Lecture: The Culture Concept
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 2
Opening
Picture a graduation. Rows of people sit in matching caps and gowns. A name is read, someone crosses a stage, and one family in the stands cheers louder than everyone around them. Then a tassel moves from one side of a cap to the other, and the whole room knows something changed. Nobody handed out a manual. Everyone already knew.
That shared, unwritten knowing is what this lecture is about. And you'll meet it wherever you end up working. A business student wonders why a handshake, a bow, or a fist bump closes a deal in different places. A future teacher notices that every family has its own rule about phones at dinner. A health-care worker meets patients whose daily habits differ from their own. Each of them is bumping into culture.
In Week 1 you met anthropology as the study of humans across place and time, and three habits: holism, comparison, and fieldwork. Holism and comparison need something to look at whole and to compare. That something is culture. In this lecture I'll give you the field's first definition of culture, its five characteristics, and three tools for reading it: norms, values, and symbols. Then we'll take on ethnocentrism and cultural relativism, and finish with a famous article that makes the familiar strange. Next, in Week 3, Fieldwork and Ethnographic Methods, you'll see how an anthropologist learns a culture from the inside.
1. Tylor's definition of culture
Ask a few friends what culture means, and you'll probably hear about museums, opera, or a city's art scene. In everyday talk the word points at the arts, or at "high culture", the kind you dress up for. Anthropology uses it far more widely.
The field's first definition comes from Tylor, in a book from 1871 called Primitive Culture. That title uses the period's wording, which this course never uses in its own voice. But the definition inside is still where we start. Here it is, word for word. "Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is 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."
Three phrases do most of the work. "That complex whole" means culture is a whole way of life whose parts fit together. That's holism from Week 1. "Acquired" means people learn it. And "as a member of society" means they learn it from the people around them. One word needs a note: "man" is the period's usage for all people.
So here's the definition we'll use all course long. Culture is the whole learned, shared way of life of a group, including its knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, laws, customs, and habits, acquired as a member of society rather than inherited; not the arts alone.
Now count what Tylor names before he opens the list with "any other capabilities and habits." Knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom. That's 6 items. Only 1 of them is art. So 5 of the 6 are not the arts at all. The open end matters too. "Any other capabilities and habits" means the list keeps going, into how you greet people, how you wait in line, and how you eat.
Pause and try this. A friend says that culture means opera, painting, and museums. Using Tylor's list, what would you tell them?
Think about how many of the named items are art.
Here's the answer. Art is only 1 of the 6 items Tylor names, beside knowledge, belief, morals, law, and custom. Culture is a whole learned way of life, so the way a family passes dishes at dinner counts as much as a symphony.
Keep that phrase "complex whole" in mind. Everything else this week fills it in.
2. Five characteristics of culture
Watch two people meet. In one setting they shake hands. In another they bow. Between two teammates it might be a fist bump. None of those greetings is built into the body. Each person learned which one fits which moment, and they learned it from the people around them.
That's the first of five features. The characteristics of culture are the five features this course uses to describe any culture: it is learned, shared but never uniform, symbolic, integrated, and changing.
Learned means it isn't inherited biologically. A child adopted at birth into a family on another continent grows up with that family's language and that family's greetings. Shared but never uniform means a group holds it in common, yet people inside it disagree. Every culture holds many voices. Symbolic means meaning is attached by agreement. The tassel at a graduation means "graduated" only because people agree it does. Integrated means a change in one part ripples through others. When a workplace moves its meetings online, people dress differently, chat at different times, and different people get heard. And changing means exactly that. Every culture changes, and even Tylor's word "man" now reads as the period's usage.
Two pairs of terms keep this tidy. Society is the group of people who live a way of life together and interact. Culture is the way of life; society is the people who share it. The second pair is about learning. Enculturation is the way a person learns their own culture growing up, mostly without noticing it. Acculturation is the cultural change that follows sustained contact between groups, as each takes up and reworks some of the other's ways. You'll meet acculturation again in Week 15.
Here's a common wrong turn. People often say culture is "in the blood", or that it never changes. It's tempting, because habits we learned early feel natural. But the adopted child shows that culture is learned, and every culture changes over time.
Pause and try this. A child copies the adults in the stands and claps at each name read at a graduation. Is that enculturation or acculturation?
Is the child learning their own culture, or changing after contact?
Here's the answer. It's enculturation. The child is learning their own culture by watching and joining in, mostly without noticing, which is the kind of learning that makes culture feel natural later.
3. Norms, values, and symbols
Think of a family that keeps phones off the table at dinner. Maybe nobody wrote the rule down. Still, a teenager who checks a message gets a look from across the table. The rule tells you how to behave, and the look tells you the rule is real.
Three terms name the parts of that moment. A norm is a shared expectation for how people should behave in a setting, such as waiting for a signal before starting. A value is a shared idea about what is good, right, or important, which norms often protect. A symbol is something that stands for something else by convention, such as a flag, a gesture, a word, or a bell, with no natural link between the thing and its meaning. At that dinner table, "no phones" is the norm, and the value it may protect is time spent paying attention to each other.
Now take these tools to the course's market. It's the running fieldwork site, an illustrative market made up for teaching, with 24 stalls, open one morning a week, from 8:00 a.m. to noon. At 8:00 a.m. the market manager rings a hand bell. Vendors call out "Bell's rung!", and the first sales begin within a minute.
