frazer relied on the accounts of others who had traveled, such as scholars, missionaries, and government officials, to formulate his study.

Another example of anthropological writing without the use of fieldwork is Sir E. B. Tylor’s 1871 work Primitive Culture. Tylor, who went on to become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in 1896, was an important influence in the development of sociocultural anthropology as a separate discipline. Tylor defined culture as “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.” His definition of culture is still used frequently today and remains the foundation to the culture concept in anthropology.

Tylor’s definition of culture was influenced by the popular theories and philosophies of his time, including the work of Charles Darwin. Darwin formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species . Scholars of the time period, including Tylor, believed that cultures were subject to evolution just like plants and animals and thought that cultures developed over time from simple to complex. Many nineteenth century anthropologists believed that cultures evolved through distinct stages. They labeled these stages with terms such as savagery, barbarism, and civilization. These theories of cultural evolutionism would later be successfully refuted, but conflicting views about cultural evolutionism in the nineteenth century highlight an ongoing nature versus nurture debate about whether biology shapes behavior more than culture.

Both Frazer and Tylor contributed important and foundational studies even though they never went into the field to gather their information. Armchair anthropologists were important in the development of anthropology as a discipline in the late nineteenth century because although these early scholars were not directly experiencing the cultures they were studying, their work did ask important questions—questions that could ultimately only be answered by going into the field.

Anthropologists as Cultural Participants

The armchair approach as a way to study culture changed when scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead took to the field and studied by being participants and observers. As they did, fieldwork became the most important tool anthropologists used to understand the “complex whole” of culture.

Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist, was greatly influenced by the work of Frazer . How- ever , unlike the armchair anthropology approach Frazer used in writing The Golden Bough , Malinowski used more innovative ethnographic techniques, and his fieldwork took him off the veranda to study different cultures. The off the veranda approach is different from armchair anthropology because it includes active participant-observation : traveling to a location, living among people, and observing their day-to-day lives.

Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, 1915–1918

What happened when Malinowski came off the veranda? The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) was considered the first modern ethnography and redefined the approach to fieldwork. This book is part of Malinowski’s trilogy on the Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski lived with them and observed life in their villages. By living among the islanders, Malinowski was able to learn about their social life, food and shelter, sexual behaviors, community economics, patterns of kinship , and family.

Malinowski went “native” to some extent during his fieldwork with the Trobriand Islanders. Going native means to become fully integrated into a cultural group: taking leadership positions and assuming key roles in society; entering into a marriage or spousal contract; exploring sexuality or fully participating in rituals. When an anthropologist goes native, the anthropologist is personally involved with locals. In The Argonauts of the Western Pacific , Malinowski suggested that other anthropologists should “grasp the native’s point of view, his relations to life, to realize his vision of his world.” However, as we will see later in this chapter, Malinowski’s practice of going native presented problems from an ethical point of view. Participant-observation is a method to gather ethnographic data, but going native places both the anthropologist and the culture group at risk by blurring the lines on both sides of the relationship.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF CULTURE

Anthropology in europe.

The discipline of cultural anthropology developed somewhat differently in Europe and North Amer- ica, in particular in the United States, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with each region contributing new dimensions to the concept of culture. Many European anthropologists were particularly interested in questions about how societies were structured and how they remained stable over time. This highlighted emerging recognition that culture and society are not the same. Culture had been defined by Tylor as knowledge, beliefs, and customs, but a society is more than just shared ideas or habits. In every society, people are linked to one another through social institutions such as families, political organizations, and businesses. Anthropologists across Europe often focused their research on understanding the form and function of these social institutions.

European anthropologists developed theories of functionalism to explain how social institutions contribute to the organization of society and the maintenance of social order. Bronislaw Malinowski believed that cultural traditions were developed as a response to specific human needs such as food, comfort, safety, knowledge, reproduction, and economic livelihood. One function of educational institutions like schools, for instance, is to provide knowledge that prepares people to obtain jobs and make contributions to society. Although he preferred the term structural-functionalism , the British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown was also interested in the way that social structures functioned to maintain social stability in a society over time.  He suggested that in many societies it was the family that served as the most important social structure because family relationships determined much about an individual’s social, political, and economic relationships and these patterns were repeated from one generation to the next. In a family unit in which the father is the breadwinner and the mother stays home to raise the children, the social and economic roles of both the husband and the wife will be largely defined by their specific responsibilities within the family. If their children grow up to follow the same arrangement, these social roles will be continued in the next generation.

In the twentieth century, functionalist approaches also became popular in North American anthropology, but eventually fell out of favor. One of the biggest critiques of functionalism is that it views cultures as stable and orderly and ignores or cannot explain social change. Functionalism also struggles to explain why a society develops one particular kind of social institution instead of another. Functionalist perspectives did contribute to the development of more sophisticated concepts of culture by establishing the importance of social institutions in holding societies together. While defining the division between what is cultural and what is social continues to be complex, functionalist theory helped to develop the concept of culture by demonstrating that culture is not just set of ideas or beliefs, but consists of specific practices and social institutions that give structure to daily life and allow human communities to function.

Anthropology in the United States

During the development of anthropology in North America (Canada, United States, and Mexico), the significant contribution made by the American School of Anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the concept of cultural relativism , which is the idea that cultures cannot be objectively understood since all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture. Cultural relativism is different than ethnocentrism because it emphasizes understanding culture from an insider’s view. The focus on culture, along with the idea of cultural relativism, distinguished cultural anthropology in the United States from social anthropology in Europe.

The participant-observation method of fieldwork was a revolutionary change to the practice of anthropology, but at the same time it presented problems that needed to be overcome. The challenge was to move away from ethnocentrism, race stereotypes, and colonial attitudes, and to move forward by encouraging anthropologists to maintain high ethical standards and open minds.

Franz Boas, an American anthropologist, is acknowledged for redirecting American anthropologists away from cultural evolutionism and toward cultural relativism. Boas first studied physical science at the University of Kiel in Germany. Because he was a trained scientist, he was familiar with using empirical methods as a way to study a subject. Empirical methods are based on evidence that can be tested using observation and experiment.

Franz Boas, One of the Founders of American Anthropology, 1915

In 1883, Franz Boas went on a geographical expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. The Central Eskimo (1888) details his time spent on Baffin Island studying the culture and language of the central Eskimo (Inuit) people. He studied every aspect of their culture such as tools, clothing, and shelters. This study was Boas’ first major contribution to the American school of anthropology and convinced him that cultures could only be understood through extensive field research. As he observed on Baffin Island, cultural ideas and practices are shaped through interactions with the natural environment. The cultural traditions of the Inuit were suited for the environment in which they lived. This work led him to promote cultural relativism: the principle that a culture must be understood on its own terms rather than compared to an outsider’s standard. This was an important turning point in correcting the challenge of ethnocentrism in ethnographic fieldwork.

Boas is often considered the originator of American anthropology because he trained the first generation of American anthropologists including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kroeber. Using a commitment to cultural relativism as a starting point, these students continued to refine the concept of culture. Ruth Benedict, one of Boas’ first female students, used cultural relativism as a starting point for investigating the cultures of the American northwest and southwest. Her best-selling book Patterns of Culture (1934) emphasized that culture gives people coherent patterns for thinking and behaving. She argued that culture affects individuals psychologically, shaping individual personality traits and leading the members of a culture to exhibit similar traits such as tendency toward aggression, or calmness.

Benedict was a professor at Columbia University and in turn greatly influenced her student Margaret Mead, who went on to become one of the most well-known female American cultural anthropologists. Mead was a pioneer in conducting ethnographic research at a time when the discipline was predominately male. Her 1925 research on adolescent girls on the island of Ta‘ū in the Samoan Islands, published as Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), revealed that teenagers in Samoa did not experience the same stress and emotional difficulties as those in the United States. The book was an important contribution to the nature versus nurture debate, providing an argument that learned cultural roles were more important than biology. The book also reinforced the idea that individual emotions and personality traits are products of culture.

Ruth Benedict, 1936

Alfred Louis Kroeber, another student of Boas, also shared the commitment to field research and cultural relativism, but Kroeber was particularly interested in how cultures change over time and influence one another. Through publications like The Nature of Culture (1952), Kroeber examined the historical processes that led cultures to emerge as distinct configurations as well as the way cultures could become more similar through the spread or diffusion of cultural traits. Kroeber was also interested in language and the role it plays in transmitting culture. He devoted much of his career to studying Native American languages in an attempt to document these languages before they disappeared.

Anthropologists in the United States have used cultural relativism to add depth to the concept of culture in several ways. Tylor had defined culture as including knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, capabilities and habits. Boas and his students added to this definition by emphasizing the importance of enculturation , the process of learning cul- ture, in the lives of individuals. Benedict, Mead, and others Ruth Benedict, 1936 established that through enculturation culture shapes individual identity, self-awareness, and emotions  in fundamental ways. They also emphasized the need for holism, approaches to research that considered the entire context of a society including its history

Kroeber and others also established the importance of language as an element of culture and documented the ways in which language was used to communicate complex ideas. By the late twentieth century, new approaches to symbolic anthropology put language at the center of analysis. Later on, Clifford Geertz, the founding member of postmodernist anthropology, noted in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) that culture should not be seen as something that was “locked inside people’s heads.” Instead, culture was publicly communicated through speech and other behaviors. Culture , he concluded, is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life.” This definition, which continues to be influential today, reflects the influence of many earlier efforts to refine the concept of culture in American anthropology.

Ethical Issues in Truth Telling

As anthropologists developed more sophisticated concepts of culture, they also gained a greater understanding of the ethical challenges associated with anthropological research. Because participant- observation fieldwork brings anthropologists into close relationships with the people they study, many complicated issues can arise. Cultural relativism is a perspective that encourages anthropologists to show respect to members of other cultures, but it was not until after World War II that the profession of anthropology recognized a need to develop formal standards of professional conduct.

The Nuremberg trials, which began in 1945 in Nuremberg, Germany and were conducted under the direction of the France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, prosecuted members of the Nazi regime for war crimes. In addition to military and political figures, physicians and scientists were also prosecuted for unethical human experimentation and mass murder. The trials demonstrated that physicians and other scientists could be dangerous if they used their skills for abusive or exploitative goals. The Nuremberg Code that emerged from the trials is considered a land- mark document in medical and research ethics. It established principles for the ethical treatment of the human subjects involved in any medical or scientific research.

Many universities adopted principles from the Nuremberg Code to write ethical guidelines for the treatment of human subjects. Anthropologists and students who work in universities where these guidelines exist are obliged to follow these rules. The American Anthropological Association (AAA), along with many anthropology organizations in other countries, developed codes of ethics describing specific expectations for anthropologists engaged in research in a variety of settings. The principles in the AAA code of ethics include: do no harm; be open and honest regarding your work; obtain informed consent and necessary permissions; ensure the vulnerable populations in every study are protected from competing ethical obligations; make your results accessible; protect and preserve your records; and maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships. These principles sound simple, but can be complicated in practice.

Bronislaw Malinowski

The career of Bronislaw Malinowski provides an example of how investigations of culture can lead anthropologists into difficult ethical areas. As discussed above, Malinowski is widely regarded as a leading figure in the history of anthropology. He initiated the practice of participant-observation fieldwork and published several highly regarded books including The Argonauts of the Western Pacific . Following his death, the private diary he kept while conducting fieldwork was discovered and published as A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term (1967). The diary described Malinowski’s feelings of loneliness and isolation, but also included a great deal of information about his sexual fantasies as well his some insensitive and contemptuous opinions about the Trobriand Islanders. The diary provided valuable insight into the mind of an important ethnographer, but also raised questions about the extent to which his personal feelings, including bias and racism, were reflected in his official conclusions.

Most anthropologists keep diaries or daily notes as a means of keeping track of the research project, but these records are almost never made public. Because Malinowski’s diary was published after his death, he could not explain why he wrote what he did, or assess the extent to which he was able to separate the personal from the professional. Which of these books best reflects the truth about Malinowski’s interaction with the Trobriand Islanders? This rare insight into the private life of a field researcher demonstrates that even when anthropologists are acting within the boundaries of professional ethics, they still struggle to set aside their own ethnocentric attitudes and prejudices.

