Of Culture and Cultural Imperialism: Sid Harth

[cogitoergosum]

Of Culture and Cultural Imperialism: Sid Harth
http://bakulaji.typepad.com/blog/

If one could manage to quantify such thing as 'Hate,' and also give it
a qualitative ranking, say from zero for absolutely no hate to # 10
for the highest rank of humanly possible hate, then The United States
of America would score at the top.

Hate and hatred originates, mostly, in jelousy, competition, failure
to imitate, and last but not the least, despair.

Why human beings hate America so much?

The answer is:

1. America is the world's strongest democracy.
2. America has tremendous power.
3. America acts as a Sheriff to the world.
4. America is believer in Liberty, Equality and Universal Brotherhood.
5. America gets away with her dominating Culture.

At the top of the list:

1. Osama ben Laden.
2. Various and sundry Ayatollahs.
3. Communists of past era, present era and Communist wannabes, such as
Venezuela's Dictator, Cesar Chavez.
4. Saddam Hussein and his ilk.
5. Yankee Hindutva Hoodlums, aka Sangh Parivar.

Culture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Culture (disambiguation).

Petroglyphs in modern-day Gobustan, Azerbaijan, dating back to 10,000
BC indicating a thriving culture
Ancient Egyptian art, 1,400 BC

The Persian Hasht-Behesht PalaceCulture (from the Latin cultura
stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate")[1] is a term that has
different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde
Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture:
A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.[2] However, the word
"culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:

Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as
high culture
An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that
depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that
characterizes an institution, organization or group
When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in
agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to
refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual,
especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national
aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists
used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity. For
the German nonpositivist sociologist, Georg Simmel, culture referred
to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external
forms which have been objectified in the course of history".[3]

In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to
anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely
results of human genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in
American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity
to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act
imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people
living in different parts of the world classified and represented
their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the
term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other
disciplines such as cultural studies, organizational psychology and
management studies.[citation needed]

19th century discourses

English Romanticism

In the nineteenth century, humanists such as English poet and essayist
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an
ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been
thought and said in the world."[4] This concept of culture is
comparable to the German concept of bildung: "...culture being a
pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all
the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and
said in the world."[4]

British poet and critic Matthew Arnold viewed "culture" as the
cultivation of the humanist ideal.In practice, culture referred to an
élite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical
music, and haute cuisine.[5] As these forms were associated with
urbane life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from lat.
civitas, city). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest
in folklore, which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites.
This distinction is often characterized as that between "high
culture", namely that of the ruling social group, and "low culture."
In other words, the idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during
the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within
European societies.[6]

Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with "anarchy;" other Europeans,
following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
contrasted "culture" with "the state of nature." According to Hobbes
and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by
Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature;
this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized"
and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could
classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and
some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert
Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory
of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the
distinction between high and low cultures is really an expression of
the conflict between European elites and non-elites, some critics have
argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people
is really an expression of the conflict between European colonial
powers and their colonial subjects.

British anthropologist Edward Tylor was one of the first English-
speaking scholars to use the term culture in an inclusive and
universal sense.Other 19th century critics, following Rousseau, have
accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but
have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as
corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort
people's essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as
produced by working-class people) to honestly express a natural way of
life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally,
this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as "noble savages" living
authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the
highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.

In 1870 Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus
lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion.
According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to
more monotheistic forms.[7] In the process, he redefined culture as a
diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This
view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture.

Johann Herder called attention to national cultures.
Adolf Bastian developed a universal model of culture.German
Romanticism
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) formulated an
individualist definition of "enlightenment" similar to the concept of
bildung: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred
immaturity."[8] He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack
of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently.
Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: Sapere aude, "Dare to
be wise!" In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity, which
necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as
important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective
form of bildung: "For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences
that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a
people."[9]

In 1795, the great linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–
1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and
Herder's interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany,
especially those concerned with nationalist movements—such as the
nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out of diverse
principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities
against the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive notion
of culture as "worldview." According to this school of thought, each
ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the
worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier
views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between
"civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal" cultures.

In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) argued for "the psychic unity of
mankind". He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human
societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same
basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set
of "elementary ideas" (Elementargedanken); different cultures, or
different "folk ideas" (Volkergedanken), are local modifications of
the elementary ideas.[10] This view paved the way for the modern
understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this
tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the
United States.

20th century discourses

American anthropology

Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of
culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and
unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly
refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode their
experiences symbolically, and communicate symbolically encoded
experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four
fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture:
biological anthropology, linguistics, cultural anthropology and
archeology. Research in these fields have influenced anthropologists
working in other countries to different degrees.

Biological anthropology: the evolution of culture

Taxonomic relations between four surviving species of the clade
Hominoidea: Hylobatidae, Gorillini, Homo, Pan and PongoDiscussion
concerning culture among biological anthropologists centers around two
debates. First, is culture uniquely human or shared by other species
(most notably, other primates)? This is an important question, as the
theory of evolution holds that humans are descended from (now extinct)
non-human primates. Second, how did culture evolve among human beings?

Gerald Weiss noted that although Tylor's classic definition of culture
was restricted to humans, many anthropologists take this for granted
and thus elide that important qualification from later definitions,
merely equating culture with any learned behavior. This slippage is a
problem because during the formative years of modern primatology, some
primatologists were trained in anthropology (and understood that
culture refers to learned behavior among humans), and others were not.
Notable non-anthropologists, like Robert Yerkes and Jane Goodall thus
argued that since chimpanzees have learned behaviors, they have
culture.[11][12] Today, anthropological primatologists are divided,
several arguing that non-human primates have culture, others arguing
that they do not.[13][14][15][16]

This scientific debate is complicated by ethical concerns. The
subjects of primatology are non-human primates, and whatever culture
these primates have is threatened by human activity. After reviewing
the research on primate culture, W.C. McGrew concluded, "[a]
discipline requires subjects, and most species of nonhuman primates
are endangered by their human cousins. Ultimately, whatever its merit,
cultural primatology must be committed to cultural survival [i.e. to
the survival of primate cultures]."[17]

McGrew suggests a definition of culture that he finds scientifically
useful for studying primate culture. He points out that scientists do
not have access to the subjective thoughts or knowledge of non-human
primates. Thus, if culture is defined in terms of knowledge, then
scientists are severely limited in their attempts to study primate
culture. Instead of defining culture as a kind of knowledge, McGrew
suggests that we view culture as a process. He lists six steps in the
process:

A new pattern of behavior is invented, or an existing one is
modified.
The innovator transmits this pattern to another.
The form of the pattern is consistent within and across performers,
perhaps even in terms of recognizable stylistic features.
The one who acquires the pattern retains the ability to perform it
long after having acquired it.
The pattern spreads across social units in a population. These social
units may be families, clans, troops, or bands.
The pattern endures across generations.[17]
McGrew admits that all six criteria may be strict, given the
difficulties in observing primate behavior in the wild. But he also
insists on the need to be as inclusive as possible, on the need for a
definition of culture that "casts the net widely":

Culture is considered to be group-specific behavior that is acquired,
at least in part, from social influences. Here, group is considered to
be the species-typical unit, whether it be a troop, lineage, subgroup,
or so on. Prima facia evidence of culture comes from within-species
but across-group variation in behavior, as when a pattern is
persistent in one community of chimpanzees but is absent from another,
or when different communities perform different versions of the same
pattern. The suggestion of culture in action is stronger when the
difference across the groups cannot be explained solely by ecological
factors ....[18]

As Charles Frederick Voegelin pointed out, if "culture" is reduced to
"learned behavior," then all animals have culture.[19] Certainly all
specialists agree that all primate species evidence common cognitive
skills: knowledge of object-permanence, cognitive mapping, the ability
to categorize objects, and creative problem solving.[20] Moreover, all
primate species show evidence of shared social skills: they recognize
members of their social group; they form direct relationships based on
degrees of kinship and rank; they recognize third-party social
relationships; they predict future behavior; and they cooperate in
problem-solving.[20]

Cast of the skeleton of Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis
One current view of the temporal and geographical distribution of
hominid populationsNevertheless, the term "culture" applies to non-
human animals only if we define culture as any or all learned
behavior. Within mainstream physical anthropology, scholars tend to
think that a more restrictive definition is necessary. These
researchers are concerned with how human beings evolved to be
different from other species. A more precise definition of culture,
which excludes non-human social behavior, would allow physical
anthropologists to study how humans evolved their unique capacity for
"culture".

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus) are humans' (Homo
sapiens) closest living relative; both are descended from a common
ancestor which lived around five or six million years ago. This is the
same amount of time it took for horses and zebras, lions and tigers,
and rats and mice, to diverge from their respective common ancestors
[21] The evolution of modern humans is rapid: Australopithicenes
evolved four million years ago and modern humans in past several
hundred thousand years.[22] During this time humanity evolved three
distinctive features:

(a) the creation and use of conventional symbols, including linguistic
symbols and their derivatives, such as written language and
mathematical symbols and notations; (b) the creation and use of
complex tools and other instrumental technologies; and (c) the
creation and participation in complex social organization and
institutions.[23]
According to developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, "where
these complex and species-unique behavioral practices, and the
cognitive skills that underlie them, came from" is a fundamental
anthropological question. Given that contemporary humans and
chimpanzees are far more different than horses and zebras, or rats and
mice, and that the evolution of this great difference occurred in such
a short period of time, "our search must be for some small difference
that made a big difference – some adaptation, or small set of
adaptations, that changed the process of primate cognitive evolution
in fundamental ways." According to Tomasello, the answer to this
question must form the basis of a scientific definition of "human
culture."[23]

In a recent review of the major research on human and primate tool-
use, communication, and learning strategies, Tomasello argues that the
key human advances over primates (language, complex technologies,
complex social organization) are all the results of humans pooling
cognitive resources. This is called "the ratchet effect:" innovations
spread and are shared by a group, and mastered "by youngsters, which
enables them to remain in their new and improved form within the group
until something better comes along." The key point is that children
are born good at a particular kind of social learning; this creates a
favored environment for social innovations, making them more likely to
be maintained and transmitted to new generations than individual
innovations.[24] For Tomasello, human social learning—the kind of
learning that distinguishes humans from other primates and that played
a decisive role in human evolution—is based on two elements: first,
what he calls "imitative learning," (as opposed to "emulative
learning" characteristic of other primates) and second, the fact that
humans represent their experiences symbolically (rather than
iconically, as is characteristic of other primates). Together, these
elements enable humans to be both inventive, and to preserve useful
inventions. It is this combination that produces the ratchet effect.

