# Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

## The Winkiness of Culture

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Provide E. B. Tylor’s definition of culture.
2. Distinguish natural behavior from cultural behavior.
3. Describe deliberate and nondeliberate ways that people acquire culture.
4. 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.


# Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

## The Elements of Culture

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Define the concept of material culture and provide examples of material culture.
2. Provide a detailed example of cultural practices.
3. Explain how cultural frames orient our experiences and actions.
4. Describe how norms and values are threaded through culture.
5. Explain how ideologies and worldviews shape our perception of the world around us.
The complex whole of culture can be broken down into three categories: what we make, what we do, and what we think. The boundaries separating these categories are somewhat artificial because so much of cultural life involves all of these things at once. However, it’s useful to start with the basic building blocks of culture, then see how those blocks can be put together to produce more complex structures.

### Culture Is What We Make

Museums are buildings where objects of historical, artistic, scientific, or cultural interest are displayed. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has one of the world’s largest collections of Native artifacts, including many two- and three-dimensional objects such as baskets, pottery, and preserved specimens representative of the lives of Native populations from all areas of the country.
People living in groups learn to craft the things they need in order to make a living in their environment. Early human ancestors learned how to make sharp blades useful for processing meat. They shared their knowledge of toolmaking in groups, passing those skills down to younger generations. Objects that are made and used by humans in group contexts are called material culture. All of the tools developed by early hominins (blades, arrows, axes, etc.) are examples of material culture. All of the artifacts discovered by archaeologists (buildings, pottery, beads, etc.) are examples of material culture. The specialized knowledge and skills used for making material culture are called technology. Today, the word technology is often used to refer to electronic devices such as smartphones and computers. For anthropologists, both smartphones and obsidian blades are forms of material culture produced through specialized technologies. That is, technology refers to the knowledge and skills required to make blades, phones, and other objects of material culture.
Material culture is not just found in museums, of course. Material culture is all around. All of the furniture, appliances, books, dishes, and pictures on the walls in a typical American home are elements of material culture, and they reveal a great deal about the whole way of life of a society.
Consider the toothbrush. It would be possible for people to clean their teeth with a found object such as a twig or leaf, or even with a finger. Ancient peoples often used a special chew stick, a twig with a frayed end. The bristled toothbrush was invented in 15th-century China and spread across Europe and into the United States, where it began to be mass produced in the late 19th century. Drugstores now feature many styles of toothbrush with an array of special features. Specialized teams design, manufacture, and market this wide variety of toothbrushes to consumers. Parents buy toothbrushes for their children and teach them the conventional techniques for brushing their teeth (little circles, two minutes, etc.). As adults, people often isolate themselves in a special room to brush their teeth in privacy. Even so, toothbrushing is a profoundly social act, relying on shared knowledge and observance of social norms for hygiene and health.
Trees, rocks, microbes, and planets are all material objects, but they are not material culture unless they are made and used by humans in group contexts. For instance, a tree growing in a natural forest is not an object of material culture. However, an apple tree can be material culture if it is planted by a farmer in an orchard designed to produce fruit for human consumption. A microbe can be material culture if it is manufactured to improve human digestion or genetically engineered to fight cancer.
On display in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History is a gray rock. This rock was simply found by humans and never shaped for any particular use. Sitting there in the museum, it has no specific purpose other than to serve as an object of popular contemplation. Though it is a fairly unremarkable lump of basalt, thousands of people stop to gaze at this rock, reading the sign that describes how it was obtained, marveling at its presence there in the museum. Why? What’s so interesting about a rock? This particular rock was collected by astronauts on the Apollo 12 mission to the moon. The rock serves as evidence of this magnificent feat of scientific engineering and a source of great pride to the culture that accomplished such a mission. We go to museums to view the items on display there, but clearly, the human activities surrounding those objects are what make them interesting to us. That is, culture is not just material objects—it’s also what we do and what we think.

### Culture Is What We Do

Ahmed is a carpet seller in the Istanbul Grand Bazaar. Every day, people from all over the world come into his stall to examine, and sometimes buy, the carpets in his inventory. Anthropologist Patricia Scalco (2019) met Ahmed while she was conducting research on market exchange in Istanbul. She carefully observed the set of sales strategies he had crafted to respond to customer desires and knowledge. When anyone pauses at the entrance, Ahmed greets the potential customer and ushers the person into his stall. Bringing out a silver platter, Ahmed offers the customer a cup of tea, a welcoming gesture. As the customer browses, Ahmed initiates a carefully constructed conversation designed to determine what sort of person this customer is, what they are looking for, and what they really know (and do not know) about carpets. He pulls out various carpets from the stacks, unfurling them as he describes their distinctive qualities. Ahmed identifies this interaction as a sort of game he must play with his customers. European tourists in this Turkish marketplace are often inspired by the desire for handmade traditional crafts made by local rural ethnic groups such as the Kurds. These days, however, most carpets sold in the Istanbul market are industrially produced in Pakistan, India, and China. However, in his many years of selling carpets, Ahmed has learned that he must play to Western orientalist fantasies, weaving a distinctive story around the origins and manufacture of a carpet, in order to win a sale. Like other merchants in this market, Ahmed has a family to support, and he cannot afford to openly contradict the knowledge and desires of his customers.
Centered on the material culture of carpets, Ahmed’s work illustrates the importance of what people do and what they think in the making of cultural life. What people do and what they think are nonmaterial elements of culture. In his everyday interactions with customers, Ahmed has developed a set of habitual practices involving gesture and speech. Anthropologists use the term cultural practices to refer to this form of culture. Routine speech communicates meanings and values (such as the “authenticity” of a carpet), while routine action organizes social events (such as, hopefully, a sale). People from all walks of life develop similar combinations of habitual action and speech that constitute the everyday culture of people in those circumstances.
What do you do in the morning to get ready for the day? That is cultural practice. What do you do when someone comes over to your house? That is cultural practice. What do you do when you’re hungry? That is cultural practice. Some cultural anthropologists focus on these everyday practices as keys to understanding culture, while others are more interested in special events such as ceremonies and festivals.
For instance, Carnival in Brazil is an annual festival of music and dance held every year to mark the beginning of the Catholic season of Lent. Parades of costumed dancers throng the streets of many cities, interacting with the audience and attracting crowds of followers. Cultural anthropologist Kenneth Williamson (2012) studied Carnival in Salvador, Bahia, in the north of Brazil. While Brazilian Carnival is framed as a national celebration, Williamson found that Carnival in the poorer and largely Black city of Salvador is distinctively animated by the politics of race. Local Carnival dance groups incorporate Black forms of movement such as capoeira, a combination of dance and martial art techniques created by Brazilian enslaved peoples. Forms of music and religion originating in Africa also contribute to the distinctiveness of Salvadoran Carnival. Carnival has become increasingly commercialized as a tourist attraction in Salvador, bringing in Black and White tourists alike. Black Brazilian activists complain that forms of Black culture are being appropriated and exploited as forms of cultural leisure with little understanding of their deep cultural meanings as expressions of resistance and survival. Meanwhile, most Black Salvadorans enjoy little benefit from the burgeoning tourist economy.
The practices of Turkish carpet merchants and Brazilian Carnival participants are both ways of doing culture, every day and on special occasions. As we see in both examples, the materials and actions of culture are infused with patterns of thought, some shared and some controversial. These ways of thinking constitute a third element of culture.

