10
Culture: What It Is!
By
Joseph McNair (Rev. 2004)
The human spirit evolves through a variety of different groups and subgroups through the medium of culture. It therefore needs a variety of different cultural experiences to realize its full potential or to fulfill itself. Every human culture is a fairly unique expression of the human spirit. As no aspect or combination of aspects of the human spirit is superior or inferior to another, no culture is superior or inferior.
In the essay "Transformation: Creating Context, Part 2", we introduced Joyce Millet's overview of culture and Robert Gibson's idea of culture as an "iceberg" as a preliminary to a discussion of intercultural competence. Let us review. According to Millet:
We then used Gibson's "cultural iceberg" model to illustrate a brief introduction/review of the external or overt (material) aspects of culture e.g. on the surface and the internal or covert (immaterial) aspects of culture.
That was the extent of the discussion of culture. In this essay we will examine more extensively the concept and the characteristics of culture, including the "germinative" principle of culture, and characteristic cultural thought and behavior.
CULTURE
One of earliest attempts to formulate a modern technical definition of culture was the classic definition submitted by Edward Burnett Tylor. Tylor, believed by many to be the father of Cultural Anthropology, elevated anthropology to the forefront of the social sciences. In 1883, he headed the Oxford's University Museum and was a Professor of Anthropology from 1896 until 1909. He is credited with designing and putting into place the framework of courses needed to graduate with a degree in Anthropology at Oxford University -- a model which was adopted by many other universities. His most significant contribution to anthropology, however, was his definition of culture.
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917)
http://www.countries.ru/library/photos/tylor.jpg
Culture, according to Tylor,
"... taken in its broad, 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. (Tylor, in Haviland, 1991)
This rather "topical" view of culture as socially patterned thought and behavior contrasted sharply with English poet, social and literary critic Matthew Arnold's notions of culture being "the love of perfection" and the "study of perfection"; and that the cultured person is one who knows "the best that has been said and thought in the world." (from Quotes on Culture [online][URL] http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/ quotations-on-culture/quotations-on-culture.html# Matthew %20Arnold. Arnold's definition of culture is reflective of the values of the Victorian era, particularly it social elitism.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
http://mrs.umn.edu/~deaneb/images/arnold.jpg
It is from Arnold's definition that we get notion of "high culture" where culture is used to describe elitist consumption of goods and activities such as fine cuisine, art, and music. According to Tyler Cowen (1998):
Sometimes we distinguish between "high" culture, the items achieving greatest critical acclaim, and "low" culture, the most popular cultural items. Tyler Cowen (1998) In Praise of Commercial Culture [online][URL] http://www.jahsonic.com/High.html
There is no better example of a surviving form of this cultural model in the twenty first century than haute couture. In the world of high fashion, catering to the tastes and demands of the rich and famous are establishments and/or designers for the creation of exclusive lines of clothing. According to Laurence Benaïm (1996):
...The origins of haute couture date back to Charles Frédéric Worth who, in 1858, founded the first true house of haute couture at 7, rue de la Paix, in Paris, creating original models for individual clients. Haute couture involves craftsmanship, the skill of the seamstress and embellisher (feather makers, embroiderers, milliners) who, each season, create the finery of the exceptional.
Charles FrédéricWorth
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/index.asp?id=52314The term haute couture is a designation protected by law and "only those companies mentioned on the list drawn up each year by a commission domiciled at the Ministry for Industry are entitled to avail themselves thereof," to quote the Syndical Chamber for Haute Couture. The main criteria, set forth in 1945 and updated in 1992, are as follows: to employ a minimum of fifteen people at the workshops, to present to the press in Paris each season (spring/summer and autumn/winter) a collection of at least thirty-five runs consisting of models for daytime wear and evening wear.
In January and July, some 1,000 journalists from all over the world (2,000 for ready-to-wear) come to see the haute couture collections which, by tradition, are held in some of Paris's most prestigious hotels such as the Intercontinental, the Ritz, the Grand Hôtel and, from time to time, the new rooms at the Louvre Carrousel, which is the venue mainly for the prêt-à-porter shows. The atmosphere is always unique: the glitter of fabrics, the sumptuous accessories and the stage directions for each appearance affording each model the presence of a diva. In the first row, clients and celebrities take notes: Paloma Picasso for Christian Lacroix, Catherine Deneuve for Yves Saint Laurent, and, all around them, wealthy Americans (60% of the clientele) who have travelled to Paris to breathe the fresh air of perfection.
Madeleine Vionnet, defined herself as "a physician of the figure".
http://www.vionnet.com/home.htmHaute couture implies precision in lines. "Haute couture consists of secrets whispered from generation to generation," says Yves Saint Laurent, who is careful to achieve a supreme balance in all his clothes, designed in the secrecy of the "studio". If, in ready-to-wear, a garment is manufactured according to standard sizes, the haute couture garment adapts to any imperfection in order to eliminate it (see box). Haute couture is the art of raising a collar, adjusting the sleeve of a suit or a plunging neckline, to hide a sloping shoulder or admirably emphasise a bustline One of the century's great French designers, Madeleine Vionnet, defined herself as "a physician of the figure". On average a dress will require three fittings.
Pierre Cardin, Hubert De Givency, Christian Dior and Louis Féraud
http://www.elle.fr/exclus/cannes2001/gfx/les_marches/14/marche_cardin.jpg
http://bellavia.free.fr/portrait/image/004.jpg
http://cn.cl2000.com/fashion/designer/france/images/christian%20dior.jpg
http://www.worldstyle.com/collections/hcsummer99/collections.htmlThere are eighteen houses of haute couture in France today: Balmain, Pierre Cardin, Carven, Chanel, Christian Dior, Louis Féraud, Givenchy, Lecoanet Hemant, Christian Lacroix, Lapidus, Guy Laroche, Hanae Mori, Paco Rabanne, Nina Ricci, Yves Saint Laurent, Jean-Louis Scherrer, Torrente, Emanuel Ungaro.
See http://www.worldstyle.com/collections/hcsummer99/collections.html (Laurence Benaïm, 1996, [online][URL]http://www.france.diplomatie.fr/label_france/ENGLISH/DOSSIER/MODE/cou.html )
Other examples of this conception of high culture are haute cuisine, literally meaning high or superior cooking and those cultural objects, activities and events enjoyed by the cognoscenti, people (usually from the upper classes) thought to have superior, specialized knowledge or highly refined taste.
high culture |
Particular novels, plays, paintings, operas, cultural activities and events (human objects) etc., that are considered intrinsically better than others, in and of themselves. |
haute cusine |
Literally haute "superior" cuisine "cooking." Food that is prepared in an elegant or elaborate manner; the very finest food, prepared perfectly. |
haute couture |
Haute means "high" or "elegant." Couture literally means "sewing," but has come to indicate the business of designing, creating, and selling custom-made fashion for the rich and famous |
Joe Sartelle (1994) reflects the postmodernist or opposite point of view to Arnold's high culture:
What we know of as high culture and the great masterpieces of art are really just the preferred culture of a particular minority group within society -- but a minority with the power to enforce its taste preferences, to impose its own values and standards and interests upon others. In other words, what they like becomes what is good for everyone. Of course, the proponents of multiculturalism have been arguing exactly this point for some time now. However, the multicultural critique of the exclusionary and biased nature of the canons of high culture as we have known them rarely challenges the more fundamental basis of the canon, the belief that value resides in objects rather than in their uses. (Sartelle, J. The Use Value of High Culture, 1994[online][URL]http://eserver.org/ bs/11/Intro.html)
Matthew Arnold and the cognoscenti notwithstanding, anthropology as a social science has been been struggling to establish a comprehensive definition of culture since Tylor. (Bodley, John H. 1994 [online][URL] http://www.wsu.edu:8001/ vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definitions/bodley-text.html)
John H. Bodley
http://libarts.wsu.edu/anthro/images-facphoto/bodley.jpg
John H. Bodley (1994) tells us that Tylor gave the social sciences the first "modern technical definition of culture...as socially patterned human thought and behavior." It is important to note here that while Tylor's definition of culture began to reflect the the shifting anthropological paradigm, his views on culture and cultural groups were still very much in the ethnocentric, evolutionist tradition of Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer.
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 - 1881)
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/klmno/morgan_lewis_henry.html
Lewis Henry Morgan's several contributions to cultural studies included the idea a few basic patterns in human behavior occur over and over, and that each pattern has a logical structure of its own. As such, like Tylor, he saw culture as consisting of patterned and interrelated ideas, symbols, or behaviors. Considered by some to be the father of scientific anthropology, he was one of the first to establish the study of kinship systems as an integral part of anthropological knowledge. In his major work, Ancient Society (1877), he defined three main (evolutionary) cultural stages through which all human groups progressed. According to Robert Graber :
Morgan carefully defined three main cultural stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Savagery and barbarism he divided into substages of lower, middle, and upper, for a total of seven stages. These terms sound ethnocentric, or culturally biased, to us today. But in Morgan's time, and certainly in his usage, they were technical terms and did not have all the pejorative connotations they later acquired. (Graber. R.B, 2002 "Lewis Henry Morgan" [online][URL] http://www2.truman.edu/ ~rgraber/cultev/morgan.html)
Nineteenth century anthropology was moving toward a genetic explanation for cultural evolution (social Darwinism) and Morgan's work provided its foundation.
Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903)
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/spencer_herbert.html
Herbert Spencer attempted to apply the principles of biological evolution to understand social systems. He is credited as being one of the first to use such terms as "system," "function" and "structure" in social theory. He also is responsible for misapplying the theory of biological evolution, vulgarizing the same into the dubious theory that came to be known as "Social Darwinism." S. Samuel Shermis (1998) comments on the misapplication of biological evolution:
Some simplified the idea to "survival of the fittest." Others believed that an identical process [evolution...] took place among human beings. They believed that white Protestant Europeans had evolved much further and faster than other "races." And some, especially the followers of Herbert Spencer, took it one step further. Human society is always in a kind of evolutionary process in which the fittest- which happened to be those who can make lots of money--were chosen to dominate. There were armies of unfit, the poor, who simply could not compete. And just as nature weeds out the unfit, an enlightened society ought to weed out its unfit and permit them to die off so as not to weaken the racial stock. (Shermis, S.S. 1998 Social Darwinism)[online][URL]http://www.ioa.com/~shermis/ socjus/socdar.html)
It takes no real stretch of the imagination to see where this reasoning took the so-called "civilized" world. Social Darwinism became the justification for some of the worst atrocities in the western world. Shermis continues:
This idea eventually led to a variety of practices and beliefs, e.g., Nordic Racism, used by German anthropologists and later Nazi theoreticians. It also led to eugenics in which, it was believed, the unfit transmit their undesirable characteristics. A breeding program for human beings would see to it that the unfit did not transmit their undesirable characteristics. (Shermis, S.S. 1998 Social Darwinism)[online][URL]http://www.ioa.com/~shermis/socjus/socdar. html)
Adolf Bastian (1826-1905)
There were some in the nineteenth century who rejected the simplistic evolutionary ideas of culture and human origins inspired by Morgan and certainly influenced by Spencer. The most prominent was German anthropologist Adolf Bastian known as the father of ethnography. According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen (2001):
In 1860, the prolific German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) published his three-volume Der Mensch in der Geschichte ("Man in History", see Koepping 1983). Bastian, originally a medical doctor, was trained as an ethnographer under the influence of the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, the linguist and the geographer who revolutionised humanistic and social thought in Germany during the first half of the 1800's. Bastian travelled extensively, indeed it has been estimated that he spent twenty years outside of Germany (Koepping 1983: 8). In between his travels he wrote his books, was appointed Professor of Ethnology at the University of Berlin and Director of the Imperial Museum, founded the important Berliner Museum für Völkerkunde in 1868, and contributed generously to its collections. Like the Humboldt brothers before him and Boas after him (Chapter 3), Bastian continued the German tradition of research on Volkskultur that had been inspired by Herder, and sharply criticised the simplistic evolutionist schemes that were on the rise in his day. As the only major nineteenth-century anthropologist, Bastian was an energetic and articulate critic of evolutionism. His view was that all cultures have a common origin, from which they have branched off in various directions - a view later developed to great sophistication by Boas and his students. (Eriksen, T.H and Nielson, F.S. A History of Antropology, 2001 [online][URL]http://www.anthrobase.com/Txt/E/Eriksen_T_H_&_Nielsen_F_S_02.htm)
Bastian didn't believe in unilinear evolution i.e. that human beings and human cultures develop in the same way through progressive sequences from the primitive to the advanced. Instead, he believed there were multiple possible outcomes in human development. While his contemporaries believed that human "races" evolved separately, he had a monogenetic view of human origins -- that all human beings (and human cultures) have a common origin.
Franz Boaz (1858 - 1942)
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/boas_franz.html
American anthropologist Franz Boaz, influenced by Bastian, also argued against the evolutionary theories advocated by Spencer, Morgan and Tylor. He rejected the notion that cultures could be evaluated according to "the broad theorizing characteristic of evolutionary 'laws' of developing culture. " He proposed instead the twin theories of "cultural relativism " and "historical particularism." Mark Glazer (1994) explains:
Cultural relativism in anthropology is a key methodological concept which is universally accepted within the discipline. This concept is based on theoretical considerations which are key to the understanding of "scientific" anthropology as they are key to the understanding of the anthropological frame of mind. Cultural relativism is an anthropological approach which posit that all cultures are of equal value and need to be studied from a neutral point of view. The study of a and/or any culture has to be done with a cold and neutral eye so that a particular culture can be understood at its own merits and not another culture’s. Historically, cultural relativism has had a twin theoretical approach, historical particularism. This is the notion that the proper way to study culture is to study one culture in depth. The implications of cultural relativism and historical particularism have been significant to anthropology and to the social sciences in general. (Glazer, M 1994 Cultural Relativism [online][URL}http://www.panam.edu/faculty/ mglazer/ Theory/cultural_ relativism.htm)
In other words, no one culture is superior to another. The only way to evaluate a culture is against criteria that the culture itself has established. And the only way to understand culture in general is to study in detail a particular culture. Glazer continues:
The roots of cultural relativism go to the rejection of the comparative school of the nineteenth century on the basis of exact and specific ethnological information. This information rejected the comparative school’s methodology [to compare and classify the external characteristics of societies all over the globe -- author] and as a result its evolutionary conclusions. Furthermore, as the basis of cultural relativism is a scientific view of culture, it also rejects value judgments on cultures. There is, in this view, no single scale of values which holds true for all cultures and by which all culture can be judged. Beliefs, aesthetics, morals and other cultural items can only be judged through their relevance to a given culture. For example, good and bad are culture specific and can not be imposed in cultural analysis. The reason for this view is, of course, that what is good in one culture may not be bad in another. This indicates that every culture determines its own ethical judgments to regulate the proper behavior of its members. A result of this view is that it assumes that most individuals would prefer to live in the culture in which they have been enculturated. It must be added to the discussion above that the cultural in cultural relativism and historical particularism is about specific cultures and not about a more abstract, singular and general concept of culture.
(Glazer, M 1994 Cultural Relativism [online][URL] http://www.panam.edu/faculty/mglazer/Theory/ cultural_ relativism.htm)
Boas' ideas were developed and furthered by his talented students, most notably Albert Kroeber, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston. These anthropologists changed the face of American anthropology. Cultural relativism and historical particularism became the most prominent of the "largely implicit basic propositions'" also known as Boasian postulates that found their way into most twentieth century definitions of culture. Ideas such as "culture is learned and shared; culture is integrated, and culture is transmitted primarily through language and symbols" are also Boasian propositions.
Albert Kroeber, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedic and Zora Neale Hurston --Boas' students
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Anthro/kroeber/kroeberinfield.jpg
http://www.sandiegohistory.org/digesu/images/mead2.jpg
http://specialcollections.vassar.edu/benedict/benedict.jpg
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam312/galryznh.jpg
Since Tylor, definitions of culture have proliferated almost out of control. According to Bodley, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled in 1952 a list of 160 different definitions of culture. Bodley provides a simplified table giving the broad, general categories of cultural definitions as we know them today:
TABLE: Diverse Definitions of Culture:
| Topical: | Culture consists of everything on a list of topics, or categories, such as social organization, religion, or economy |
| Historical: | Culture is social heritage, or tradition, that is passed on to future generations |
| Behavioral: | Culture is shared, learned human behavior, a way of life |
| Normative: | Culture is ideals, values, or rules for living |
| Functional: | Culture is the way humans solve problems of adapting to the environment or living together |
| Mental: | Culture is a complex of ideas, or learned habits, that inhibit impulses and distinguish people from animals |
| Structural: | Culture consists of patterned and interrelated ideas, symbols, or behaviors |
| Symbolic: | Culture is based on arbitrarily assigned meanings that are shared by a society |
Bodley, John H. in "definitions and discussions of culture", Collins, P., Law, R.and Miraglia, R. 1999 [online][URL] http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definitions/bodley-text.html
Peg Collins, Richard Law and Eric Miraglia (1999) suggest that there is a modern "baseline" definition of culture which includes aspects of these diverse definitions, specifically those that assert that culture is learned and shared and that it consists of "patterned and interrelated ideas, symbols or behaviors":
People learn culture. That, we suggest, is culture's essential feature. Many qualities of human life are transmitted genetically -- an infant's desire for food, for example, is triggered by physiological characteristics determined within the human genetic code. An adult's specific desire for milk and cereal in the morning, on the other hand, cannot be explained genetically; rather, it is a learned (cultural) response to morning hunger. Culture, as a body of learned behaviors common to a given human society, acts rather like a template (ie. it has predictable form and content), shaping behavior and consciousness within a human society from generation to generation. So culture resides in all learned behavior and in some shaping template or consciousness prior to behavior as well (that is, a "cultural template" can be in place prior to the birth of an individual person). (Collins, P., Law, R.and Miraglia, R. 1999 [online][URL] http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definition.html)
Anthropology stretches the boundaries of the "canon", the body of authoritative lterature generally accepted as representing the discipline, more than any other social science. Let us examine briefly the definitions of culture espoused by three mainstream academic anthropologists, each of whom are popular authors of introductory anthropology textbooks.
Anthropologist William D. Haviland (1991) defines culture in the following fashion:
Culture consists of the abstract values, beliefs, and perceptions of the world that lie behind people's behavior and that their behavior reflects. These are shared by the members of society, and when acted upon, they produce behavior considered acceptable within that society.
Cultures are learned, largely through the medium of language, rather than inherited biologically, and the parts of a culture function as an integrated whole (Haviland, 1991, p. 279).
Haviland emphasizes values, beliefs and perceptions rather than behavior as the key ingredients of culture. He asserts that "culture is not observable behavior, but rather the values and beliefs that people use to interpret experience and generate behavior" (p. 280). He argues that culture is learned and shared. It is not a quality that is innate in the individual, but is learned by the individual as a result of his or her various social interactions.
By social interactions we typically mean the relations between two or more human beings, ranging from communication to social ritual, problem-solving to intimacy. Culture, he says, is founded on symbols, or the verbal (language) and nonverbal (behavioral/objectival/eventual) representations of ideas, feelings, needs and desires transmitted through language and other forms of social interaction.
Finally, Haviland asserts that culture is integrated, or that the elements of culture, conceptual and behavioral, function as an integrated whole (Haviland, 1991/2004).
Anthropologist Conrad P. Kottack (1991/2004) defines culture as:
... traditions and customs, transmitted through learning, that govern the beliefs and behaviors of the people exposed to them. (Kottak, C. 2004 Cultural Anthropology [on-line][URL} http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072500506/ student_view0/chapter3/faqs.htm)
He makes the distinction between the general and the specific meanings of culture:
All human populations have culture, which is therefore a generalized possession of the genus Homo. This is Culture (capital C) in the general sense, a capacity and possession shared by hominids. However, anthropologists also use the word culture to describe the different and varied cultural traditions of specific societies. This is culture in the specific sense (small c) (Kottack, 1991, p. 37).
It is a characteristic of all human beings to create and transmit "Culture." Human beings experience events and give meaning to them. Human beings form beliefs, values and attitudes as a result of these experiences. These beliefs, values and attitudes influence and sometimes directly determine human behavior. Human beings interact with other human beings. Human beings are not only capable of creating conflict but are also capable of agreeing with other human beings about what they experience, what they believe, how they view the world. The products -- objects, behaviors and systems of meaning -- of this capacity in human beings is what Kottack means by culture with a capital "C."
It is culture with a "small c," the "different and varied cultural traditions of specific societies" and their subgroups that is pertinent to this discussion.
Kottack concurs with Haviland in the view that culture is learned, shared, based on symbols and integrated or patterned (in his own terms). In addition, Kottack asserts that culture "imposes itself upon nature."
What he means by this is that culture can impose human conventions (rules, adjudications, etc.) on natural phenomena or events, i.e., the partitioning of land, water "rights," hunting season, etc., and/or can convert in any number of ways natural biological functions into cultural customs, e.g., eating: table manners; sleeping: bed clothes; bathing: sauna.
Kottak also adds that culture can be adaptive or maladaptive, meaning that certain learned "symbol-based behavior patterns" and/or biological traits contained in a culture may enhance or threaten the continued existence of a cultural or subcultural group (p. 38).