Napoleon Chagnon

A more serious and complicated incident concerned research conducted among the Yanomami, an indigenous group living in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Venezuela. Starting in the 1960s, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel, a geneticist, carried out research among the Yanomami. Neel was interested in studying the effects of radiation released by nuclear explosions on people living in remote areas. Chagnon was investigating theories about the role of violence in Yanomami society. In 2000, an American journalist, Patrick Tierney, published a book about Chagnon and Neel’s research: Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazo n . The book contained numerous stunning allegations, including a claim that the pair had deliberately infected the Yanomami with measles, starting an epidemic that killed thousands of people. The book also claimed that Neel had conducted medical experiments without the consent of the Yanomami and that Chagnon had deliberately created conflicts between Yanomami groups so he could study the resulting violence.

These allegations were brought to the attention of the American Anthropological Association, and a number of inquiries were eventually conducted. James Neel was deceased, but Napoleon Chagnon steadfastly denied the allegations. In 2002, the AAA issued their report; Chagnon was judged to have misrepresented the violent nature of Yanomami culture in ways that caused them harm and to have failed to obtain proper consent for his research. However, Chagnon continued to reject these conclusions and complained that the process used to evaluate the evidence was unfair. In 2005, the AAA rescinded its own conclusion, citing problems with the investigation process. The results of several years of inquiry into the situation satisfied few people. Chagnon was not definitively pronounced guilty, nor was he exonerated. Years later, debate over this episode continues. The controversy demonstrates the extent to which truth can be elusive in anthropological inquiry. Although anthropologists should not be storytellers in the sense that they deliberately create fictions, differences in perspective and theoretical orientation create unavoidable differences in the way anthropologists interpret the same situation. Anthropologists must try to use their toolkit of theory and methods to ensure that the stories they tell are truthful and represent the voice of the people being studied using an ethical approach.

BACK IN THE COFFEE SHOP

This chapter has looked at some historic turning points in the way anthropologists have defined culture. There is not one true, absolute definition of culture. Anthropologists respect traditions such as language; the development of self, especially from infancy to adulthood; kinship; and the structure of the social unit, or the strata of a person within their class structure; marriage, families, and rites of passage; systems of belief; and ritual. However, anthropologists also look at change and the impact it has on those traditions.

With globalization moving at a dramatic pace, and change unfolding daily, how will emerging trends redefine the culture concept? For example, social media and the Internet connect the world and have created new languages, relationships, and an online culture without borders. This leads to the question: is digital, or cyber anthropology the future? Is the study of online cultures, which are encountered largely through reading text, considered armchair or off the veranda research? Is the cyber world a real or virtual culture? In some ways, addressing online cultures takes anthropology back to its roots as anthropologists can explore new worlds without leaving home. At the same time, cyberspaces and new technologies allow people to see, hear, and communicate with others around the world in real time.

Back in the coffee shop, where we spent time with Bob, we discovered that he hoped to keep familiar aspects of his own culture, traditions such as language, social structure, and unique expressions of values, alive. The question, what is culture, caused us to reflect on our own understandings of the cultural self and the cultural Other , and on the importance of self and cultural awareness.

My cultural self has evolved from the first customary traditions of my childhood, yet my life with the Inuit caused me to consider that I have similar values and community traits as my friends in the North. My childhood was focused on caring, acceptance, and working together to achieve the necessities of life. Life on the land with the Inuit was no different, and throughout the years, I have seen how much we are the same, just living in different locations and circumstances. My anthropological training has enriched my life experiences by teaching me to enjoy the world and its peoples. I have also experienced being the cultural Other when working in the field, and this has always reminded me that the cultural self and the cultural Other will always be in conflict with each other on both sides of the experience.

Living with different indigenous tribes in Kenya gave me a chance to learn how communities main- tain their traditional culture and ways of living. I come from a Portuguese- Canadian family that has kept strong ties to the culture and religion of our ancestors. Portuguese people believe storytelling is a way to keep one’s traditions, cultural identity, indigenous knowledge, and language alive. When I lived in Nairobi Province, Kenya, I discovered that people there had the same point of view. I found it odd that people still define their identities by their cultural history. What I have learned by conducting cul- tural fieldwork is that the meanings of culture not only vary from one group to another, but that all human societies define themselves through culture.

Our Final Reflection

Bob took us on a journey to understand what is at the heart of the culture concept. Clearly, the culture concept does not follow a straight line. Scholars, storytellers, and the people one meets in everyday life have something to say about the components of culture. The story that emerges from different voices brings insight into what it is to be human. Defining the culture concept is like putting together a puzzle with many pieces. The puzzle of culture concepts is almost complete, but it is not finished…yet.

Armchair anthropology : an early and discredited method of anthropological research that did not involve direct contact with the people studied.

Cultural determinism : the idea that behavioral differences are a result of cultural, not racial or genetic causes.

Cultural evolutionism: a discredited theory popular in nineteenth century anthropology suggesting that societies evolved through stages from simple to advanced.

Cultural relativism : the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own.

Culture : a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all- encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways.

Enculturation: the process of learning the characteristics and expectations of a culture or group.

Ethnocentrism: the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures.

Functionalism: an approach to anthropology developed in British anthropology that emphasized the way that parts of a society work together to support the functioning of the whole.

Going native : becoming fully integrated into a cultural group through acts such as taking a leadership position, assuming key roles in society, entering into marriage, or other behaviors that incorporate an anthropologist into the society he or she is studying.

Holism: taking a broad view of the historical, environmental, and cultural foundations of behavior.

Kinship: blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.

Participant observation: a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participat- ing in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.

Structural-Functionalism: an approach to anthropology that focuses on the ways in which the cus- toms or social institutions in a culture contribute to the organization of society and the maintenance of social order.

The Other: is a term that has been used to describe people whose customs, beliefs, or behaviors are “dif- ferent” from one’s own

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture . Boston: Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1934. Boas, Franz. Race, Language, and Culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species . London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859. Kroeber, Alfred. The Nature of Culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific . London: Routledge and Sons, 1922.

Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization .

New York: William Morrow and Company, 1928.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World . London: Benjamin Motte, 1726. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Lan guage, Art, and Customs . London: Cambridge University Press. 1871.

• Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Customs (London: Cambridge University Press, 1871), preface.
• Lewis Henry Morgan was one anthropologist who proposed an evolutionary framework based on these terms in his book Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1877).
• The film Bronislaw Malinowski: Off the Veranda , (Films Media Group, 1986) further describes Malinowski’s research practices.
• Bronislaw Malinowski. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1922), 290.
• For more on this topic see Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (New York: Routledge, 1983) and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London: Cohen and West, 1952).
• Boas’ attitudes about cultural relativism were influenced by his experiences in the Canadian Arctic as he strug- gled to survive in a natural environment foreign to his own prior experience. His private diary and letters record the evolution of his thinking about what it means to be “civilized.” In a letter to his fiancé, he wrote: “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over that of the ‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them … We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We ‘highly educated people’ are much worse, relatively speaking.” The entire letter can be read in George Stocking, ed. Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madi- son, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 33.
• Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, Geertz 1973), 89.
• For more information about the controversy, see Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross, “Guilt by Association: The Culture of Accusation and the American Anthropological Associations Investigation of Darkness in El Dorado.” American Anthropologist 106 no. 4 (2004):687-698 and Robert Borofsky, Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and

What We Can Learn From It (Berkley: University California Press, 2005). Napoleon Chagnon has written his rebuttal in Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).

Discovering Cultural Anthropology Copyright © by Antonia M. Santangelo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Bishop's Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy

James bishop (phd candidate) – public access to scholarly resources (and a few of my reflections…), e. b. tylor – animistic theory of religion and religion in ‘primitive culture’.

We have looked at Edward Burnett Tylor before in an article that would be much more pleasant for those who enjoy a briefer read. This article, however, engages in a more detailed analysis of Tylor’s theory of religion, notably his famous concept of animism, and some of the value and criticisms of his work Primitive Culture (1871).

Tylor’s Background

Tylor, born in 1832, died in 1917, was a British anthropologist widely credited as being the father of cultural anthropology. He held academic positions at Oxford, embarked on some early travels to America, Cuba, and Mexico before returning to England. Many of the societies he studied and discussed he did not visit. Other than his famous Primitive Culture , Tylor published three works during his career: A nahuac; or, Mexico and the Mexicans Ancient and Modern (1861), Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865), and Anthropology, an Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (1881).

Tylor was raised in a religious Quaker household and community. The Quakers are known for emphasizing God’s spirit moving a person to speak during worship meetings which meant that all participants would stay in a state of silence until someone felt the spirit prompting them to speak. Tylor also attended a Quaker school until he the age of sixteen but his faith did not allow him to enter university, so he became a clerk in the family business. Tylor, however, grew to dislike religion. He saw religion grounded in error and he had a negative attitude toward the church, particularly the Church of England and the Roman Catholics (1). Tylor wished to discover the earliest religion or form of religious belief and was fully away that doing so would undermine religion itself. It is likely that Tylor’s dislike for religion and his Quaker background came to influence the formation of his animistic theory of religion.

Primitive Cultures and Cultural Evolution

In Primitive Culture , Tylor made it his goal to understand so-called “primitive” people and culture. He proposed an evolutionary, developmental chronicle of culture from the primitive and savage to the civilized. It is Tylor’s controversial cultural evolutionary theory, as well as his views on the evolution of religious belief, for which he is well-known today. He was also much influenced by Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) biological theory of evolution in the On the Origin of Species (1859) and came to view human cultural evolution to have proceeded in a lawful and natural way. One means of gauging how developed a culture is is to view their technological and moral accomplishments. The greater these are the more developed the culture is in Tylor’s mind.

Tylor’s Philosophical Convictions and Definition of Religion

Tylor held the universe to be inanimate and impersonal and therefore did not find a need to appeal to supernatural forces to explain it. Neither did he need spiritual explanations of religion, especially since religious doctrines and practices belong to “theological systems devised by humans without supernatural aid or revelation.” If anything, rather than owing their origin or continued existence to a God or supernatural force, religions are the development of natural religion . Natural religion is a feature within human beings that makes them turn to religious ways of thinking. It is in human nature to be religious and one need not explain the manifestations of religion with the supernatural, God, or gods. Tylor instead wanted to engage in a “systematic study of the religions of the lower races” and so found it necessary to provide a rudimentary definition of religion, which he defined as the belief in Spiritual Beings: “It seems best to fall back at once on this essential source, and simply to claim, as a minimum definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings” (2). In what is also somewhat reminiscent of Rudolf Otto’s numinous , Tylor stated that religion is associated with “intense emotion, with awful reverence, with antagonizing terror, with rapt ecstasy when sense and thought utterly transcend the common evil of daily life” (3). Tylor further saw religion to provide an objective account of, or explanation of, the world, which meant that it could be verified or falsified. A religion could fail or succeed in terms of how it squares with reality.

Animism as the Earliest Form of Religion and Two Great Dogmas

Primitive Culture deals with religion and with animism specifically. Broadly understood, animism is ascribing personal agency to inanimate objects and using spirits, souls, or gods to explain phenomena within the world. Tylor phrases it as follows: “I propose here, under the name of Animism, to investigate the deep-lying doctrine of Spiritual Beings, which embodies the very essence of Spiritualistic as opposed to Materialistic philosophy” (4). In Tylor’s terms, animism is a Spiritualism. This means that a person holds to “extreme spiritualistic views” or “the general belief in spiritual beings” which can intervene in the lives of human beings and in the natural world. Such a worldview is opposed to materialism, if not constituting its total opposite, which claims that all phenomena in the universe are material or can be reduced to the material. Tylor claimed animism to be historically the earliest form of religion or religious belief,

“Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture” (5).

Employing colonial terminology that would make many modern readers uncomfortable, animism was the religion of the “savages” that continued to evolve up until the age of “civilized men.” Of course, civilized men being Tylor and many of his fellow European countrymen who agreed with his views. Tylor also acknowledged the possibility of there being other forms of belief prior to animism. This could even have been a non-religious condition prior to the religious condition, although Tylor still maintained that on the “immense mass of accessible evidence, we have to admit that the belief in spiritual beings appears among all low races” (6).