### Culture Is What We Think

Imagine that you are walking down the street and you see a building. You notice a mailbox next to a driveway. You follow a little walkway lined with flowers to a front door. Below your feet, you find a mat that says, “Welcome!” Peering through a window, you see a central room where two people are sitting on a couch, eating chips, and watching television. Off to the side, there’s a hallway. You can barely see the stockinged feet of a small person resting on a bed. A dog barks.
What kind of place is this? Are you sure? How do you know?
Now imagine you are walking down the street and see another building. There are neon lights in the front window and a large paved area to the side. As you enter the front door, a little bell jingles and young woman in a white blouse greets you from behind a long table. To one side of that table is a large black machine with buttons and numbers on it. The young woman carries a small leather folder in her hand and gives you an expectant smile. You look around to find a room full of people seated at tables of various sizes. Young people in white tops and black pants are scurrying here and there, some carrying giant platters. You hear music in the background. You smell something delicious.
What kind of place is this? How do you know?
In both scenarios, elements of material culture are combined with patterns of action and speech. In order to make sense of these two scenarios, we must use shared ways of thinking about them. What we know about the way of life in our society leads us to identify the first scenario as somebody’s home. What we know about the circumstances of eating in public leads us to identify the second scenario as a restaurant.
These patterned, shared ways of making sense of situations are called cultural frames. Cultural frames tell people where they are, what role they they play in that context, and what forms of behavior and speech are expected and appropriate. There are cultural frames for places, times, events, and relationships. If a couple have been dating for over a year, they probably use a cultural frame for romantic relationships to structure their actions and expectations in that relationship. And if one of the romantic partners invites the other to spend a holiday with their family, the invited person will probably summon a cultural frame for that holiday to tell them what to expect and how to behave.
Cultural frames are complex cognitive models that incorporate various roles and actions patterned in space and time. A cultural role is a conventionalized position held by a person or persons in a particular context or situation. Sociocultural roles are associated with certain behaviors and actions. For example, “mother” is a sociocultural role in the cultural frame of “family.” “Waiter” is a sociocultural role in the cultural frame of “restaurant.” While these roles are found in many cultures, the actions and behaviors associated with them vary significantly across cultural contexts.
In cultures that celebrate Mother’s Day, it is conventional to send one’s mother a card along with flowers and/or a gift. Anyone who has ever been shopping for a Mother’s Day card has been bombarded with images and text that convey the stereotypical behaviors and preferences associated with motherhood. Many Mother’s Day cards feature pastel flower arrangements with birds, butterflies, and delicate calligraphy. The text lionizes the emotional and material work of motherhood, praising the constant care and sacrifice of the good mother. In return, the card promises eternal gratitude.
The behaviors and actions associated with a sociocultural role are collectively called a norm. Norms are not necessarily “normal” in the sense that they represent the most common features and behaviors exhibited by people in a certain role. Do all mothers prefer pastel flower motifs over, say, images of books or sports? Rather, norms tend to be idealized, a fantasy about how people in a role behave—or how they should behave. Why do we associate flowers, pastels, cursive, and self-sacrifice with motherhood?
The answer lies in another thinking element of culture: values. Cultural values are notions about what is good, true, correct, appropriate, or beautiful. A certain mainstream way of thinking about motherhood indicates that mothers should be delicate and feminine, concerned with beauty and decorum. Moreover, mothers should nurture and sustain growth. What better way of conveying these notions than through the imagery of pastel flower arrangements? Messages of gratitude describe the sort of behavior considered appropriate to mothers. A “good” mother is a mother who puts her children at the center of her life at all times, neglecting her own interests for the benefit of her family.
In any culture, norms indicate how people should behave, and values explain why they should behave that way. For example, the norm for women in the 1950s was to get married and work in the home rather than have a job in the public workforce. Not that all women did this, or even most. Many mothers, particularly women of color, were obliged to work outside the home just to make a living for their families. Nonetheless, normative depictions of women as housewives dominated media and public discourse in mid-20th-century America, establishing this idealistic norm. Why were mothers supposed to stay at home? A set of “family values” appointed fathers as the breadwinning heads of household, while mothers were relegated to serving men by keeping house and caring for children. Thus, the values that came to be associated with motherhood were subservience, self-sacrifice, gentleness, and nurture—the very values we see celebrated on Mother’s Day cards.
Norms and values can combine in larger models that depict how various social realms operate, such as the family, the economy, the supernatural, and the political sphere. These models are known as ideologies. An ideology identifies the entities, roles, behaviors, relationships, and processes in a particular realm as well as the rationale behind the whole system. Take democracy, for instance. The political ideology of democracy envisions a society of equal individual citizens who each cast a vote on proposals for government action. The majority vote wins. The essential roles in this ideology are citizen voters and government. The essential actions are voting and government action. The rationale is that government should obey the wishes of the citizenry.
Is this how democracy really works, though? What about the influence of powerful organizations such as the media and large corporations? Moreover, in most democracies, people do not vote directly on government policies but rather elect representatives, who craft laws and then vote on those laws themselves. Those representatives are accountable to citizens through the process of voting, but they are also strongly influenced by lobbyists representing business interests and the campaign donations of wealthy individuals and groups. Obviously, this ideology is a simplification of the way any democratic system really works. Ideologies are always partial, foregrounding the perspectives of some people in society while obscuring the perspectives of others.
A worldview is a very broad ideology that shapes how the members of a culture generally view the world and their place in it. Worldviews tend to span several realms, including religion, economics, and politics. A worldview provides an overarching model for the purpose and process of social life, depicting “how the world works.” Many West African cultures, for instance, are shaped by a worldview that identifies the rationale of society in the accumulation and distribution of material goods in extended families, communities, and the nation as a whole. People rise to leadership through their ability to accumulate wealth, but they are strongly obligated to distribute that wealth through their extended families and communities by funding the education and business ventures of family members and helping those in need. Beyond the family, the actions of political and business leaders are shaped by this worldview as well. A political leader is expected to support the generation of wealth while also making sure that the benefits are spread through the community. Moreover, leaders are expected to maintain relationships with departed ancestors who watch over their descendants. Through periodic rituals and offerings, leaders petition ancestors to bless their families and communities with prosperity and good fortune.


# Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

## The Aggregates of Culture

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Explain how elements of culture combine in aggregates.
2. Give three detailed examples of cultural symbols.
3. Explain how symbols are embedded in rituals.
4. Describe how social structures organize important cultural processes.
An aggregate is a combination of elements. What we make, what we do, and what we think all combine in larger aggregates of culture. For instance, it’s pretty clear that toothbrushes, moon rocks, restaurants, and Mother’s Day cards must be understood as aggregates of material objects, practices, and ideas. In order to fully understand the toothbrush as a cultural object, we must examine not only its design and production but also how people use toothbrushes and why they use them. A set of routine practices surround our cultural objects (brushing), and those practices are supported by cultural ideas (hygiene).