John H. Bodley, who refers to culture as " a society and its way of life or in reference to human culture as a whole" addresses the three components of culture:
Culture involves at least three components: what people think, what they do, and the material products they produce. Thus, mental processes, beliefs, knowledge, and values are parts of culture. Some anthropologists would define culture entirely as mental rules guiding behavior, although often wide divergence exists between the acknowledged rules for correct behavior and what people actually do. Consequently, some researchers pay most attention to human behavior and its material products. Culture also has several properties: it is shared, learned, symbolic, transmitted cross-generationally, adaptive, and integrated.(Bodley, J. in Collins, P., Law, R.and Miraglia, R. 1999 [online][URL] http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definitions/bodley-text.html
The following are presented to illustrate the several properties of culture.
Culture Is Learned
Culture is not biologically inherited. Physical traits and behavioral instincts are inherited, culture is learned. Although Islam is a religion, like most religions, it serves as a carrier of cultural traditions and norms. You are not born a muslim. You must learn to be a muslim. Islam teaches you how to think and what to think about. It teaches what to do and what not to do. It teaches what things in life are valuable and desirable. If you are taught to be a muslim in a muslim country, there are many models to imitate and appropriate behavior is easily reinforced. But suppose you are a muslim in a christian country. Your learning can be sorely tested. Heba El-Mansy (2002) shares this anecdote:
Throughout my childhood, I have encountered many curious people who were eager to hear about Islam. In both the seventh and the tenth grades, I spoke about the basic principles of Islam, as well as demonstrating prayers. I showed people that Islam is not a male-domineering, terrorist religion as many people had previously believed. During the fasting of Ramadan, people often wondered why a religion would call for such a serious deprivation. However, when I explained to them the reasons behind the fasting in Ramadan, many understood the beauty and purpose behind fasting and admired my dedication. I encountered many of the same questions when I went on trips and prayed. People often asked why do you have to pray so many times, or face a certain direction. Nobody ever belittled my practices, the majority just wanted to learn more about Islam and clear up misconceptions.
Although living in a Christian society has been challenging, it has also strengthened my faith. Fasting, abstaining from pork, and praying on time have been just a few of the challenging concepts. However, abiding to Islam in this society shows that we believe in the principles of Islam and are not following our religion because of society. In this aspect, we are being tested to see if we truly believe in our faith, or are just following society...
From personal experience, I know that if I had not been exposed to Islam and observed the religious examples of my parents, my faith would not be nearly as strong. However, parents can only impact our faith to a certain degree. When we are young, they need to tell us stories of the history of Islam. When we start praying, they remind us to pray until we form our own habits. Yet once we mature, it is the responsibility of each individual to abide by Islam. We need to follow our religion because we believe in it, not because our parents tell us to. (El-Mansy, H. 2002, Muslims Growing Up in America [online]{URL] http://www.angelfire.com/me4/islaam/growing.html)
Culture is not only learned, but it is cumulative. Not only have human beings developed methods and means to preserve and pass on their culture from generation to generation but they have added to and improved upon the cultural knowledge received from antecedent generations.
Culture is Shared
Culture is a social phenomena; it is shared. The sharing of culture comes about in multitudinous ways. The anthropological term for the sharing of culture is called "cultural transmisson." Cultural transmission is defined as:
...the process of passing on culturally relevant knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values from person to person or from culture to culture. (LinguaLinks Library, 1999 [online][URL]http://www.sil.org/ lingualinks/literacy/referenceMaterials/GlossaryOfLiteracyTerms/ WhatIsCulturalTransmission.htm)
Education, formal and informal, is one of the principal means of sharing culture. Teachers and parents intentionally pass on selected parts of their culture to their students and children. Education as cultural transmission happens explicitly as well as in implicitly. In schools there is a formal curriculum which according to John Kerr is:
All the learning which is planned and guided by the school, whether it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or outside the school. (quoted in Kelly 1983 in Smith, M. K. (1996, 2000) 'Curriculum theory and practice' the encyclopedia of informal education[online][URL] www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm.
There is also the informal or "hidden"curriculum. There is much that students learn just from the experience of attending school. This curriculum is much different from the stated educational objectives of the formal curriculum. The process of education is if anything a socialization process. This means education consists of much more than socially approved curriculum content. It includes the transmission of norms and values as well. Students must learn to conform to a whole array of belief, value, and attitudinal/behavioral standards, not just to the formal rules of the school but also to the informal rules, beliefs and attitudes perpetuated through the process of socialization.
In the informal curriculum, students learn from interactions between teachers and students, administrators and students and students and students. They learn from the examples set by the teachers, particularly in the way they treat students:
- the way teachers communicate with students
- the way teachers interpret the behavior of students
- the way teachers have different expectations of students based on those behaviors.
- the way teachers acknowledge, reward or punish student behavior
They learn from the way teachers treat and communicate with each other and their relationships with administrators. They learn from way administrators treat and communicate with teachers. They learn from the way teachers conduct themselves, resolve conflicts and how they handle their personal issues. They also learn from other students.
Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist with New York’s Presbyterian Hospital talks to parents on the September 10, 2004 "Today Show" about a significant element in the "hidden" curriculum of most schools, peer pressure:
Starting in middle school, children tend to spend more time with their peers and less time with their parents. This often leads kids to look to those peers for opinions, reinforcement and acceptance. All of this is developmentally quite normal.
Peer pressure is not always negative. In fact friends often encourage each other to study, try out for sports or to try new interests in the arts. But these are years of experimentation and sometimes risk taking in an attempt to find their identity and feel “larger than life.” To that end, some kids may try to pressure your child to behave in a manner that is dangerous.
http://www.childline.org.uk/graphics/peer_pressure.jpg
While in school your child will probably be pressured every day to do things like talk badly about peers, exclude or be hurtful to others, cheat, skip classes, break curfew and lie to you. In addition, kids are growing up faster than ever and will be pressured to do drugs, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and have sex.
It is especially hard for your child to turn down their closest friend, a boyfriend or girlfriend, and the “cool” kids. Saltz, G. 2004, Preteens and peer pressure: How to help your kids avoid negative influences from friends,Today Show[online][URL] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3079366/
In the family, the process of transmitting culture is mostly implicit. Family education consists of primarily of socialization and enculturation. Socialization, simply, is a lifelong, social process during which we learn norms values, attitudes, beliefs and knowledge and develop a sense of who we are. Our parents or parent figures are the primary agents of socialization teaching us directly or through modeling how to function in the family and then in society. In fact, socialization by those close to us and particularly from infancy through the early years of life is called primary socialization. Secondary socialization occurs through the agency of formal schooling and training experiences for "specialist" roles in society. When our parents are effective, they teach us how to be self-reliant, self-controlled, friendly, cooperative and sociable, among other worthwhile characteristics. They also teach us how to modify our behaviors in order to meet the needs of many social groups. Snowhawk, a webdesigner and internet consultant, gives us a glimpse of how she was socialized:
Dad taught me that the most important thing in life is knowledge, and the second most important thing is sharing that knowledge. He also taught me about my favorite things: sports, animals, gardening, music, fishing, automobiles, and computers. He told me I was born in a speed boat and never slowed down.
My Mom, the Top Gun of MoMs, who continues her mission at trying to teach me all the appropriate girl things, is Tsalagi (Cherokee) -- with more ancestors of many nations, and a dash of Irish. (And man what that dash did to me!<grin>) She was born in Madill, Oklahoma; and raised in Miami, OK and Tulsa. (This, in turn, makes me an American conglomeration.)
Mom is one of the strongest persons I've ever known. Whenever I want a straight, true answer, that's where it's at. She never gave me a direct "no" once I was a teenager. Instead, we would discuss things, and it resulted in me thinking for myself. She would say things like "you should decide - these are the possible outcomes".. or "I would think that's a big testing arena, do you it see it that way?" She knew just how to word things so that NOT going somewhere, or doing something could be my idea of the "right" decision.
I realize now that I did have a very good childhood. Growing up, my friends told me their stories of "eye-bulging-horror" about their parents, and I was/am so grateful mine were "cool." My parents raised me in the belief I could become anything I wanted; and also that whatever one does, they should always do their best... Be it sharpening a pencil, tying a shoestring, or designing a spacecraft. They also taught me that there is more strength in being gentle than any amount of physical force in the world. (Snowhawk, 1996-2004,[online[URL] http://www.snowhawk. com/snowhawk.html)
Enculturation is often used synonymously with socialization, According to Collins, Law and Miraglia:
"enculturation," which one anthropologist describes as "a partly conscious and partly unconscious learning experience whereby the older generation invites, induces, and compels the younger generation to adopt traditional ways of thinking and behaving" (Harris 7). Does enculturation work like a Xerox machine, reproducing everything mostly as it was? Of course not. Your hairstyles and music and diction are different in many ways from those of your parents; cultures are organic, growing and changing with the passing of time. However, enculturation is a powerful tool, and enculturation is the reason why, for example, people born in the U.S. drive on the right side of the road while people in Europe drive on the left. Parents and educators are two of the most influential enculturating forces...(Collins, P., Law, R.and Miraglia, R. 1999 [online][URL] http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definition.html)
Mark Twain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, in his own inimitable fashion sums up what we mean by socialization and the related process of cultural reproduction called enculturation:
Mohammedans are Mohammedans because they are born and reared among the sect, not because they have thought it out and can furnish sound reasons for being Mohammedans; we know why Catholics are Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterians; why Baptists are Baptists; why Mormons are Mormons; why thieves are thieves; why monarchists are monarchists; why Republicans are Republicans and Democrats, Democrats. We know that it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination; that hardly a man in the world has an opinion on morals, politics, or religion that he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Twain, M., Cornpone 'Pinions [online][URL] http://nweb.pct.edu/homepage/staff/evavra/ENL111/ Anthology/Twain01.htm
Culture is based on symbols.
Culture is based on symbols. A symbol is something (an image, figure, object, word) that represents, stands for or means something else. Human beings create symbols. We create and manipulate symbols to think, to solve problems and to communicate with each other. This process of creating and manipulating symbols when done cognitively (in our heads) is called abstraction.
To abstract is to symbolize. According to Jaroslaw Francik (2000):
Abstraction is formation of an idea, as of the qualities or properties of a thing, by mental separation from particular instances or material objects. (Francik. J. 2000, Data Flow Tracing for Algorithm Animation [online][URL]http://sun.iinf.polsl.gliwice.pl/ ~jfrancik/aa/definitionsD.htm)
Simple abstraction is forming a mental image (idea or concept) of a person, object or event and holding that image in the mind (memory). For example, the christian rock/rap group "DC Talk" infer this process in the lyrics of their single "Mind's Eye" on their compact disc recording, "Jesus Freak":
[In my mind, I can see Your face
As Your love pours down in a shower of grace
Some people tell me that You're just a dream
My faith is the evidence of things unseen]
In my mind's eye, in my mind's eye
In my mind's eye, in my mindDC Talk, 2004, Mind's Eye, [online][URL]http://www.lyricsdepot.com/dc-talk/minds-eye.html
What is held in the "mind's eye", in the mind, is neither the person nor even the person's face in actuality, but a symbol or a representation -- an idea. This symbol stands for that person, "means" that person. Once we understand that, whenever we see that symbol -- recall that image, we think of that person.