Tylor divided animism into two “ great dogmas .” The first dogma concerns that of the souls of individual creatures that are capable of existing after the death or destruction of the body. The second dogma concerns spirits that exist in a hierarchy “upward to the rank of powerful deities.” These spiritual beings are believed by devotees to be active,

“Spiritual beings are held to affect or control the events of the material world, and man’s life here and hereafter; and it being considered that they hold intercourse with men, and receive pleasure or displeasure from human actions, the belief in their existence leads natural, and it might almost be said inevitably, sooner or later to active reverence and propitiation” (7).

Tylor’s definition of animism thus includes a belief in souls, in controlling deities, and a hierarchy of subordinate spirits. These beliefs are also accompanied by doctrines resulting in some form of active worship. Tylor saw this worldview in many cultures such as the Algonquins, Arawak, Abipones, Zulus, Basutos, Caribs, Dakotas, Tongans, Fijians, Karens, Khonds, Papuas, Greenlanders, Malays, Java, Seminoles, the “natives of Nicaragua.” He also includes the Hebrews, and Jewish and Arabic philosophy.

Animism and Development: Souls, Phantoms, Dreams

Several important ideas were proposed by Tylor to explain the development of animism within the primitive peoples at the “low level of culture.” First he observed two phenomena of interest to the primitive cultures. The first concerned what makes the difference between a living body and a dead one, and what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death. The second concerned those human shapes that appeared in dreams and visions. In terms of dreams , Tylor states that the human beings experience their dreams in that they really feel like they are moving in a spiritual space where bodies are not needed (8). In a dream one can observe other things happening, fly, pass through walls, engage in battle, all of which feel very real. According to Tylor, many primitive cultures interpreted dreams as being real experiences of things actually happening and it is perhaps because of this that the so-called “savage philosopher” inferred that every person has two things belonging to him: a life and a phantom . According to Tylor,

“The notion of a ghost-soul animating man while in the body, and peering in dream and vision out of the body, is found deeply ingrained… the primitive animistic doctrine is thoroughly at home among savages” (9).

According to Tylor, the life and the phantom are closely connected with the body. The life enables the body to feel, think, and act, whereas the phantom is the body’s image or second self. Although closely connected with the body, both are also perceived as separable from the body: “the life as able to go away and leave it insensible or dead, the phantom as appearing to people at a distance from it” (10).

Tylor suggested that the next step for these cultures is to combine the life and the phantom. They now both belong to the body and are the manifestations of one and the same soul. Tylor proposed a closer and more nuanced description of this ghost-soul,

“It is a thin unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapor, film, or shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates; independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or present; capable of leaving the body far behind, to flash swiftly from place to place; mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing to men waking or asleep as phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness; continuing to exist and appear to men after the death of that body; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things” (11).

Tylor did not claim this ghost-soul concept to be universal but he nonetheless saw it as being sufficiently general to be taken as a standard for religion. Further, there is a kind of extrapolation that occurred to animals and objects who were then also thought to have souls. This, Tylor writes, is a “natural extension from the theory of human souls; the souls of trees and plants follow in some vague partial way; and the souls of inanimate objects expand the general category to its extremest boundary” (12).

Tylor’s Personal Investment in Animism

As we noted earlier, Tylor disliked the church and religion and was well aware that his animistic theory would undermine both. He reasoned that if all beliefs in and about God had merely evolved from a so-called primitive early form of animism then no belief, sophisticated or not, held by anyone in the modern-day, including those within the church, could be considered truer or superior to any other. Every form of monotheistic belief, whether that be the monotheism of Christianity, Islam , or Judaism, is an evolution from animism, just as are the polytheistic and henotheistic religions. All modern religions are therefore no different from the obsolete, ancient superstitious ways of seeing the world. We see this in Tylor’s view of modern theology which simply reuses and sophisticates the beliefs of the savages: “[T]he conception of the human soul is, as to its most essential nature, continuous from the philosophy of the savage thinker to that of the modern professor of theology” (13).

Superstition in Modern People

Tylor held animistic beliefs to have been appropriate for the primitive and savage societies but wondered why contemporary people, especially the religious, still shared similar beliefs. Why, Tylor asked, if modern people are aware of science do their beliefs not conform more to this intellectual progress? Instead most still believed in spirits such as Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, and so on. Tylor states how “extremely difficult civilized men have found it [animism] to unmake” (14). Tylor had, however, indeed noticed some changes in animistic beliefs as human beings became more civilized. For example, the so-called “notion of souls of beasts is to be seen dying out” while the doctrine of the human soul had undergone modification. The human soul is no longer believed by the civilized mind to be associated with dreams but is instead just an immaterial entity. It is nonetheless a superstition still present in theology. The means by which Tylor explained the continued presence of animism within modern thought was to suggest a kind of animistic residue left over from humanity’s historical development,

“The animism of civilized men, while more appropriate to advanced knowledge, is in great measure only explicable as a developed product of the older and ruder system… [it is the] survival of the old in the midst of the new, modification of the old to bring it into conformity with the new” (15).

“Though classic and medieval philosophy modified it much, and modern philosophy has handled it yet more unsparingly, it has so far retained the traces of its original character, that heirlooms of primitive ages may be claimed in the existing psychology of the civilized world. Out of the vast mass of evidence, collected among the most various and distant races of mankind, typical details may now be selected to display the earlier theory of the soul, the relation of the parts of this theory, and the manner in which these parts have been abandoned, modified, or kept up, along the course of culture” (16).

According to Tylor, certain people had become stuck at a lower stage or level of cognitive, cultural, and religious development than others. He was interested in discoveries of hunter-gatherer societies from the Brixham cave made in 1859 which he used to support his case. Such people made use of simple stone tools, had not developed sophisticated technology, metals, or agriculture, so Tylor viewed them as lower in development than the civilized in “men’s intellectual history.”

Appreciation and Criticisms of Tylor

Tylor’s animistic theory has led some scholars to adopt a “Tylorian theory of religion” simply because he really captured within religion what is really there, namely religion involving a belief in spirit (17). Belief in spirit is a real feature of many religions from the likes of Hinduism and Islam to Christianity, Judaism, Neo-paganism, and many others, although it is less clear how this definition would apply to the likes of Taoism , Confucianism , or Buddhism .

Although one certainly finds value in Tylor’s theory, there are important critiques that have been offered in response to it. One strong criticism is that Tylor underestimated the intellectual and artistic complexity of pre-historical cultures. Scholar Ivan Strenski says that the lack of technological sophistication of hunter-gatherer peoples,

“[L]ed thinkers of Tylor’s ilk to regard our ancient prehistoric ancestors as lower in their development than we. They were, to him, “primitive.” But Tylor seemed blind to the sophisticated artistic quality of the wall painting found in the caves. Of the four chapters of his Anthropology entitled “The Arts of Life,” he writes only about utilitarian material culture – technologies, tools, and implements. There is nothing on esthetics or beauty of so-called “primitive” material culture… Tylor had no taste for the cave paintings that so impressed Marrett as fine art. He literally and figuratively never saw sophistication and high culture in the caves. He saw only what he wanted to see — the “primitive”.” (18)

But as some have argued, the artistic ability evident within hunter-gatherer aesthetic culture suggests an intellectual command not appreciated by later theorists. Also increasingly is contemporary evidence revealing pre-historical peoples to be much more advanced than they have initially been given credit for (19). The twentieth-century British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard is critical of representations like Tylor’s. Having conducted fieldwork with the Nuer people of South Sudan, Evans-Pritchard concedes that to a western mind “It seems odd, if not absurd, to a European when he is told that a twin is a bird as though it were an obvious fact”, as the Nuer evidently believe (20). Equally, for the Nuer to say that the will-o’-the-wisps (these being mysterious lights that emerge in bushes and in swamps) are spirits or Spirit is strange as “For us the light is [merely] a gas arising from swamp vegetation…” and nothing more than that (21). However, Evans-Pritchard still claims to have uncovered a far greater level of intellectual and artistic elocution than theorists like Tylor and others allowed. Speaking of the Nuer, he says that this ability,

“implies experience on an imaginative level of thought where the mind moves in figures, symbols, metaphors, analogies, and many an elaboration of poetic fancy and language… In all their poems and songs also they play on words and images to such an extent that no European can translate them without commentary from Neur… How Nuer delight in playing with words is also seen in the fun they have in making up tongue-twisters, sentences which are difficult to pronounce without a mistake, and slips of the tongue, usually slips in the presence of mothers-in-law, which turn quite ordinary remarks into obscenities… the imagination of this sensitive people finds its sole expression in ideas, images, and worlds” (22).

Tylor seriously underestimated, if not much ignored, this feature to the pre-historical peoples. A further critique, which has spawned an entire field of study called post-colonial and decolonial theory, is the conspicuous colonial terminology and value judgments employed by theorists like Tylor. As post-colonial theorists have highlighted, many of these newly discovered peoples and cultures of Tylor’s time and before were perceived and represented by Europeans as irrational, primitive, savage, and superstitious, and placed on a lower rung of evolutionary development than Europeans themselves. Their texts frequently employ derogatory terminology suggestive of a self-notion of superiority over other persons subject to the dominion of their own countries. In religion studies , many scholars of religion are aware that the origin of their discipline developed out of an intellectual and geopolitical context of conquest, which has led some of them to advocate for positive liberty and encourage respect for local knowledge and practices of indigenous men and women.

1. Strenski, Ivan. 2015. Understanding Theories of Religion: An Introduction . New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.

2. Tylor, E. B. 2002. “Religion in Primitive Culture.” In A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion , edited by Michael Lambek, 23-34. p. 25.

3. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 32

4. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 25

5. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 26

6. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 25

7. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 26

8. Strenski, Ivan. 2015. Ibid. p. 46.

9. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 31

10. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 27

11. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 27

12. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 31

13. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 31

14. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 27

15. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 31

16. Tylor, E. B. 2002. p. 27

17. Strenski, Ivan. 2015. Ibid. p. 47.

18. Strenski, Ivan. 2015. Ibid. p. 48-49.

19. Brooks, Alison., Yellen, John., Potts, Richard., Behrensmeyer, Anna., Deino, Alan., Leslie, David., Ambrose, Stanley., et al. 2018. “Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone Age.” Science 360(6384):90-94; Scharping, Nathaniel. 2019. Denisovan Research Reveals That Early Humans Were More Complex Than We Thought . Available .

20. Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evans. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People . Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 137.

21. Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evans. 1940. Ibid. p. 137.

22. Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evans. 1940. Ibid. p. 142-143

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[…] (mystè), invisibles (anvizib), angels (zanj), ancestors, and the recently deceased. Voodoo is animistic as a fundamental belief is that everything is spirit; according to Haitian sociologist Laënnec […]

Thank you for a very fine article. Just one minor detail: It is not Evans-Pritchard’s ‘The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People’, you are quoting (20-22), but Evans-Pritchard: 1956: ‘Nuer Religion’. Kind regards, Rune Engelbreth Larsen

Thank you for a fine article. Just one minor detail: It is noge Evans-Pritchard’s ‘The Nuer. A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People’ (1940), you are quoting (20-22), but his ‘Nuer Religion’ (1956). Kind regards, Rune Engelbreth Larsen

Thank you for a fine article. Just one minor detail: It is noge Evans-Pritchard’s ‘The Nuer. A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People’ (1940), you are quoting (20-22), but his ‘Nuer Religion’ (1956). Kind regards, Rune Engelbreth Larsen

[…] Paganism can be polytheistic, pantheistic, duotheistic, panentheistic and/or animistic. [3] Paganism is anti-hierarchical and opposed to any form of external domination. It is likewise […]

[…] incoherent, irrational, or illogical as was held by some other theorists such as James Frazer and E. B. Tylor. To the contrary, primitive thought actually contained an internal rationality even though such […]

[…] the past, Western anthropologists labeled such beliefs as “primitive”. However, the notion of animism was previously misapprehended by […]

[…] E. B. Tylor – Animistic Theory of Religion and Religion in ‘Primitive Culture’ – Bishop’s Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy: https://jamesbishopblog.com/2020/03/16/e-b-tylor-animistic-theory-of-religion-and-religion-in-primit&#8230 ; […]

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The Culture Concept

Emily cowall, mcmaster university, priscilla medeiros, mcmaster university , learning objectives.