### Symbols

A symbol is an object, image, gesture, vocalization, or event conventionally associated with a particular meaning. anthropologist Jennifer Hasty was conducting fieldwork in Ghana during an election year, she noticed that the posters and pamphlets of one politician featured a broom. Confused, she asked a friend why a male politician would choose a humble domestic tool associated with women’s work as his political motif. Making a sweeping motion with her hands, she explained, “Because he is promising to sweep away all the corruption.” Turns out, he was the not the first to use this symbol. Over time, the broom has come to acquire political meaning as a symbolic anti-corruption tool in Ghana.
Colors, shapes, gestures, animals, plants—all of these commonly acquire specific cultural meaning. For a Hindu wedding, a bride typically wears a bright red sari, as red is an auspicious color associated with change, passion, and prosperity. White, on the other hand, is typically worn to Indian funerals.
Symbols are useful cultural aggregates because they provide a kind of shorthand for expressing complex ideas. Consider the American bumper sticker shown in Figure 3.9.
Combining symbols from Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Christianity, paganism, women, men, and the peace movement, this sticker aims to promote multicultural diversity. Rather than listing the various religions, identities, and ideologies and describing the conflicts among them, the message simply incorporates their symbols into a word urging mutual tolerance.
Although symbols have conventional meanings, they can mean different things in different contexts or to different people. Although the intended meaning of the above bumper sticker is diversity, some people interpret it as an emblem of radical atheism. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, some Americans started wearing safety pins to show their solidarity with LGBTQIA+ people, people of color, and others who had become targets of post-election harassment. For some, however, the safety pin symbolized pretentiousness and hypocrisy.

### Ritual

Combining objects, actions, and meanings, ritual is a special kind of repeated, patterned action conventionally associated with a particular meaning. Rituals incorporate symbols and roles along with routinized activities such as gestures, music, and movement. Many rituals are performed by specialists in group settings to accomplish specific group or individual goals. Rituals bring together symbols, practices, and worldviews.
Consider this popular American ritual. On the first Sunday in February, many Americans gather in each other’s homes to watch the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL) on television. So widespread is this practice that stores are nearly empty and many Christian churches cancel afternoon and evening activities. As a whole, the ritual consists of many roles and relationships as well as patterned actions and conventional meanings. At the heart of the action are the two teams competing against one another in a chaotic game featuring an oddly shaped ball carried forward in campaigns of full-frontal assault across a carefully marked field. The players are surrounded by referees, coaches, camera people, and cheerleaders, each group having a strategic role in the action. Surrounding the field are commentators who interpret and contextualize, giving meaning to the actions of the game. At home, some people watch the game closely, exclaiming with joy or disappointment and commenting on the comments of the commentators. Other people socialize with one another, watching the game intermittently. Vast amounts of food and drink are consumed by Americans on Super Bowl Sunday. Typical foods include potato chips, dips, barbecued chicken wings, and pizza. Beer is the beverage of choice for this occasion. An event celebrating competition, spectatorship, and consumption, Super Bowl Sunday is an effective ritual for reinforcing dominant values in a society structured by corporate capitalism. Notions of gender, race, and class are threaded through the various levels of play and consumption as well.
In the Akan communities of central and southern Ghana, in West Africa, leaders perform a ritual called Adae that uses important cultural symbols and reinforces cultural commitments to authority, ancestors, and shared prosperity. In the Akan society, people are given special wooden stools to mark certain stages in life, such as puberty and marriage. A person’s stool is said to contain the personal power of the owner, symbolizing the life essence of that person.
When an eminent person dies, that person’s stool is enshrined in a special shed called a stool house, or nkonuafieso. Twice every 42 days (once on a Wednesday and once on a Sunday), a community leader makes a procession to the stool house of the ancestral leaders of the community. Entering the stool house, the leader must remove their sandals and lower the cloth worn draped around their shoulders, symbolizing their humility and respect for the ancestors. Then the leader greets the ancestral leaders one by one, making offerings of drink and food and asking for blessings and prosperity for the community.
Special rituals called rites of passage are used to mark the movement of a person from one social status to another. Naming ceremonies, puberty rites, weddings, and funerals are all common rites of passage. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1960) identified three stages in rites of passage: separation, transition, and incorporation. In the first phase, separation, individuals, or groups are taken out of their everyday social context, leaving their original social status. In the second phase, transition, people exist in an in-between state outside of conventional norms of dress and action. In this phase, people are often dressed in special costume, made to engage in unusual behaviors, and taught special forms of secret knowledge. In the third phase, people are brought back into society in a formal ceremony and introduced as subjects in a new social category.
Initiation rituals are a common rite of passage in many societies. In many African societies that practice initiation, young people are gathered together in a group and taken to a special camp outside the town or village. This constitutes the separation phase. In the next phase, transition, members of the group are often dressed alike and made to follow a common set of rules and schedule of activities. They may be required to perform unusual feats, such as eating strange foods. Their bodies may be scarified or tattooed. Elders give them special knowledge essential to performing their future roles as women or men. For instance, girls may learn explicit lessons about conception and childbirth. Finally, when the transition is complete, initiates are returned to the town or village and presented as women or men. Often, the completion of initiation marks a young woman as formally eligible for courtship and marriage.

### Social Structure

The way a society is formally organized is called social structure. Typically, a society organizes a set of routine activities and objects in space and time to accomplish a particular function, such as community decision-making, the production and circulation of goods, or religious observance. Social structure is the framework for those realms, designating when, where, how, and by whom these functions are accomplished. Social structures combine material culture (such as buildings) with practices (such as meetings) and ideas (such as the rules and procedures of those meetings).
Consider the social structure of community decision-making, or the political realm. In some societies, community decisions are routinely made under the authority of a person inhabiting an inherited political office, called a chief or king (such as the Akans, discussed in the last section). Chiefs often have a council of community elders, the heads of local extended families. A chief is expected to consult with this council in all community matters. Other groups in society may represent the interests of youth, women, farmers, or traders. Each group will have its own leader who communicates directly with the local chief. Regular procedures govern how issues are raised and discussed and how decisions are taken. Together, the groups, roles, relationships, and procedures all constitute the social structure of the political system.
Rather than seeing social structure as fixed and immobile, some anthropologists emphasize that people continually make and alter their social structures through everyday forms of interpretation, participation, and resistance. These processes mean that social structures are always subject to a variety of forces in a constant state of change.


# Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

## Modes of Cultural Analysis

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Explain how evolutionary theories have been applied to the study of human culture.
2. Identify two critiques of evolutionary approaches.
3. Describe how anthropologists have studied the functionality of culture.
4. Distinguish Malinowski’s functionalism from Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functionalism.
5. Explain how ontological anthropology defines the study of reality.
Anthropologists have a number of ways of studying the elements and aggregates of culture. Some approaches emphasize the development of a particular aspect of culture over time, while other approaches examine how the different parts of culture fit together.