Every mental image, mental representation, idea etc., is an abstraction. Some abstractions are iconic -- they are pictures that resemble what they represent, as in the example above -- the face of Jesus. A more complex abstraction is when the image of a person becomes the symbol of a principle.
Osama Ben laden
http://www.index.hu/cikkepek/0109/kulfold/osama.jpg
For many Americans, the image of Osama Ben Laden has become a symbol of evil based upon his association with world-wide terrorism.
Words are abstractions of the most complex kind. Words are symbols of sounds, which in turn are symbols of ideas. Dennis O'Neill referring to human language explains:
A word is one or more sounds that in combination have a specific meaning assigned by a language. The symbolic meaning of words can be so powerful that people are willing to risk their lives for them or take the lives of others. For instance, words such as "queer" and "nigger" have symbolic meaning that is highly charged emotionally in America today. They are much more than just a sequence of sounds to us.
A major advantage of human language being a learned symbolic communication system is that it is infinitely flexible. Meanings can be changed and new symbols created. This is evidenced by the fact that new words are invented daily and the meaning of old ones change. This allows us to respond linguistically to major environmental, historical, and social changes...(O'Neill, D. 1998-2004) What is Language?, [online][URL]http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/ language_2.htm)
Human beings can make virtually anything a symbol of something else. When we get others to agree with our assigned meanings, those symbols become real in so far as there is agreement on their meaning by (theoretically) two or more people.
The following symbols are supposedly emblazoned on the American consciousness as symbolic of the American way:
http://www.lowellhealth.com/american-flag.gif
http://www.widewordofsports.com/images-apple-pie.jpg
According to Bodley:
The human ability to assign arbitrary meaning to any object, behavior or condition makes people enormously creative and readily distinguishes culture from animal behavior... Speech is infinitely more productive and allows people to communicate about things that are remote in time and space. (Bodley, J. in Collins, P., Law, R.and Miraglia, R. 1999 [online][URL] http://www.wsu.edu:8001/ vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definitions/bodley-text.html
Everything in a given culture -- characteristic cultural thought and behavior, food, clothing, language, art and artifacts and institutions represent that culture -- are assigned meanings by that culture. As such, everything in a given culture is symbolic. These symbols cannot be properly understood outside the context of that culture.
Culture is adaptive
Kottack, earlier, asserted that all human beings have "Culture" -- a characteristic way of thinking, believing, valuing, behaving, problem-solving. Culture is the principal means employed by the human species to survive. Culture keeps us alive. We have developed tools and technology that have enabled us to walk out of Africa 150,000 and 80,000 years ago and populate the entire world. Although we evolved primarily in the tropical and sub-tropical regions of Africa, we thrive now all over the world -- in freezing cold as well as swelteringly hot environments and all that falls in between. We have not had to develop layers of fat and thick coats of fur to survive cold climates.
http://www.lanehs.com/wa8.jpg
http://www.alumni.utah.edu/continuum/winter99/images/invention.jpg
We have controlled the use of fire and developed tools to hunt animals for meat and for their skins to make warm clothes. We have learned to tell stories and sing songs -- and dance. We have learned to farm and to build cities; to write and send messages afar. We have learned to trade for goods and make war. We have learned to travel over land and sea, in the air and into space. We have learned to publish newspapers and books. We have learned to create great art and architecture. We have learned to cure illnesses, create computers and the internet, deconstruct the human genome. As culture consists of everything that man has learned, and what man has learned has caused him to survive, then culture is adaptive.
Culture is integrated.
Culture must be looked at holistically. While one can examine the parts of a given culture, the whole is ususally much more than a "sum of its parts." Culture is a system, an active system which organizes and regulates. For our purposes, a system may be defined as a group of interrelated elements or parts comprising a unified whole. The relationship between the parts is such that you cannot affect one part without affecting the other parts and the system as a whole.
The parts or elements of culture are beliefs, values, attitudes, norms, ethical codes, stories, histories, myths, legends, jokes, rituals, rites, ceremonies, celebrations, and artifacts -- the physical objects that have a particular meaning in the culture. This list is not exhaustive. All of these parts are interrelated or connected.
At the core of all cultures is a belief system which contains assumptions, mental models and representations about what is real and what is true and how members of the culture should view the world. These beliefs were derived initially from the accumulated histories, myths, legends and even jokes told by principal cultural agents to underscore the shared historical experiences of members, to bind them together as a group and to give them a sense of "We-ness," and to remind them of their identity as a member of the culture. These beliefs are also distilled from the lives of the heroes, heroines and great ancestors of the group whose "perfect" cultural thought and behavior is to be emulated.
From these histories, myths and legends, etc., certain rites, rituals, ceremonies and celebrations were created to bring individuals into full membership into the culture. Also derived are the values, norms and and ethical codes to which members must conform or risk being sanctioned or even expelled from the culture -- a fate in some instances that is worse than death; and the attitudes, characteristic predispositions to think, feel and act, that signal to other members of the culture that one is also a member.
Finally, characteristic cultural behavior (including language) and artifacts are derived which help members know each other, remind them of their cultural identity and what it means to belong to the culture.
Mickey Mouse Cookie Cutter
http://lati.tec.sd.us/academics/tradedivision/machinetool/images/Personal%20Project%2003/ Mickey%20Mouse%20Cookie%20Cutter.jpg
Culture as a template
What is a template? The generic definition of a template is
a pattern (like a cookie cutter) used to replicate objects. (Information Networks, 2000 [online][URL] http://info.louisiana.edu/dept/glost.html
There are, of course, other definitions:
Culture, as a body of learned behaviors common to a given human society, acts rather like a template (ie. it has predictable form and content), shaping behavior and consciousness within a human society from generation to generation. So culture resides in all learned behavior and in some shaping template or consciousness prior to behavior as well (that is, a "cultural template" can be in place prior to the birth of an individual person). (Collins, P., Law, R.and Miraglia, R. 1999 [online][URL] http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definition.html)
Claude Levi-Strauss
http://www.dur.ac.uk/SMEL/depts/french/Wiseman/strauss.gif
There have been allusions in the writings of several anthropologists to some force that organizes, holds the culture together and "cuts out" or reproduces cultural types among the members of the culture. For Claude Levi-Strauss, the father of the Structuralist school of anthropology, it is the universal principles and properties of the human mind that provided the basis for belief, custom, behavior and artifact. According to Soga (2003), Levi-Strauss:
assumes that cultural forms are based on common underlying properties of the human mind. Levi-Strauss believed that human minds have certain characteristics which stem from the functions of the brain. These common mental structures lead people to think similarly, regardless of their society or cultural background. Since culture is formulated by human minds, which follows the same pattern of functions, all cultures are based on common general rules. (Soga, 2003, Claude Levi-Strauss [online][URL]http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/anthropology/french_structuralism. html)
Goodenough in field, Ward Goodenough and Charles O. Frake
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthro/facultypics/Goodenough.jpg
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9908/images/f-goodenough.jpg
http://wings.buffalo.edu/anthropology/Faculty/frake.htm
Ward Goodenough and Charles Frakes, cognitive anthropologists, are modern day exponents of the idea that culture is a mental template or program. According to Goodenough:
… it (culture) does not consist of things, people, behavior or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them.”(Goodenough, 1957: 36)
Charles Frake, on the other hand, believes culture influences
how people organize their experience conceptually so that it can be transmitted as knowledge from person to person.” (Frake, 1963).
As cognitive anthropologists, Goodenough and Frake believe that culture is not about material phenomena, but how people understand and organized material phenomena. According to Tara Robertson and Duke Beasley:
Cognitive anthropologists study how people understand and organize the material objects, events, and experiences that make up their world as the people they study perceive it. It is an approach that stresses how people make sense of reality according to their own indigenous cognitive categories, not those of the anthropologist. Cognitive anthropology posits that each culture orders events, material life and ideas, to its own criteria...
(Robertson, T and Beasley, D, 2003, Cognitive Anthropology [online][URL]http://www.as.ua.edu/ ant/Faculty/ murphy/ 436/coganth.htm#Basic%20 Premises)
Clifford Geertz
http://www.emsf.rai.it/dati/anagrafico/images/geertz.GIF
Symbolic anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) defines culture as
an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life" (Geertz 1973e:89).
This "historically transmitted pattern of meaning" shapes the consciousness and the behavior of members of a culture and influences the creation of their artifacts as well. Geertz uses religion (a key aspect of culture) to illustrate how culture is a template. (If the reader would substitute the word "culture" for "religion" and "religious"in following passage, an even clearer understanding might be obtained.)
For an anthropologist, the importance of religion lies in its capacity to serve, for an individual or for a group, as a source of general, yet distinctive, conceptions of the world, the self, and the relations between them, on the one hand -- its model of aspect -- and of rooted, no less distinctive "mental" dispositions -- its model for aspect on the other. From these cultural functions flow, in turn, its social and psychological ones.
Religious concepts spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts to provide a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide range of experience -- intellectual, emotional, moral -- can be given meaningful form. . . . A synopsis of cosmic order, a set of religious beliefs, is also a gloss upon the mundane world of social relationships and psychological events. It renders them graspable.
But more than a gloss, such beliefs are also a template. They do not merely interpret social and psychological processes in cosmic terms -- in which case they would be philosophical, not religious -- but they shape them. . . . (Geertz, C. The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, 1973, pp. 123-25)
A discussion of culture as template provides an opening to interject and examine the ideas of two Afrocentric cultural scientists whose ideas may add some "spice" as well as spirit (literally) to the cultural debate.
Wade W. Nobles
http://bernard.pitzer.edu/~hfairchi/wade194.jpg
Wade W. Nobles (1985) defines culture as:
a process which gives people a general design for living and patterns for interpreting their reality.
Consistent with idea of culture as a template, Nobles presents a model of culture consisting of three levels:
- cultural aspects;
- cultural factors and
- cultural manifestations (Nobles, 1985, p. 102).
According to Nobles' cultural paradigm:
- core beliefs about nature of being,
- core beliefs about reality (including the universe, deity and "Nature"), and
- values (Ontology, Cosmology and Axiology).
The idea of culture as a template is implicit in the phrase "a general design for living and patterns for interpreting their reality." Nobles acknowledges a force, ethos, as the active agent which causes the creation of cultural thought and behavior. Ethos is not a mental "aspect" but a spiritual one that combines an undifferentiated consciousness, a cultural coloring, a certain "feel" that becomes the signature of members of a cultural group.
Marimba Ani
http://www.cuc.claremont.edu/idbs/Marimba.jpg
Marimba Ani , author of "Yurugu" (1994), elaborates on Nobles' model and establishes the parameters of her own model by providing a useful set of the characteristics of culture. Accordingly, Culture:
Culture tells us what our experiences mean; that there is a body of "correct" interpretations that have emerged from and were developed by the group which must be used when explaining a given experience or experiences. Within this body of interpretations are ideas about "how life is" and "how the world works"; ideas about the causes that underlie phenomena, events and behavior.
