CULTURE

CULTURE . In its most basic sense, culture is that portion or aspect of thought and behavior that is learned and capable of being taught to others. Culture includes customs and worldviews that provide a mental model of reality and a guide for appropriate and moral action. Languages are cultural in that they are learned symbolic information sets and are one of the most important means of encoding ideas and knowledge for memory and communication. All religions are cultural and all forms of spirituality exist within broader traditions or cultures.

Culture becomes widely communicated and shared in social groups, and it serves as a foundation for general agreement and common acceptance of certain principles and perceptions as valid, normal, and natural. In this way, the influences on culture are often masked and it is not automatically apparent that one's own views and beliefs are not simply accurate apprehensions of reality, but are, in fact, artificial and, to a degree, arbitrary. Because of this characteristic, culture can be difficult to study, either in oneself or in others. Habitual use makes the cultural lenses that one continually wears disappear from awareness, so that what is seen falsely seems to be objective truth.

In observing foreign peoples and ways of life through one's own cultural lenses, people tend to automatically judge others—insofar as their ways are different from one's own—as erroneous and inferior. At the same time, adherents to other traditions or cultures tend to look upon their customs and beliefs using their own cultural assumptions, and they can misinterpret and judge both thought and action according to foreign standards. This natural human tendency is known as ethnocentrism, which is a major barrier to understanding other ways of life and value systems. Ethnocentrism is overcome through cultural relativism, an approach in which judgment is withheld in a measured fashion in an attempt to understand another people's way of life according to their own perspectives. Once an empathetic understanding is reached, one can begin to compare cultures more accurately according to some external scientific or humanistic standard, in order to discern patterns or make generalizations.

Culture is normally contrasted with instinctual modes of thought and behavior that are not learned, but rather are genetically inherited. While the distinction between biological and cultural inputs is heuristically useful and, indeed, necessary for an understanding of human emotion, cognition, motor behavior, social interaction, and institutions, culture does not exist independently of biologically inherited characteristics, including instinctual drives and behaviors. While some behaviors appear to be almost entirely instinctual (such as an infant's innate ability to suck) as a rule, both biology and culture are implicated in most mental and motor behavior. This can be seen, for example, in food preferences. The biological need for nourishment is culturally elaborated in the great variation in which particular foods are preferred, such that any two peoples may find each other's delicacies unpalatable. These differences, while partly attributable to genetic and constitutional factors, are largely explicable only in terms of cultural difference.

Culture could also be contrasted with individual learning that is incapable of being communicated to others, or with idiosyncratic ideas and preferences not widely shared by the social group. Culture is often used in this sense in the social sciences and humanities. When scholars stress a populational rather than an individual perspective, culture typically implies a shared perspective ostensibly held by an entire population, such as a religious group or an ethic group, referred to as a culture. However, this usage can mask the fact that learned information is not always shared.

While many animal species include learning and even social transmission of knowledge in their behavioral repertoires, humankind differs from other species primarily in our much greater neurological capacity for culture and the degree to which humans rely on socially learned information as a basis for both individual and group life. Human reliance on culture allows people to adapt to a great variety of environments and psychological stresses, to respond to innumerable challenges, and to transmit to others the lessons learned through experience. One consequence of this ability to both purposely and unconsciously transmit information is that ideas originating in one person's experience can become widely shared among members of social groups. Once cultural ideas are widely shared, they appear to acquire an added aura of truthfulness, supported by apparent mutual confirmation and elaboration. A second consequence of cultural transmissibility is that individuals' ideas can survive, albeit in somewhat altered form, beyond their lifetimes. The capacity for and reliance on culture thus allows traditions to come into existence by providing a means for their codification and transmission.

Particularly in anthropology, where the concept was refined, but also in the other social sciences and humanities, culture is central because of its pervasive relevance to everything that human beings think, feel, and do. Much is captured by the term culture, and the phenomena scholars seek to describe, interpret, and explain under its rubric are among the most complex in nature. Therefore, the term has meant different things to different scholars, and it has undergone repeated critiques, abandonments, and redefinitions. Nevertheless, it has proven an extremely useful term with which to discuss and model the great variety of ways of thinking and living that different groups and societies around the world display. This is nowhere more clear than in the study of religion, which has revealed both great diversity and remarkable similarities in the many religious traditions of the world. Contemporary social scientists would agree that differences between religions are differences of culture, though some would use different terms. For this reason, the study of culture must be central to understanding religion as a human phenomenon.