Chimpanzee mother and baby
Chimpanzee extracting insects
The Japanese Macaques at Jigokudani hotspring in NaganoThe kind of
learning found among other primates is "emulation learning," which
"focuses on the environmental events involved – results or changes of
state in the environment that the other produced – rather than on the
actions that produced those results."[25][26][27] Tomasello emphasizes
that emulation learning is a highly adaptive strategy for apes because
it focuses on the effects of an act. In laboratory experiments,
chimpanzees were shown two different ways for using a rake-like tool
to obtain an out-of-reach-object. Both methods were effective, but one
was more efficient than the other. Chimpanzees consistently emulated
the more efficient method.[28]

Examples of emulation learning are well-documented among primates.
Notable examples include Japanese macaque potato washing, Chimpanzee
tool use, and Chimpanzee gestural communication. In 1953, an 18-month-
old female macaque monkey was observed taking sandy pieces of sweet
potato (given to the monkeys by observers) to a stream (and later, to
the ocean) to wash off the sand. After three months, the same behavior
was observed in her mother and two playmates, and then the playmates'
mothers. Over the next two years seven other young macaques were
observed washing their potatoes, and by the end of the third year 40%
of the troop had adopted the practice.[29][30] Although this story is
popularly represented as a straightforward example of human-like
learning, evidence suggests that it is not. Many monkeys naturally
brush sand off of food; this behavior had been observed in the macaque
troop prior to the first observed washing. Moreover, potato washing
was observed in four other separate macaque troops, suggesting that at
least four other individual monkeys had learned to wash off sand on
their own.[30] Other monkey species in captivity quickly learn to wash
off their food.[31] Finally, the spread of learning among the Japanese
macaques was fairly slow, and the rate at which new members of the
troop learned did not keep pace with the growth of the troop. If the
form of learning were imitation, the rate of learning should have been
exponential. It is more likely that monkeys the washing behavior is
based on the common behavior of cleaning off food, and that monkeys
that spent time by the water independently learned to wash, rather
than wipe their food. This explains both why those monkeys that kept
company with the original washer, and who thus spent a good deal of
time by the water, also figured out how to wash their potatoes. It
also explains why the rate at which this behavior spread was slow.[32]

Chimpanzees exhibit a variety of population-specific tool use: termite-
fishing, ant-fishing, ant-dipping, nut-cracking, and leaf-sponging.
Gombe chimpanzees fish for termites using small, thin sticks, but
chimpanzees in Western Africa use large sticks to break holes in
mounds and use their hands to scoop up termites. Some of this
variation may be the result of "environmental shaping" (there is more
rainfall in western Africa, softening termite mounds and making them
easier to break apart, than in the Gombe reserve in eastern Africa.
Nevertheless it is clear that chimpanzees are good at emulation
learning. Chimpanzee children independently know how to roll over
logs, and know how to eat insects. When children see their mothers
rolling over logs in order to eat the insects beneath, they quickly
learn to do the same. In other words, this form of learning builds on
activities the children already know.[26][33]


Mother and child
Inuit family
Girls in Xinjiang in northwestern China
Children in Jerusalem
Children in NamibiaThe kind of learning characteristic of human
children is "Imitative learning," which "means reproducing an
instrumental act understood intentionally."[34] Human infants begin to
display some evidence of this form of learning between the ages of
nine and twelve months, when infants fix their attention not only on
an object, but on the gaze of an adult which enables them to use
adults as points of reference and thus "act on objects in the way
adults are acting on them." [35] This dynamic is well-documented and
has also been termed "joint engagement" or "joint attention."[36][37]
Essential to this dynamic is the infants growing capacity to recognize
others as "intentional agents:" people "with the power to control
their spontaneous behavior" and who "have goals and make active
choices among behavioral means for attaining those goals."[38]

The development of skills in joint attention by the end of a human
child's first year of life provides the basis for the development of
imitative learning in the second year. In one study 14-month old
children imitated an adult's overly-complex method of turning on a
light, even when they could have used an easier and more natural
motion to the same effect.[39] In another study, 16-month old children
interacted with adults who alternated between a complex series of
motions that appeared intentional and a comparable set of motions that
appeared accidental; they imitated only those motions that appeared
intentional.[40] Another study of 18-month old children revealed that
children imitate actions that adults intend , yet in some way fail, to
perform.[41] Tomasello emphasizes that this kind of imitative learning
"relies fundamentally on infants' tendency to identify with adults,
and on their ability to distinguish in the actions of others the
underlying goal and the different means that might be used to achieve
it."[42] He calls this kind of imitative learning "cultural learning
because the child is not just learning about things from other
persons, she is also learning things through them — in the sense that
she must know something of the adult's perspective on a situation to
learn the active use of this same intentional act." [43][44] He
concludes that the key feature of cultural learning is that it occurs
only when an individual "understands others as intentional agents,
like the self, who have a perspective on the world that can be
followed into, directed and shared"[45]

Emulation learning and imitative learning are two different
adaptations that can only be assessed in their larger environmental
and evolutionary contexts. In one experiment, chimpanzees and two-year-
old children were separately presented with a rake-like-tool and an
out-of-reach object. Adult humans then demonstrated two different ways
to use the tool, one more efficient, one less efficient. Chimpanzees
used the same efficient method following both demonstrations. Most of
the human children, however, imitated whichever method the adult was
demonstrating. Were chimps and humans to be compared on the basis of
these results, one might think that Chimpanzees are more intelligent.
From an evolutionary perspective they are equally intelligent, but
with different kinds of intelligence adapted to different environments.
[28] Chimpanzee learning strategies are well-suited to a stable
physical environment that requires little social cooperation (compared
to humans). Human learning strategies are well-suited to a complex
social environment in which understanding the intentions of others may
be more important than success at a specific task. Tomasello argues
that this strategy has made possible the "ratchet effect" that enabled
humans to evolve complex social systems that have enabled humans to
adapt to virtually every physical environment on the surface of the
earth.[46]

Tomasello further argues that cultural learning is essential for
language-acquisition. Most children in any society, and all children
in some, do not learn all words through the direct efforts of adults.
"In general, for the vast majority of words in their language,
children must find a way to learn in the ongoing flow of social
interaction, sometimes from speech not even addressed to them."[47]
This finding has been confirmed by a variety of experiments in which
children learned words even when the referent was not present,
multiple referents were possible, and the adult was not directly
trying to teach the word to the child.[48][49][50] Tomasello concludes
that "a linguistic symbol is nothing other than a marker for an
intersubjectively shared understanding of a situation.[51]

Tomasello's 1999 review of the research contrasting human and non-
human primate learning strategies confirms biological anthropologist
Ralph Holloway's 1969 argument that a specific kind of sociality
linked to symbolic cognition were the keys to human evolution, and
constitute the nature of culture. According to Holloway, the key issue
in the evolution of H. sapiens, and the key to understanding
"culture," "is how man organizes his experience." Culture is "the
imposition of arbitrary form upon the environment."[52] This fact,
Holloway argued, is primary to and explains what is distinctive about
human learning strategies, tool-use, and language. Human tool-making
and language express "similar, if not identical, cognitive processes"
and provide important evidence for how humankind evolved.[53]

In other words, whereas McGrew argues that anthropologists must focus
on behaviors like communication and tool-use because they have no
access to the mind, Holloway argues that human language and tool-use,
including the earliest stone tools in the fossil record, are highly
suggestive of cognitive differences between humans and non-humans, and
that such cognitive differences in turn explain human evolution. For
Holloway, the question is not whether other primates communicate,
learn or make tools, but that the way they do these things. "Washing
potatoes in the ocean … stripping branches of leaves to get termites,"
and other examples of primate tool-use and learning "are iconic, and
there is no feedback from the environment to the animal ."[54] Human
tools, however, express an independence from natural form that
manifests symbolic thinking. "In the preparation of the stick for
termite-eating, the relation between product and raw material is
iconic. In the making of a stone tool, in contrast, there is no
necessary relation between the form of the final product and the
original material."[55]

In Holloway's view, our non-human ancestors, like those of modern
chimpanzees and other primates, shared motor and sensory skills,
curiosity, memory, and intelligence, with perhaps differences in
degree. "It is when these are integrated with the unique attributes of
arbitrary production (symbolization) and imposition that man qua
cultural man appears."[56]

I have suggested above that whatever culture may be, it includes "the
imposition of arbitrary forms upon the environment." This phrase has
two components. One is a recognition that the relationship between the
coding process and the phenomenon (be it a tool, social network, or
abstract principle) is non-iconic. The other is an idea of man as a
creature who can make delusional systems work—who imposes his
fantasies, his non-iconic constructs (and constructions) , upon the
environment. The altered environment shapes his perceptions, and these
are again forced back on the environment, are incorporated into the
environment, and press for further adaptation.[57]
This is comparable to the "ratcheting" aspect suggested by Tomasello
and others that enabled human evolution to accelerate. Holloway
concludes that the first instance of symbolic thought among humans
provided a "kick-start" for brain development, tool complexity, social
structure, and language to evolve through a constant dynamic of
positive feedback. "This interaction between the propensity to
structure the environment arbitrarily and the feedback from the
environment to the organism is an emergent process, a process
different in kind from anything that preceded it ."[58]

Arbitrariness
Magritte The Treachery of Images provides a classic illustration of
the "arbitrariness of the sign."
Ancient stone tools
Simple-edge chopper
Chopping-tool

Unretouched bifaceLinguists Charles Hockett and R. Ascher have
identified thirten design-features of language, some shared by other
forms of animal connunication. One feature that distinguishes human
language is its tremendous productivity; in other words, competent
speakers of a language are capable of producing an infinite number of
original utterances. This productivity seems to be made possible by a
few critical features unique to human language. One is "duality of
patterning," meaning that human language consists of the articulation
of several distinct processes, each with its own set of rules:
combining phonemes to produce morphemes, combining morphemes to
produce words, and combining words to produce sentences. This means
that a person can master a relatively limited number of signals and
sets of rules, to create infinite combinations. Another crucial
element is that human language is symbolic: the sound of words (or
their shape, when written) bear no relation to what they represent.
[59] In other words, their meaning is arbitrary. That words have
meaning is a matter of convention. Since the meaning of words are
arbitrary, any word may have several meanings, and any object may be
referred to using a variety of words; the actual word used to describe
a particular object depends on the context, the intention of the
speaker, and the ability of the listener to judge these appropriately.
As Tomasello notes,

An individual language user looks at a tree and, before drawing the
attention of her interlocutor to that tree, must decide, based on her
assessment of the listener's current knowledge and expectations,
whether to say "that tree over there," "it," "the oak," "that hundred-
year-oak," "the tree," "the bagswing tree," "that thing in the front
yard," "the ornament," "the embarrassment," or any of a number of
other expressions. … And these decisions are not made on the basis of
the speaker's direct goal with respect to the object or activity
involved, but rather that they are made on the basis of her goal with
respect to the listener's interest and attention to that object or
activity.
This is why symbolic cognition and communication and imitative
learning go hand-in-hand.[60]

Holloway argues that the stone-tools associated with genus Homo have
the same features of human language:

Returning to matter of syntax, rules, and concatenated activity
mentioned above, almost any model which describes a language process
can also be used to describe tool-making. This is hardly surprising.
Both activities are concatenated, both have rigid rules about eh
serialization of unit activities (the grammar, syntax), both are
hierarchical systems of activity (as is any motor activity), and both
produce arbitrary configurations which thence become part of the
environment, either temporarily or permanently.[61]
productivity can be seen in the facts that basic types were probably
used for multiple purposes, that tool industries tend to expand with
time, and that a slight variation on h basic pattern may be made to
met some new functional requisite. Elements of a basic "vocabulary" of
motor operations—flakes, detachment, rotation, preparation of striking
platform, etc.—are used in different combinations to produce
dissimilar tools, with different forms, and supposedly, different
uses. . . . Taking each motor event alone, no one action is complete;
each action depends on the prior one and requires a further one, and
each is dependent in another ax on the original plan. In other words,
at each point of the action except the last, the piece is not
"satisfactory" in structure. Each unit action is meaningless by itself
in the sense of the use of the tool; it is meaningful only in the
context of the whole completed set of actions culminating in the final
product. This exactly parallels language.[62]
As Tomasello has demonstrated, symbolic thought can operate only in a
particular social environment:

Arbitrary symbols enforce consensus of perceptions, which not only
allows members to communicate about the same objects in terms of space
and time (as in hunting) but it also makes it possible for social
relationships to be standardized and manipulated through symbols. It
means that idiosyncrasies are smoothed out and perceived within
classes of behavior. By enforcing perceptual invariance, symbols also
enforce social behavioral constancy, and enforcing social behavioral
constancy is a prerequisite to differential task-role sectors in a
differentiated social group adapting not only to the outside
environment but to its own membership.[63]
Biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon, in a synthesis of over
twenty years of research on human evolution, human neurology, and
primatology, describes this "ratcheting effect" as a form of
"Baldwinian Evolution." Named after psychologist James Baldwin, this
describes a situation in which an animal's behavior has evolutionary
consequences when it changes the natural environment and thus the
selective forces acting on the animal.[64]

Once some useful behavior spreads within a population and becomes more
important for subsistence, it will generate selection pressures on
genetic traits that support its propagation ... Stone and symbolic
tools, which were initially acquired with the aid of flexible ape-
learning abilities, ultimately turned the tables on their users and
forced them to adapt to a new niche opened by these technologies.
Rather than being just useful tricks, these behavioral prostheses for
obtaining food and organizing social behaviors became indispensable
elements in a new adaptive complex. The origin of "humanness" can be
defined as that point in our evolution where these tools became the
principle source of selection on our bodies and brains. It is the
diagnostic of Homo symbolicus.[65]
According to Deacon, this occurred between 2 and 2.5 million years
ago, when we have the first fossil evidence of stone tool use and the
beginning of a trend in an increase in brain size. But it is the
evolution of symbolic language which is the cause—and not the effect—
of these trends.[66] More specifically, Deacon is suggesting that
Australopithecines, like contemporary apes, used tools; it is possible
that over the millions of years of Australopithecine history, many
troops developed symbolic communication systems. All that was
necessary was that one of these groups so altered their environment
that "it introduced selection for very different learning abilities
than affected prior species."[67] This troop or population kick-
started the Baldwinian process (the "ratchet effect") that led to
their evolution to genus Homo.

The question for Deacon is, what behavioral-environmental changes
could have made the development of symbolic thinking adaptive? Here he
emphasizes the importance of distinguishing humans from all other
species, not in order to privilege human intelligence but to
problematize it. Given that the evolution of H. sapiens began with
ancestors who did not yet have "culture," what led them to move away
from cognitive, learning, communication, and tool-making strategies
that were and continued to be adaptive for most other primates (and,
some have suggested, most other species of animals)? Learning symbol
systems is more time consuming than other forms of communication, so
symbolic thought made possible a different communication strategy, but
not a more efficient one than other primates. Nevertheless, it must
have offered some selective advantage of H. sapiens to have evolved.
Deacon starts by looking a two key determinants in evolutionary
history: foraging behavior, and patterns of sexual relations. As he
observes competition for sexual access limits the possibilities for
social cooperation in many species; yet, Deacon observes, there are
three consistent patterns in human reproduction that distinguish them
from other species:

Both males and females usually contribute effort towards the rearing
of their offspring, though often to differing extents and in very
different ways.
In all societies, the great majority if adult males and females are
bound by long-term, exlusive secual access rights and pronibitions to
particular individuals of the opposite sex.
They maintain these exclusive sexual relations while living in modest
to large-sized, multi-male, multi-female, cooperative social groups.
[68]
Moreover, there is one feature common to all known human foraging
societies (all humans prior to ten or fifteen thousand years ago), and
markedly different from other primates: "the use of meat. . . . The
appearance of the first stone tools nearly 2.5 million years ago
almost certainly correlates with a radical shift in foraging behavior
in order to gain access to meat."[69] Deacon does not believe that
symbolic thought was necessary for hunting or tool-making (although
tool-making may be a reliable index of symbolic thought); rather, it
was necessary for the success of distinctive social relations.

The key is that while men and women are equally effective foragers,
mothers carrying dependent children are not effective hunters. They
must thus depend on male hunters. This favors a system in which males
have exclusive sexual access to females, and females can predict that
their sexual partner will provide food for them and their children. In
most mammalian species the result is a system of rank or sexual
competition that results in either polygyny, or life-long pair-bonding
between two individuals who live relatively independent of other
adults of their species; in both cases male aggression plays an
important role in maintaining sexual access to mate(s). What is unique
about humans?

Human reliance on resources that are relatively unavailable to females
with infants selects not only for cooperation between a child's father
and mother but also for the cooperation of other relatives and
friends, including elderly individuals and juveniles, who can be
relied upon for assistance. The special demands of acquiring meat and
caring for infants in our own evolution together contribute to the
underlying impetus for the third characteristic feature of human
reproductive patterns: cooperative group living.[70]
What is uniquely characteristic about human societies is what required
symbolic cognition, which consequently leads to the evolution of
culture: "cooperative, mixed-sex social groups, with significant male
care and provisioning of offspring, and relatively stable patterns of
reproductive exclusion." This combination is relatively rare in other
species because it is "highly susceptible to disintegration." Language
and culture provide the glue that holds it together.[71]

Chimpanzees also, on occasion, hunt meat; in most cases, however,
males consume the meat immediately, and only on occasion share with
females who happen to be nearby. Among chimpanzees, hunting for meat
increases when other sources of food become scarce, but under these
conditions, sharing decreases. The first forms of symbolic thinking
made stone-tools possible, which in turn made hunting for meat a more
dependable source of food for our nonhuman ancestors while making
possible forms of social communication that make sharing—between males
and females, but also among males, decreasing sexual competition:

So the socio-ecological problem posed by the transition to a meat-
supplemented subsistence strategy is that it cannot be utilized
without a social structure which guarantees unambiguous and exclusive
mating and is sufficiently egalitarian to sustain cooperation via
shared or parallel reproductive interests. This problem can be solved
symbolically.[72]
Symbols and symbolic thinking thus make possible a central feature of
social relations in every human population: reciprocity. Evolutionary
scientists have developed a model to explain reciprocal altruism among
closely related individuals. Symbolic thought makes possible
reciprocity between distantly related individuals.[73]

Archeological approaches to culture: matter and meaning

Excavated dwellings at Skara Brae, Europe's most complete Neolithic
village
The making of a Levallois Point
Bifacial points, engraved ochre and bone tools from the c. 75,000–
80,000 year old M1 & M2 phases at Blombos cave
Monte Alban archaeological site
Excavations at the South Area of Çatal Höyük
Mural of an aurochs, a deer, and humans from Çatalhöyük, sixth
millennium BC; Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, TurkeyIn the
19th century archeology was often a supplement to history, and the
goal of archeologists was to identify artifacts according to their
typology and stratigraphy, thus marking their location in time and
space. Franz Boas established that archeology be one of American
anthropology's four fields, and debates among archeologists have often
paralleled debates among cultural anthropologists. In the 1920s and
1930s, Australian-British archeologist V. Gordon Childe and American
archeologist W. C. McKern independently began moving from asking about
the date of an artifact, to asking about the people who produced it —
when archeologists work alongside historians, historical materials
generally help answer these questions, but when historical materials
are unavailable, archeologists had to develop new methods. Childe and
McKern focused on analyzing the relationships among objects found
together; their work established the foundation for a three-tiered
model:

An individual artifact, which has surface, shape, and technological
attributes (e.g. an arrowhead)
A sub-assemblage, consisting of artifacts that are found, and were
likely used, together (e.g. an arrowhead, bow and knife)
An assemblage of sub-assemblages that together constitute the
archeological site (e.g. the arrowhead, bow and knife; a pot and the
remains of a hearth; a shelter)
Childe argued that a "constantly recurring assemblage of artifacts" to
be an "archaeological culture."[74][75] Childe and others viewed "each
archeological culture ... the manifestation in material terms of a
specific people."[76]

In 1948 Walter Taylor systematized the methods and concepts that
archeologists had developed and proposed a general model for the
archeological contribution to knowledge of cultures. He began with the
mainstream understanding of culture as the product of human cognitive
activity, and the Boasian emphasis on the subjective meanings of
objects as dependent on their cultural context. He defined culture as
"a mental phenomenon, consisting of the contents of minds, not of
material objects or observable behavior."[77] He then devised a three-
tiered model linking cultural anthropology to archeology, which he
called conjunctive archeology:

Culture, which is unobservable and nonmaterial
Behaviors resulting from culture, which are observable and
nonmaterial
Objectifications, such as artifacts and architecture, which are the
result of behavior and material
That is, material artifacts were the material residue of culture, but
not culture itself.[78] Taylor's point was that the archeological
record could contribute to anthropological knowledge, but only if
archeologists reconceived their work not just as digging up artifacts
and recording their location in time and space, but as inferring from
material remains the behaviors through which they were produced and
used, and inferring from these behaviors the mental activities of
people. Although many archeologists agreed that their research was
integral to anthropology, Taylor's program was never fully
implemented. One reason was that his three-tier model of inferences
required too much fieldwork and laboratory analysis to be practical.
[79] Moreover, his view that material remains were not themselves
cultural, and in fact twice-removed from culture, in fact left
archeology marginal to cultural anthropology.[80]

In 1962 Leslie White's former student Lewis Binford proposed a new
model for anthropological archeology, called "the New Archeology" or
"Processual Archeology," based on White's definition of culture as
"the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism."[81]
This definition allowed Binford to establish archeology as a crucial
field for the pursuit of the methodology of Julian Steward's cultural
ecology:

The comparative study of cultural systems with variable technologies
in a similar environmental range or similar technologies in differing
environments is a major methodology of what Steward (1955: 36–42) has
called "cultural ecology," and certainly is a valuable means of
increasing our understanding of cultural processes. Such a methodology
is also useful in elucidating the structural relationships between
major cultural sub-systems such as the social and ideological sub-
systems.[82]
In other words, Binford proposed an archeology that would be central
to the dominant project of cultural anthropologists at the time
(culture as non-genetic adaptations to the environment); the "new
archeology" was the cultural anthropology (in the form of cultural
ecology or ecological anthropology) of the past.