### Evolution, Adaptation, and Historical Particularism

Some anthropologists are interested in the origins of human cultural forms and how these forms have changed over long periods of time. Just as Charles Darwin applied the notion of evolution to explain how biological species change over time, many 19th-century anthropologists used evolution to explain how cultures changed over time. This approach is called cultural evolutionism. Like Darwin, these anthropologists believed that simple forms evolved into more complex forms. Comparing different cultures of the world, they assigned the ones they considered more rudimentary to earlier evolutionary stages, while the ones they considered more complex were assigned to the more advanced stages. For example, British anthropologist Edward Tylor argued that human culture evolved from savagery through barbarism to civilization. He identified savagery with people who used gathering and hunting to meet their basic needs. The domestication of animals and plants was associated with barbarism. Civilization resulted from more advanced forms of farming, trade, and manufacturing as well as the development of the alphabet. Not surprisingly, British scholars identified their own culture as highly civilized.
Elaborating on Tylor’s scheme, American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan subdivided each of these three stages into an even more elaborate model and proposed a mechanism for moving from stage to stage. Morgan focused on technology as the primary driver of cultural evolution. New and better ways of making things, according to Morgan, resulted in new patterns of social practice and thought. Advanced technology was associated with advanced civilization.
But is technology the only measure of cultural accomplishment, or even the best one? Members of societies in which people gather and hunt for a living have vast stores of knowledge about their environments. Typically, they can name hundreds of plant species and tell when and where to find each of them. Many hunters can examine animal tracks to discern the species, sex, age, and condition of the animal as well as how long ago the tracks were laid. People in these societies also actively sustain and nurture diversity in their environments, careful to avoid depleting important resources. Is it really accurate to think of such cultures as simple? All cultures are complex, though in different ways. Technology is highly valued in American culture, while environmental knowledge and sustainability have historically been less valued. Is it any wonder that early American anthropologists ranked other cultures according to one of their own most cherished values? Perhaps people in more environmentally sustainable cultures might consider the United States to be an example of environmental savagery.
Both Tylor and Morgan, like most anthropologists of their day, thought that all cultures passed through this single set of stages in the march toward civilization. This kind of theory is called unilineal evolution. Disagreeing with this way of thinking, anthropologists such as Franz Boas argued that there is no single line of cultural evolution but that each culture changes according to its own unique historical trajectory. Moreover, cultures evolve not in isolation but in constant interaction with one another. Rather than focusing on technological changes within a culture, Boas highlighted the diffusion of material objects, practices, and ideas among cultures in complex relations of trade, migration, and conquest.
Though theories of unilineal cultural evolution have been largely abandoned, some anthropologists are still interested in discovering regular patterns that might govern how human cultures change over long periods of time. In the 1950s, American anthropologist Julian Steward developed an approach called cultural ecology, recognizing the importance of environmental factors by focusing on how humans adapt to various environments. Steward’s approach showed how humans in each environmental zone develop a set of core cultural features that enable them to make a living. Central to each cultural core are ways of getting or making all the resources necessary for human survival—in particular, food, clothing, and shelter. Similarly, anthropologist Marvin Harris developed a theory called cultural materialism, arguing that technology and economic factors are fundamental to culture, molding other features such as family life, religion, and politics.
Though recognizing the importance of cultural change, many anthropologists reject the notion that all cultures change according to a general universal model, such as cultural materialism. Drawing from the Boasian notion that each culture follows its own historical path; many cultural anthropologists analyze change in terms of historical particularism. In this approach, contemporary processes are understood as products of the unique combination of internal and external forces unfolding over time in a particular culture.

### Functionalism

Rejecting the comparative unilineal models that assigned each culture to an evolutionary stage, a number of cultural anthropologists developed a radically different approach that attempts to understand each contemporary culture in its own terms. Functionalism seeks to understand the purpose of the elements and aggregates of culture in the here and now.
Bronislaw Malinowski, an early proponent of this approach, argued that the function of culture is to meet human needs. All humans need to satisfy the need for food, clothing, and shelter. The fundamental purpose of culture is to provide a means of satisfying those needs. In the course of meeting those basic needs, humans in all cultures develop a set of derived needs—that is, needs derived from the basic ones. Derived needs include the need to organize work and distribute resources. Family structures and gender roles are examples of cultural elements addressing these derived needs. Finally, cultures also address a set of integrative needs, providing people with guiding values and purpose in life. Religion, law, and ideologies fulfill these integrative needs. Malinowski sought to understand both the biological and psychological functions of culture.
At first glance, this approach may not seem all that different from evolutionary approaches that identify the core set of cultural features devoted to human survival. What was so different in Malinowski’s approach was his attempt to show that even so-called primitive societies had functionally complex cultural systems for meeting the full array of human needs. Malinowski’s three-volume ethnography of the economics, religion, and kinship of the Trobriand people of Papua New Guinea demonstrated this fact in striking and elaborate detail.
A second version of functionalism, advocated by British anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, identified the functions of various elements of culture in a slightly different way. Rather than looking for the way culture satisfies biological or psychological needs, structural functionalism focused more on how the various structures in society reinforce one another. Culture is not a random assortment of structural features but a set of structures that fit together into a coherent whole. Common norms and values are threaded through the family structure, the economy, the political system, and the religion of a culture. Structural functionalists conceptualized culture as a kind of machine with many small parts all working in tandem to keep the machine operating properly. While recognizing the value of this approach, contemporary anthropologists have complicated the mechanistic model of culture by pointing out that the various elements of culture come into conflict just as often as they reinforce one another. Although few anthropologists would now identify themselves as structural functionalists, the holistic approach to culture as an integrated system is derived from this important theoretical foundation.

### Structuralism

In the previous paragraph, you learned about structural functionalism, an approach that marries functionalism with social structure. In a different sense, the term structure can refer to patterns of thought embedded in the culture of a people—that is, conceptual structure. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss pioneered this approach, sometimes called French structuralism. Lévi-Strauss considered culture to be a system of symbols that could be analyzed in the various realms of culture, including myths, religion, and kinship. In these realms of culture, objects and people are organized into symbolic systems of classification, often structured around binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are pairs of terms that are opposite in meaning, such as light/dark, female/male, and good/evil. For example, kinship systems are varied and complex, but they are fundamentally structured by oppositions such as male versus female, older versus younger, and relation by blood versus relation by marriage. Lévi-Strauss examined myths as well, showing how the characters and plots emphasize binary oppositions. Consider the many European folktales featuring an evil stepmother (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty), a character that combines the opposition of good versus evil with the opposition of blood relation versus relation by marriage. Lévi-Strauss argued that myths operate as public arenas for conceptually pondering and processing the fundamental categories and relations of a culture.

### Ontology

In recent decades, some cultural anthropologists have come to focus on the nature of reality, including but not limited to human perspectives and experiences. Ontology is the study of the true nature of existence. In some cultures, for instance, the social world consists not only of embodied persons but also of spirit beings, such as ancestors and witches, who interact with people in mysterious ways. And in some cultures, people are not just bodies but assemblages that include souls, spirits, characters, or fates. Ontological anthropology explores how culture constructs our social and natural realities, what we consider real, and how we act on those assumptions. Reaching beyond human realities, ontological anthropology also attempts to include nonhuman perspectives, relationships, and forms of communication.
For instance, in his provocative ethnography How Forests Think (2013), anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes how the web of life in the Amazon rainforest consists of continual communication among plants, animals, and humans. He examines how Amazonian peoples engage with dogs, spirits, the dead, pumas, rivers, and even sounds. Humans and these nonhuman beings are both antagonistic and interdependent in this interactive web. Predators and prey read one another’s behavior, interpreting intentions and motivations. Kohn’s effort is to get beyond conventional modes of human thought and language to understand how humans are embedded in nonhuman ecological realities.


# Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

## The Paradoxes of Culture

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Identify four paradoxes in the concept of culture.
2. Define four mechanisms of cultural change.
3. Provide a detailed example of the mobility of culture.
4. Describe culture as an arena of argument and contest.
5. Explain how members of a culture can have different versions of their shared culture.
As European immigrants settled in the western frontier of the United States, they faced the challenge of reinventing the elements of culture familiar to them in very different environmental and social conditions. Used to living in houses made of wooden planks or logs, they found themselves on vast plains with very few trees. A common adaptation to this environmental limitation was to dig into a slope of earth to create a dugout home with turf walls and roof.
While these homes were perfectly functional, many Euro-American settlers considered them dirty and backward. When their farming ventures became prosperous, they often undertook the great expense of importing wood from forested areas to build the kind of house familiar to them from life back east, either on the East Coast of the United States or in the European countries they originally came from.
While conducting fieldwork in Lesotho in the 1980s, cultural anthropologist Jim Ferguson observed that people who became prosperous often replaced their round homes made of mud and stone and thatched roofs with rectangular ones featuring cement floors and galvanized steel roofs. While the round buildings were functionally adapted to local conditions, made of local materials, cool on hot days, and warm in cool nights, the rectangular ones heated up like ovens under the hot sun and were noisy in the rain. The materials were imported and expensive. Talking to one man who was planning to replace his round house with a rectangular one made of cement and steel, Ferguson suggested that local building methods and materials might be superior to foreign ones.
In both cases, for Euro-American settlers and Lesotho villagers, the idea of home is not a settled matter but subject to the forces of environmental adaptation, functionality, social status, and ideological debate. Both examples illustrate a set of tensions at the heart of the concept of culture. Originally, anthropologists studied culture as a fairly stable and consensual set of features commonly embraced by the people of a certain geographical area. In the course of the 20th century, however, anthropologists began to realize that this notion of culture was misleading and incomplete. In the early 20th century, American anthropologist Franz Boas argued that the elements of culture are highly mobile, diffusing through the cultural contacts of trade and migration. Since the 1960s, cultural anthropologists have come to emphasize the controversial aspects of culture: how people disagree and argue over the dominant values and practices of their societies. Much of this controversy stems from the unevenness of culture within a society—how people in different social categories and subgroups participate differently in their common culture, with different versions or perspectives on the same cultural norms and practices.
Despite these forces of change and controversy, there is something durable and shared about culture, some set of common elements that distinguishes the whole way of life of each society. Even as cultures change through innovation and contact, they often hold on to some of their distinctive features. In the 1980s, some scholars thought that increases in global trade, migration, and technology were transforming all the diverse societies of the world into one uniform global monoculture. In the 2020s, we see that the opposite has happened. In many parts of the world, we have seen a resurgence of cultural identities and explicit efforts to maintain, rehabilitate, and reinvent forms of cultural heritage.
So riddled with contradictions is the concept of culture that some anthropologists have suggested ditching the whole notion altogether and finding some other concept to bind together the four fields in their pursuit of knowledge about humanity. Perhaps such an integrated understanding of humanity isn’t even possible.
Or maybe the contradictions of culture are the most illuminating aspects of the culture concept. Maybe those contradictions are anthropology’s most important contribution to our understanding of humanity. This textbook takes the latter approach. Culture is the whole way of life of a people subject to a set of contradictory forces. These forces constitute four central paradoxes of culture.

### Paradox 1: Culture Is Continuous, but It Changes

Cultural materials, practices, and ideas are handed down from older to younger members of a culture, giving some degree of continuity to culture over time. However, many factors can intervene in this process of cultural reproduction to subtly alter or dramatically change the elements and aggregates of culture. In some contexts, younger people either fail to precisely learn the culture of their elders or deliberately reject those cultural lessons. Through travel and trade, people learn about other ways of doing things, and they take these ideas back to their own cultures, trying them out to see how they might improve their own ways of life. Accidents and deliberate experimentation introduce new possibilities. People may simply get tired of doing things one way over and over and thrill at some refreshing style or craze.
We can identify four main mechanisms of cultural change. These four mechanisms overlap and interact as the history of a culture unfolds over time. Diffusion is the movement of an element of culture from one society to another, often through migration or trade. Friction occurs when two or more elements of culture come into conflict, resulting in alteration or replacement of those elements. Innovation is the slight alteration of an existing element of culture, such as a new style of dress or dance. Invention is the independent creation of a new element of culture, such as a new technology, religion, or political form.
In the examples at the beginning of this section, building techniques and ideals move along with human migration to new settings, where they must be altered to fit the materials and challenges of the new environment. In colonial and neocolonial contexts, dominant groups may introduce the techniques and ideals of their own homelands as “superior” even if they don’t work very well in the environments of colonial conquest.
Some cultural inventions are so successful that they transform the whole way of life of a people. Consider the information technologies that have reshaped American life since the 1970s, such as computers, the Internet, and cell phones. These tools have changed the ways Americans communicate, work, learn, shop, navigate, and entertain themselves. Diffusing through trade, these inventions have transformed cultures all over the world in diverse ways. In many societies, modes of interacting through communication technologies come into conflict with norms for interacting face-to-face, creating friction between the two realms. Where the movements, behavior, and social relationships of young women are tightly controlled, for instance, mobile phones allow women to secretly make new friends, explore new topics of conversation, and engage in behavior their elders might not sanction.
Sometimes the forces of innovation and invention catch on, and sometimes they don’t. In the 1970s, Ralph Hasty, a disc jockey from southwest Missouri, moved to Northern California, where he lived and worked for many years. There, he learned about a new technology for building houses in the form of geodesic domes, structures comprising intersecting polygons assembled from prefabricated kits. In late 1980s, he returned to live in southwest Missouri, bringing with him this enthusiasm for geodesic construction. He ordered a kit and built a geodesic dome house on a piece of rural land, intending to sell the house and use the profits to build more of these geodesic wonders. Well, things did not exactly go to plan. The locals apparently found the house far too weird to suit their notion of home. From the outside, the dome looked like some sort of futuristic greenhouse or zoo habitat. On the inside, conventional furniture did not fit in the oddly shaped rooms of the dome. Once finished, the geodesic home sat on the market for a number of months, and eventually, he had to sell it at a loss. It must be mentioned that Ralph Hasty, geodesic innovator, continued to live in a conventional rectangular house for the rest of his life.