History of the Concept

In its earliest known English usages, culture refers to the cultivation of food plants. Philip Smith (2001, p. 1) writes that by the sixteenth century this meaning was metaphorically applied to people to signify proper education and human achievement. In this sense, the term culture in English carries a positive bias and refers only to those parts of learned ideals and behaviors that the observer considers good, proper, and refined, as when one speaks of a person being highly cultured, or of culture in the sense of fine arts. In other words, culture was originally meant to refer to one's own culture, carried to its most benevolent and ideal state of development.

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), the world's first professor of anthropology, was the most influential in adapting and changing this English term for the social sciences, humanities, and popular usage. Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952/1963, p. 14) verified that Tylor derived these new meanings from the German term Kultur as used in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of Gustav E. Klemm. Tylor's definition, first proposed in the 1870s and still widely quoted, broadened the term by removing its ethnocentric bias and narrow reference to artistic achievement to include all socially learned knowledge and the behaviors, institutions, and artifacts that are produced as a result of that knowledge. For Tylor, "Culture …, 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" (1877 [1871], p. 3).

Tylor's definition accomplished four things. First, with this usage, culture could be extended to people whose ideals and practices the scholar personally disapproves of or considers inferior, so that all peoples could be recognized as having culture. This element became central to the development of cultural relativism. Second, one could speak of multiple independent cultural traditions that develop in isolation from one another. This allowed scholars to speak of societies sharing ideas and beliefs as cultures. Third, the definition allowed one to treat all socially learned knowledge as part of a single, great body of wisdom produced by humankind as a whole. This allowed scholars to see all peoples as participating in a common project of advancing knowledge. Fourth, one could speak of culture writ large as something that develops and evolves at a level beyond that of the individuals who bear culture. This allowed scholars to analyze those learnable institutions, including religions, that do not reside in full in any individual's mind, but rather are distributed among people and artifacts and seem to transcend the individual.

From around the time that Tylor's new definition of culture was introduced, anthropologists began increasingly to believe that racial and biological explanations could not account for the differences between customs and religions throughout the world. Adopted babies grew up learning the language, religion, and skills of the people among whom they were raised, rather than inheriting those of their biological ancestors. In light of these observations, they made culture the central concept of their discipline—because through it one could explain differences in beliefs and morals in terms of learning, not innate characteristics. Fortuitously, this explanation carried with it the implication that all peoples have an equal potential to learn and develop.

Kroeber and Kluckhohn's detailed history of the term culture shows that Tylor's definition remained unelaborated for decades, following which a flurry of new definitions were offered (1952/1963, pp. 291–292). They cite 164 of these offered by 1950. Scholars developed new definitions of culture as a way of emphasizing certain elements of what was coming to be seen as an excessively broad concept, including such elements as ideas; learned behavior; symbols; problem-solving devices; normative rules or values; and patterns, systems, and organizations that are abstracted from observed behaviors. Kroeber and Kluckhohn correctly anticipated future revisions of these formulations in terms of "the interrelations of cultural forms[,] variability and the individual," and observed that some British and American anthropologists had avoided the concept altogether because of its vagueness (1952/1963, p. 357). These critiques were harbingers of developments in the second half of the twentieth century, in which the culture concept was further contested, particularly in relation to the problems of the locus, variability, and dynamics of culture.

Current Use and Contestation in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Because of all its ambiguities and its uneven acceptance, the culture concept has come to be regarded with some suspicion, but nevertheless remains firmly fixed in scholarship. From the 1970s to the 1990s, scholars released a flurry of critiques of the concept. To summarize from Robert Brightman's 1995 review of this literature, several areas of semantic difficulty have been identified. Since the term can be used as a reified abstraction, or to refer to ideas and meanings, culture can deflect attention from actual, observable human behavior and interaction. Culture is often used to refer to a legalistic guide for behavior, which downplays the importance of individual agency or volitional choice, strategy, and improvisation. In the same vein, culture can imply that objective, grammatical systems of behavior control individuals like automatons. Culture is also often regarded as a holistic, homogeneous, coherent, functionally integrated pattern, when in fact there is a great deal of internal variation, fragmentation, disorder, contradiction, and contestation. The term cultures implies discrete, localized groupings, when in fact people and ideas often overlap and are not strictly bounded. Speaking of cultures can imply that these are ahistorical grouping systems, when in reality they are always changing. Culture can be used to mean a primordial, authentic, native way of life when in fact there is constant borrowing and mixing of ideas and practices. This usage can also falsely imply that cultures are discrete objects. Finally, viewing human variation as cultural difference can encourage scholars to exaggerate the differences between peoples, and to imply that these differences must be seen in hierarchical relationship with one another.

