1b.
Culture
At its simplest, culture involves learned behaviour. It involves things like ideas, ideologies,
values, and morals that individuals all acquire as members of any society.
Culture, as per our textbook (Lavenda et al., 2020), is “passed down,” but with the qualification
that it’s not reinvented from generation to generation.
There are certain aspects, cultural shifts, and changes that happen daily.
Culture is never static, never fixed, and never tethered to a particular place. Culture is always in a
state of flux, always changing and being modified. Culture is in our heads. It can be expressed
materially, sometimes through fashion.
One core aspect of culture is that it is symbolic. We use symbols to communicate cultural
meaning. A symbol is something that stands for something else, like a picture or words in a
language.
Culture is learned — and it’s shared. Culture is patterned and it’s also adaptive. As people
change, they sometimes transform it according to their needs.
Culture in a lot of ways allows us to transform our surroundings to meet our needs. This is
something that Karl Marx, a renowned economist (he had some really great things to say and
some not-so-great things to say), discussed. He believed that what makes human beings so
distinctive and unique is that we can transform our environments and adapt better to our
environments through those transformations.
We can acquire ways of solving problems by coming up with technologies that can allow us to
keep going and to survive, sometimes more easily, as biological organisms.
Key Terms
Culture and the capacity to use culture are processes that have evolved very slowly over time.
1c. Socialization and Enculturation
Socialization: The process by which humans as material organisms,
living together with other similar organisms, cope with the behavioural
rules established by their respective societies.
Socialization is the process of learning to live as a member of a group. We are all socialized.
Enculturation
The cognitive challenges facing humans who live together and must come to terms with the ways
of thinking and feeling considered appropriate in their respective cultures.
It refers to the cognitive challenges facing humans who live together and to how people must
come to terms with the ways of thinking and feeling considered appropriate.
process of learning to live as a member of a group includes perfecting skills of interaction with
others and learning behavioural rules (socialization), followed by the cognitive challenge of
humans who live together and who must come to terms with ways of thinking and feeling
considered appropriate (enculturation).
1d. Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism
Ethnocentrism is when each of us has our own set of ingrained biases that get so in the way that
we cannot see past ourselves.
The problem is when cultural biases become ethnocentric, when rather than interpreting it
based on its own set of standards, we use our own standards and say, “Well, I don’t like that.
That’s not good. You don’t do things how we do things? Well, that’s silly.
Combatting Ethnocentric Reactions
Another way to counter ethnocentric bias is by doing what you’re doing now, taking an
anthropology course and consuming, being privy to, and understanding ethnographic research.
Ethnographic research provides perspectives on cultural practices that may come across to
outsiders as bizarre or exotic but are actually quite natural, normal, and accepted in their own
setting.
Cultural Relativism
Cultural relativism is the counterpart, the antidote if you will, to ethnocentrism.
Cultural relativism is the understanding or consideration of a culture on its own terms: as a
coherent set of learned lifeways and symbols, in meaningful design for living and for solving
problems.
It promotes understanding of cultural practices an outsider might find difficult, incoherent, or
morally troubling.
Sadly, this way of thinking created the possibility for things like residential schools and more
colonial practices that are destructive and based on cultural gaslighting.
A relativistic standpoint says things like, “Hold up. Yeah, there are differences here. But let's not
value them.
So cultural relativism assumes, in the end, that no culture or no cultural lifeway, no way of
understanding the world, is better than another.
1e. Case Study: Female Circumcision
That would be a mistaken and ethnocentric approach. There’s actually quite a lot of
consideration and care involved; not to mention the fact that such practices have historically
grounded cultural and religious meaning and importance for the women undergoing genital
cutting. It can provide a sense of gendered cultural inclusion, and a sense of self-esteem related
to the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood.
Ethnocentrism vs. Moral Dilemmas
then this is a moral case and is something that maybe should stop. We would have to listen to
them and say, "Okay. If they're not consenting and participating willingly in it, then this is
something that should be questioned."
Reconciling Ethnocentrism and Moral Dilemmas
Anthropology can shed light on the reasons behind these practices and situate them within
their own social, cultural, and historical contexts.
And we have to look at it as such. So anthropology can shed light on the reasons why cultural
practices exist as they do.
A culturally relativistic perspective allows us to understand that some of our own cultural
practices can be understood as barbaric and extremely dangerous.