• Compare and contrast the ideas of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.
• Describe the role that early anthropologists Sir James Frazer and Sir E. B. Tylor played in defining the concept of culture in anthropology.
• Identify the differences between armchair anthropology and participant-observer fieldwork and explain how Bronislaw Malinowski contributed to the development of anthropological fieldwork techniques.
• Identify the contributions Franz Boas and his students made to the development of new theories about culture.
• Assess some of the ethical issues that can arise from anthropological research.

THOUGHTS ON CULTURE OVER A CUP OF COFFEE

Do you think culture can be studied in a coffee shop? Have you ever gone to a coffee shop, sat down with a book or laptop, and listened to conversations around you? If you just answered yes, in a way, you were acting as an anthropologist. Anthropologists like to become a part of their surroundings, observing and participating with people doing day-to-day things. As two anthropologists writing a chapter about the culture concept, we wanted to know what other people thought about culture. What better place to meet than at our community coffee shop?

Our small coffee shop was filled with the aroma of coffee beans, and the voices of people competed with the sound of the coffee grinder. At the counter a chalkboard listed the daily specials of sandwiches and desserts. Coffee shops have their own language, with vocabulary such as macchiato and latte . It can feel like entering a foreign culture. We found a quiet corner that would allow us to observe other people, and hopefully identify a few to engage with, without disturbing them too much with our conversation. We understand the way that anthropologists think about culture, but we were also wondering what the people sitting around us might have to say. Would having a definition of culture really mean something to the average coffee-shop patron? Is a definition important? Do people care? We were very lucky that morning because sitting next to us was a man working on his laptop, a service dog lying at his feet.

Meeting Bob at the Coffee Shop

Having an animal in a food-service business is not usually allowed, but in our community people can have their service dogs with them. This young golden retriever wore a harness that displayed a sign stating the owner was diabetic. This dog was very friendly; in fact, she wanted to be touched and would not leave us alone, wagging her tail and pushing her nose against our hands. This is very unusual because many service dogs, like seeing eye dogs, are not to be touched. Her owner, Bob, let us know that his dog must be friendly and not afraid to approach people: if Bob needs help in an emergency, such as a diabetic coma, the dog must go to someone else for help.

We enjoyed meeting Bob and his dog, and asked if he would like to answer our question: what is culture? Bob was happy to share his thoughts and ideas.

Bob feels that language is very important to cultural identity. He believes that if one loses language, one also loses important information about wildlife, indigenous plants, and ways of being. As a member of a First Nations tribe, Bob believes that words have deep cultural meaning. Most importantly, he views English as the language of commerce. Bob is concerned with the influence of Western consumerism and how it changes cultural identity.

Bob is not an anthropologist. He was just a person willing to share his ideas. Without knowing it though, Bob had described some of the elements of anthropology. He had focused on the importance of language and the loss of tradition when it is no longer spoken, and he had recognized that language is a part of cultural identity. He was worried about globalization and consumerism changing cultural values.

With Bob’s opinions in mind, we started thinking about how we, two cultural anthropologists, would answer the same question about culture. Our training shapes our understandings of the question, yet we know there is more to culture concepts than a simple definition. Why is asking the culture concept question important to anthropologists? Does it matter? Is culture something that we can understand without studying it formally?

In this chapter, we will illustrate how anthropology developed the culture concept. Our journey will explore the importance of storytelling and the way that anthropology became a social science. This will include learning about the work of important scholars, how anthropology emerged in North America, and an overview of the importance of ethics.

STORIES AS A REFLECTION ON CULTURE

Stories are told in every culture and often teach a moral lesson to young children. Fables are similar, but often set an example for people to live by or describe what to do when in a dangerous situation. They can also be a part of traditions, help to preserve ways of life, or explain mysteries. Storytelling takes many different forms such as tall tales and folktales. These are for entertainment or to discuss problems encountered in life. Both are also a form of cultural preservation, a way to communicate morals or values to the next generation. Stories can also be a form of social control over certain activities or customs that are not allowed in a society.

A fable becomes a tradition by being retold and accepted by others in the community. Different cultures have very similar stories sharing common themes. One of the most common themes is the battle between good and evil. Another is the story of the quest. The quest often takes the character to distant lands, filled with real-life situations, opportunities, hardships, and heartaches. In both of these types of stories, the reader is introduced to the anthropological concept known as the Other . What exactly is the Other ? The Other is a term that has been used to describe people whose customs, beliefs, or behaviors are different from one’s own.

Figure 1: Travel writer Lemuel Gulliver is captured and tied down by the Lilliputians.

Can a story explain the concept of the Other? Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is about four different voyages that Gulliver undertakes. His first adventure is the most well-known; in the story, Lemuel Gulliver is a surgeon who plans a sea voyage when his business fails. During a storm at sea, he is shipwrecked, and he awakens to find himself bound and secured by a group of captors, the Lilliputians, who are six inches tall. Gulliver, having what Europeans consider a normal body height, suddenly becomes a giant. During this adventure, Gulliver is seen as an outsider, a stranger with different features and language. Gulliver becomes the Other.

What lessons about culture can we learn from Gulliver’s Travels ? Swift’s story offers lessons about cultural differences, conflicts occurring in human society, and the balance of power. It also provides an important example of the Other. The Other is a matter of perspective in this story: Gulliver thinks the Lilliputians are strange and unusual. To Gulliver, the Lilliputians are the Other, but the Lilliputians equally see Gulliver as the Other—he is a their captive and is a rare species of man because of his size.

The themes in Gulliver’s Travels describe different cultures and aspects of storytelling. The story uses language, customary behaviors, and the conflict between different groups to explore ideas of the exotic and strange. The story is framed as an adventure, but is really about how similar cultures can be. In the end, Gulliver becomes a member of another cultural group, learning new norms, attitudes, and behaviors. At the same time, he wants to colonize them, a reflection of his former cultural self.

Stories are an important part of culture, and when used to pass on traditions or cultural values, they can connect people to the past. Stories are also a way to validate religious, social, political, and economic practices from one generation to another. Stories are important because they are used in some societies to apply social pressure, to keep people in line, and are part of shaping the way that people think and behave.

Anthropologists as Storytellers

People throughout recorded history have relied on storytelling as a way to share cultural details. When early anthropologists studied people from other civilizations, they relied on the written accounts and opinions of others; they presented facts and developed their stories, about other cultures based solely on information gathered by others. These scholars did not have any direct contact with the people they were studying. This approach has come to be known as armchair anthropology . Simply put, if a culture is viewed from a distance (as from an armchair), the anthropologist tends to measure that culture from his or her own vantage point and to draw comparisons that place the anthropologist’s culture as superior to the one being studied. This point of view is also called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is an attitude based on the idea that one’s own group or culture is better than any other.

Figure 2: Sir James Frazer is among the founders of modern anthropology.

Armchair anthropologists were unlikely to be aware of their ethnocentric ideas because they did not visit the cultures they studied. Scottish social anthropologist Sir James Frazer is well-known for his 1890 work The Golden Bough: A Study of Comparative Religions . Its title was later changed to A Study in Magic and Religion , and it was one of the first books to describe and record magical and religious beliefs of different culture groups around the world. Yet, this book was not the outcome of extensive study in the field. Instead, Frazer relied on the accounts of others who had traveled, such as scholars, missionaries, and government officials, to formulate his study.

Another example of anthropological writing without the use of fieldwork is Sir E. B. Tylor’s 1871 work Primitive Culture . Tylor, who went on to become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in 1896, was an important influence in the development of sociocultural anthropology as a separate discipline. Tylor defined culture as “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.” [1]  His definition of culture is still used frequently today and remains the foundation of the culture concept in anthropology.

Figure 3: Drawing of a mother and child in Malaysia from Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and  Civilization E.B. Tylor, 1904.

Both Frazer and Tylor contributed important and foundational studies even though they never went into the field to gather their information. Armchair anthropologists were important in the development of anthropology as a discipline in the late nineteenth century because although these early scholars were not directly experiencing the cultures they were studying, their work did ask important questions that could ultimately only be answered by going into the field.

Anthropologists as Cultural Participants

The armchair approach as a way to study culture changed when scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead took to the field and studied by being participants and observers. As they did, fieldwork became the most important tool anthropologists used to understand the “complex whole” of culture.

Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist, was greatly influenced by the work of Frazer . However , unlike the armchair anthropology approach Frazer used in writing The Golden Bough , Malinowski used more innovative ethnographic techniques, and his fieldwork took him off the veranda to study different cultures. The off the veranda approach is different from armchair anthropology because it includes active participant-observation : traveling to a location, living among people, and observing their day-to-day lives.

What happened when Malinowski came off the veranda? The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) was considered the first modern ethnography and redefined the approach to fieldwork. This book is part of Malinowski’s trilogy on the Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski lived with them and observed life in their villages. By living among the islanders, Malinowski was able to learn about their social life, food and shelter, sexual behaviors, community economics, patterns of kinship, and family. [3]

 Malinowski went “native” to some extent during his fieldwork with the Trobriand Islanders. Going native means to become fully integrated into a cultural group: taking leadership positions and assuming key roles in society; entering into a marriage or spousal contract; exploring sexuality or fully participating in rituals. When an anthropologist goes native, the anthropologist is personally involved with locals. In The Argonauts of the Western Pacific , Malinowski suggested that other anthropologists should “grasp the native’s point of view, his relations to life, to realize his vision of his world.” [4] However, as we will see later in this chapter, Malinowski’s practice of going native presented problems from an ethical point of view. Participant-observation is a method to gather ethnographic data, but going native places both the anthropologist and the culture group at risk by blurring the lines on both sides of the relationship.

Figure 4: Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, 1915–1918

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF CULTURE

Anthropology in europe.

The discipline of cultural anthropology developed somewhat differently in Europe and North America, in particular in the United States, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with each region contributing new dimensions to the concept of culture. Many European anthropologists were particularly interested in questions about how societies were structured and how they remained stable over time. This highlighted emerging recognition that culture and society are not the same. Culture had been defined by Tylor as knowledge, beliefs, and customs, but a society is more than just shared ideas or habits. In every society, people are linked to one another through social institutions such as families, political organizations, and businesses. Anthropologists across Europe often focused their research on understanding the form and function of these social institutions.

European anthropologists developed theories of functionalism to explain how social institutions contribute to the organization of society and the maintenance of social order. Bronislaw Malinowski believed that cultural traditions were developed as a response to specific human needs such as food, comfort, safety, knowledge, reproduction, and economic livelihood. One function of educational institutions like schools, for instance, is to provide knowledge that prepares people to obtain jobs and make contributions to society. Although he preferred the term structural-functionalism , the British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown was also interested in the way that social structures functioned to maintain social stability in a society over time. [5] He suggested that in many societies it was the family that served as the most important social structure because family relationships determined much about an individual’s social, political, and economic relationships and these patterns were repeated from one generation to the next. In a family unit in which the father is the breadwinner and the mother stays home to raise the children, the social and economic roles of both the husband and the wife will be largely defined by their specific responsibilities within the family. If their children grow up to follow the same arrangement, these social roles will be continued in the next generation.

In the twentieth century, functionalist approaches also became popular in North American anthropology, but eventually fell out of favor. One of the biggest critiques of functionalism is that it views cultures as stable and orderly and ignores or cannot explain social change. Functionalism also struggles to explain why a society develops one particular kind of social institution instead of another. Functionalist perspectives did contribute to the development of more sophisticated concepts of culture by establishing the importance of social institutions in holding societies together. While defining the division between what is cultural and what is social continues to be complex, functionalist theory helped to develop the concept of culture by demonstrating that culture is not just a set of ideas or beliefs, but consists of specific practices and social institutions that give structure to daily life and allow human communities to function.