Brightman's citation of earlier literature makes it clear that, while many of these critiques have been presented as new, scholars have in fact wrestled with all of these complexities of the culture concept throughout the twentieth century. What is perhaps different in some of the newer critiques is that alternative terms have been suggested, either to replace or to supplement culture and to shift attention to processes considered more useful for the study of humanity. For example, Pierre Bourdieu uses habitus rather than culture to emphasize the disposition and practice of individuals as the proper locus of human social life (1977, pp. 72–95). Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) takes this a step further, suggesting that culture be abandoned altogether in favor of Bourdieu's practice and Michel Foucault's discourse, both of which emphasize the agency of individuals and observable behavior and speech rather than the supposedly timeless control of an abstract culture. Brightman (1995, p. 518) observes that another alternative term, Antonio Gramsci's hegemony, has come into common use among those who wish to emphasize the greater influence on ideals and behaviors exerted by people possessing disproportionate power in a society, while counterhegemony refers to areas of resistance within these spheres of domination.

Other threads of thinking on the culture concept can be seen in cognitive anthropology. Scholars like Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn (1998) have addressed the critique that culture is an abstract, timeless, and agentless concept by locating it in human perception, cognition, and shared experience. In this view, culture operates in the mind as generic images of reality, or schemas, that direct perception and alter in response to experiences, allowing culture to be relatively stable, but also capable of change.

Some scholars focus on cultural transmission and reception as a way to remove static or abstract implications from the culture concept. Some use analogies of genetic transmission and evolution, while others, like Dan Sperber (1996, p. 82), explain cultural processes, including the spread of religious beliefs, by using the metaphor of epidemiology. For certain thinkers, such metaphors imply that culture exists in units, sometimes called memes after Richard Dawkins's coinage, variously conceived of as songs, stories, or religious beliefs. Such theorized units of culture are controversial, however, and not widely accepted by scholars, who see them as arbitrary, unbounded, and changeable (see Aunger, 2001).

The interdependencies and relationships between the cultural and genetic information that contributes to each individual's capabilities and makeup, together with human agency as a force in its own right, are also pressing concerns for some scholars of culture, as Lee Cronk (1999) discusses. Despite the various critiques, culture continues to be a useful term in the social sciences and humanities, not only in spite of, but also because of, its multiple meanings and ambiguity.

The Relationship between Culture and Religion

Virtually all of the questions that scholars in the humanities and social sciences seek to answer involve cultural factors, and questions about religion are no exception. There are certainly biological components to religious behavior, including cognitive tendencies to anthropomorphize, or perceive humanlike attributes in nonhuman phenomena, which Stewart Guthrie (1993) sees as the source of religion. Cognitive constraints limit what kinds of perception and beliefs are conceivable, and, as Pascal Boyer (1994) argues, the combination of ideas that are memorably bizarre or "unnatural" with those that are believably ordinary or "natural" appears to be a characteristic of all religious beliefs. However, no religious belief or behavior can be understood by reference to biological factors alone, for culture overlays, stylizes, elaborates, and embellishes these foundations with meanings that are both deeply motivating and arbitrary. The capacity for religious thought and experience has its foundation in our biological makeup, but it can only come to full expression with cultural inputs and processes. Thus, cognitive constraints interact with culture to produce the range of specific supernatural beings and forces that are characteristic of the world's religions.

No specific religious system can be understood without recourse to culture, for particular religions are forms of culture and exist within broader cultures. Regardless of whether one takes a theological or an agnostic perspective on a particular religion, one must recognize that the stuff of religions is cultural—it is socially learned and widely shared, and it is made up of mental and public representations of reality that guide behavior and are changed by experience. Successful religions can be seen as more widely appealing than others, and therefore more likely to be culturally learned. The fact that religions operate within broader cultural contexts is profoundly relevant to the study of religion because the "same" religious ideas change when they are transmitted from one culture to another—as shown, for example, in Kenelm Burridge's 1960 study of how beliefs of European missionaries were interpreted very differently by their Melanesian recipients, creating a "cargo cult." Syncretism, or the mixing of elements from different religious in situations of culture contact, are an important area of cross-cultural religious studies—as explored, for example, in Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw's (1994) volume on this phenomenon. In other cases, religions appear to be transmitted wholesale across cultural boundaries, as exemplified in Joel Robbins's (2004) account of a Papua New Guinea people's adoption of Baptist Christianity and concepts of sin, modernity, and globalization.