### Paradox 2: Culture Is Bounded but Mobile

Because many elements of culture are shaped by environmental forces, trading opportunities, and local histories of settlement, culture becomes associated with territory. But because of the mobility of people, objects, and ideas, culture rarely stays within the boundaries of any society; rather, it wanders restlessly along lines of travel, communication, conquest, and trade.
People move around a lot, and this is nothing new. On the popular British television series Time Team, archaeological excavations all over the United Kingdom uncover artifacts from ancient times that were produced in far-flung places such as Rome, Scandinavia, and the Middle East. In episode 4 of season 16 (2015), the team excavated a town in Wales that was constructed by Romans during the time of Roman conquest. There, archaeologists unearthed the foundations of Roman buildings along with a variety of Roman objects, including a third-century Roman coin, a Roman tool for removing earwax, a twisted-wire bracelet, and a knife handle decorated with gladiators. Other Time Team investigations have uncovered artifacts from travelers and pilgrims to sacred religious sites. These objects have diffused to British cultures through conquest, trade, and migration. As people move around, so do objects, technologies, practices, and ideas.
However, certain integrated sets of things, practices, and ideas do cluster in certain places. Take a look at the cloth in Figure 3.15. This kind of cloth is quintessentially African. It’s called wax print, and indeed, clothing made of wax-print cloth is very popular in many parts of Africa. Wax-print cloth is industrially produced cotton cloth with intricate designs and bold colors. In most African countries, a vast selection of designs and brands of wax prints can be found in any market. Rather than buying ready-made clothes in clothing shops, people more often purchase cloth in the market and take it to a seamstress or tailor to be made into the garment of their own choosing.
Many wax-print designs are symbolic, serving as a means of nonverbal communication for the people who wear them. Some cloths are associated with proverbs, occasions, monuments, and famous people. In the West African country of Ghana, many cloth designs are named using the vivid proverbs of the large Akan cultural group. One popular design features a bird in flight, associated with the Akan proverb Sika wo antaban, meaning “money takes flight.” Another elaborate motif is called Akyekyde? Akyi, or “the back of the tortoise,” worn by wise people who move through life with slow intention. One design with long, corrugated stripes is called sugarcane, which is said to mean “I love you like sugar.”
Though iconically associated with African dress, wax print actually originated in Indonesia, derived from local techniques for making batik cloth. Batik is made using wax to draw designs on plain cotton cloth that is then immersed in a dye bath. When the wax is melted off, the design remains against the background of color. When the Dutch colonized Indonesia in the 1700s, Dutch merchants were impressed with the beauty of local batik and sought to use their own methods of mass-produced block printing to imitate the vibrant colors and elaborate designs of Indonesian cloth.
In the 1880s, Dutch and British merchants introduced their own mass-produced wax prints to people in their African colonies, particularly along the west coast of Africa. Dutch wax cloth was enthusiastically embraced by Africans, who began to infuse certain patterns with social meanings. With independence in the mid-20th century, many African countries developed their own wax-print textile industries using designs developed by local artists.
Exemplifying the cultural paradox of locality and mobility, wax-print cloth is culturally embedded in African culture while carrying a complex history of global trade, appropriation, and colonial domination.
In the context of global power relations, the mobility of culture poses questions about who has the right to claim or use elements of culture diffused from elsewhere. As part of the process of cultural immersion and participant observation, many cultural anthropologists adopt the dress, diet, gestures, and language of the peoples they study while they are conducting fieldwork. Often, anthropologists bring their love of these cultural elements back to their home societies and continue to use and practice them to show their appreciation for the cultures they have studied. However, some people may find it unsettling to see a white Euro-American anthropologist wearing an African wax-print dress—or a silk sari from India, or an ornately woven lliclla cape from Peru. In your travels, have you ever purchased an item of clothing or jewelry worn by local peoples? Is it appropriate to wear such items in your home society?
If someone is using cultural items as a way of honoring that culture, many people would think it’s perfectly fine. If someone is wearing items from another culture as a form of humorous costume, such as a sports mascot or Halloween costume, most people would find that offensive. An even more serious problem emerges when a person uses or claims cultural elements from another society in order to make a profit. What if, for instance, someone from the American fashion industry copied a wax print motif such as Sika wo antaban, using the design for American clothing, housewares, or art? The elements of culture, both material and nonmaterial, constitute the intellectual property of the people of that culture. Claiming or using the elements of another culture inappropriately is called cultural appropriation.

### Paradox 3: Culture Is Consensual but Contested

In any society, people interact using a set of assumptions about the sorts of behavior and speech considered appropriate to certain people in certain situations. That is to say, culture is consensual; through their words and actions, people agree to a certain way of doing things. As discussed earlier in this chapter, culture includes conventionalized roles, behavioral norms, and shared ideas for framing situations.
For example, imagine that someone in the United States has just graduated from college and is looking for a job. What should that person do? In the United States, it is common to spend time crafting an impressive résumé, using a specific form of technical language that accentuates the quality of a person’s skills and experiences while demonstrating their educational background. Instead of listing “worked as a camp counselor,” someone might indicate that they “developed systems of cooperative leadership among youth in an environmental awareness program.” A recent graduate would likely post this linguistic masterpiece to a job search website such as Indeed.com.
For many people in China, such a strategy would seem very rudimentary and even grossly inadequate. Seeking opportunities for education, employment, and business, people in China frequently rely on a cultural system known as guanxi. Informed by Confucianism, guanxi refers to gifts and favors exchanged among people in wide social networks based on mutual benefit. Guanxi is based on family ties but also includes relationships formed in schools, in workplaces, and even among strangers who meet at parties or through mutual friends (Yin 2017). While still in school, a student may be on the lookout for people who might be able provide access to employment opportunities in the future. Using the practices of guanxi, the student would seek to establish personalized links with such people in the hope that these links might prove advantageous in the future.
Say, for instance, a student hopes to get a job in solar technology after graduation. That student might seek out professors whose teaching and research suggest connections in that industry. To establish relations of guanxi, the student would not only take courses from that professor but also attempt to establish some sort of personal rapport. This is typically done through strategic gift giving. In a particularly brutal winter, a student might knit a sweater for the professor. An artistically inclined student might sketch a portrait of the professor and frame it as a gift. Importantly, the gift must go slightly beyond the bounds of their professional relationship as professor and student. Over time, the student might find ways to meet with the professor, further cementing the social bond. After carefully cultivating this personalized relationship over months or years, the student might then ask the professor to use industry connections to help them find a job.
What this means is that personal connections can be just as important as, if not more important than, the language or qualifications of a person’s résumé. While Americans emphasize the importance of job-search techniques, personal connections also play a role in securing employment in the American context, particularly in highly paid, competitive industries such as software development and finance. In many societies, people prefer to work with people they trust. Rather than hiring a random stranger, many prefer to hire someone recommended by a trusted friend or business partner. In  relationships, relations of trust are established through the exchange of gifts and favors over time.
But what if the people who are hired in competitive industries are the ones who deployed their strategic social connections and not necessarily the ones who are most skilled, talented, or otherwise best suited to the work? What if the companies who are hired to complete infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges are not necessarily the most competent or experienced ones but those who have given strategic gifts to government officials? What if people use their guanxi networks to obtain special privileges, such as government licenses or social services? Legal scholar Ling Li (2011) argues that some people use the cultural system of guanxi to facilitate and rationalize bribery and other acts of corruption.
In 2012, the Chinese government launched an ambitious campaign against corruption among government officials. More than 100,000 people have been investigated and charged with corruption, including many high-ranking government officials, military officers, and senior executives of state-owned companies. Investigations have revealed how powerful people use their extensive guanxi networks to secure deals, exert influence, and extract goods and services. The campaign against corruption in China raises questions about the morality and legality of guanxi practices.
Although guanxi is a widely accepted system for gaining access to goods, services, and opportunities, people who don’t have elite connections may feel that this informal cultural system is unfair. For personal or ethical reasons, some people may challenge or resist the practices of guanxi. Chinese journalist Lijia Zhang (2013) describes how she was denied a promotion in her first job because she refused to give the expected guanxi gifts to her boss. Zhang reports that most Chinese people complain about the widespread practices of corruption but are forced to use their guanxi networks to get ahead in life.
Guanxi illustrates how culture can be generally taken for granted but also highly controversial. Many other cultural norms are also widely accepted but challenged and resisted by certain groups who are disadvantaged or limited by those norms. Gender roles are a good example, as are norms of sexuality and marriage.