In the 1980s, there was a movement in the United Kingdom and Europe
against the view of archeology as a field of anthropology, echoing
Radcliffe-Brown's earlier rejection of cultural anthropology.[83]
During this same period, then-Cambridge archeologist Ian Hodder
developed "post-processual archeology" as an alternative. Like Binford
(and unlike Taylor) Hodder views artifacts not as objectifications of
culture but as culture itself. Unlike Binford, however, Hodder does
not view culture as an environmental adaptation. Instead, he "is
committed to a fluid semiotic version of the traditional culture
concept in which material items, artifacts, are full participants in
the creation, deployment, alteration, and fading away of symbolic
complexes."[84] His 1982 book, Symbols in Action, evokes the symbolic
anthropology of Geertz, Schneider, with their focus on the context
dependent meanings of cultural things, as an alternative to White and
Steward's materialist view of culture.[85] In his 1991 textbook,
Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology
Hodder argued that archeology is more closely aligned to history than
to anthropology.[86]

Language and culture
The connection between culture and language has been noted as far back
as the classical period and probably long before. The ancient Greeks,
for example, distinguished between civilized peoples and bárbaros
"those who babble", i.e. those who speak unintelligible languages.[87]
The fact that different groups speak different, unintelligible
languages is often considered more tangible evidence for cultural
differences than other less obvious cultural traits.

The German romanticists of the 19th century such as Herder, Wundt and
Humbolt, often saw language not just as one cultural trait among many
but rather as the direct expression of a people's national character,
and as such as culture in a kind of condensed form. Herder for example
suggests, "Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie
seine Sprache" (Since every people is a People, it has its own
national culture expressed through its own language).[88]

Franz Boas, founder of American anthropology, like his German
forerunners, maintained that the shared language of a community is the
most essential carrier of their common culture. Boas was the first
anthropologist who considered it unimaginable to study the culture of
a foreign people without also becoming acquainted with their language.
For Boas, the fact that the intellectual culture of a people was
largely constructed, shared and maintained through the use of
language, meant that understanding the language of a cultural group
was the key to understanding its culture. At the same time, though,
Boas and his students were aware that culture and language are not
directly dependent on one another. That is, groups with widely
different cultures may share a common language, and speakers of
completely unrelated languages may share the same fundamental cultural
traits.[89][90] Numerous other scholars have suggested that the form
of language determines specific cultural traits.[91] This is similar
to the notion of Linguistic determinism, which states that the form of
language determines individual thought. While Boas himself rejected a
causal link between language and culture, some of his intellectual
heirs entertained the idea that habitual patterns of speaking and
thinking in a particular language may influence the culture of the
linguistic group.[92] Such belief is related to the theory of
Linguistic relativity. Boas, like most modern anthropologists,
however, was more inclined to relate the interconnectedness between
language and culture to the fact that, as B.L. Whorf put it, "they
have grown up together".[93]

Indeed, the origin of language, understood as the human capacity of
complex symbolic communication, and the origin of complex culture is
often thought to stem from the same evolutionary process in early man.
Linguists and evolutionary anthropologists suppose that language
evolved as early humans began to live in large communities which
required the use of complex communication to maintain social
coherence. Language and culture then both emerged as a means of using
symbols to construct social identity and maintain coherence within a
social group too large to rely exclusively on pre-human ways of
building community such as for example grooming. Since language and
culture are both in essence symbolic systems, twentieth century
cultural theorists have applied the methods of analyzing language
developed in the science of linguistics to also analyze culture.
Particularly the structural theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, which
describes symbolic systems as consisting of signs (a pairing of a
particular form with a particular meaning), has come to be applied
widely in the study of culture. But also post-structuralist theories,
that nonetheless still rely on the parallel between language and
culture as systems of symbolic communication, have been applied in the
field of semiotics. The parallel between language and culture can then
be understood as analog to the parallel between a linguistic sign,
consisting for example of the sound [kau] and the meaning "cow", and a
cultural sign, consisting for example of the cultural form of "wearing
a crown" and the cultural meaning of "being king". In this way it can
be argued that culture is itself a kind of language. Another parallel
between cultural and linguistic systems is that they are both systems
of practice, that is they are a set of special ways of doing things
that is constructed and perpetuated through social interactions[94].
Children, for example, acquire language in the same way as they
acquire the basic cultural norms of the society they grow up in -
through interaction with older members of their cultural group.

However, languages, now understood as the particular set of speech
norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture
of the community that speak them. Humans use language as a way of
signalling identity with one cultural group and difference from
others. Even among speakers of one language several different ways of
using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with
particular subgroups within a larger culture. In linguistics such
different ways of using the same language are called "varieties". For
example, the English language is spoken differently in the USA, the UK
and Australia, and even within English-speaking countries there are
hundreds of dialects of English that each signal a belonging to a
particular region and/or subculture. For example, in the UK the
cockney dialect signals its speakers' belonging to the group of lower
class workers of east London. Differences between varieties of the
same language often consist in different pronunciations and
vocabulary, but also sometimes of different grammatical systems and
very often in using different styles (e.g. cockney Rhyming slang or
Lawyers' jargon). Linguists and anthropologists, particularly
sociolinguists, ethnolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have
specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech
communities.

A community's ways of speaking or signing are a part of the
community's culture, just as other shared practices are. Language use
is a way of establishing and displaying group identity. Ways of
speaking function not only to facilitate communication, but also to
identify the social position of the speaker. Linguists calls different
ways of speaking language varieties, a term that encompasses
geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the
jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and
sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that
language is used and understood within a particular culture.[95]

The differences between languages does not consist only in differences
in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar, but also in different
"cultures of speaking". Some cultures for example have elaborate
systems of "social deixis", systems of signalling social distance
through linguistic means[96]. In English, social deixis is shown
mostly though distinguishing between addressing some people by first
name and others by surname, but also in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy",
"Doctor" or "Your Honor", but in other languages such systems may be
highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of
the language. In several languages of east Asia, for example Thai,
Burmese and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a
speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than one self in
a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods
and members of royalty as the highest[96]. Other languages may use
different forms of address when speaking to speakers of the opposite
gender or in-law relatives and many languages have special ways of
speaking to infants and children. Among other groups, the culture of
speaking may entail not speaking to particular people, for example
many indigenous cultures of Australia have a taboo against talking to
one's in-law relatives, and in some cultures speech is not addressed
directly to children. Some languages also require different ways of
speaking for different social classes of speakers, and often such a
system is based on gender differences as well as in Japanese and
Koasati[97].

Cultural anthropology
1899–1946: Universal versus particular

Franz Boas established modern American anthropology as the study of
the sum total of human phenomena.
Ruth Benedict was instrumental in establishing the modern conception
of distinct cultures being patterned.The modern anthropological
understanding of culture has its origins in the 19th century with
German anthropologist Adolf Bastian's theory of the "psychic unity of
mankind," which, influenced by Herder and von Humboldt, challenged the
identification of "culture" with the way of life of European elites,
and British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor's attempt to define
culture as inclusively as possible. Tylor in 1874 described culture in
the following way: "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."[98] Although Tylor was
not aiming to propose a general theory of culture (he explained his
understanding of culture in the course of a larger argument about the
nature of religion), American anthropologists have generally presented
their various definitions of culture as refinements of Tylor's. Franz
Boas's student Alfred Kroeber (1876–1970) identified culture with the
"superorganic," that is, a domain with ordering principles and laws
that could not be explained by or reduced to biology.[99] In 1973,
Gerald Weiss reviewed various definitions of culture and debates as to
their parsimony and power, and proposed as the most scientifically
useful definition that "culture" be defined "as our generic term for
all human nongenetic, or metabiological, phenomena" (italics in the
original).[100]

Franz Boas, founded modern American anthropology with the
establishment of the first graduate program in anthropology at
Columbia University in 1896. At the time the dominant model of culture
was that of cultural evolution, which posited that human societies
progressed through stages of savagery to barbarism to civilization;
thus, societies that for example are based on horticulture and
Iroquois kinship terminology are less evolved that societies based on
agriculture and Eskimo kinship terminology. One of Boas's greatest
accomplishments was to demonstrate convincingly that this model is
fundamentally flawed, empirically, methodologically, and
theoretically. Moreover, he felt that our knowledge of different
cultures was so incomplete, and often based on unsystematic or
unscientific research, that it was impossible to develop any
scientifically valid general model of human cultures. Instead, he
established the principle of cultural relativism and trained students
to conduct rigorous participant observation field research in
different societies. Boas understood the capacity for culture to
involve symbolic thought and social learning, and considered the
evolution of a capacity for culture to coincide with the evolution of
other, biological, features defining genus Homo. Nevertheless, he
argued that culture could not be reduced to biology or other
expressions of symbolic thought, such as language. Boas and his
students understood culture inclusively and resisted developing a
general definition of culture. Indeed, they resisted identifying
"culture" as a thing, instead using culture as an adjective rather
than a noun. Boas argued that cultural "types" or "forms" are always
in a state of flux.[101][102] His student Alfred Kroeber argued that
the "unlimited receptivity and assimilativeness of culture" made it
practically impossible to think of cultures as discrete things.[103]

Wovoka, Paiute spiritual leader and creator of the Ghost Dance
Zuñi girl with jar, 1903

Edward Curtis photo of a Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch
Tu'i Manu'a Elisala

Hopi Basket WeaverBoas's students dominated cultural anthropology
through World War II, and continued to have great influence through
the 1960s. They were especially interested in two phenomena: the great
variety of forms culture took around the world,[104] and the many ways
individuals were shaped by and acted creatively through their own
cultures.[105][106] This led his students to focus on the history of
cultural traits: how they spread from one society to another, and how
their meanings changed over time[107][108]—and the life histories of
members of other societies.[109][110][111][112][113][114][115][116]
Others, such as Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and Margaret Mead (1901–
1978), produced monographs or comparative studies analyzing the forms
of creativity possible to individuals within specific cultural
configurations.[117][118][119] Essential to their research was the
concept of "context": culture provided a context that made the
behavior of individuals understandable; geography and history provided
a context for understanding the differences between cultures. Thus,
although Boasians were committed to the belief in the psychic unity of
humankind and the universality of culture, their emphasis on local
context and cultural diversity led them away from proposing cultural
universals or universal theories of culture.