Culture binds individuals together as a group and empowers that group to name or label themselves, whether that name or label is a simple "we" or "the people" or "human beings" or whatever name the group decides gives the best representation of their group identity.
People who have been bound together by culture, who have developed a sense of group identity have conformed, for the most part, to the fundamental beliefs and standards derived from the long-standing customs and traditions of that culture. They understand that to deviate from the dictates of culture means alienation, isolation and exile.
Culture not only tells its members what to do but gives them a vision of what they may become as a result of following and abiding by its dictates. It does this by presenting to its members compelling descriptions of a preferred future for the cultural group. It is this vision the members of the cultural group rally around.
It is this vision which incites emotion and compels commitment. It is this vision that validates cultural behavior and cultural products.
Binding all cultural transactions are agreements. Culture itself is a product of the agreements of individuals who share historical experiences, who have come together as a group, who hold common beliefs and affix certain values and meanings to people, events and behaviors.
Culture determines if "Canis" of the family "canidae" is called "dog" or "perro"; if the color "white" means purity or mourning. Culture determines what represents something else and thus creates symbols.
Finally, culture through its shared historical experience and its compelling description of a preferred future (vision) not only influences but often determines the interests of the cultural group. Shared historical experience and the interpretation of that experience informs a cultural group about what is good and what is not good for it.
A culture's vision describes how conditions can be improved. That description of the future will almost always include the superimposition of what was thought to be good from the past. Culture tends to preserve itself. Group members informed by culture will pursue what they perceive to be their interests. Cultural interests are political interests.
The characteristics of culture presented by Nobles and Ani, respectively, share quite a few elements in common with those of Bodley, Haviland and Kottack. Nobles' definition shares the idea with Bodley, Haviland and Kottack that culture is more than just behavior, that it embraces the values, beliefs and perceptions that are acted out in cultural behavior. Implied in Ani's six characteristics is the notion that culture is learned, shared, symbol-based and integrated, etc.
What is different about the conceptions of these two Afrocentric cultural scientists (aside from different social and moral concerns) represents a different epistemological orientation, particularly the inclusion of spirit, and an emphasis on culture as ideology.
ETHOS AND EIDOS
Nobles suggests that the symbols upon which a culture is based represent at their deepest level of meaning the cultural group's ethos or to paraphrase John A. Carpenter, its intimate and engaging spirit/force (Personal Communication, July 27, 1993).
This spirit/force, according to Nobles, generates the
"...tone, character and quality of...life" of he group, "...its moral and aesthetic style and mode."
It emerges as a set of guiding principles that define the underlying attitude they have toward themselves and their world (p. 104).
The concept ethos is difficult to precisely define in the English language (and, perhaps, most western languages) primarily because it incorporates conceptions that the western mind has arbitrarily classified into at least three different (and sometimes mutually exclusive) categories: spirit, cognition and feeling.
The western mind has difficulty explaining the notion of the "spirit." Spirit as a conception operating outside or beyond the pale of rational categories evokes uneasiness in the western-trained mind, especially one trained in the empirical or scientific tradition.
The purported manifestations of spirit as reported from the so-called "primitive," religious or fundamentalist worldview are usually dismissed by western intellectuals as either overactive imagination, or uninformed, post hoc speculation or superstition.
For many Westerners, spirit seems either too ephemeral (as in insubstantial) for rational analysis or too closely associated with emotion for "serious" consideration.Rational thinking, in the first instance, with its inclination to objectify reality is limited in its capacity to make spirit a conceptual "object." It (spirit) is, therefore, beyond the scope of the scientific method and cannot be "substantiated."
In the second instance, rational thinking is believed (in the west) to be superior to feeling and emotion, and if spirit is in some way allied to or a product of the same, then spirit is subordinate to mind and thought. Interestingly, in the classical idealist tradition of the west, "spirit" and "mind" are presented as virtually identical (Ani, 1994).
The creativity of spirit is thus the same as or analogous to the creativity of mind; the force of spirit is the same as the force of mind. But the pervasive tradition of western dualism which
makes the conceptual synthesis of spirit, cognition, and feeling impossible.
Gregory Bateson (1904-1980)
http://www.global-vision.org/gifs/batesonB.gif
Anthropologist and one-time husband to Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson (1954, cited in Ani, 1994) apparently bounded by the previously mentioned dualistic tradition, defines ethos as:
...the system of emotional attitudes which governs what value a community shall set upon the various satisfactions or dissatisfactions which the contents of life may offer (Bateson, 1954 in Ani, 1994, p. 14).
Unlike Nobles, Bateson cannot, by definition, find in ethos alone the necessary cognitive (and spiritual) elements to explain how culture organizes the ideas, feelings and behaviors of individuals into a coherent cultural system. As such, he deems it necessary to invent the conception eidos in order to study the "cognitive aspects" of the cultural or group personality.
Accordingly, Bateson defines eidos as:
...a standardization of the cognitive aspects of the personality of individuals..[and]...the cultural expression of cognitive and intellectual aspects of personality...(p. 14).
With the conceptions eidos and ethos Bateson believes he has two useful investigative frameworks. One to explain how culture molds the ideas and beliefs of individual members of a culture or a group into characteristic systems of thought and a distinctive cognitive style, and the other to explain how culture shapes individual emotional attitudes into a coherent system of cultural values and behaviors.
Bateson asserts that a culture's eidos fosters certain ideas and beliefs in individual members of the culture and sanctions or suppresses others. Culture through its eidos will
favor, recognize and empower those individuals who assimilate, express, replicate, re-create or extend ideas and beliefs espoused by that culture or who have the potential to do so.
It will deny favor, recognition and power to those individuals associated with ideas and beliefs contrary to those embraced by the culture.
The culture's ethos works in the same way on the emotional responses of individual members of a culture. Ethos
rewards those individuals with emotional tendencies or responses preferred by the culture and castigates those who express deviant tendencies.
The notion of spirit is ignored by Bateson, and while implied by Nobles, is not clearly articulated in his (Nobles') model presented here.
Ani, in contrast, uncovers the seminal work of Robert Armstrong (1975), who introduced (at least to the lay or non-anthropological audience) a notion of consciousness, a "code of awareness," within the human being as a member of a culture or group which predisposes him or her to think, feel, and act in certain ways. [Kottak refers to this "code of awareness" when he asserts that all human beings have the capacity to create "Culture."]
According to Armstrong, there is within each member of a culture or group a "primal consciousness," an awareness that causes him or her to acquire and subsequently to re-create or shape that culture. This awareness is prescriptive, it defines and imposes:
the terms under which the world is to be perceived and experienced (Armstrong, 1975 in Ani, 1994, p. 10).
This primal consciousness is what Armstrong calls the mythoform.
Is consciousness "spirit"? If we subscribe to the absolute idealism of German philosopher Georg F. Hegel, the answer is yes, absolutely!
For Armstrong, this mythoform is a
"generative germ" of culture; it is a "preconceptual," "preaffective," "prespatial," and "pretemporal" tate of awareness, stimulated into activity by certain forms of social interaction, that creates the psychic infrastructure which facilitates the creation and acquisition of symbols and upon which systems of beliefs are built (Ani, 1994 p. 10) .
Even Armstrong who "is far in advance of Eurocentric social science" (p. 10) is vague on the subject of spirit.
ASILI
It takes Ani, herself, to provide a conceptual model which incorporates spirit, cognition and feeling; which is at the same time analytical and synthetic. In place of Nobles' ethos and Bateson's eidos and ethos, Ani (1994) reinterprets Nobles' cultural aspects to replace ethos with a concept similar to Armstrong's mythoform. This concept (Spirit) becomes the initiating principle for the development of ideology and worldview.
Ani's reconceptualization takes three concepts from Kiswahili to plot the explanatory principle of culture and its development into its several "aspects," "factors" and "manifestations" (Nobles, 1985)." These concepts are asili (pronounced ah-SEE-lee), utamawazo (ooh-tah-mah-WAH-zoe) and utamaroho (ooh-tah-mah-ROE-hoe).
She explains asili, which in Kiswahili means "beginning," "origin," "source," "nature," "essence," "fundamental principle" or "seed" as:
... the germinal principle of the being of a culture, its essence.
The idea of a seed, the ubiquitous analogical symbol in African philosophical and cosmological explanations is ideal for our purposes.
The idea is that the asili is like a template that carries within it the pattern or archetypal model for cultural development; we might say that it is the DNA of culture.
Seeds
http://www.catholic.org/market/rosary/seeds.jpg
At the same time it embodies the "logic" of the culture. The logic is an explanation of how it works, as well as, the principle of its development (Ani, 1994 p. 12).
Let us take the seed metaphor and attempt to explain asili somewhat more simply.
If you have ever examined an acorn, there is nothing about its physical appearance that would even hint at what it might become. There is no hint of the majestic oak tree at the end the acorn's growth cycle. Yet in that acorn is the potential of the full-grown oak.
http://www.einst.ee/publications/images/symbols/oak.jpg
When planted and nurtured that "potency" or potential emerges as tendrils and stems and grows into roots, trunk, branches, leaves and acorns, looking nothing like the solitary acorn in its completeness. At each stage of its development the oak tree is fundamentally different than its previous stage.
From acorn to seedling to sapling to mature tree -- the plant cycle of the oak tree
http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/abbotbeyne/rosliston/WEBTREES/
What powers the oak tree through its successive stages of development? Nothing more than the mysterious power of growth.
What is growth? Or more fundamentally, what causes growth? We know that growth has happened by the physical changes we observe in the oak tree. What we don't know is the exact nature of the force or forces which cause growth. We can only infer the causes from the results.
The asili can be likened to the mysterious power of growth, but it is much more. Asili may be explained as the collective spirit of a group of human beings who are related by consanguinity (blood relationship) and/or who become related through shared historical experiences. This group spirit gives the group direction and purpose.
The asili not only powers a culture through its successive stages of growth but it engenders and gives form to a particular culture. It determines and proscribes i.e., sets the boundaries of the developmental stages through which a particular culture and its members must proceed. It makes a given culture consistent. It gives it its pattern.
Ani is careful to distinguish the asili from Armstrong's mythoform. In doing so, she underscores the fact that asili is at the same time the "spirit" of a culture, its cognitive style and its emotional/behavioral patterns:
The asili determines cultural development; then the form the culture takes to maintain the integrity of the asili. It acts as a screen (like Bateson's ethos and eidos), incorporating or rejecting innovations, depending on their compatibility with its own essential nature.
The asili is not an idea, like Armstrong's mythoform. It is a force, an energy that asserts itself by giving direction to and placing limits on cultural creativity (Ani, 1994 pp. 12-13).