Anthropology in the United States

Figure 5: Franz Boas, One of the founders of American Anthropology, 1915

The participant-observation method of fieldwork was a revolutionary change to the practice of anthropology, but at the same time it presented problems that needed to be overcome. The challenge was to move away from ethnocentrism, race stereotypes, and colonial attitudes, and to move forward by encouraging anthropologists to maintain high ethical standards and open minds.

Franz Boas, an American anthropologist, is acknowledged for redirecting American anthropologists away from cultural evolutionism and toward cultural relativism. Boas first studied physical science at the University of Kiel in Germany. Because he was a trained scientist, he was familiar with using empirical methods as a way to study a subject. Empirical methods are based on evidence that can be tested using observation and experiment.

In 1883, Franz Boas went on a geographical expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. The Central Eskimo (1888) details his time spent on Baffin Island studying the culture and language of the central Eskimo (Inuit) people. He studied every aspect of their culture such as tools, clothing, and shelters. This study was Boas’ first major contribution to the American school of anthropology and convinced him that cultures could only be understood through extensive field research. As he observed on Baffin Island, cultural ideas and practices are shaped through interactions with the natural environment. The cultural traditions of the Inuit were suited for the environment in which they lived. This work led him to promote cultural relativism: the principle that a culture must be understood on its own terms rather than compared to an outsider’s standard. This was an important turning point in correcting the challenge of ethnocentrism in ethnographic fieldwork. [6]  

Boas is often considered the originator of American anthropology because he trained the first generation of American anthropologists including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kroeber. Using a commitment to cultural relativism as a starting point, these students continued to refine the concept of culture. Ruth Benedict, one of Boas’ first female students, used cultural relativism as a starting point for investigating the cultures of the American northwest and southwest. Her best-selling book Patterns of Culture (1934) emphasized that culture gives people coherent patterns for thinking and behaving. She argued that culture affects individuals psychologically, shaping individual personality traits and leading the members of a culture to exhibit similar traits such as a tendency toward aggression, or calmness.

Figure 6: Ruth Benedict, 1936

Alfred Louis Kroeber, another student of Boas, also shared the commitment to field research and cultural relativism, but Kroeber was particularly interested in how cultures change over time and influence one another. Through publications like T he Nature of Culture (1952), Kroeber examined the historical processes that led cultures to emerge as distinct configurations as well as the way cultures could become more similar through the spread or diffusion of cultural traits. Kroeber was also interested in language and the role it plays in transmitting culture. He devoted much of his career to studying Native American languages in an attempt to document these languages before they disappeared.

Anthropologists in the United States have used cultural relativism to add depth to the concept of culture in several ways. Tylor had defined culture as including knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, capabilities and habits. Boas and his students added to this definition by emphasizing the importance of enculturation , the process of learning culture, in the lives of individuals. Benedict, Mead, and others established that through enculturation culture shapes individual identity, self-awareness, and emotions in fundamental ways. They also emphasized the need for holism , approaches to research that considered the entire context of a society including its history.

Kroeber and others also established the importance of language as an element of culture and documented the ways in which language was used to communicate complex ideas. By the late twentieth century, new approaches to symbolic anthropology put language at the center of analysis. Later on, Clifford Geertz, the founding member of postmodernist anthropology, noted in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) that culture should not be seen as something that was “locked inside people’s heads.” Instead, culture was publically communicated through speech and other behaviors. Culture , he concluded, is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life.” [7] This definition, which continues to be influential today, reflects the influence of many earlier efforts to refine the concept of culture in American anthropology.

ETHICAL ISSUES IN TRUTH TELLING

As anthropologists developed more sophisticated concepts of culture, they also gained a greater understanding of the ethical challenges associated with anthropological research. Because participant-observation fieldwork brings anthropologists into close relationships with the people they study, many complicated issues can arise. Cultural relativism is a perspective that encourages anthropologists to show respect to members of other cultures, but it was not until after World War II that the profession of anthropology recognized a need to develop formal standards of professional conduct.

The Nuremberg trials, which began in 1946 Nuremberg, Germany, were conducted under the direction of France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, prosecuted members of the Nazi regime for war crimes. In addition to military and political figures, physicians and scientists were also prosecuted for unethical human experimentation and mass murder. The trials demonstrated that physicians and other scientists could be dangerous if they used their skills for abusive or exploitative goals. The Nuremberg Code that emerged from the trials is considered a landmark document in medical and research ethics. It established principles for the ethical treatment of the human subjects involved in any medical or scientific research.

Because of events such as the Nuremberg trials, many universities embraced research ethical guidelines for the treatment of human subjects. Anthropologists and students who work in universities where these guidelines exist are obliged to follow these rules. The American Anthropological Association (AAA), along with many anthropology organizations in other countries, developed codes of ethics describing specific expectations for anthropologists engaged in research in a variety of settings. The principles in the AAA code of ethics include: do no harm; be open and honest regarding your work; obtain informed consent and necessary permissions; ensure the vulnerable populations in every study are protected from competing ethical obligations; make your results accessible; protect and preserve your records; and maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships. These principles sound simple, but can be complicated in practice.

Bronislaw Malinowski

The career of Bronislaw Malinowski provides an example of how investigations of culture can lead anthropologists into difficult ethical areas. As discussed above, Malinowski is widely regarded as a leading figure in the history of anthropology. He initiated the practice of participant-observation fieldwork and published several highly regarded books including The Argonauts of the Western Pacific . Following his death, the private diary he kept while conducting fieldwork was discovered and published as A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term (1967). The diary described Malinowski’s feelings of loneliness and isolation, but also included a great deal of information about his sexual fantasies as well his some insensitive and contemptuous opinions about the Trobriand Islanders. The diary provided valuable insight into the mind of an important ethnographer, but also raised questions about the extent to which his personal feelings, including bias and racism, were reflected in his official conclusions.

Most anthropologists keep diaries or daily notes as a means of keeping track of the research project, but these records are almost never made public. Because Malinowski’s diary was published after his death, he could not explain why he wrote what he did, or assess the extent to which he was able to separate the personal from the professional. Which of these books best reflects the truth about Malinowski’s interaction with the Trobriand Islanders? This rare insight into the private life of a field researcher demonstrates that even when anthropologists are acting within the boundaries of professional ethics, they still struggle to set aside their own ethnocentric attitudes and prejudices.

Figure 7: Yanomami Woman and Child,1997

Napoleon Chagnon

A more serious and complicated incident concerned research conducted among the Yanomami, an indigenous group living in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Venezuela. Starting in the 1960s, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel, a geneticist, carried out research among the Yanomami. Neel was interested in studying the effects of radiation released by nuclear explosions on people living in remote areas. Chagnon was investigating theories about the role of violence in Yanomami society. In 2000, an American journalist, Patrick Tierney, published a book about Chagnon and Neel’s research: Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon . The book contained numerous stunning allegations, including a claim that the pair had deliberately infected the Yanomami with measles, starting an epidemic that killed thousands of people. The book also claimed that Neel had conducted medical experiments without the consent of the Yanomami and that Chagnon had deliberately created conflicts between Yanomami groups so he could study the resulting violence.

These allegations were brought to the attention of the American Anthropological Association, and a number of inquiries were eventually conducted. James Neel was deceased, but Napoleon Chagnon steadfastly denied the allegations. In 2002, the AAA issued their report; Chagnon was judged to have misrepresented the violent nature of Yanomami culture in ways that caused them harm and to have failed to obtain proper consent for his research. However, Chagnon continued to reject these conclusions and complained that the process used to evaluate the evidence was unfair. In 2005, the AAA rescinded its own conclusion, citing problems with the investigation process. The results of several years of inquiry into the situation satisfied few people. Chagnon was not definitively pronounced guilty, nor was he exonerated. Years later, debate over this episode continues. [8] The controversy demonstrates the extent to which truth can be elusive in anthropological inquiry. Although anthropologists should not be storytellers in the sense that they deliberately create fictions, differences in perspective and theoretical orientation create unavoidable differences in the way anthropologists interpret the same situation. Anthropologists must try to use their toolkit of theory and methods to ensure that the stories they tell are truthful and represent the voice of the people being studied using an ethical approach.

BACK IN THE COFFEE SHOP

This chapter has looked at some historic turning points in the way anthropologists have defined culture. There is not one true, absolute definition of culture. Anthropologists respect traditions such as language; the development of self, especially from infancy to adulthood; kinship; and the structure of the social unit, or the strata of a person within their class structure; marriage, families, and rites of passage; systems of belief; and ritual. However, anthropologists also look at change and the impact it has on those traditions.

With globalization moving at a dramatic pace, and change unfolding daily, how will emerging trends redefine the culture concept? For example, social media and the Internet connect the world and have created new languages, relationships, and an online culture without borders. This leads to the question: is digital, or cyber anthropology the future? Is the study of online cultures, which are encountered largely through reading text, considered armchair or off the veranda research? Is the cyber world a real or virtual culture? In some ways, addressing online cultures takes anthropology back to its roots as anthropologists can explore new worlds without leaving home. At the same time, cyberspaces and new technologies allow people to see, hear, and communicate with others around the world in real time.

Back in the coffee shop, where we spent time with Bob, we discovered that he hoped to keep familiar aspects of his own culture, traditions such as language, social structure, and unique expressions of values, alive. The question, what is culture, caused us to reflect on our own understandings of the cultural self and the cultural Other , and on the importance of self and cultural awareness.

My cultural self has evolved from the first customary traditions of my childhood, yet my life with the Inuit caused me to consider that I have similar values and community traits as my friends in the North. My childhood was focused on caring, acceptance, and working together to achieve the necessities of life. Life on the land with the Inuit was no different, and throughout the years, I have seen how much we are the same, just living in different locations and circumstances. My anthropological training has enriched my life experiences by teaching me to enjoy the world and its peoples. I have also experienced being the cultural Other when working in the field, and this has always reminded me that the cultural self and the cultural Other will always be in conflict with each other on both sides of the experience.

Living with different indigenous tribes in Kenya gave me a chance to learn how communities maintain their traditional culture and ways of living. I come from a Portuguese- Canadian family that has kept strong ties to the culture and religion of our ancestors. Portuguese people believe storytelling is a way to keep one’s traditions, cultural identity, indigenous knowledge, and language alive. When I lived in Nairobi Province, Kenya, I discovered that people there had the same point of view. I found it odd that people still define their identities by their cultural history. What I have learned by conducting cultural fieldwork is that the meanings of culture not only vary from one group to another, but that all human societies define themselves through culture.

Our Final Reflection

Bob took us on a journey to understand what is at the heart of the culture concept. Clearly, the culture concept does not follow a straight line. Scholars, storytellers, and the people one meets in everyday life have something to say about the components of culture. The story that emerges from different voices brings insight into what it is to be human. Defining the culture concept is like putting together a puzzle with many pieces. The puzzle of culture concepts is almost complete, but it is not finished…yet.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• How did the armchair anthropology and the off the veranda approaches differ as methods to study culture? What can be learned about a culture by experiencing it in person that cannot be learned from reading about it?
• Why is the concept of culture difficult to define? What do you think are the most important elements of culture?
• Why is it difficult to separate the “social” from the “cultural”? Do you think this is an important distinction?
• In the twenty-first century, people have much greater contact with members of other cultures than they did in the past. Which topics or concerns should be priorities for future studies of culture?

Armchair anthropology : an early and discredited method of anthropological research that did not involve direct contact with the people studied.

Cultural determinism : the idea that behavioral differences are a result of cultural not racial or genetic causes.

Cultural evolutionism: a theory popular in nineteenth century anthropology suggesting that societies evolved through stages from simple to advanced. This theory was later shown to be incorrect.

Cultural relativism : the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own.

Enculturation: the process of learning the characteristics and expectations of a culture or group

Ethnocentrism: the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures.

Functionalism: an approach to anthropology developed in British anthropology that emphasized the way that parts of a society work together to support the functioning of the whole.

Going native : becoming fully integrated into a cultural group through acts such as taking a leadership position, assuming key roles in society, entering into marriage, or other behaviors that incorporate an anthropologist into the society he or she is studying.

Holism: taking a broad view of the historical, environmental, and cultural foundations of behavior.

Kinship: blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.

Participant observation: a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.

Salvage anthropology : activities such as gathering artifacts, or recording cultural rituals with the belief that a culture is about to disappear.