To study religions—whether one's own or others'—with cultural sophistication necessitates awareness of multiple points of view. Awareness of the cultural perspective of both scholars of religion and the people they describe is vital to assessing any study of religion. Missiologists begin with a cultural assumption of the primacy of a particular religious tradition in relation to other religious cultures that they consider erroneous and in need of change. Some social scientists work from materialist assumptions that deny the existence of supernatural beings and forces for lack of evidence, while others either embrace the existence of spirits or consider such questions unanswerable. Theories about religion, like religions themselves, are cultural.

Implications of the Comparative Study of Cultures for the Study of Religion

Cross-cultural research indicates that religious thinking and behavior is found among all peoples and in all cultures. The basis of this commonality is sometimes attributed to a panhuman tendency to supernaturalism, which is elaborated differently from one culture to the next. However, others argue that the concept of supernaturalism is itself too culturally biased to describe all religions. Scholars engaging this debate have not reached consensus (see Lohmann, 2003). The degree to which culture determines human religiosity itself remains contested. However, there is no doubt that the particular beings, forces, and morals that people sense or believe in are culturally learned, since they differ from one religion to the next. Variation in specific religious ideas shows the degree of cultural malleability that humans possess with regard to religion. Perhaps the most important implication of the comparative study of cultures for the study of religion is that all religions appear to be true from the perspective of the cultural systems in which they are found; however, the arbitrariness and variability of cultures indicates that no religion is a flawless representation of absolute truth.

See Also

Religion.

Bibliography

Abu-Lughod, Lila. "Writing against Culture." In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard Fox, pp. 137–162. Santa Fe, N.Mex., 1991. An influential essay arguing that the term culture should be replaced with practice and discourse.

Aunger, Robert, ed. Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford, 2001. A volume in which a variety of scholars debate the utility of memes as models of culture's units and their implications for cultural transmission and evolution.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, U.K., 1977. Broadly influential in social science, this book avoids the culture concept but describes cultural phenomena, emphasizing individual dispositions and decision-based behavior.

Boyer, Pascal. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley, Calif., 1994. This book cross-culturally explores common themes in all religious ideas, arguing that these point to constraints in human cognition.

Brightman, Robert. "Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification." Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 4 (1995): 509–546. Usefully summarizes critiques of the term culture, its changing meanings, and its replacement with new terms.

Burridge, Kenelm. Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium. London, 1960; reprint, Princeton, N.J., 1995. A classic and readable account of a cargo cult—an example of how Christian beliefs altered when they entered a new cultural context.

Cronk, Lee. That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior. Boulder, Colo., 1999. A book describing approaches to cultural transmission and change drawing on biological evolutionary theory, sociobiology, and memetics.

Guthrie, Stewart Elliott. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford, 1993. A book exploring the causes and prevalence of anthropomorphism, arguing that religion derives from this tendency to misperceive.

Kroeber, A. L., and Clyde Kluckhohn. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, Mass., 1952; reprint, New York, 1963. A detailed tracing of the culture idea in the social sciences and humanities, including numerous quoted definitions.

Lohmann, Roger Ivar, ed. "Perspectives on the Category 'Supernatural.'" Special issue, Anthropological Forum 13, no. 2 (2003). A collection of essays debating the value of supernaturalism as a culture-neutral concept for describing religions cross-culturally.

Robbins, Joel. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley, Calif., 2004. An ethnographic description of the cultural changes brought about by the rapid adoption of Christianity by a remote people.

Smith, Philip. Cultural Theory: An Introduction. Malden, Mass., 2001. An excellent and readable overview of cultural theory, wide-ranging but emphasizing sociology.

Sperber, Dan. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford, 1996. A lucid book that defines culture as mental and public representations of reality, arguing that to explain culture, one must show why certain ideas, including religious beliefs, become more common than others.

Stewart, Charles, and Rosalind Shaw, eds. Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. London, 1994. A collection of essays on cross-cultural religious mixing, known as syncretism—at times a controversial term insofar as it is used to imply that mixed religions are less authentic than others.

Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge, U.K., 1998. A sophisticated treatment of culture that responds to critics of the concept by drawing on cognitive theory to remove culture' s abstraction.

Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. 2d ed. 2 vols. New York, 1877. The Victorian source of the extremely influential first anthropological definition of culture, this book proposes a now dated evolutionary model of cultural and religious advancement, but nevertheless contains much of lasting value.

Roger Ivar Lohmann (2005)