There is a tension in cultural anthropology between the claim that
culture as a universal (the fact that all human societies have
culture), and that it is also particular (culture takes a tremendous
variety of forms around the world). Since Boas, two debates have
dominated cultural anthropology. The first has to do with ways of
modeling particular cultures. Specifically, anthropologists have
argued as to whether "culture" can be thought of as a bounded and
integrated thing, or as a quality of a diverse collection of things,
the numbers and meanings of which are in constant flux. Boas's student
Ruth Benedict suggested that in any given society cultural traits may
be more or less "integrated," that is, constituting a pattern of
action and thought that gives purpose to people's lives, and provides
them with a basis from which to evaluate new actions and thoughts,
although she implies that there are various degrees of integration;
indeed, she observes that some cultures fail to integrate.[120] Boas,
however, argued that complete integration is rare and that a given
culture only appears to be integrated because of observer bias.[121]
For Boas, the appearance of such patterns—a national culture, for
example—was the effect of a particular point of view.[122]

The first debate was effectively suspended in 1934 when Ruth Benedict
published Patterns of Culture, which has continuously been in print.
Although this book is well known for popularizing the Boasian
principle of cultural relativism, among anthropologists it constituted
both an important summary of the discoveries of Boasians, and a
decisive break from Boas's emphasis on the mobility of diverse
cultural traits. "Anthropological work has been overwhelmingly devoted
to the analysis of cultural traits," she wrote "rather than to the
study of cultures as articulated wholes."[123] Influenced by Polish-
British social anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, however, she
argued that "The first essential, so it seems today, is to study the
living culture, to know its habits of thought and the functions of its
institutions" and that "the only way in which we can know the
significance of the selected detail of behavior is against the
background of the motives and emotions and values that are
institutionalized in that culture."[124] Influenced by German
historians Wilhelm Dilthey and Oswald Spengler, as well as by gestalt
psychology, she argued that "the whole determines its parts, not only
their relation but their very nature,"[125] and that "cultures,
likewise, are more than the sum of their traits."[126] Just as each
spoken language draws very selectively from an extensive, but finite,
set of sounds any human mouth (free from defect) can make, she
concluded that in each society people, over time and through both
conscious and unconscious processes, selected from an extensive but
finite set of cultural traits which then combine to form a unique and
distinctive pattern."[127]

The significance of cultural behavior is not exhausted when we have
clearly understood that it is local and man-made and hugely variable.
It tends to be integrated. A culture, like an individual, is a more or
less consistent pattern of thought and action. Within each culture
there come into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared
by other types of society. In obedience to their purposes, each people
further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to
the urgency of these drives the heterogeneous items of behavior take
more and more congruous shape. Taken up by a well-integrated culture,
the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its particular
goals, often by the most unlikely metamorphoses.[128]
Although Benedict felt that virtually all cultures are patterned, she
argued that these patterns change over time as a consequence of human
creativity, and therefore different societies around the world had
distinct characters. Patterns of Culture contrasts Zuňi, Dobu and
Kwakiutl cultures as a way of highlighting different ways of being
human. Benedict observed that many Westerners felt that this view
forced them to abandon their "dreams of permanence and ideality and
with the individual's illusions of autonomy" and that for many, this
made existence "empty."[129] She argued however that once people
accepted the results of scientific research, people would "arrive then
at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as
new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of
life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of
existence."[129]

This view of culture has had a tremendous impact outside of
anthropology, and dominated American anthropology until the Cold War,
when anthropologists like Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf rejected the
validity and value of approaching "each culture" as "a world in
itself" and "relatively stable.".[130] They felt that, too often, this
approach ignored the impact of imperialism, colonialism, and the world
capitalist economy on the peoples Benedict and her followers studied
(and thus re-opened the debate on the relationship between the
universal and the particular, in the form of the relationship between
the global and the local). In the meantime, its emphasis on
metamorphosing patterns influenced French structuralism and made
American anthropologists receptive to British structural-
functionalism.

Turkish nomad clan with the nodes as marriages
Mexican village with the nodes as marriages
Iroqois Kinship Structure

Culinary triangleThe second debate has been over the ability to make
universal claims about all cultures. Although Boas argued that
anthropologists had yet to collect enough solid evidence from a
diverse sample of societies to make any valid general or universal
claims about culture, by the 1940s some felt ready. Whereas Kroeber
and Benedict had argued that "culture"—which could refer to local,
regional, or trans-regional scales—was in some way "patterned" or
"configured," some anthropologists now felt that enough data had been
collected to demonstrate that it often took highly structured forms.
The question these anthropologists debated was, were these structures
statistical artifacts, or where they expressions of mental models?
This debate emerged full-fledged in 1949, with the publication of
George Murdock's Social Structure, and Claude Lévi-Strauss's Les
Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté.

Opposing Boas and his students, Yale anthropologist George Murdock,
who compiled the Human Relations Area Files. These files code cultural
variables found in different societies, so that anthropologists can
use statistical methods to study correlations among different
variables.[131][132][133] The ultimate aim of this project is to
develop generalizations that apply to increasingly larger numbers of
individual cultures. Later, Murdock and Douglas R. White developed the
standard cross-cultural sample as a way to refine this method.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology
brought together ideas of Boas (especially Boas's belief in the
mutability of cultural forms, and Bastian's belief in the psychic
unity of humankind) and French sociologist's Émile Durkheim's focus on
social structures (institutionalized relationships among persons and
groups of persons). Instead of making generalizations that applied to
large numbers of societies, Lévi-Strauss sought to derive from
concrete cases increasingly abstract models of human nature. His
method begins with the supposition that culture exists in two
different forms: the many distinct structures that could be inferred
from observing members of the same society interact (and of which
members of a society are themselves aware), and abstract structures
developed by analyzing shared ways (such as myths and rituals) members
of a society represent their social life (and of which members of a
society are not only not consciously aware, and which typically stand
in opposition to, or negate, the social structures of which people are
aware). He then sought to develop one universal mental structure that
could only be inferred through the systematic comparison of particular
social and cultural structures. He argued that just as there are laws
through which a finite and relatively small number of chemical
elements could be combined to create a seemingly infinite variety of
things, there were a finite and relatively small number of cultural
elements which people combine to create the great variety of cultures
anthropologists observe. The systematic comparison of societies would
enable an anthropologist to develop this cultural "table of elements,"
and once completed, this table of cultural elements would enable an
anthropologist to analyze specific cultures and achieve insights
hidden to the very people who produced and lived through these
cultures.[134][135] Structuralism came to dominate French anthropology
and, in the late 1960s and 1970s, came to have great influence on
American and British anthropology.

Murdock's HRAF and Lévi-Strauss's structuralism provide two ambitious
ways to seek the universal in the particular, and both approaches
continue to appeal to different anthropologists. However, the
differences between them reveal a tension implicit in the heritage of
Tylor and Bastian. Is culture to be found in empirically observed
behaviors that may form the basis of generalizations? Or does it
consist of universal mental processes, which must be inferred and
abstracted from observed behavior? This question has driven debates
among biological anthropologists and archeologists as well.

Structural-Functionalist challenge: Society versus culture
In the 1940s the Boasian understanding of culture was challenged by a
new paradigm for anthropological and social science research called
Structural functionalism. This paradigm developed independently but in
parallel in both the United Kingdom and in the United States (In both
cases it is sui generis: it has no direct relationship to
"structuralism" except that both French structuralism and Anglo-
American Structural-Functionalism were all influenced by Durkheim. It
is also analogous, but unrelated to, other forms of "functionalism").
Whereas the Boasians viewed anthropology as that natural science
dedicated to the study of humankind, structural functionalists viewed
anthropology as one social science among many, dedicated to the study
of one specific facet of humanity. This led structural-functionalists
to redefine and minimize the scope of "culture."

In the United Kingdom, the creation of structural functionalism was
anticipated by Raymond Firth's (1901–2002) We the Tikopia, published
in 1936, and marked by the publication of African Political Systems,
edited by Meyer Fortes (1906–1983) and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–
1973) in 1940.[136][137] In these works these anthropologists
forwarded a synthesis of the ideas of their mentor, Bronisław
Malinowski (1884–1942), and his rival, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–
1955). Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown viewed anthropology—what
they call "social anthropology"—as that branch of sociology that
studied so-called primitive societies. According to Malinowski's
theory of functionalism, all human beings have certain biological
needs, such as the need for food and shelter, and humankind has the
biological need to reproduce. Every society develops its own
institutions, which function to fulfill these needs. In order for
these institutions to function, individuals take on particular social
roles that regulate how they act and interact. Although members of any
given society may not understand the ultimate functions of their roles
and institutions, an ethnographer can develop a model of these
functions through the careful observation of social life.[138]
Radcliffe-Brown rejected Malinowski's notion of function, and believed
that a general theory of primitive social life could only be built up
through the careful comparison of different societies. Influenced by
the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who argued
that primitive and modern societies are distinguished by distinct
social structures, Radcliffe-Brown argued that anthropologists first
had to map out the social structure of any given society before
comparing the structures of different societies.[139] Firth, Fortes,
and Evans-Pritchard found it easy to combine Malinowski's attention to
social roles and institutions with Radcliffe-Brown's concern with
social structures. They distinguished between "social
organization" (observable social interactions) and "social
structure" (rule-governed patterns of social interaction), and shifted
their attention from biological functions to social functions. For
example, how different institutions are functionally integrated, and
the extent to, and ways in, which institutions function to promote
social solidarity and stability. In short, instead of culture
(understood as all human non-genetic or extra-somatic phenomena)they
made "sociality" (interactions and relationships among persons and
groups of people) their object of study. (Indeed, Radcliffe-Brown once
wrote "I should like to invoke a taboo on the word culture.")[140]

Coincidentally, in 1946 sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979)
founded the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University.
Influenced by such European sociologists as Émile Durkheim and Max
Weber, Parsons developed a theory of social action that was closer to
British social anthropology than to Boas's American anthropology, and
which he also called "structural functionalism." Parson's intention
was to develop a total theory of social action (why people act as they
do), and to develop at Harvard and inter-disciplinary program that
would direct research according to this theory. His model explained
human action as the result of four systems:

the "behavioral system" of biological needs
the "personality system" of an individual's characteristics affecting
their functioning in the social world
the "social system" of patterns of units of social interaction,
especially social status and role
the "cultural system" of norms and values that regulate social action
symbolically
According to this theory, the second system was the proper object of
study for psychologists; the third system for sociologists, and the
fourth system for cultural anthropologists.[141][142] Whereas the
Boasians considered all of these systems to be objects of study by
anthropologists, and "personality" and "status and role" to be as much
a part of "culture" as "norms and values," Parsons envisioned a much
narrower role for anthropology and a much narrower definition of
culture.

Although Boasian cultural anthropologists were interested in norms and
values, among many other things, it was only with the rise of
structural functionalism that people came to identify "culture" with
"norms and values." Many American anthropologists rejected this view
of culture (and by implication, anthropology). In 1980, anthropologist
Eric Wolf wrote,

As the social sciences transformed themselves into "behavioral"
science, explanations for behavior were no longer traced to culture:
behavior was to be understood in terms of psychological encounters,
strategies of economic choice, strivings for payoffs in games of
power. Culture, once extended to all acts and ideas employed in social
life, was now relegated to the margins as "world view" or
"values."[143]
Nevertheless, several of Talcott Parsons' students emerged as leading
American anthropologists. At the same time, many American
anthropologists had a high regard for the research produced by social
anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s, and found structural-
functionalism to provide a very useful model for conducting
ethnographic research.