Structuralism: an approach to anthropology that focuses on the ways in which the customs or social institutions in a culture contribute to the organization of society and the maintenance of social order.

The Other: a term that has been used to describe people whose customs, beliefs, or behaviors are “different” from one’s own.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dr. Emily Cowall is a cultural anthropologist and instructor in the department of Anthropology at McMaster University, Canada; Medical Historian; and former regulated health practitioner in Ontario. Her primary academic research interests are focused on the cultural ethno-history of the Canadian Arctic. Emily moved to the Eastern Arctic in the 1980s, where she became integrated into community life. Returning for community-based research projects from 2003 to 2011, her previous community relationships enabled the completion of a landmark study examining the human geography and cultural impact of tuberculosis from 1930 to 1972. From 2008 to 2015, her work in cultural resource management took her to the Canadian High Arctic archipelago to create a museum dedicated to the Defense Research Science Era at Parks C anada, Quttinirpaaq National Park on Ellesmere Island. When she is not jumping into Twin Otter aircraft for remote field camps, she is exploring cultural aspects of environmental health and religious pilgrimage throughout Mexico.

Priscilla Medeiros is a PhD candidate and instructor at McMaster University, Canada, and is defending her thesis in fall 2017. Her primary research interests center on the anthropology of health. This involves studying the biocultural dimensions of medicine, with a particular emphasis on the history and development of public health in developed countries, sickness and inequalities, and gender relationships. Priscilla began her community-based work in prevention, care, and support of people living with HIV and AIDS seven years ago in Nairobi Province, Kenya, as part of her master’s degree. Her current research focuses on the absence of gender-specific and culturally appropriate HIV prevention initiatives and programs for women in the Maritime Provinces, Canada, and is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. When she is not working in rural areas or teaching in the classroom, Priscilla is traveling to exotic destinations to learn to prepare local cuisine, speak foreign languages, and explore the wonders of the world. In fact, she is the real-life Indiana Jane of anthropology when it comes to adventures in the field and has many great stories to share.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture . Boston: Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1934.

Boas, Franz. Race, Language, and Culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940.

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species . London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859.

Kroeber, Alfred. The Nature of Culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific . London: Routledge and Sons, 1922.

Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization . New York: William Morrow and Company, 1928.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World . London: Benjamin Motte, 1726.

Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Customs . London: Cambridge University Press. 1871.

• Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Customs (London: Cambridge University Press, 1871), preface. ↵
• Lewis Henry Morgan was one anthropologist who proposed an evolutionary framework based on these terms in his book Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1877). ↵
• The film Bronislaw Malinowski: Off the Veranda , (Films Media Group, 1986) further describes Malinowski’s research practices. ↵
• Bronislaw Malinowski. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1922), 290. ↵
• For more on this topic see Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (New York: Routledge, 1983) and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London: Cohen and West, 1952). ↵
• Boas’ attitudes about cultural relativism were influenced by his experiences in the Canadian Arctic as he struggled to survive in a natural environment foreign to his own prior experience. His private diary and letters record the evolution of his thinking about what it means to be “civilized.” In a letter to his fiancé, he wrote: “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over that of the ‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them ... We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We ‘highly educated people’ are much worse, relatively speaking.” The entire letter can be read in George Stocking, ed. Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 33. ↵
• Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, Geertz 1973), 89. ↵
• For more information about the controversy, see Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross, “Guilt by Association: The Culture of Accusation and the American Anthropological Associations Investigation of Darkness in El Dorado.” American Anthropologist 106 no. 4 (2004):687-698 and Robert Borofsky, Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From It (Berkley: University California Press, 2005). Napoleon Chagnon has written his rebuttal in Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). ↵
• Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology. Authored by : Edited by Nina Brown, Laura Tubelle de Gonzalez, and Thomas McIlwraith. Provided by : American Anthropological Association. Located at : http://perspectives.americananthro.org/ . License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial

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A way out of the predicament of social sciences in the 20th century: a dialogue with Clifford Geertz’s essay “Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture”(Part II)

• Hua Cai 1  

International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology volume  8 , Article number:  2 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Clifford Geertz’s essay, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” comprehensively explored the basic problems encountered in the theoretical efforts of 20th century social sciences. As a response to his reflection, this paper tries to reveal the methodological roots of the predicament of interpretive anthropology and all social sciences, through an epistemological analysis of social science. In addition, with the Theory of Belief as an analytical tool, it also tries to offer a solution to one of the classic predicaments in social sciences: “what is ethnography”.

Introduction

Human Pondered by Human establishes a theory of belief by identifying the causal entity, the belief, that dictates human behavior through a comparison of four types of body representation systems. Beliefs are conceptual beings. If the research object in social sciences is human behaviour, a given belief or a conception shapes a pattern of behaviour. For this reason, the author refers to beliefs as cultural facts and patterns of behaviour as social facts. The aggregation of various belief networks of an ethnicity is culture (Cai 2008 ). As a result, we reach a clear distinction between cultural facts and social facts. The author established an ontology appropriate for social sciences and, for the first time, proposed a scientific perspective of social sciences based on discovering and demonstrating the conceptual being of belief. The following analysis and argumentation on “what is ethnography” will be carried out within the framework of the theory of belief.

Clifford Geertz’s Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture (summarized as “ Thick Description ” below), published in 1973, records Geertz’s reflections on the primary questions facing the social sciences in the 20th century (Geertz 2000b ). Any advance in cultural anthropology and social sciences cannot actually occur without addressing these questions. What intellectual process did Geertz pass through in this part of his academic activities? What puzzles does he leave us? What lessons can we draw from his legacy?

In 2001, Geertz published The Visit , a lengthy review of my book A Society without Fathers or Husbands , in The New York Review of Books. Later, on February 7th, 2002, he emailed me saying he hoped to see my further research. His words were keen and challenging. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to see my L’homme pensé par l’homme (Human Pondered by Human), which was published in 2008. Geertz’s passing away left a vacuum in one of the fields of anthropology and left us feeling lonely. I should have responded to The Visit earlier. Now, in this paper, I will assess Thick Description and, in the meanwhile, discuss several epistemological issues concerning ethnography in The Visit .

The entity of the object in social sciences

The root of the cultural black hole.

In order to exhaustively examine the root of obstacles in exploring “culture”, I will get back to Tylor’s definition of culture: “culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by [a human] as a member of society” (Tylor 1871 ).

Geertz maintains that Tylor’s definition obscures a good deal more than it reveals. We respectfully disagree. From the perspective of methodology, we can see that this definition judiciously and selectively collects terms concerning fundamental differences between humans and other animals. Its advantage is that it could serve as a reference for anthropologists, directing them to focus on objects of study, while its disadvantage is that it attends to different matters all at once. Moreover, its most marked defect is not providing a qualitative analysis of the terms’ referents. Without analysis, this definition neither conceal or reveal anything.

Now, let’s examine Geertz’s methods. Linguistics and semiotics were in their prime in the 1940s, with scholars of other disciplines draw nourishment from these ideas. In the 1940s, Lévi-Strauss borrowed structural analysis (which was shown to be a failure), and then Geertz borrowed “symbol” and “meaning”, though Geertz never explicitly identifies what he means by symbol by example. As we all know, since interpretive anthropology emerged in the 1970s (even till now), many disciplines of the social sciences have been busy defining the symbols in their fields, aiming to interpret their meanings.

Probing the entity of the objects in social science is the highest priority of all priorities. According to this standard, we advocate, we should affirm that interpretive anthropology, which focuses on meaning, is progress compared with previous methods.

Semiotics’ mission is to investigate the relationship between languages as well as other symbols and their meanings. Its research unit is a certain symbol’s meaning. Once the meaning is made clear, the research is complete. Behavior is not included as an object of study. From the epistemological perspective, choosing to focus on “meaning” seems to require finding an analytical tool, which seems to be able to make various phenomena commensurate. However, this is also its defect. Anthropology has borrowed a double-edged sword. Semiotics or hermeneutics has been dealing with nothing but symbols and meanings since the symbol became the basic unit of study. It doesn’t probe the initial condition, nor does it consider the implication of the meaning of the symbol (Cai 2012 ). Apparently, such learning is far from meeting anthropology’s expectations. In addition, it is faced with some other practical problems. For example, moving away from languages and taking up practice, how do we work in the field (especially among ethnic groups with languages but no characters) with this tool? Even more challenging, we are sometimes faced with some phenomena in which there are symbols without meanings, or meanings (belief) without symbols (corresponding words). Semiotics is not anthropology. These phenomena would not be identified if one doesn’t go to the field, nor can these connections be identified. Therefore, the methodology of semiotics doesn’t suit anthropology. This conclusion is compatible with the below judgment: Hermeneutics and semiotics that aim to explicate ancient documents will continue playing their roles in their fields, such as exegesis.

Geertz’s practice is precisely the opposite of semiotics. He reserves both “meaning” and “social action” in “culture”. By the means of semiotics, Geertz takes a correct step—abstraction. Nevertheless, he continues the confusion that began with Tylor: mixing qualitatively different things together to make a whole. This is also a classic mistake anthropology has kept making during the last hundred years. For that matter, Tylor, Franz Boas, Kluckhohn and Geertz all follow the same path.

When “culture” is considered a priori meaning (A) and action (B), the only way to define it is to regard it as either one or the other. Given the preconditions have already imposed restriction on making the judgement that culture is not A or B, culture is therefore both A and B. However, an argument that culture is A + B fails to provide anything new and is almost like saying nothing because it is the very premise of this qualitative analysis. Consequently, we can only try to explore a thing that is neither A nor B but implying both A and B. Since meaning is conceptual and social action is the consequence of the conception, the objects referred to by these two concepts, i.e, meaning and action, are incommensurable. We cannot define culture (by means of both concepts) if they do not have a common denominator. Geertz’s analysis is thus driven into nihilism—”something”—by formal logic. In other words, he is driven out of this research field. Once the hidden prerequisite of “culture” is revealed, we can understand why Geertz has three definitions of culture: (1) culture is meaning; (2) culture is social action; (3) culture is neither of the two, but “something”. Obviously, one doing qualitative analysis on culture with such prerequisites is actually destined to set off into a dead end.

Geertz originally intends to develop “a narrowed, specialized, and, … theoretically more powerful concept of culture”. It’s a pity that no “culture” appears at the end of his research, not to mention “more powerful”. Here, we see a difficult fight.

In contrast, the author of this article argues that the aggregation of various belief networks of an ethnicity is culture. Since beliefs constitute the connotation of culture and belong to the category of conceptions, the essence of culture is conceptual reality. A culture constitutes a world of conceptions. Given that human communities behave according to their beliefs and that the opposite logic has never been found in empirical facts, it is identified that human behaviors gravitate towards beliefs. Thus, the author of this article refers to this “gravity” of beliefs on human behavior as the structuring force of beliefs. For this reason, beliefs (conceptual reality) mould patterns of behavior (social realities), i.e., beliefs determine human cultural (or non-biological) identities and modes of movement (Cai 2008 ).

What is ethnography

As I have stated in Human Pondered by Human , the entity of study object in social sciences is belief, that is, conceptual existence. A given belief shapes the form of behavior. Hence, I term belief as a cultural fact and behavior as a social fact. Thus, we have made a clear distinction between cultural and social facts. Based on the finding and the proof of belief as conceptual existence, I set up a new ontology that is appropriate for the social sciences and put forward for the first time a new conception of science for the natural and social sciences (Cai 2009 ).

The conceptualization of cultural and social facts is decisive in terms of developing a basic theory of the social sciences. Once the entity of study object in social science is grasped, a series of classic puzzles in anthropological history have all gained precise and rigorous answers. Accordingly, the definitions of cultural and social facts make defining “ethnography” possible: ethnography is the description of an ethnic group’s living institutions, knowledge, art and technical systems as well as the behaviors underpinned by them for a time (a year or several sequential years). Ethnography offers a cross-section of the history of the researched ethnic groups according to prolonged ethnographic fieldwork. Ethnography, a kind of writing of scientific research that we seek to be as complete as possible, not only includes data verified by what indigenous people say and do (words and deeds) as its main content but also uses all existing historical documents and relics as much as possible to fully examine various cultural facts’ causes and effects as verified by ethnographers during fieldwork. Meanwhile, as a necessary follow-up, it should also include structural analysis of the ethnic group’s cultural and social facts as well as revelation of the social mechanism of the ethnic group.