### Paradox 4: Culture Is Shared, but It Varies

The examples of  and the geodesic dome both illustrate another paradox: how culture is widely yet unevenly shared among members of a group. Different members of and groups in a society have different perspectives on their shared culture—and different versions of that culture. Among elites, the use of Chinese guanxi (or American “networking”) might seem to be a more personal and trustworthy process for making things happen. But for people who lack access to elite networks, these cultural norms may seem to be an exclusive and unfair tool of class oppression.
Returning to the notion of home, consider the many, many versions of home in your society. People in different subgroups and regions live in structures of different shapes and sizes that are made of different materials. And yet, the members of a culture do share a common set of assumptions about home. Home is where we live, where we sleep, and most often where our family lives as well. Even with such diversity, people in a society have a common image or ideal of home. On the West Coast of the United States, geodesic innovators sought to expand the notion of home with a new shape and a new way of building. But in southwest Missouri, that variation of home did not take root. Alas.
The four paradoxes all illustrate how culture operates as a force of stability in a society while also generating forms of constant alteration, adaptation, and change. As culture is mobile, controversial, and variable, some elements are always in the process of transformation even as other elements are maintained and reinforced. Over time, people reinterpret their cultural norms and practices and sometimes even reject them altogether in favor of some other way of thinking or doing things.
This paradoxical view of culture points to the dynamic tensions of people living in groups. Societies are collectivities of individuals, families, regional groups, ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, political groups, and so on. Culture provides a way for people to live and work together while also allowing for the expression and performance of distinctive differences. Rather than breaking down, culture responds to pressures for change with adaptation to new conditions. The paradoxes that make culture seem impossible also make culture flexible and durable. In an era that combines increasing polarization with an urgent need for cooperative change, perhaps we need culture now more than ever.

### Summary

The discipline of anthropology is centered on the concept of culture. What we make, what we do, and what we think constitute the basic elements of culture. These elements combine in aggregates such as symbols, rituals, and social structures. Since the 19th century, anthropologists have developed various modes of analysis for understanding culture, some examining change over time and others considering the functions of culture at one particular point in time. While it is an incredibly useful tool for understanding human social life, the concept of culture is riddled with paradox. Though durable and integrated, culture is subject to constant change, mobility, contest, and variability.

### Critical Thinking Questions

### Suggested Readings

“Anthropological Theories: A Guide Prepared by Students for Students.” 2012. Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama College of Arts & Sciences. https://anthropology.ua.edu/anthropological-theories/.
Bachmann-Medick, Doris, Jens Kugele, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. 2020. Futures of the Study of Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Challenges. Boston: De Gruyter.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. 2012. Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture. Boston: De Gruyter.

### Bibliography

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1970. “The Berber House or the World Reversed.” Social Science Information 9 (2): 151–170.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Gennep, Arnold van. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hallowell, A. Irving. 1992. The Ojibwa of Berens River, Manitoba: Ethnography into History. Edited by Jennifer S. H. Brown. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Li, Ling. 2011. “‘Performing’ Bribery in China: Guanxi-Practice, Corruption with a Human Face.” Journal of Contemporary China 20 (68): 1–20. https://ssrn.com/abstract=1712390.
Lyons, Harriet D. 2011. “Dame Mary Douglas.” In Fifty Key Anthropologists, edited by Robert J. Gordon, Andrew P. Lyons, and Harriet D. Lyons, 46–51. New York: Routledge.
Peters-Golden, Holly. 2002. Culture Sketches: Case Studies in Anthropology. 3rd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Scalco, Patricia. 2019. “Weaving Value: Selling Carpets in the Liminal Space of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.” Anthropology Today 35 (5): 7–10.
Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1873. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: John Murray.
Williamson, Kenneth. 2012. “Night Becomes Day: Carnival, Contested Spaces, and the Black Movement in Bahia.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 17 (2): 257–278.
Yin, Xiangru. 2017. “An Analysis of Corruption in China: The Guanxi Network of Chinese High Level Officials and Governors.” Master’s thesis, Clark University. International Development, Community, and Environment (IDCE) (140). https://commons.clarku.edu/idce_masters_papers/140.
Zhang, Lijia. 2013. “Author: In China, ‘Everyone Is Guilty of Corruption.’” CNN. October 24, 2013. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/23/opinion/china-corrution-lijia-zhang/.


# Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence

## Introduction

This chapter applies evolutionary concepts to the understanding of human origins and explains the biological variation seen in our ancestors across time. Chapters 4, Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence and Chapter 5, The Genus Homo and the Emergence of Us, represent a field of study that is probably the most dynamic, controversial and highly debated subfield of anthropology. Perspectives and opinions vary not only within the mindset of the general public but also amongst scientists and anthropologists alike. As the human fossil puzzle begins to fill in with new discoveries, we find ourselves gaining valuable insights into what makes us human and the ways in which we are a part of, not separate from, the natural world. Despite our advances in the field, we also have to be prepared for the possibility we may end up with more questions than answers! It is these very reasons that explain why so many of us find this such a fascinating field and why so many of us take it so personally. It is after all a journey into the discovery of who we are and where we came from; and that should be of interest to all of us as members of the Homo genus.


# Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence

## What Is Biological Anthropology?

### Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Identify the five subfields of biological anthropology.
2. Explain how each of the subfields contributes to our understanding of human origins and evolution.
3. Understand the historical context of the field of biological anthropology.

### Looking to the Deep Past

Biological anthropology, also referred to as physical anthropology or evolutionary anthropology, is one of the four major subfields of anthropology. While the other subfields focus on current and relatively recent human cultures, biological anthropology looks to the deeper past, asking questions about what it means to be human by exploring where humans came from as a species. Biological anthropology comprises numerous areas of study: human biological variation, paleoanthropology (human and primate evolution), primatology (the study of nonhuman primates), bioarchaeology (the study of bones found at archaeological sites), and genetic anthropology (the application of molecular science to archaeological, historical, and linguistic evidence to reveal the history of ancient human origins and migration). Each of these areas of study contributes something to anthropologists’ understanding of current human physical characteristics and behaviors.