The asili is a "spirit seed." The question which now may be asked, if we are faithful to our analogy, is how does the "seed" of culture form?
Biologically speaking, all seeds are the offspring of adult plants. The "plant" to which we refer in this analogy is the social "organism" we call a group.
Consider this scenario:
Twenty individuals, ten males and ten females, from different parts of the world and ranging in age from 18 to 55 were "marooned" individually all over a thirty square mile island. No individual was aware that anyone else was on the island.
http://www.lost-woods.com/photos/san%20francisco.htm
http://www.amazonsoft.com/SinoCharm/Being%20Chinese/Julia/991016JnJl.jpgEach individual was given enough food to last for a week and was told that the island had enough food and other resources to keep them alive.Along with the week's supply of food, each individual had only the clothes he or she were wearing at the time they were left on the island.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/madagascar/surviving/images/nestor.jpgOver the next few weeks and months, each individual became aware of the fact that he or she was not alone on the island. A few braved language barriers and natural suspicion and sought out the company of the others. There was no common language.
http://www.childrenstheatreplays.com/images/ycpic2.jpgIn order to communicate with each other, they devised, first, a rudimentary sign language and then began to exchange words from each others language. Soon, a common language emerged, a mixture of words and signs. With a means to communicate, couples formed and soon a village was established for mutual protection. All but two or three of the original twenty individuals moved into the village and established homesteads.
http://www.outbackman.com/html/1986-1991-page5.htmlThe island was subjected to the fury of the elements. Storms ravaged the village and one or two people were killed.Two more were bitten by snakes and died. A third ate a poisonous plant and died.
http://www.30thnct.org/ Allison's%20Woods/Dead%20Will.
The survivors, however, drew closer together and devised ways to better protect themselves against the elements and the dangers extant in the environment. They devised better ways of feeding themselves, sharing with each other successful methods of growing food or hunting the small game that roamed the island.
With improved communication, and shared experiences, they, over time, began to refer to themselves as the "island people," not just by the names that each individual called himself or herself.
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Soon the island people began to raise their children to be "good" island people, to do only those things that respectable island people do. They taught their children to be suspicious of strangers and any information that did not come directly from the elders of the island...
At what point in the foregoing scenario did the "asili," the "seed" of culture form? It formed shortly after the individuals established themselves as a group. It formed when the group named themselves and became a "we" rather than a collection of individuals.
As a "seed" germinates root and stem, so does the asili germinate out of its essence utamawazo and utamaroho.
UTAMAWAZO
Utamawazo is a Kiswahili compound word meaning literally culture (utama) thought (wazo). Ani defines it as "thought as determined by culture" (Ani, 1994, p.14).
Every culture or group has a distinctive cognitive style or a way of thinking. This cognitive style results from the purposeful and directive "outward thrusting" of the asili (spirit of the group/culture), and compels members of the group into relationships, with each other, with outgroup persons, with their physical and metaphysical environments. The individual actions and reactions of group members, whether reflexive or deliberate, impulsive or calculated, create experiences.
Aristotle, An African Griot and Confucius
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These experiences are reflected upon individually, measured against their utility in the day to day struggle for survival, and shared. Out of these shared experiences emerge collective or, in the words of Bateson, standardized beliefs about existence, nature, the universe, deity, knowledge and the individual's relationship to each; and what the group values.
These beliefs shape or "structure" the group's reality, inform their judgments about what is desirable or undesirable, even determine the way group members perceive their world.
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From the "spirit seed" of culture called asili develops the cognitive style, the ideology and eventual worldview of the culture, the utamawazo.
We have said previously that asili can be likened to the mysterious and aggressive power of growth, but was more than that force. That force, an aspect of asili, has its own specialized purposes.
It not only powers the culture through its respective stages of development but it systematizes these concepts and beliefs (utamawazo) so as to give them coherence. It gives the utamawazo internal consistency and establishes its "truth."
More importantly, it builds and sustains the structure of beliefs which incorporates ideas congruent to the particular established cultural predisposition, and rejects those which are not. What is this force called and how does it do this?
UTAMAROHO
Utamaroho, literally culture (utama) spirit/life (roho), is the distinctive pattern of emotional response of a group or culture. Emotion is distinguished from feeling here because "emoting" is behaving, while feeling is that holistic, internal, organic response in an individual e.g., biochemical, electrochemical or psychochemical, etc., that is invisible except through emotional behavior.
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The distinctive pattern of emotional response of a culture reveals the collective affective makeup or feeling-tone of that group or culture. This is utamaroho. According to Ani, utamaroho
...denotes the way in which the asili acts to forge a collective response among the members of a culture to life and to the world as they confront it.(Ani, 1994, p. 15).
But this response, in the sense of utamaroho, is not thought out or planned. It is more of an instinctive reaction caused by their "spirit" (Ani, 1994, p. 15).
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Utamaroho is an emotive force released out of the asili. It is imbued with the purpose of the asili and is embodied in the expression of attitudes and beliefs, in individual behavior, in art objects and artifacts, in artistic pursuits and in cultural institutions. It is the force that drives the culture; powers it through its respective phases of development.
Utamawazo, a culture's distinctive way of thinking, believing, truth testing, reasoning and its distinctive forms of thought, is vitalized by the utamaroho. The collective emotional response of the culture to life's immediate and long-term challenges is not separate from its cognitive style and forms of thought but part and parcel of them. Utamawazo and utamaroho are interrelated and interdependent aspects of the asili/spirit.
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We see utamaroho in the various attitudes standardized and prescribed by a culture. Gordon Allport (1958) in defining attitudes, viewed them as mental constructs containing:
The implication here is that thoughts are associated with feelings and as such have an affective "motive" force. Put differently, where there is a thought, there is a feeling-- the two are inseparable.
Deepak Chopra (1993) expresses this in yet another way.
Fear, for example, may have its mental images, but fear is also adrenaline rushing through the body. Both the adrenaline and the mental images are fear (Chopra, 1993).
In the same way, utamawazo is associated with, not separate from, utamaroho. For purposes of analysis, it is appropriate to examine them separately, but care must be taken after doing so to synthesize them, to put them back together again. Together, they are much more and explain much more than taken separately. Taken together, they explain the asili.
The pattern of emotional response of an individual is often called the personality. These responses may be reflexive (instinctive?) or learned, but are fairly good indicators of what the individual believes about himself or herself, those he or she interacts with socially, life and the world in general.
In the same way, utamaroho may be seen as the personality of the culture or group, and in that personality is revealed the spirit/force which moves the culture or group.
According to Ani:
While the character of a culture's utamawazo is expressed most obviously in literature, philosophy, academic discourse, and pedagogy, utamaroho becomes more visible in behavior and aesthetic expression, whether visual, aural, or kinesthetic. At the same time utamaroho is the inspirational source from which the utamawazo derives its form.... (Ani, 1994 p. 16).
Utamaroho is the force that arouses feelings and incites action.
In the utamawazo, there is an ongoing process of development, a set of basic cultural propositions, both normative and empirical, about human nature and society.These propositions explain and appraise the human condition and serve as cognitive stratagem for cultural realization. They also interpret the past, explain the present and provide visions of the future. They establish the purposes, organization and boundaries of the culture.
Utamaroho gives these propositions their power of appeal. It mobilizes and releases emotional energies in individuals
In this way, culture is ideological. It is the combination of utamawazo and utamaroho that makes culture ideological.
Ideology is a systematic pattern of beliefs which explains and justifies a preferred social organization, socio-technological direction, political order and the strategies for realizing the same. According to Christenson, Engel, Jacobs, Rejai and Waltzer (1975), ideology includes:
... a set of basic propositions, both normative and empirical, about human nature and society which in turn serve to explain and judge the human condition and to guide the development of or preserve a preferred political order...An ideology offers an interpretation of the past, an explanation of the present and a vision of the future (Christenson, et al., 1975, p. 6).
Utamawazo, like ideology, is a systematic pattern of thought. It provides (among other things)
Utamaroho gives utamawazo its persuasive appeal, its capacity to generate emotion, to inspire belief and action.
The Many Faces of Patriotism
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Within the framework of the utamawazo is a system of beliefs that prescribe the preferred political order for society. But it is the utamaroho which wins the assent of the cultural group and moves them to accept or reject the existing order, to modify it, overthrow it or impose it on others.
Asili is spirit, and out of spirit comes ideas, personality and/or behavior -- a very African/Oriental construction that is relatively free of the dualism normally associated with western thought.
This writer believes that Marimba Ani has been rather successful in constructing a model of culture and cultural development that includes rather than excludes the notion of spirit.
Cultures Change
The final cultural characteristic to be addressed in this essay is change. All cultures change and for a variety of reasons. Cultures change by accident, by contact with other cultures and as a result of the impact of innovation.
Accidental cultural change
Although a group of people sharing historical experiences, beliefs, values and attitudes, customs and traditions may elect to voluntarily change the way they act or speak or behave in response to some problem or challenge the affects the group as a whole, a considerable amount of cultural changes occurs by accident.
Michael Lee comments on the changes in the obscure universe of diversity training for business in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001:
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 had a profound effect on diversity training in the United States. Although managers have become more sensitized to cultural differences, cultural misunderstandings in the workplace continue to have a negative impact on productivity and profitability.
Diversity training has been affected by the events of September 11 in five major ways:
The horrific events of 9/11 have caused America's business culture to focus, among other things, on helping businesses understand people’s differences so they can work together as a team amd learn how to be more effective in selling more products and services to people from diverse cultures.
Cultural Diffusion
The spread of customs or practices from one culture to another is called cultural diffusion. Some anthropologists have suggested that "borrowing" from other cultures accounts for as much as 90% of any culture’s content. Conrad Kottack asserts that any two cultures can share experiences and means of adaptation through the process of cultural diffusion, which may be realized through direct or indirect methods.
Diffusion is direct when two cultures intermarry, wage war, or trade with each other or when they watch the same TV program. Diffusion is indirect when products and patterns move from population A to population C via population B without any firsthand contact between A and C. (Kottack, 1991/2001)
Ever since humans began to form groups and cultures, they have had contact with other groups and cultures. The resulting cultural diffusion has liberally borrowed and assimilated into these cultures those objects, tools, practices,ideas and principles useful to cultural purpose and in making adaptive adjustment to environmental stresses.
With respect to intrasocietal diffusion, particularly in the United States of America, the impact on American macroculture of worldwide cuisine, or African American, Hispanic American or Asian American nonstandard speech, or African, Afro-Hispanic, Asian and /or indigenous images and rhythms is so obvious it almost goes unseen or unconsidered. Think for a moment about the pervasiveness of Chinese medicines and medical practices, or Japanese and Taiwanese manufacture. Or the proliferation of African, Arabic, Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, and Native American religion, philosophy, art, martial arts or magic, or the growing numbers of people of color and women in the workforce, in the professional and management class?