The possibility of understanding foreign ethnic groups

Are ethnographers destined to understand only a small part of foreign ethnic groups’ culture or social discourse? We see that Geertz thought so from 1973 till 2000. However, if it’s believed that one can understand part of something and can’t understand the whole, then the general judgment of “one can only understand part of something” is invalid and even false. Instead, if the proposition of “one can only understand part of something” is true, one is necessarily able to understand other parts of it and then ultimately understand its whole. Thus, according to my field experiences, contrary to Geertz’s opinion, our answer is: we are not only able to understand part of foreign ethnic groups’ discourses, but also the whole.

Fortunately, Geertz’s opinion changes with anthropological development. In 2001, he wrote,

“Hua (CAI) goes on to trace out, methodically and in remorseless detail, the variations, the social ramifications, and the ethnographical specifics of all this” (Geertz 2001 ). “The question that in the end we most want answered and the one most insistently raised by the very circumstantiality of Hua’s ethnography ‘What is it like to be a Na?’ goes largely unattended. We are left with a compact, well-arranged world of rules, institutions, customs, and practices: a ‘kinship system’” (ibid.).

Geertz’s evaluation showed that at least in 2001 he had already realized it was no longer impossible to understand in enormous detail and describe faithfully and methodically another ethnic group’s institutions, lifestyle and the social consequences of both. Doing ethnography(fieldwork, writing ethnography and analysis) can’t be regarded as a fragmented understanding or a faded, incoherent description. Thus, the conditions of discussions about ethnographic contents and dependability are quite different since the spiny and foundational question about whether we can only understand a small part of exotic ethnic groups’ social life has been eliminated.

Therefore, we intend to emphasize that systematic observation, prolonged analysis, and close questioning of the observational results are the pith of anthropological methodology. When an ethnographer realizes he or she only acquires fragmented information about an ethnic group’s social life and social discourse, the researcher comes to understand that his or her practice of participant observation, especially deep interview methods, still has some room for improvement.

The above arguments don’t, in the least, mean fieldwork is an easy enterprise. Particular attention should be paid to the fact that fieldwork in different domains has different sorts and degrees of difficulty. For example, in comparison with the investigation of kindred lives, fieldwork on political life may be greeted with a forbidding iron curtain rather than a soft sunblind. Aspiring to take part in participant observation about the chief of state’s decision-making may be the craziest idea in politicians’ eyes (anthropologists could be just this kind of people). The details of political life can only wait to be disclosed from the release of declassified files and dealt with by historians. However, this doesn’t mean anthropology can’t research a country’s political institutions and behaviors. Performances on the stage stubbornly reveal secrets behind the scenes. Through listening to what he or she says and observing what he or she does, people are always able to understand a country’s administrative policies and conduct to recognize who is heroic or mediocre, licentious or despotic. Time will tell. More extended fieldwork is the ransom political anthropology must pay.

It is known that in an ethnographer’s mother tongue, there is often no corresponding word for translating the particular words which represent the basic concepts of the ethnic group he or she studies; nevertheless, he or she can introduce these kinds of concepts through a drawing-like description. In addition, when we meet with a particular word in fieldwork, the indigenous people present its meanings in different contexts by telling us its intention and extension, i.e. presenting us the concept represented by this word through a “sketch”. An ethnographer can refer to the concept through transliteration or choose a similar word from his or her mother tongue, giving particular explanation in the text, thus completing a faithful (or original) representation of the indigenous social discourse and achieving objectivity according to anthropological standards. Therefore, ethnography is not a construction of constructions. I have made extensive arguments on this issue in Contemporary Methodology of Ethnography (Cai 2014 ).

Differences between ethnography and fiction

When the definition of “ethnography” was uncertain, there was a lack of the prerequisites for comparing ethnography and fiction. Clarifying ethnography makes the comparison possible. Geertz says this when he talks about the similarity between ethnography and fiction again:

Her [Madame Bovary’s] story was created while Cohen’s was only noted. The conditions of their creation and the point of it (to say nothing of the manner and the quality) differ. But the one is as much a fictiō —“a making”—as the other (Geertz 2000b ).

The difference between ethnography and fiction shouldn’t be flashed with a sentence wrapped in parentheses (not to mention its manner and quality). The crucial question is the difference between the conditions and the gist of writing. In particular, how are they fundamentally different? It’s right that in the sense of being made by humans, ethnography and fiction are all makings. But are they homogenous because of this? We know that fiction creates characters through stories under certain space-time circumstances. Whatever kind of fiction, its basic characteristic is fabrication. So, if traced in real life, it is certain that no character or story corresponds fully with real existence.

Instead, ethnographers’ fieldwork aims to understand an ethnic group’s social institutions and behavior patterns. Being together day by day, even year by year, ethnographers repeatedly learn and verify the basic details of the ethnic groups’ daily social lives through all-in and highly intense participant observation and deep interviews. The ethnography is written based on what he or she has kept in his or her memory and the field notes after such a process. Thus, the personal stories told in ethnography are just the vivid representation of social ethos and (or more exactly) illustrations of social institutions and behavior patterns, only taking second place in the text after the institutions.

Generally speaking, the behavior patterns, institutions, social structures and mechanisms of a given ethnicity are a set of autonomous entities and are highly stable for a given period (especially before modernization began). Researchers can’t possibly coin a set of social institutions, not to mention change the social structures that he or she studies, which are independent of researchers.

The study object of anthropologists is other ethnic groups’ institutions, which are embodied in daily life. Every ethnic group repeats the same behavior pattern yearly, just like we do in our social environment. Where can we see examples of transient behavior patterns? Which ethnic group’s life mode is changing every day?

Engaging in ethnography is a scientific activity. The description and theories in an ethnography are scientific and contribute to gains in scientific knowledge if they are based on empirical facts. Otherwise, they are pseudoscientific. Instead, fiction doesn’t have such restrictions. Creative fiction contributes by putting forward new ethnic orientations and values to provide readers with new thoughts and choices. Ethnography tries to record and describe the existing issues, while fiction tries to open up something.

Hence, if we are fortunate to live with an ethnographer in the same period, and if the society described in the ethnography is not in a transformational phase, then other anthropologists, if they visit the society, will generally see everyone (instead of someone) is living a life just like that in the ethnography. One is creation and fabrication, while the other is a faithful drawing verified by ethnographers and able to withstand re-verification by others. That’s the essential difference between ethnography and fiction.

Here emerges a question: What ethnography should be considered good? Geertz’s answer is great: “Good anthropological tests are plain and unpretending” (Geertz 1989 ). But he only answers the question in terms of writing style or, to say, form. The answer must have dimensions of both essence and formation. Thus, my answer is: when ethnography has made a basically complete and exquisitely detailed drawing (plain and unpretending) of an ethnic group’s social institutions and the corresponding life mode so that even if the life mode disappears, the complexity and delicate description can enable a group of people who admire such a lifestyle to reestablish a society like that based on the drawing: such ethnography should be considered top-grade.

Historians’ experiences show that various historical materials seldom record details of their author’s contemporary social life. Why? My experience reveals to me that’s because self-evident things needn’t be told. In comparison, ethnographers are experts at self-evident things for natives. Excellent ethnography consists of holographs of different realms of that ethnic group’s social life in its author’s fieldwork period. Seen from the future, a piece of ethnography, once written, is a book of history.

Inductive method

Since every ethnic group has its unique belief system formed from ancient times, it’s meaningless in social science activities to infer another ethnic group deductively from the research of a certain ethnic group; neither can we deductively infer (like Geertz’s guess) an ethnic group’s other beliefs based on the known parts of its belief system. The people observed are the only ones who own the knowledge and thus have the right to explain their behavior patterns. Therefore, natives provide the first layer and the only explanations (rather than interpretation). Geertz believes ethnographers need to provide the second and third interpretive layers. This opinion is a result caused by the misjudgment that “there is only interpretation but no fact”. If psychological analysis (like Geertz’s cockfight analysis) doesn’t correspond to Geertz’s so-called second and third layer analysis, there are no examples to prove its existence. Thus, it is necessary to stress again that inductive inference is indeed an unshakable, absolute imperative of anthropology or the methodology of all social sciences. Deviating from it means abandoning one’s greatest ability.

Cultural burdens

The discussion between Geertz and me provides a perfect example of the influence of traditional and modern cultural background on researchers. The Visit not only approves and applauds but also challenges my monograph, A Society without Fathers or Husbands.

Geertz writes:

[S]ome of this inability or unwillingness, it is hard to be certain which to face up to the less edged and outlined dimensions of Na life may be due to what we have come these days to call Hua’s ‘subject position’. As a Han Chinese, brought up in what must be one of the most family-minded, most explicitly moralized, least unbuttoned societies in the world, studying as non-Han a society as it seems possible to imagine (and one located in ‘China’ to boot) by using the concerns and preconceptions of Western-phrased ‘science’, Hua has his work cut out for him. In itself, this predicament is common to all field anthropologists, even ones working in less dramatic circumstances, and there is no genuine escape from it. The problem is that Hua seems unaware that the predicament exists that the passing of ‘Na institutions’ through Chinese perceptions on the way to ‘doing the West a service’ by placing them ‘in the anthropological literature’ raises questions not just about the institutions, but about the perceptions and the literature as well (Geertz 2001 ). Footnote 1

This comment contains three questions: emic and etic approaches, the influence of my Han cultural background on myself, and the influence of concepts and theories dominating at that time in French anthropology of kinship on my research.

The distinction between emic and etic approaches doesn’t correspond to anthropological experience in practice. It is another spiritual “gymnastics” borrowed from semantics, which is actually a false proposition. For example, totally in accordance with the Na’s narrative of their social and cultural facts, when we faithfully describe Na society, the whole book, each chapter and even every section’s composition in A Society without Fathers or Husbands relies on the author’s recognition of the structure of the Na’s cultural logic system. Additionally, for a subject with a broad scope, one basic writing principle is to avoid repetition and every researcher has his or her own way of that. So, there are various possibilities for how to compose so long as the description is authentic. Due to this fact, the imagined emic approach can’t possibly accomplish its mission since no natives can tell us the structure of their cultural logic system. If there is a native who can accomplish such a difficult task, he or she must be an excellent anthropologist and outsider-researchers are not needed. In terms of the etic approach, it is a complete illusion. Concerning this observation, the etic approach is nonsense because observers are always etic. When it concerns writing, the etic approach describes ethnographers’ feelings about exotic culture rather than the universe of the others. Has such an ethnography ever been written? Ethnography is usually written by objects, i.e. ethnographers from foreign ethnic groups, instead of subjects, i.e. the natives under research. Therefore, the real question is: are the results of our observation and interview objective? How can they be objective? Is the description faithful? How can it be faithful? Footnote 2

Moreover, since I am a Han researcher, what roles does Han culture play for me in the process of understanding Na culture? In the 1980s, all mainstream opinions and focus in kinship anthropology saw “kinship” (consanguinity + affinity) as biological and cultural (consanguinity is biological, and affinity is cultural). However, in comparison with such an argument, we know that zongqin (宗亲, all the members of the patrilineal lineage in traditional Han society, i.e. only calculating patrilineal relatives as the kindred of Ego) is purely prescribed by their culture, totally independent of biology. As the kinship system in traditional Han culture is purely and extremely patrilineal, Han’s patrilineal culture not only has not been a barrier to our understanding of Na culture, but is immensely beneficial for us and helps us to identify the fact that both kinship dimensions are cultural.

In other words, the essence of kinship present in my traditional Han culture corresponds more than the bilateral system to that of all kinds of kinship. Apparently, the bilateral kinship system (my predecessors studying kinship are almost from the cultures where the kinship system is bilateral) is more similar to genetic law: chromosomes from father and mother account for 50 per cent each. However the seemingly same phenomenon blinds the eyes of scholars, making them always cast their eyes on biological relations and believe blood relations to be solely biological. This belief becomes a long-lasting obstacle that prevents them from realizing the cultural essence of kinship.