### Exploring What It Means to Be Human

Studies of human biological variation evaluate the physical similarities and differences between human populations across both time and space. Differences in morphology include features such as height, jawline, eye sockets, and ear and nose shape and size. Biochemical differences account for variations in the sense of smell, mutations in the CCR5 gene that offer resistance to HIV, and variations in skin pigmentation in response to levels of exposure to ultraviolet rays from the sun.
The study of human biological variation is closely linked to the original conception of biological anthropology, which was formalized in 1930 with the establishment of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, recently renamed the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. The change in name is an effort to move away from the term physical anthropology, which has come to be associated with views promoting scientific racism that no longer represent or align with views held by anthropologists today. In 1951, American anthropologist Sherwood Washburn introduced a “new physical anthropology,” changing the focus from racial typology and classification to the study of human evolution and the evolutionary process. This new focus expanded anthropology as a field to include paleoanthropology and primatology
Paleoanthropology looks at the fossil evidence of humanity’s ancestors along with ancient material culture such as tools and other human artifacts. The physical morphology (shape and size) of skulls and other postcranial material (skeletal remains other than the skull) allow paleoanthropologists to form hypotheses about important milestones in human evolution over time.
Primatology examines the behavioral and physical attributes of both living and fossil primates as well as their relationships with their environments. Humans are primates who share a common ancestry with nonhuman primates. By studying nonhuman primates, anthropologists can gain a better understanding of what it means to be a primate and what it means to be human.
Genetic anthropology is used within several areas of biological anthropology. In this specialized area, DNA testing is combined with archaeological, historical, and linguistic evidence to reveal the history of ancient human migration or to track human disease.
Forensic anthropology is a subfield of biological anthropology that applies scientific methods to the analysis of human remains for the purposes of identifying a victim and determining the possible cause of death. A major difference between forensic anthropology and other types of biological anthropology is that forensic anthropology is usually focused on crime scenes involving the death of an individual, whereas other types primarily focus on understanding patterns and features that may appear in a group or an entire population. Beginning in World War II, forensic anthropologists have been instrumental in helping identify victims of war and disasters. They have played critical roles in identifying victims of the Thailand tsunami in 2004 and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Today, most forensic anthropologists work in a medical examiner’s office, assisting with autopsies and examinations of skeletal remains.
Bioarchaeology studies human remains in archaeological settings with a focus on what skeletal material can reveal about the culture, diet, and presence of disease in a population. Bioarchaeologists are also interested in the socioecological system of a population, which helps anthropologists better understand the roles of environmental and ecological pressures and influences in shaping cultural identity, social inequity, sustainability, and access to and use of resources. Based on the biological remains found at archaeological sites, bioarchaeologists explore questions pertaining to social and funerary behavior, diet and nutrition, health, and disease. Bioarchaeology offers a window into the connections among biology, society, and culture. An example of what a bioarchaeologist might study is skeletal evidence of infant cranial boarding, which was practiced by many cultures, including the ancient Maya, the Inca, and some Native North American groups. The process involved binding a child’s head to a flat board in order to artificially deform the skull, possibly to meet an aesthetic ideal or to signify social status. Bioarcheologists have found that variations in how the board was attached to the skull provide important information about an individual’s social identity.


# Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence

## What’s in a Name? The Science of Taxonomy

### Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe the historical context of binomial nomenclature and scientific classification.
2. Distinguish between the different categories of groups found in Linnaean classification.
3. Explain the different definitions of species and how they are applied to different populations.

### Defining the Science of Taxonomy

Taxonomy is defined as the classification and naming of things. Taxonomy organizes things into groups based on predefined criteria. The criteria can be as simple as color or height or as complex as the presence or absence of a trait, gene, or behavior. Taxonomy is a critical component of biological anthropology because it helps anthropologists organize humans and their evolutionary ancestors both spatially (by location) and temporally (through time).
Taxon refers to a specific subgroup, such as the genus. Taxa is the plural form of taxon, used to refer to all groups. The classification system used for organizing living organisms was originally developed in the 18th century by Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. His system, which he called the , uses a structure known as binomial nomenclature. Binomial nomenclature assigns two Latin names to each organism. The first is termed the genus name. The second is the specific or the trivial name, commonly called the species name. In print, genus and species names are italicized. The first letter of the genus is capitalized, while the species or trivial name is lowercase. For example, the scientific name for the house cat is Felis catus, and the name for modern human beings is Homo sapiens. Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature established a shared scientific language that would become universal across countries and cultures, avoiding the confusion caused by regional and colloquial names.
In addition to establishing a shared language, Linnaeus’s naming system groups organisms that share common traits. For example, he grouped together animals with mammary glands into the category mammals. Mammals were further broken down according to other traits. For example, mammals that have opposable thumbs were grouped together as primates, and those without opposable thumbs were grouped as non-primates. This is a hierarchical classification scheme, meaning that organisms are grouped into successive levels from the broadest category of domain to the more specific level of species.
When Linnaeus first created his Systema Naturae, he built five hierarchical levels into his taxonomy: kingdom, class, order, genus, and species. Humans are in the kingdom Animalia, the class Mammalia, the order Primates, the genus Homo, and the species sapiens. Over time, many levels have been added to the Linnaean system of classification, including domain, phylum, subclass, superorder, family, and tribe. The addition of these taxon groups has enabled biological anthropologists to better understand the variations present in various groups of organisms. However, biological anthropologists spend the majority of their time trying to understand the species level.

### Defining a Species

While species is a word that most people are familiar with and comfortable using, just what determines a species is incredibly difficult to define. At the most basic level, a species comprises a group of organisms with shared characteristics that distinguish them from other groups. Most scientists distinguish a species based on behavior, genetics, and/or morphology. Species definitions are the basis for scientific names. The common name of a species, on the other hand, is usually based on general physical characteristics noted by a culture or local population. Common names are also referred to as folk taxonomy or ethnotaxonomy (classifications influenced by culture, etc.). There is a growing interest among anthropologists and the scientific community in preserving Indigenous classifications of the natural world and connecting them with scientific classifications.
Decisions related to classification often involve tremendous taxonomical controversy, especially within the field of biological anthropology. There are more than 20 distinct species definitions, or ways of categorizing or distinguishing one type of organism from another. Below are the four most common definitions of a species.

### Biological Species

The biological species definition states that a species is a group of interbreeding organisms that are reproductively isolated from other groups of organisms. Reproductive isolation means that members of a species are not able to mate successfully with members outside their species. Gorillas, for example, cannot successfully breed with Pan paniscus, the bonobo. The biological species definition uses the ability to interbreed as its foundation because successful mating leads to gene flow, or the movement of genetic material from one population to another.

### Ecological Species

The ecological species definition emphasizes the role of natural selection in maintaining species boundaries. This concept is based on the idea that gene flow is neither necessary nor sufficient to maintain species boundaries. Instead, natural selection plays an important role in maintaining the boundaries between species. In nature, species boundaries are often maintained even though there is a substantial amount of gene flow between species. Gene flow between species generally occurs at places called hybrid zones, areas of overlap where two species are known to successfully breed. A classic example of a hybrid zone occurs on the island of Sulawesi in Southeast Asia, where Macaca maura (the moor macaque) and Macaca tonkeana (the Tonkean macaque) are known to have successfully interbred for more than 150 years. Despite this, the integrity of the two distinct species has been maintained.

### Phylogenetic Species

The biological species definition is based on breeding behavior, specifically whether species are capable of mating with one another. This foundation is problematic when trying to identify species over time. It is hard to know whether two fossil specimens were capable of interbreeding. It is also difficult in the fossil record to distinguish between interspecific variation (differences between members of two different species) and intraspecific variation (variation within a species). Imagine finding the bones of two individuals, one five feet tall and the other six feet four inches. Identifying whether these individuals were members of two different species (interspecific variation) or representative of the normal variation within a given species would be extremely challenging.
These problems are addressed by the phylogenetic species definition. The phylogenetic species definition states that a species can be determined by shared possession of one unique characteristic. For example, imagine you found a group of fossil leg bones. In order to decide if they were from the same species, you would need to determine if they had a trait in common that only these fossil leg bones possessed. If the bones all possessed trait A and this trait was not found in any other species already identified, then you would have a new species, and all of the fossil leg bones could be placed in that species.

### Mate Recognition Species

The mate recognition species definition states that a species is a set of organisms that recognize one another as potential mates. A classic example of a group of species that can be distinguished using this definition is American crickets. Within a single habitat in the United States, there might be over 30 different species of crickets. Each species of cricket is known to produce a distinct song. Despite all these different species living side by side, the female cricket of each species will only mate with a male after hearing the male sing her species-specific song. The song, and the female recognition of it, constitutes a mate recognition system. This is analogous to the biological species definition in that the song acts as a reproductive isolating mechanism.