Iranian Pro-Reform Law-maker Elheh Koulaei
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When people from one culture or subculture enter and reside in a specific locality occupied by people of another culture, cultural diffusion can and usually does occur. The process of entering and establishing one’s group in a locality occupied by others has a variety of names ranging from invasion to immigration. Major cultural changes that people are forced to make as a consequence of intensive, firsthand contact between cultures and societies is called acculturation.
Diffusion or Acculturation?
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Yet cultural diffusion and acculturation are not the same. Diffusion is the transference of discrete culture traits from one culture to another, through migration, trade, war, or other contact. Acculturation, on the other hand, is the imposition of systematic cultural change carried out by a dominant and often alien culture. One
culture can borrow from
another without being
acculturated. But when a dominant culture through direct contact between individuals imposes, for example, language, habits, and values on other cultures, aculturation has happened. Acculturation more often than not brings about cultural loss and truama.
Cultural Loss and Trauma
The experience of the indigenous native peoples of America speak eloquently of cultural loss and trauma. According to Hudnall Stamm (1997/2004):
Western European contact with indigenous cultures has taken many forms--warfare, friendship, trade, disease--such that indigenous cultures suffered extensive alterations to their spiritual and material well being. This has meant replacement of traditional economies with modern markets, dramatic population loss, and relegation to third-world status. Challenges to traditional medical practices & spiritual beliefs also left deep cultural wounds that manifest in poverty, substance abuse, intergenerational trauma, community & interpersonal violence. Stamm, H. (1997/2004) [URL] http://www.isu.edu/~bhstamm/ct/hct_intro.htm
Residential School for Native Americans
Stamm suggests that in the aftermath of cultural contact there is an "era of cultural challenge." In this period, cultures experience the effects of exposure, including expanded opportunities for trade, warfare, clashing belief systems and innovations.
Ron Eyerman in the book, Cultural Trauma : Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (2001) characterizes cultural loss and trauma as
The experience of the African in America, particularly through the various agencies of individual and institutional racism has led to cultural loss and trauma in the form of
http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/coon/
Cultural loss and trauma can occur when cultural agents die out or leave in large numbers, forcing those who remain to exist in such small numbers as to become refugees, living among peoples of other cultures. Stephen Kinzer illustrates this in his reportage of the Kurds in Turkey:
More than 1,000 miles separate a defiant peasant named Baran, who lives in a refugee's hovel outside Van, in eastern Turkey, from a polished and successful Istanbul jeweler named Cemal.
The gap in perception and experience between the two is even wider. All they have in common is that they are Kurdish citizens of Turkey.
"I am a Kurd, but what difference does that make?" asked Cemal as he sat behind a glass case full of gold bracelets and earrings. "I'm Turkish. I love Turkey. Never once have I had a problem because I happen to have Kurdish blood. Everyone is equal in this country."
To Baran, who fled his ancestral village rather than be pressed into the pro-government village guards, things look very different.
"My identity as a Kurd is the most precious thing I have," he said as his son listened solemnly. "If I give up that identity, I can do anything in this country, even become president.
"But no matter what they do to me, I will never abandon a hundred generations of tradition in my family. I was born a Kurd, and nothing can ever make me a Turk."
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These two men, both of whom asked to be identified only by their first names, represent the twin paradigms of Kurdish life in Turkey: Until their world views can somehow be reconciled, the government will find it all but impossible to resolve one of the world's bitterest and most intractable ethnic conflicts.
It is a conflict that has produced more than a dozen rebellions over the last 80 years, cost untold amounts of blood and treasure and polarized public opinion here and abroad. The current revolt, led for the last 13 years by the Kurdistan Workers Party, has taken more than 20,000 lives, mostly in fighting in eastern Turkey. Kinzer, S. (1997) Kurds Fashion Two Identities in a Fearful Turkey [URL] http://kurdistan.org/Washington/kinzers.html
A most severe form of cultural loss and trauma results from genocide. Genocide is the extermination of one people by another. Human history is checkered by ancient and modern examples of genocide. Since 1945, twenty-nine African , twelve Latin American , eighteen Asian, ten European and seven Middle Eastern regimes have carried out systematic programs of genocide. (See chart)
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Gregory Stanton (1988) asserts that there are eight (8) stages of genocide:
1. CLASSIFICATION: All cultures have categories to distinguish people into "us and them" by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality: German and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi. Bipolar societies that lack mixed categories, such as Rwanda and Burundi, are the most likely to have genocide.
The main preventive measure at this early stage is to develop universalistic institutions that transcend ethnic or racial divisions, that actively promote tolerance and understanding, and that promote classifications that transcend the divisions. The Catholic church could have played this role in Rwanda, had it not been riven by the same ethnic cleavages as Rwandan society. Promotion of a common language in countries like Tanzania or Cote d'Ivoire has also promoted transcendent national identity. This search for common ground is vital to early prevention of genocide.
2. SYMBOLIZATION: We give names or other symbols to the classifications. We name people "Jews" or "Gypsies", or distinguish them by colors or dress; and apply them to members of groups. Classification and symbolization are universally human and do not necessarily result in genocide unless they lead to the next stage, dehumanization. When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups: the yellow star for Jews under Nazi rule, the blue scarf for people from the Eastern Zone in Khmer Rouge Cambodia.To combat symbolization, hate symbols can be legally forbidden (swastikas) as can hate speech. Group marking like gang clothing or tribal scarring can be outlawed, as well. The problem is that legal limitations will fail if unsupported by popular cultural enforcement. Though Hutu and Tutsi were forbidden words in Burundi until the 1980's, code-words replaced them. If widely supported, however, denial of symbolization can be powerful, as it was in Bulgaria, when many non-Jews chose to wear the yellow star, depriving it of its significance as a Nazi symbol for Jews. According to legend in Denmark, the Nazis did not introduce the yellow star because they knew even the King would wear it.
3. DEHUMANIZATION: One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group. In combating this dehumanization, incitement to genocide should not be confused with protected speech. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than in democracies. Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Hate crimes and atrocities should be promptly punished.
4. ORGANIZATION: Genocide is always organized, usually by the state, though sometimes informally (Hindu mobs led by local RSS militants) or by terrorist groups. Special army units or militias are often trained and armed. Plans are made for genocidal killings.To combat this stage, membership in these militias should be outlawed. Their leaders should be denied visas for foreign travel. The U.N. should impose arms embargoes on governments and citizens of countries involved in genocidal massacres, and create commissions to investigate violations, as was done in post-genocide Rwanda.
5. POLARIZATION: Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda. Laws may forbid intermarriage or social interaction. Extremist terrorism targets moderates, intimidating and silencing the center.Prevention may mean security protection for moderate leaders or assistance to human rights groups. Assets of extremists may be seized, and visas for international travel denied to them. Coups d'¢etat by extremists should be opposed by international sanctions.
6. PREPARATION: Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols. They are often segregated into ghettoes, forced into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved.At this stage, a Genocide Alert must be called. If the political will of the U.S., NATO, and the U.N. Security Council can be mobilized, armed international intervention should be prepared, or heavy assistance to the victim group in preparing for its self-defense. Otherwise, at least humanitarian assistance should be organized by the U.N. and private relief groups for the inevitable tide of refugees.
7. EXTERMINATION: Extermination begins, and quickly becomes the mass killing legally called "genocide." It is "extermination" to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human. When it is sponsored by the state, the armed forces often work with militias to do the killing. Sometimes the genocide results in revenge killings by groups against each other, creating the downward whirlpool-like cycle of bilateral genocide (as in Burundi).At this stage, only rapid and overwhelming armed intervention can stop genocide. Real safe areas or refugee escape corridors should be established with heavily armed international protection. The U.N. needs a Standing High Readiness Brigade or a permanent rapid reaction force, to intervene quickly when the U.N. Security Council calls it. For larger interventions, a multilateral force authorized by the U.N., led by NATO or a regional military power, should intervene. If the U.N. will not intervene directly, militarily powerful nations should provide the airlift, equipment, and financial means necessary for regional states to intervene with U.N. authorization. It is time to recognize that the law of humanitarian intervention transcends the interests of nation-states.
8. DENIAL: Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them.The best response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts. There the evidence can be heard, and the perpetrators punished. Tribunals like the Yugoslav, Rwanda, or Sierra Leone Tribunals, an international tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and ultimately the International Criminal Court must be created. They may not deter the worst genocidal killers. But with the political will to arrest and prosecute them, some mass murderers may be brought to justice. Stanton, Gregory H. 1988, The Eight Stages of Genocide [URL] http://www.genocidewatch.org/8stages.htm
Cultural trauma and loss involves more than physical destruction of people, property, and landscapes such as might be seen in warfare, genocide or ethnic cleansing but psycho-spiritual injury as well. Consider the disruption that comes with acceptance of a new innovation:
In a prominent Northern Nigerian University, a group of experts was assembled to determine the cause of widespread vandalism in the University's bathrooms. The fancy western toilets were being destroyed in alarming rates. The team of experts had no choice but to take turns observing what transpired in the restrooms. They were unanimous in their findings. The toilets were not being willfully destroyed. The public eliminatory experience of most Nigerians in that part of the country was to squat over toilets set into the floor. They were not accustomed to sitting on toilet "seats." As a result several people were observed standing on top of the toilets to defecate in the manner in which they were accustomed.
Or this example in another so-called third world country:
A group of village farmers were persuaded by faculty/researchers in the College of Agriculture in a major university to plant high yield sorgum, a staple for peasant famers, during the next planting season. The farmers agreed, After all, the college was supplying the seeds free of charge and if the sorgum was anything like promised, the farmers would eat well after harvest. The planting season came and went and the grain was harvested. The yield was a s high as promised and the faculty/researchers congratulated themselves on their successful foray into social engineering.
When the next planting season came, they delivered their free seed to the farmers, but were surprised when they found the seed returned unopened, every last bag.
Wondering what had happened, the researchers questioned the farmers. The new seed, they learned, because of its high yield, did not produce as much ruffage e.g. leaves and stalks as the traditional crop. The ruffage was used by the farmers to feed their livestock and thatch their roofs. More importantly, the people did not like the taste of the new sorghum. They decided to stay with the crop they knew and liked.
Innovation can be defined as any new practice, tool, or principle that gains widespread acceptance within a cultural group or society. Innovation may be the ultimate source of all cultural change. There are two general categories of innovation. These are primary innovation and secondary innovation:
Primary Innovations: innovations that result from the chance discovery of some new principle.
Secondary Innovations: innovations that result from the deliberate applications of known principles
The acceptance of a new innovation more often than not leads to the loss of an older innovation.
While invention usually involves the discovery of new ideas and principles,
innovation can be described as actualizing these ideas and principles into
practical, commercial or organizational cultural practice. Invention does not
necessarily invoke innovation, nor is invention necessary and sufficient for
innovation to occur.