The combination of American cultural anthropology theory with British
social anthropology methods has led to some confusion between the
concepts of "society" and "culture." For most anthropologists, these
are distinct concepts. Society refers to a group of people; culture
refers to a pan-human capacity and the totality of non-genetic human
phenomena. Societies are often clearly bounded; cultural traits are
often mobile, and cultural boundaries, such as they are, can be
typically porous, permeable, and plural.[144] During the 1950s and
1960s anthropologists often worked in places where social and cultural
boundaries coincided, thus obscuring the distinction. When
disjunctures between these boundaries become highly salient, for
example during the period of European de-colonization of Africa in the
1960s and 1970s, or during the post-Bretton Woods realignment of
globalization, however, the difference often becomes central to
anthropological debates.[145][146][147][148][149]

1946–1968: Symbolic versus adaptive

American kinship
A cockfight in India
Huli Wigman from the Southern Highlands

In Hinduism, the cow is a symbol of wealth, strength, and selfless
giving.
Cleveley's depiction of Captain Cook

Vietcong troops pose with new AK-47 riflesParsons' students Clifford
Geertz and David M. Schneider, and Schneider's student Roy Wagner,
went on to important careers as cultural anthropologists and developed
a school within American cultural anthropology called "symbolic
anthropology," the study of the social construction and social effects
of symbols.[150][151][152][153] Since symbolic anthropology easily
complemented social anthropologists' studies of social life and social
structure, many British structural-functionalists (who rejected or
were uninterested in Boasian cultural anthropology) accepted the
Parsonian definition of "culture" and "cultural anthropology." British
anthropologist Victor Turner (who eventually left the United Kingdom
to teach in the United States) was an important bridge between
American and British symbolic anthropology.[154]

Attention to symbols, the meaning of which depended almost entirely on
their historical and social context, appealed to many Boasians. Leslie
White asked of cultural things, "What sort of objects are they? Are
they physical objects? Mental objects? Both? Metaphors? Symbols?
Reifications?" In Science of Culture (1949), he concluded that they
are objects "sui generis"; that is, of their own kind. In trying to
define that kind, he hit upon a previously unrealized aspect of
symbolization, which he called "the symbolate"—an object created by
the act of symbolization. He thus defined culture as "symbolates
understood in an extra-somatic context."[155]

Nevertheless, by the 1930s White began turning away from the Boasian
approach.[156] He wrote,

In order to live man, like all other species, must come to terms with
the external world.... Man employs his sense organs, nerves, glands,
and muscles in adjusting himself to the external world. But in
addition to this he has another means of adjustment and control....
This mechanism is culture.[157]
Although this view echoes that of Malinowski, the key concept for
White was not "function" but "adaptation." Whereas the Boasians were
interested in the history of specific traits, White was interested in
the cultural history of the human species, which he felt should be
studied from an evolutionary perspective. Thus, the task of
anthropology is to study "not only how culture evolves, but why as
well.... In the case of man ... the power to invent and to discover,
the ability to select and use the better of two tools or ways of doing
something- these are the factors of cultural evolution."[158] Unlike
19th century evolutionists, who were concerned with how civilized
societies rose above primitive societies, White was interested in
documenting how, over time, humankind as a whole has through cultural
means discovered more and more ways for capturing and harnessing
energy from the environment, in the process transforming culture.

At the same time that White was developing his theory of cultural
evolution, Kroeber's student Julian Steward was developing his theory
of cultural ecology. In 1938 he published Basin-Plateau Aboriginal
Socio-Political Groups in which he argued that diverse societies—for
example the indigenous Shoshone or White farmers on the Great Plains—
were not less or more evolved; rather, they had adapted differently to
different environments.[159] Whereas Leslie White was interested in
culture understood holistically as a property of the human species,
Julian Steward was interested in culture as the property of distinct
societies. Like White he viewed culture as a means of adapting to the
environment, but he criticized Whites "unilineal" (one direction)
theory of cultural evolution and instead proposed a model of
"multilineal" evolution in which (in the Boasian tradition) each
society has its own cultural history.[160]

When Julian Steward left a teaching position at the University of
Michigan to work in Utah in 1930, Leslie White took his place; in 1946
Julian Steward was made Chair of the Columbia University Anthropology
Department. In the 1940s and 1950s their students, most notably Marvin
Harris, Sidney Mintz, Robert Murphy, Roy Rappaport, Marshall Sahlins,
Elman Service, Andrew P. Vayda and Eric Wolf dominated American
anthropology.[161][162][163][164][165][166][167][168][169] Most
promoted materialist understandings of culture in opposition to the
symbolic approaches of Geertz and Schneider. Harris, Rappaport, and
Vayda were especially important for their contributions to cultural
materialism and ecological anthropology, both of which argued that
"culture" constituted an extra-somatic (or non-biological) means
through which human beings could adapt to life in drastically
differing physical environments.

The debate between symbolic and materialist approaches to culture
dominated American Anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam
War and the publication of Dell Hymes' Reinventing Anthropology,
however, marked a growing dissatisfaction with the then dominant
approaches to culture. Hymes argued that fundamental elements of the
Boasian project such as holism and an interest in diversity were still
worth pursuing: "interest in other peoples and their ways of life, and
concern to explain them within a frame of reference that includes
ourselves."[170] Moreover, he argued that cultural anthropologists are
singularly well-equipped to lead this study (with an indirect rebuke
to sociologists like Parsons who sought to subsume anthropology to
their own project):

In the practice there is a traditional place for openness to phenomena
in ways not predefined by theory or design – attentiveness to complex
phenomena, to phenomena of interest, perhaps aesthetic, for their own
sake, to the sensory as well as intellectual, aspects of the subject.
These comparative and practical perspectives, though not unique to
formal anthropology, are specially husbanded there, and might well be
impaired, if the study of man were to be united under the guidance of
others who lose touch with experience in concern for methodology, who
forget the ends of social knowledge in elaborating its means, or who
are unwittingly or unconcernedly culture-bound..[171]
It is these elements, Hymes argued, that justify a "general study of
man," that is, "anthropology".[172]

During this time notable anthropologists such as Mintz, Murphy,
Sahlins, and Wolf eventually broke away, experimenting with
structuralist and Marxist approaches to culture, they continued to
promote cultural anthropology against structural functionalism.[173]
[174][175][176][177]

1940–present: Local versus global

Big Tree, a Kiowa chief and warrior
The Tepozteco mountain dominates views from Tepoztlán.

Ex-convent of Dominico de la Natividad, a World Heritage SiteBoas and
Malinowski established ethnographic research as a highly localized
method for studying culture. Yet Boas emphasized that culture is
dynamic, moving from one group of people to another, and that specific
cultural forms have to be analyzed in a larger context. This has led
anthropologists to explore different ways of understanding the global
dimensions of culture.

In the 1940s and 1950s, several key studies focused on how trade
between indigenous peoples and the Europeans who had conquered and
colonized the Americas influenced indigenous culture, either through
change in the organization of labor, or change in critical
technologies. Bernard Mishkin studied the effect of the introduction
of horses on Kiowa political organization and warfare.[178] Oscar
Lewis explored the influence of the fur trade on Blackfoot culture
(relying heavily on historical sources).[179] Joseph Jablow documented
how Cheyenne social organization and subsistence strategy between 1795
and 1840 were determined by their position in trade networks linking
Whites and other Indians.[180] Frank Secoy argued that Great Plains
Indians' social organization and military tactics changed as horses,
introduced by the Spanish in the south, diffused north, and guns,
introduced by the British and French in the east, diffused west.[181]

In the 1950s Robert Redfield and students of Julian Steward pioneered
"community studies," namely, the study of distinct communities
(whether identified by race, ethnicity, or economic class) in Western
or "Westernized" societies, especially cities. They thus encountered
the antagonisms 19th century critics described using the terms "high
culture" and "low culture." These 20th century anthropologists
struggled to describe people who were politically and economically
inferior but not, they believed, culturally inferior. Oscar Lewis
proposed the concept of a "culture of poverty" to describe the
cultural mechanisms through which people adapted to a life of economic
poverty. Other anthropologists and sociologists began using the term
"sub-culture" to describe culturally distinct communities that were
part of larger societies.

One important kind of subculture is that formed by an immigrant
community. In dealing with immigrant groups and their cultures, there
are various approaches:

Leitkultur (core culture): A model developed in Germany by Bassam
Tibi. The idea is that minorities can have an identity of their own,
but they should at least support the core concepts of the culture on
which the society is based.
Melting Pot: In the United States, the traditional view has been one
of a melting pot where all the immigrant cultures are mixed and
amalgamated without state intervention.
Monoculturalism: In some European states, culture is very closely
linked to nationalism, thus government policy is to assimilate
immigrants, although recent increases in migration have led many
European states to experiment with forms of multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism: A policy that immigrants and others should preserve
their cultures with the different cultures interacting peacefully
within one nation.
The way nation states treat immigrant cultures rarely falls neatly
into one or another of the above approaches. The degree of difference
with the host culture (i.e., "foreignness"), the number of immigrants,
attitudes of the resident population, the type of government policies
that are enacted, and the effectiveness of those policies all make it
difficult to generalize about the effects. Similarly with other
subcultures within a society, attitudes of the mainstream population
and communications between various cultural groups play a major role
in determining outcomes. The study of cultures within a society is
complex and research must take into account a myriad of variables.

Cultural studies
In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by
Marxism, such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, developed Cultural
Studies. Following nineteenth century Romantics, they identified
"culture" with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art,
music, film, food, sports, and clothing). Nevertheless, they
understood patterns of consumption and leisure to be determined by
relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations
and the organization of production.[182][183] In the United States,
"Cultural Studies" focuses largely on the study of popular culture,
that is, the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure
goods. The term was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded
the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It
has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded
Hoggart as Director.

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with his
colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela
McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field
developed it began to combine political economy, communication,
sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video
studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art
history in order to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In
this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena
relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class,
and/or gender.[citation needed] Cultural studies is concerned with the
meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the
ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or
eating out) in a given culture. This field studies the meanings and
uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Recently, as
capitalism has spread throughout the world (a process called
globalization), cultural studies has begun to analyse local and global
forms of resistance to Western hegemony.[citation needed]

In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not only
includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or
hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful
artifacts of culture.[citation needed] Similarly, the discipline
widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a cultural studies
researcher not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of
ruling social groups)[184] and popular culture, but also everyday
meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main
focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is
comparative cultural studies, based on the discipline of comparative
literature and cultural studies.[citation needed]

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed
somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field's
inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies
was developed in the 1950s and 1960s mainly under the influence first
of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later
Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-
wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as 'capitalist' mass
culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School
critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges
in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their
influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart
Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.

Whereas in the United States Lindlof & Taylor say that "cultural
studies was grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition".
[185] The American version of cultural studies initially concerned
itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side
of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example,
American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects
of fandom.[citation needed] The distinction between American and
British strands, however, has faded.[citation needed] Some
researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a
Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence
from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist
Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox
Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model
assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing
with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who
control the means of production (the economic base) essentially
control a culture.[citation needed] Other approaches to cultural
studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American
developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They
criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared
by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest
that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning
of the product. This view is best exemplified by the book Doing
Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et
al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce
commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them.
Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and art historian Griselda Pollock
contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and
psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is influential voices in the
turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field
of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.[citation needed]

Cultural change

A 19th century engraving showing Australian "natives" opposing the
arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770Cultural invention has come to
mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of
people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a
physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change
period", driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass
media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other
factors.

Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and
forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social
structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of
cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which
themselves are subject to change[186]. (See structuration.)

Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce
changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new
cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These
social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of
cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new
practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both
gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also
enter as factors. Changes include following for the film local hero.
For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last
ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to
the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many
cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics[187].

Full-length profile portrait of Turkman woman, standing on a carpet at
the entrance to a yurt, dressed in traditional clothing and
jewelryCultures are externally affected via contact between societies,
which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in
cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact
technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural
ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or
acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not
necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For
example, hamburgers, mundane in the United States, seemed exotic when
introduced into China. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas)
refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or
propagation in another. "Direct Borrowing" on the other hand tends to
refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to
another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based
model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas,
practices, and products.

Acculturation has different meanings, but in this context refers to
replacement of the traits of one culture with those of another, such
has happened to certain Native American tribes and to many indigenous
peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related
processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a
different culture by an individual) and transculturation.

See also

Culture portal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Culture
Book:Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Culture

Books are collections of articles which can be downloaded or ordered
in print.
Main article: Outline of culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_culture

Counterculture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture
Cross-cultural communication -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-cultural_communication
Intercultural competence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercultural_competence
Cultural bias -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_bias
Cultural imperialism -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_imperialism
Ethnocentrism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism
Cultural dissonance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_dissonance
Cultural Institutions Studies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Institutions_Studies
Culture theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_theory
Culture war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war
Interculturality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interculturality
Legal culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_culture
Online Etymology Dictionary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Etymology_Dictionary
Outline of culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_culture
Sociocultural evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural_evolution
Urban culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_culture

Notes

^ Harper, Douglas (2001). Online Etymology Dictionary
^ Kroeber, A. L. and C. Kluckhohn, 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of
Concepts and Definitions.
^ Levine, Donald (ed) 'Simmel: On individuality and social forms'
Chicago University Press, 1971. p6.
^ a b Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy.
^ Williams (1983), p.90. Cited in Shuker, Roy (1994). Understanding
Popular Music, p.5. ISBN 0-415-10723-7. argues that contemporary
definitions of culture fall into three possibilities or mixture of the
following three:
"a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic
development"
"a particular way of life, whether of a people, period, or a group"
"the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic
activity".
^ Bakhtin 1981, p.4
^ McClenon, p.528-529
^ Immanuel Kant 1974 "Answering the Question: What is
Enlightenment?" (German: "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist
Aufklärung?") Berlinische Monatsschrift, December (Berlin Monthly)
^ Michael Eldridge, "The German Bildung Tradition" UNC Charlotte
^ "Adolf Bastian", Today in Science History; "Adolf Bastian",
Encyclopædia Britannica
^ Robert Yerkes 1943 Chimpanzees: A Laboratory Colony. New Haven: Yale
University Press. 51–52, 189, 193
^ Jane Goodall 1963 "My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees" National
Geographic 124: 308
^ R. J. Andrew 1963 "Comment on The Essential Morphological Basis for
Human Culture" Alan Bryan Current Anthropology 4: 301–303, p. 301
^ Alan Bryan 1963 "The Essential Morphological basis for Human
Culture" Current Anthropology 4: 297
^ Keleman 1963 "Comment on The Essential Morphological Basis for Human
Culture" Alan Bryan Current Anthropology 4: 301–303 p.304
^ W. C. McGrew 1998 "Culture in nonhuman primates?" Annual Review of
Anthropology 27: 301–328
^ a b W.C. McGrew 1998 "Culture in Nonhuman Primates?" Annual Review
of Anthropology 27: 323
^ W.C. McGrew 1998 "Culture in Nonhuman Primates?" Annual Review of
Anthropology 27: 305
^ C.F. Voegelin 1951 "Culture, Language and the Human Organism"
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7: 370
^ a b Michael Tomasello 1999 "The Human Adaptation for Culture" in
Annual Review of Anthropology vol. 28: 511
^ M. King and A Wilson 1975 "Evolution at two levels: in humans and
chimpanzees" Science 188: 107–116
^ Stringer and McKiew 1996 African Exodus: The origins of Modern
Humanity. London: Cape
^ a b Michael Tomasello 1999 "The Human Adaptation for Culture" in
Annual Review of Anthropology vol. 28: 510
^ Michael Tomasello 1999 "The Human Adaptation for Culture" in Annual
Review of Anthropology vol. 28: 512
^ Michael Tomasello 1999 "The Human Adaptation for Culture" in Annual
Review of Anthropology vol. 28: 520
^ a b Michael Tomasello 1990 "Cultural Transmission in the Tool Use
and Communicatory Signaling of Chimpanzees?" in "Language" and
Intelligence in Monkeys and Apes: Comparative Developmental
Perspectives ed. S. Parker, K. Bibson. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 274–311
^ Michael Tmoasello 1996 "Do Apes Ape?" in Social Learning in Animals:
The Roots of Culture ed. C. Heyes and B. Galef. New York: Academic
Press, pp. 319–346
^ a b Nagell, K., Olguin K. and Tomasello M. 1993 "Processes of social
learning in the tool use of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and human
children (Homo sapiens)" in Journal of Comparative Psychology 107: 174–
186
^ S. Kawamura 1959 "The process of subcultural propogation among
Japanese macaques" Primates 2: 43–60
^ a b M. Kawai 1965 "Newly-acquired pre-cultural behairo of the
natural troop of Japanese monkeys on Koshima Islet Primates 6: 1–30
^ E. Visalberghi and D.M. Fragaszy 1990 "Food washing behavior in
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^ Mintz, Sidney 1960 Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History.
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^ Radin, Paul 1963 The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. New York:
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^ Sapir, Edward 1922 "Sayach'apis, a Nootka Trader" in Elsie Clews
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^ Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of
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^ Margaret Mead 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa
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^ Franz Boas 1940 [1932] "The Aims of Anthropological Research," in
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^ Bashkow, Ira 2004 "A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries"
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^ Ruth Benedict 1934 Patterns of Culture Boston: Houghton Miflin
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^ Ruth Benedict 1934 Patterns of Culture Boston: Houghton Miflin
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^ Ruth Benedict 1934 Patterns of Culture Boston: Houghton Miflin
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^ Ruth Benedict 1934 Patterns of Culture Boston: Houghton Miflin
Company p. 47
^ Ruth Benedict 1934 Patterns of Culture Boston: Houghton Miflin
Company pp. 23–24
^ Ruth Benedict 1934 Patterns of Culture Boston: Houghton Miflin
Company p.46
^ a b Ruth Benedict 1934 Patterns of Culture Boston: Houghton Miflin
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^ Ruth Benedict 1934 Patterns of Culture Boston: Houghton Miflin
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^ Murdock, George, 1949 Social Structure New York: The Macmillan
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^ Murdock, G. P. 1967. Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary. Pittsburgh: The
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^ Murdock, G. P. 1981. Atlas of World Cultures. Pittsburgh: The
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^ Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1955 Tristes Tropiques Atheneum press
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^ Raymond Firth 1936 We the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship
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^ Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans Pritchard 1940. African Political
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^ Bronisław Malinowski 1944 The Scientific Theory of Culture
^ A.R. Radcliffe-Brown 1952 Structure and Function in Primitive
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^ a.R. Radcliffe-Brown 1957 A Natural Science of Society Glencoe: The
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^ Talcott Parsons 1937, The Structure of Social Action
^ Talcott Parsons 1951, The Social System
^ Eric Wolf 1980 "They Divide and Subdivide and Call it Anthropology."
The New York Times November 30:E9.
^ Ira Bashkow, 2004 "A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries,"
American Anthropologist 106(3):445-446
^ Appadurai, Arjun 1986 The Social Life of Things. (Edited) New York:
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^ Appadurai, Arjun, 1996 Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of
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^ Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson, 1992, "Beyond 'Culture': Space,
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^ Marcus, George E. 1995 "Ethnography in/of the World System: The
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^ Wolf, Eric 1982 Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: The
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^ Clifford Geertz 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures New York: Basic
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^ Janet Dolgin, David Kemnitzer, and David Schneider, eds. Symbolic
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^ Victor Turner 1967 The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual
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^ White, L. 1949. The Science of Culture: A study of man and
civilization.
^ Richard A. Barrett 1989, "The Paradoxical Anthropology of Leslie
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^ Leslie White, 1949 "Ethnological Theory." In Philosophy for the
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^ Leslie White, 1943 "Energy and the Evolution of Culture." American
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^ Julian Steward 1938 Basin Plateau Aboriginal Socio-political Groups
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^ Julian Steward 1955 Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of
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^ Marvin Harris 1979 Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science
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^ Marvin Harris 1977 Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures New
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^ Roy A. Rappaport 1967 Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology
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^ Julian Steward, ed. 1966 The people of Puerto Rico: a study in
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^ Robert F. Murphy 1960 Headhunter's Heritage; Social and Economic
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

...and I am Sid Harth

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Of Culture and Cultural Imperialism: Sid Harth
http://bakulaji.typepad.com/blog/

Cultural imperialism
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Cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting, distinguishing,
separating, or artificially injecting the culture of one society into
another. It is usually the case that the former belongs to a large,
economically or militarily powerful nation and the latter belongs to a
smaller, less important one. Cultural imperialism can take the form of
an active, formal policy or a general attitude. A metaphor of
colonialism is employed: the cultural products of the first world
"invade" the third-world and "conquer" local culture.[1] In the
stronger variants of the term, world domination (in a cultural sense)
is the explicit goal of the nation-states or corporations that export
the culture.[1] The term is usually used in a pejorative sense,
usually in conjunction with a call to reject foreign influence.