Indeed, for an individual whose mother is not his “cultural relative”, it is not easy to understand a society without fathers and husbands (i.e. a society in which biological males of the previous generation have no relationship with oneself in either of the two dimensions, biological or cultural). But it’s not impossible to imagine this. Born into the absolutely patrilineal Han society, I’m fortunate to do fieldwork in the absolutely matrilineal Na society and a typically bilateral French nation. These extraordinary experiences with three different basic types of kinship provide me with a broad view. The comparison between the empirical facts I gained gives me enormous advantages in my approach to the essence of kinship. These facts prove that my culture not only hasn’t cut me off from my work so as to place me in a predicament, but instead, the difference between Han culture and Na culture has helped me to understand the Na’s essential cultural characteristics and then to successfully reveal the mistake and its reason in the focus and presumption of modern western “science” (mainstream opinions represented by Lévi-Strauss) (Cai 1997 ). Footnote 3

Geertz’s generalization seems to be unjust. Ethnographers from different societies facing different cultures encounter various difficulties as well as advantages.

The word “culture” is plural in Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures , which shows that he believes his book to be about the interpretation of concrete cultures. In 2000, Geertz expressed his thoughts as follows:

What we need are ways of thinking that are responsive to particularities, to individualities, oddities, discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities (Geertz 2000a ).

At the same time, the slogan he comes up with is “toward an interpretive theory of culture”. Although Geertz adopted it in 2000, he never published any essay to claim the completion of his interpretive theory of culture. He is always on the way toward an interpretive theory of culture (Shankman 1984 ; Micheelsen 2002 ). Footnote 4 In 2000, Arun Micheelsen interviewed Geertz about interpretive anthropology’s potential development in the new millennium. He evaded the point: “As for cultural anthropology, it will in my view go on in reasonable continuity with its past.” When the interviewer continued to inquire whether Geertz thought interpretive anthropology should be more systematic, Geertz replied, “some parts of it will become more systematic and taken for granted…But then again, I cannot predict the future” (Micheelsen 2002 ). But actually Geertz already gave his conclusion in Thick Description :

One cannot write a “ General Theory of Cultural Interpretation .” Or, rather, one can, but there appears to be little profit in it, because the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them (Geertz 2000b ).

The long review of Thick Description above may impress upon the reader that Geertz and I have no shared opinions. The actual situation is just the opposite and far more complicated. We share some opinions but have subtly different ideas at other points. To be concrete, like the opinion mentioned above, engaging in systematic ethnography is the main activity of anthropologists, and ethnography is a basic form of anthropological knowledge. This is common sense for all anthropologists. As another example, Geertz’s sharp intuition realizes “sciences (are) more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction. Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology; longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams” (ibid.). Indeed, as Belief Theory shows, anthropology doesn’t have to provide verbose reasoning after grasping the entity of our study object. As another example, Geertz writes, “The whole point of a semiotic approach to culture is, as I have said, to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live” (ibid.). We are, beyond any doubt, holding the same opinion that anthropology’s study object is the “conceptual world” in which exotic ethnic groups live. But when such a statement is associated with “though [culture is] ideational, it does not exist in someone’s head”, I have no idea whether Geertz’s “conceptual world” is still the same as my “conceptual universe”. Besides, Geertz seeks to “understand” them, while I not only try to understand but also seek a universal explanation for them, i.e., searching for law, and a unifying explanation, i.e. fundamental principles. It seems to be a methodological difference but includes a widely different purpose and theoretical pursuits.

Interpretive anthropology aims at particularities, while belief anthropology explores the basic laws between the diversity of human conceptual activities and their social consequences. The research results in Human Pondered by Human also prove Geertz’s opinion:

Every serious cultural analysis starts from a sheer beginning…but the movement is not from already proven theorems to newly proven ones, it is from an awkward fumbling for the most elementary understanding to a supported claim…A study is an advance if it is more incisive-whatever that may mean-than those that preceded it; but it less stands on their shoulders than, challenged and challenging, runs by their side (ibid.).

Indeed, the way in which Geertz deals with the concept of culture is totally different from his predecessors, and again, mine differs from his as well.

Moreover, Geertz’s evaluation of A Society without Fathers or Husbands shares my opinions: “Since the Na have no matrimonial relationship, they falsify both theories (A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s ‘descent theory’ and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘alliance theory’).” Furthermore, it’s not impossible to completely understand an ethnic group’s institutions, behavioral patterns and their social consequences. Many details worthy of comparison remain for future discussion.

The most representative and concise critical comment on Geertz’s theoretical research is “sterile beauty” (Walters 1980 ). This conclusion is indeed indisputable in its dimension of theorization. The fecund beauty of opening up a broad perspective is naturally the highest level of scientific activity. But there is no regal path to scientific progress. Thick Description is full of contradictory arguments on many issues. From this unreasonable appearance, the author’s uncertainty exuded. As scientific history reveals, confusion and disappointment are often companions to hope around the turning point of a historical breakthrough to find a new path.

However, it’s easier to criticize than contribute. Contrary to mean opinion (sterile beauty), not only are Geertz’s courage, acumen and academic achievement admirable, but his dedication is touching: few people have ever tried to solve these kinds of problems, even fewer are brave enough to talk openly about their arduous “cultural” journey. Confusion and disappointment are always seen as being beneath the researcher’s dignity, so many scholars are terrified and withdraw from the discussion, and even fewer are courageous enough to go ahead. If we review Thick Description positively, as a master of American social sciences, in the process of exploration, Geertz confronted almost all the basic problems facing the whole social scientific community. Through this close-up, Thick Description brings us face-to-face with a thinker chained by philosophy. Interpretive anthropology becomes the last classic case of the Popperian method of trial and error in the 20th century’s social scientific history following evolutionism, diffusionism, functionalism, structural-functionalism and structuralism. It records the problems the author leaves, provides peers with puzzles to be solved, and encourages us to probe the invisible barriers besieging the social sciences. All these are Geertz’s legacy, and this is the power of his “tragedy”.

The glamorous word “culture”, referring to both ideas and behavior, comes to the world with inherented effects and generates a terrible black hole in the field of social scientific thought. For this reason, Geertz’s analysis of the word “culture” with its confused meanings winds up falling into nihilism. Thus, the whole analysis in Thick Description has no empirical facts at its base and no coherence in its basic concepts. Given that Geertz doesn’t know what culture is, for example, what the essence of social sciences’ study object is, he has actually already lost his object of interpretation. Due to the lack of classification of diverse human activities, their qualitative analysis, and the exploration of the causality between different components within human activities, the methodology of the deep interview didn’t have direction, and the characteristics of ethnography couldn’t be grasped.

For this reason, it’s necessary to restate that ethnography is a particular form of anthropological knowledge and that synchronic cultural and social facts gained by anthropologists during fieldwork are the main components of this knowledge. Any concept and theory in social sciences must be rooted in the comparison of different types of cultural and social facts selected from all ethnic groups. From this perspective, it follows that ethnography is social sciences’ cornerstone.

Because the old ambiguous, never clarified word “culture” confuses independent and dependent variables within social sciences’ study object, all the researchers basing their study on this term would have placed themselves in the black hole of “culture” since their first work, regardless of their extraordinary talents. This is one of the fundamental reasons why it is hard for anthropology in the 20th century to bear fruit in terms of “culture”.

Besides the drag of the cultural black hole, another reason, traced to its source, for why Geertz’s efforts fail is the intrinsic opposition between the interpretive method that aims to identify particularities on one side, and, on the other, the theory and science that aim to reveal universalities. Its methods and targets are mutually exclusive. Therefore, from Dilthey, through Weber, to Geertz, choosing the interpretive method as the path to pursue science is choosing the wrong road.

Among the three study objects, i.e. thought, feelings and action, Geertz’s interpretation actually prefers feelings. Geertz pursues the coherent whole of inner experiences by observing the interaction of people’s different inner experiences (i.e. psychological reactions such as the feelings and venting of the gamecocks’ owners) through deductive inference. The direction of his research has a bias towards psychological studies.

Moreover, it has to be pointed out that Geertz regards ethnography as fiction as a result of self-reflection based on the outcomes of his ethnographic work. His judgment that ethnography is not objective exposed a soft rib of anthropology- a special knowledge castle at that time. The lure brought out by the enormous contrast between this weakness and Geertz’s great fame swept the naïve, clumsy and rigid successors of antiquated agnosticism–postmodernists, so that the latter, particularly some literature reviewer, launched an abrupt intrusion into anthropology. Though unusually fierce arguments have arisen between postmodernists and Geertz, Geertz is not an adversary of post-modernism but a source of post-modern trends. In some sense, he is a pioneer in post-modernism.

The axioms set up by philosophy, which are not admired by natural scientists and deductive inferences from the natural sciences, belong in their essence to western culture. They are like strong ropes hobbling certain social scientists. Thick Description appears rather irrational, especially in its mistake of misusing Lakatos’s judgment about the driving force of the direction of science. It would be dangerous if the judgments from epistemology, which are not definitive cognitive results, were followed as the ultimate truth.

In Geertz’s pursuit, the black hole of culture and philosophy’s tradition (interpretation as a method, etc.) constitute the dual sources for the biting cold confronted by interpretive anthropology. Moreover, deductive inference, which applies only to the natural sciences, lingers like a phantom. Generally speaking, the above three main characteristics constitute the basic features of the social sciences in pre-scientific times. Therefore, under the circumstance when the objects of interpretation are lost, with the fragmented Thick Description in written form, establishing theories and science with this method of interpretation cannot avoid the fate of disillusionment. Considering that in terms of experiences, the slogan toward an interpretive theory of culture deviates from reality and in terms of methodology, it faces a logical predicament: this slogan is indeed the product of the imagination. Just as other loud-for-a-time sayings, the interpretive theory of culture is just an abortive idea, a phrase. No one in the past has ever, and no one in the future will ever, put forward any theory following this path. Interpretive anthropology using semiotic methods has little prospect for future value.

Through analysis and comparison of thoughts in Chinese and western cultural backgrounds, this essay aims to participate in science games, revealing the essence of ethnography emulating other scholars’ thoughts in challenging and being challenged by way of the anthropology of belief.

As a telling description of an ethnicity’s institutional, intellectual, artistic, and technological systems and the behaviors they dictate over a year (or years), an ethnography presents a cross-section of the ethnic history investigated by an ethnographer during his or her long-term fieldwork. Meanwhile, as necessary subsequent steps after the portrait, the analysis of an ethnic group’s cultural and social facts, the clarification of the structure of these facts, and the elucidation of the ethnictiy’s social operation mechanisms should also be comprised in the ethnography. For this reason, ethnography constitutes the main body of social scientific knowledge. It is the comparative object of anthropology and, therefore, the cornerstone of social science theory.

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It puzzles me why Geertz must baffle the others in this paragraph of comment, since the predicament of anthropology’s destiny is inextricable for anthropologists including the himself.

I have offered an exhaustive demonstration to these questions in this essay’s companion piece “Contemporary Methodology of Ethnography”.(See Cai 2014 ).

It’s necessary to specify that placing “Na institutions” “in the anthropological literature” on the way to “doing the West a service” cited above is from a review and recommendation by Claude Lévi-Strauss for A Society without Fathers or Husbands (see the fourth cover of its English edition). Geertz inserted this sentence to ridicule Lévi-Strauss. I explain here since Geertz didn’t provide a clear reference for the citation.

Paul Shankman doesn’t make the basic fact clear that Geertz has never put forward any theory but only set a so-called “theoretical” goal, so that Geertz refused to respond to his long criticism.

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Cai, H. A way out of the predicament of social sciences in the 20th century: a dialogue with Clifford Geertz’s essay “Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture”(Part II). Int. j. anthropol. ethnol. 8 , 2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41257-024-00103-9

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Received : 27 December 2023

Revised : 02 January 2024

Accepted : 02 January 2024

Published : 30 January 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s41257-024-00103-9

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• Clifford Geertz
• Ethnography
• Social science
• Interpretive anthropology
• Theory of belief
• Anthropology of belief