The bell is a symbol. Nothing about the sound of a bell means "selling may begin." The meaning is learned and shared. Waiting for it is a norm. On an illustrative visit, at 7:40 a.m., vendors were unloading crates, and no money changed hands, even though two shoppers were already waiting. From 7:40 to 8:00 is 20 minutes, since 60 minus 40 is 20. People kept the rule with a sale standing right in front of them. One value the norm may protect is a fair start for every stall. That's a reading to test with the vendors, not a fact about them.
And here's the part I most want you to notice. Two vendors disagreed about whether bagging a regular's order before the bell counts as selling early. One said a regular is the exception. The other said the rule is the rule. So the market's culture is shared, but it isn't uniform.
Pause and try this. At the market, which is the symbol and which is the norm: the hand bell, or waiting for it before anyone sells?
Think about which one stands for something, and which one tells people how to behave.
Here's the answer. The bell is the symbol, because it stands for "selling may begin" only by agreement. Waiting for it is the norm, because it's a shared expectation about how vendors should behave.
4. Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism
Imagine visiting a friend's family for the first time. They take their shoes off at the door, eat dinner late, and talk over each other. Your first thought might be "that's weird" or even "that's rude." That reaction isn't a flaw in you. It's where everyone starts.
Ethnocentrism is judging another culture by the standards of one's own, and everyone begins from it by default. It isn't something only other people have. Your sense of what counts as on time, polite, or clean came from your own enculturation, so it feels like common sense.
Anthropology's answer is a method. Cultural relativism is a method: describing and understanding a practice in the terms of the culture it belongs to before judging it. It does not mean that anything goes. Benedict, in a 1934 book called Patterns of Culture, gave an early, influential statement of this approach.
Keep a second idea apart from the method. Moral relativism is the philosophical claim that no moral judgment holds across cultures. That's a different idea. Cultural relativism tells you what to do first, which is describe. It doesn't tell you that every judgment is off limits.
The discipline's own positions show where the method stops. The American Anthropological Association, the field's professional body, takes public positions, for example on race and on research ethics. A field that takes positions isn't saying anything goes. It's saying understand first, then judge with care.
Try it on the market. A shopper used to supermarkets says, "Making buyers wait for a bell is slow and old-fashioned." That's an ethnocentric first reaction. The method asks you to describe the rule in the market's own terms first. For the vendors, the bell marks the line between setting up and selling, and all 24 stalls keep it. Then you can judge, with the description in hand.
Pause and try this. A classmate says cultural relativism means anthropologists must accept every practice as fine. What's wrong with that?
Think about what the method asks you to do first, and what it doesn't forbid.
Here's the answer. Cultural relativism is a method that puts description before judgment. It doesn't forbid judgment, and the field itself takes public positions on race and on research ethics, so it never means anything goes.
5. The familiar made strange
Try describing brushing your teeth to someone who has never seen it. Twice a day, you put a small brush with stiff bristles and a flavored paste into your mouth and move it in set patterns. Said that way, an ordinary habit starts to sound like a ritual.
That's the move in a famous article by Miner, published in 1956 in the journal American Anthropologist, called "Body Ritual among the Nacirema." Miner described ordinary American body care as if it were the ritual of an unfamiliar people. Nacirema is the invented people of that article. The name is "American" spelled backward, and the Nacirema are not a real people.
Why write that way? Ethnocentrism makes other people's habits look strange and our own look natural. Miner flipped it. By describing the familiar in the voice usually saved for faraway people, he showed readers how strange their own routines could sound, and how unfair a stranger's description can be.
Line up the two dates. Tylor's definition appeared in 1871, and Miner's article in 1956. That's 85 years apart. Tylor gave the field a definition wide enough to include every habit. Miner used that wide view to make his readers' own habits look as strange as anyone else's.
You can do the same thing with a graduation. Picture it this way. Once a year, young adults put on identical dark robes and flat square hats. They file past an elder who hands each one a rolled paper. Then each moves a hanging cord from one side of the hat to the other, while their kin cry out. Nothing in that description is false. It only refuses to explain.
Pause and try this. A classmate thinks the Nacirema are a real people somewhere in the world. How would you correct them?
Try spelling the name backward.
Here's the answer. "Nacirema" is "American" spelled backward, and Miner's article describes ordinary American body care. The Nacirema aren't a real people; the article's aim is to make the reader's own habits look strange.
Closing
Let me pull it together in the order we built it. Tylor's definition of culture, from 1871, calls culture a complex whole, and art is only 1 of the 6 items it names. Culture is learned, shared but never uniform, symbolic, integrated, and changing, and it's the way of life, while society is the people. Enculturation is learning your own culture; acculturation is change after sustained contact. At the market, the bell is a symbol, waiting for it is a norm, and two vendors disagree about the rule. Ethnocentrism is where everyone starts, and cultural relativism is a method, not anything goes. And Miner's Nacirema, 85 years after Tylor, turns the outsider's eye back on you.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then, in Week 3, Fieldwork and Ethnographic Methods, you'll learn how anthropologists record a culture fairly, starting with notes that keep what they saw apart from what they think it means.
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