Background and definitions

Distribution of CNN news bureausThe term appears to have emerged in
the 1960s.[2] and has been a focus of research since at least the
1970s.[3] Terms such as "media imperialism", "structural imperialism",
"cultural dependency and domination", "cultural synchronization",
"electronic colonialism", "ideological imperialism", and "economic
imperialism" have all been used to describe the same basic notion of
cultural imperialism.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_imperialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_colonialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_imperialism

Various academics give various definitions of the term. American media
critic Herbert Schiller wrote: "The concept of cultural imperialism
today [1975] best describes the sum of the processes by which a
society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating
stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into
shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the
values and structures of the dominating centre of the system. The
public media are the foremost example of operating enterprises that
are used in the penetrative process. For penetration on a significant
scale the media themselves must be captured by the dominating/
penetrating power. This occurs largely through the commercialization
of broadcasting"[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Schiller

Tom McPhail defined "Electronic colonialism as the dependency
relationship established by the importation of communication hardware,
foreign-produced software, along with engineers, technicians, and
related information protocols, that vicariously establish a set of
foreign norms, values, and expectations which, in varying degrees, may
alter the domestic cultures and socialization processes."[6] Sui-Nam
Lee observed that "communication imperialism can be defined as the
process in which the ownership and control over the hardware and
software of mass media as well as other major forms of communication
in one country are singly or together subjugated to the domination of
another country with deleterious effects on the indigenous values,
norms and culture."[7] Ogan saw "media imperialism often described as
a process whereby the United States and Western Europe produce most of
the media products, make the first profits from domestic sales, and
then market the products in Third World countries at costs
considerably lower than those the countries would have to bear to
produce similar products at home."[8]

Downing and Sreberny-Mohammadi state: "Imperialism is the conquest and
control of one country by a more powerful one. Cultural imperialism
signifies the dimensions of the process that go beyond economic
exploitation or military force. In the history of colonialism, (i.e.,
the form of imperialism in which the government of the colony is run
directly by foreigners), the educational and media systems of many
Third World countries have been set up as replicas of those in
Britain, France, or the United States and carry their values. Western
advertising has made further inroads, as have architectural and
fashion styles. Subtly but powerfully, the message has often been
insinuated that Western cultures are superior to the cultures of the
Third World."[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_McPhail

The issue of cultural imperialism emerged largely from communication
studies.[10] However, cultural imperialism has been used as a
framework by scholars to explain phenomena in the areas of
international relations, anthropology, education, sciences, history,
literature, and sports.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_studies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_relations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology

Theory and debate

It can refer to either the forced acculturation of a subject
population, or to the voluntary embracing of a foreign culture by
individuals who do so of their own free will. Since these are two very
different referents, the validity of the term has been called into
question.

Cultural influence can be seen by the "receiving" culture as either a
threat to or an enrichment of its cultural identity. It seems
therefore useful to distinguish between cultural imperialism as an
(active or passive) attitude of superiority, and the position of a
culture or group that seeks to complement its own cultural production,
considered partly deficient, with imported products or values.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_identity

The imported products or services can themselves represent, or be
associated with, certain values (such as consumerism). According to
one argument, the "receiving" culture does not necessarily perceive
this link, but instead absorbs the foreign culture passively through
the use of the foreign goods and services. Due to its somewhat
concealed, but very potent nature, this hypothetical idea is described
by some experts as "banal imperialism." Some believe that the newly
globalised economy of the late 20th and early 21st century has
facilitated this process through the use of new information
technology. This kind of cultural imperialism is derived from what is
called "soft power." The theory of electronic colonialism extends the
issue to global cultural issues and the impact of major multi-media
conglomerates, ranging from Time-Warner, Disney, News Corp, Sony, to
Google and Microsoft with the focus on the hegemonic power of these
mainly US-based communication giants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumerism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power

Cultural diversity

One of the reasons often given for opposing any form of cultural
imperialism, voluntary or otherwise, is the preservation of cultural
diversity, a goal seen by some as analogous to the preservation of
ecological diversity. Proponents of this idea argue either that such
diversity is valuable in itself, or instrumentally valuable because it
makes available more ways of solving problems and responding to
catastrophes, natural or otherwise.

Opponents of this idea deny the validity of the analogy to
biodiversity, and/or the validity of the arguments for preserving
biodiversity itself.[citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_diversity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity

Trinidad-born writer V. S. Naipaul presents Islam as a form of
cultural imperialism, a foreign ideology smothering cultural
diversity, in two of his works: Among the Believers: An Islamic
Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the
Converted Peoples (1998).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Believers:_An_Islamic_Journey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Belief:_Islamic_Excursions_among_the_Converted_Peoples

Said and post-colonial studies

Palestinian writer, philosopher, and literary theorist, Edward Said,
who was one of the founders of the field of post-colonial study, wrote
extensively on the subject of cultural imperialism. His work attempts
to highlight the inaccuracies of many assumptions about cultures and
societies, and is largely informed by Michel Foucault's concepts of
discourse and power. The relatively new academic field of post-
colonial theory has been the source for most of the in-depth work on
the idea of discursive and other non-military mechanisms of
imperialism, and its validity is disputed by those who deny that these
forms are genuinely imperialistic.

Rothkopf on dealing with cultural dominance

David Rothkopf, managing director of Kissinger Associates and an
adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia University (who
also served as a senior US Commerce Department official in the Clinton
Administration), wrote about cultural imperialism in his provocatively
titled In Praise of Cultural Imperialism? in the summer 1997 issue of
Foreign Policy magazine. Rothkopf says that the US should embrace
"cultural imperialism" as in its self interest. But his definition of
cultural imperialism stresses spreading the values of tolerance and
openness to cultural change in order to avoid war and conflict between
cultures as well as expanding accepted technological and legal
standards to provide free traders with enough security to do business
with more countries. Rothkopf's definition almost exclusively involves
allowing individuals in other nations to accept or reject foreign
cultural influences. He also mentions, but only in passing, the use of
the English language and consumption of news and popular music and
film as cultural dominance that he supports. Rothkopf additionally
makes the point that globalization and the Internet are accelerating
the process of cultural influence.[11]

Culture is used by the organizers of society — politicians,
theologians, academics, and families — to impose and ensure order, the
rudiments of which change over time as need dictates. It is less often
acknowledged as the means of justifying inhumanity and warfare. [...]
cultural differences are often sanctified by their links to the
mystical roots of culture, be they spiritual or historical.
Consequently, a threat to one's culture becomes a threat to one's God
or one's ancestors and, therefore, to one's core identity. This
inflammatory formula has been used to justify many of humanity's worst
acts.
[O]ne need only look at the 20th century's genocides. In each one,
leaders used culture to fuel the passions of their armies and other
minions and to justify their actions among their people.
Rothkopf then cites genocide and massacres in Armenia, Russia, the
Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and East Timor as
examples of culture (in some cases expressed in the ideology of
"political culture" or religion) being used to justify violence. He
also acknowledges that cultural imperialism in the past has been
guilty of forcefully eliminating the cultures of natives in the
Americas and in Africa, or through use of the Inquisition, "and during
the expansion of virtually every empire."

The most important way to deal with cultural influence in any nation,
according to Rothkopf, is to promote tolerance and allow, or even
promote, cultural diversities that are compatible with tolerance and
to eliminate those cultural differences that cause violent conflict:

Successful multicultural societies, be they nations, federations, or
other conglomerations of closely interrelated states, discern those
aspects of culture that do not threaten union, stability, or
prosperity (such as food, holidays, rituals, and music) and allow them
to flourish. But they counteract or eradicate the more subversive
elements of culture (exclusionary aspects of religion, language, and
political/ideological beliefs). History shows that bridging cultural
gaps successfully and serving as a home to diverse peoples requires
certain social structures, laws, and institutions that transcend
culture. Furthermore, the history of a number of ongoing experiments
in multiculturalism, such as in the European Union, India, South
Africa, Canada and the United States, suggests that workable, if not
perfected, integrative models exist. Each is built on the idea that
tolerance is crucial to social well-being, and each at times has been
threatened by both intolerance and a heightened emphasis on cultural
distinctions. The greater public good warrants eliminating those
cultural characteristics that promote conflict or prevent harmony,
even as less-divisive, more personally observed cultural distinctions
are celebrated and preserved.

See also

Cocacolonization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocacolonization
Colonialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism
Cross-culturalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-culturalism
Cultural appropriation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation
Cultural Cringe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Cringe
Cultural hegemony http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
Ethnocide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocide
Hegemony http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony
Linguistic imperialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_imperialism
Right to exist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_exist
Scientific imperialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_imperialism
Transculturation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transculturation

Notes

^ a b Alexander, Victoria D. (2003). "The Cultural Diamond - The
Production of Culture". Sociology of the arts: exploring fine and
popular forms. Wiley-Blackwell,. pp. 162. ISBN 0631230408,
9780631230403.
^ Tomlinson (1991), p. 3
^ Hamm, (2005), p. 4
^ a b White (2001)
^ Schiller, Herbert I. (1976). Communication and cultural domination.
International Arts and Sciences Press, 901 North Broadway, White
Plains, New York 10603. pp. 9–10. ISBN 0873320794, 9780873320795.
^ McPhail, Thomas L. (1987). Electronic colonialism: the future of
international broadcasting and communication. Volume 126 of Sage
library of social research. Sage Publications. pp. 18. ISBN
0803927304, 9780803927308.
^ Lee, Siu-Nam Lee (1988). "Communication imperialism and dependency:
A conceptual clarification". International Communication Gazette
(Netherlands: Kiuwer Academic Publishers) (Isssue 41): 74.
^ Ogan, Christine (Spring 1988). "Media Imperialism and the
Videocassette Recorder: The Case of Turkey.". Journal of
Communication, 38 (2): p94.
^ Downing,, John; Ali Mohammadi, Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi (1995).
Questioning the media: a critical introduction (2, illustrated ed.).
SAGE. pp. 482. ISBN 0803971974, 9780803971974.
^ Salwen, Michael B. (March 1991). "Cultural imperialism: A media
effects approach". Critical Studies in Media Communication 8 (1): 29–
38.
^ [1] Rothkopf, David, "In Praise of Cultural Imperialism," Foreign
Affairs, Summer 1997, Volume 107, pp. 38-53; all descriptions of
Rothkopf's points and his quotes are from this article
http://www.globalpolicy.org/index.php

References

Tomlinson, John (1991). Cultural imperialism: a critical introduction
(illustrated, reprint ed.). Continuum International Publishing Group.
ISBN 082645013X, 9780826450135.
Hamm, Bernd; Russell Charles Smandych (2005). Cultural imperialism:
essays on the political economy of cultural domination.
Reference,Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series.
University of Toronto Press. ISBN 155111707X, 9781551117072.
White, Livingston A. (Spring/Summer 2001). "Reconsidering cultural
imperialism theory". Transnational Broadcasting Studies (The Center
for Electronic Journalism at the American University in Cairo and the
Centre for Middle East Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford) (6).

External links

"In Praise of Cultural Imperialism?", by David Rothkopf, Foreign
Policy no. 107, Summer 1997, pp. 38–53, which argues that cultural
imperialism is a positive thing.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/protected/rothkopf.html
"Reconsidering cultural imperialism theory" by Livingston A. White,
Transnational Broadcasting Studies no. 6, Spring/Summer 2001, which
argues that the idea of media imperialism is outdated.
http://www.tbsjournal.com/Archives/Spring01/white.html
"What American Culture?", by Alexander S. Peak, 14 September 2004,
which argues that what the world is witnessing is the gradual
evolution of a new, global culture.
http://alexpeak.com/ww/2004/001.html
Academic Web page from 24 February 2000, discussing the idea of
cultural imperialism
http://www.uky.edu/~drlane/capstone/mass/imperialism.htm

Categories:

Hegemony | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hegemony
Imperialism | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Imperialism
Cultural studies | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cultural_studies
Cultural geography | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cultural_geography
Political science | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_science

This page was last modified on 26 April 2010 at 12:48.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_imperialism

...and I am Sid Harth