Syncretism, revitalization movements, rebellion and revolution are all reactions to forcible cultural change brought about by diffusion, acculturation,
cultural loss and trauma and innovation.
Syncretism
According to Wikipedia, the free on-line encyclopedia, Syncretism is
"the attempt to reconcile disparate, even opposing, beliefs and to meld practices of various schools of thought. It is especially associated with the attempt to merge and analogize several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, and thus assert an underlying unity." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism
Oba Ernesto Pichardo explains syncretism in this way:
An academic definition is as follows- "the tendency to identify those elements in the new culture with similar elements in the old one, enabling the person experiencing the contact to move from one to the other and back again, with psychological ease". A simplified interpretation of syncretism refers to this cultural process as a "fusion" between the African Ayoba religion and the Catholic religion. This theoretical fusion has led some scholars to identify the Ayoba as a mixture with Catholicism causing the birth of a new religious system called Santeria in Cuba.
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For decades scholars have documented and classified the Ayoba/Lukumi religion as a syncretic religion. The primary reason for the assertion is that Africans compared their deities to the Catholic saints, worshiped them, while hiding their African deities behind the Catholic. Scholars in their research have also noted that many in the priesthood include Catholic statues of saints in their African altars. For example, the Catholic Saint Barbara found at the altar placed next to the Ayoba/Lukumi deity Shango. Another point of reference is that adherents commonly refer to their deities using the names of their Catholic associations.
The terms "santeria" and "santero" originate in Spain, at approximately the time of the inquisition. It was used to denote a Catholic person that was deviated from orthodox religious practice. According to the Church if a Catholic would "worship" saints deviating from the Church position at that time--- or "attributed" the saints with deferring qualities, they would be called Santero(a). A second definition of "santero" is a carver or maker of Catholic saint statues. During colonial Cuba the term "santero" for a male, "santera" for a female person, was used to describe the enslaved Ayoba/Lukumi people. However, this term was extended denoting an Ayoba/Lukumi priest (santero), and its use of "santera" for a priestess. Early scholar work made use if this terminology, still widely used today. The traditional word for a priest or priestess is "Olosha," and omo-osha for the faithful. http://www.church-of-the-lukumi.org/syncretism.htm
Slavery and the myriad oppressions of bondage were instruments of forcible cultural change. Africans in the Americas were forced to creatively devise ways to preserve their religious practices or general approaches to spirituality. These efforts took shape in the religions known today as Vodun, Lukumi, Ocha, Condomble, Santeria, Palo, Obeah, Macumba, Umbanda and Hoodoo.
Revitalization Movements
Revitalizations movements may be characterized as
political-religious movements promising deliverance from deprivation,
the elimination of foreign domination, and
a new interpretation of the human condition based on traditional cultural values.
Revitalization movements are common in cultures and societies undergoing the trauma associated with forcible cultural change in the form of colonial conquest and intense class or racial exploitation. The Ghost dance was on such movement at the end of the nineteenth century in America.
According to Robert Toledo, on January 1, 1879, Wovoka, a Paiute visionary, "claimed to have dreamed a vision of a new and glorious world for the Native peoples.":
In his dream, Wovoka conversed with God, who promised a new world set aside for the Native peoples. The wildlife of the region which was nearly depleted by white settlers (buffalo, elk, deer) would be replenished. The white settlers would vanish en mass and the Native dead would be resurrected and reunited with their living ancestors. Suffering, starvation, pain and disease would be wiped away forever. From a theological viewpoint and the safety of hindsight, however, one can detect prophecies which were not tribal in origin...
Wovokahttp://www.indigenouspeople.net/images/wovoka.gif
He claimed the Native peoples would receive God's favor since it was the white man who rejected Christ. And unlike the New Testament, which was vague concerning the time and place of God's new world, Wovoka spelled out the immediacy of what he said. "Jesus is now upon the Earth," he stated. But again, there is historic contradiction here— Wovoka is quoted as saying he was Christ and he wasn't Christ. It would seem that either he excelled at playing to different audiences or was damned to being preserved by faulty historians.
Wovoka added this new world for Native peoples would come, but only if a ritualistic dance was practiced. In his initial preaching, he instructed his audiences to dance five days and four nights, then bathe in a river and go home. Wovoka promised to send a good spirit to his followers, who were to return in three months, at which time he would promise "such rain as I have never given you before."
http://www.viewzone.com/wovoka.html
The Lakota Sioux became fervent dancers and believers in this vision. Their faith and their dancing led to the massacre at Wounded Knee:
On the frozen plains at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, government troops opened fire on the overwhelmingly unarmed Lakota people, killing 290 in a matter of minutes. Thirty-three soldiers died, most from friendly fire; 20 Medals of Honor were presented to surviving soldiers.
As news of Wounded Knee spread throughout the Native nations, Ghost Dance died quickly. Wovoka's prophecies were hollow; the land would not be returned from the white man through divine intervention. With the suddenness of its birth, Ghost Dance disappeared. http://www.viewzone.com/wovoka.html
Rebellion and Revolution
When discontent within a culture reaches a certain level, the possibilities for rebellion and revolution are high. On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government reacted to two months of open student rebellion. Li Yong Yan (2004) gives this account:
...on June 4, 1989, on a warm summer night, an event of extraordinary significance unfolded on Tiananmen Square, literally the "door of heaven," the vast square in the center of [Beijing]. The consequences of the event have resonated throughout China and the world ever since. Tiananmen isn't talked about much - that's very true - but it hasn't been forgotten either, and it looms over China's international reputation, casting a cloud over its lucrative arms deals with the European Union and the United States...People's Liberation Army combat troops in full battle gear, armed with automatic weapons and riding in tanks, rolled into the square, guns blazing. They were ordered by the government to clear the square of protesters, mostly students who had staged a sit-in there for well over two months. Hundreds died in the pandemonium. The exact death toll is not known...Time passes. But it only has served to strengthen the resolve of democracy activists who want nothing more than the "killers" brought to justice. And families of the June 4 victims have been airing their grievances year after year, through emotional marches by the mothers of the dead and wounded, holding pictures of their slain family members, to the National People's Congress and pleas to foreign reporters and sympathizers...for now, the weeping mothers will continue to march, the bold will continue to write and publish open letters, and journalists and those who care about China will continue to watch, and wait. http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/1867.cfm
In 1979, Iranian dissidents overthrew the oppressive rule of Mohammed Reza Palavi, the Shah of Iran. The follow account of one of the few authentic twentieth cenury revolutions is given by the Iran Chamber Society:
Ayatollah Khomeini,
Despite economical growth, there was much opposition against the Mohammad Reza Shah, and how he used the secret police, the Savak, to control the country. Strong Shi'i opposition against the Shah, and the country came close to a situation of civil war. The opposition was lead by Ayatollah Khomeini, who lived in exile in Iraq and later in France. His message was distributed through music cassettes, which were smuggled into Iran in small numbers, and then duplicated, and spread all around the country. This was the beginning of Iranian revolution.
On January 16 1979, the Shah left Iran. Shapour Bakhtiar as his new prime minister with the help of Supreme Army Councils couldn't control the situation in the country anymore.
Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1. Ten days later Bakhtiar went into hiding, eventually to find exile in Paris. Processes against the supporters of the Shah started, and hundreds were executed.
On April 1, after a landslide victory in a national referendum in which only one choice was offered (Islamic Republic: Yes or No), Ayatollah Khomeini declared an Islamic republic with a new Constitution reflecting his ideals of Islamic government.
Ayatollah Khomeini became supreme spiritual leader (Valy-e-Faqih) of Iran. Subsequently many demonstrations were held in protest to the new rules, like extreme regulations on women's code of dress.
On November 4: Iranian Islamic Students stormed the US embassy, taking 66 people, the majority Americans, as hostages. 14 were released before the end of November. In November: The republic's first Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan resigned. http://www.iranchamber.com/history/islamic_revolution/islamic_revolution.php
COMPATIBLE EPISTEMOLOGICAL ORIENTATIONS
The epistemological orientation of Nobles and Ani which accommodates a non-dualistic construction combining spirit, cognition and feeling, derives from a worldview that explains phenomena in terms different from the linear, mechanistic cause-effect model of some Eurocentric thought.
It is a world view in which the nature of reality is Spirit, where mind and matter are essentially spiritual, i.e., spirit made manifest, where causality is defined in terms of spirit and not mechanistically as in western "scientism."
In this reality all phenomena (including time and space) being essentially spiritual are cyclical rather than linear, integrated rather than dualistic, regenerative and transcendent. Nobles and Ani believe this world view to be African. Fritjof Capra (1991) sees it as Eastern or Taoist and Deepak Chopra (1993) sees it as Quantum.
Within the American macroculture and ironically out of mainstream academia there is emerging an epistemological orientation that is similar to and compatible with African, Eastern and Quantum worldviews. Foundational voices in this school of thought cutting across several disciplines are Clifford Geertz, Liebe F. Cavalieri, Noam Chomsky, Bentley Glass, Bernard Lovell, Norman D. Newell, Jonas Salk and Roger Sperry.
Ruth Nanda Anshen (1981) summarizes best the aims of this "Convergence" school of thought:
The old division of the Earth and the Cosmos into objective processes in space and time and mind in which they are mirrored is no longer a suitable starting point for understanding the universe, science, or ourselves.
Science now begins to focus on the convergence of man and nature, on the framework which makes us, as living beings, dependent parts of nature and simultaneously makes nature the object of our thoughts and actions.
Scientists can no longer confront the universe as objective observers. Science recognizes the participation of man with the universe. Speaking quantitatively, the universe is largely indifferent to what happens in man. Speaking qualitatively, nothing happens in man that does not have a bearing on the elements which constitute the universe.
This gives cosmic significance to the person.
Nevertheless, all facts are not born free and equal. There exists a hierarchy of facts in relation to a hierarchy of values.
To arrange facts rightly, to differentiate the important from the trivial, to see their bearing in relation to each other and to valuational criteria, requires a judgment which is intuitive as well as empirical. We need meaning in addition to information. Accuracy is not the same as truth. Our hope is to overcome the cultural hubris in which we have been living.
The scientific method, the technique of analyzing, explaining, and classifying, has demonstrated its inherent limitations. They arise because, by its intervention, science presumes to alter and fashion the object of its investigation. In reality, method and object can no longer be separated. The outworn Cartesian, scientific worldview has ceased to be scientific in the most profound sense of the word, for a common bond links us allman, animal, plant, and galaxyin the unitary principal of all reality.For the self without the universe is empty (Anshen, 1986, pp. xi
xii).
It is not being suggested here that this epistemological orientation has moved to a predominant position in the American macroculture. Like Multiculturalism, Afrocentricity and other nontraditional epistemological orientations, "Convergence" is a subcultural variation in macrocultural thought and must compete with mainstream positions to even get a hearing. It does, however, represent a significant movement of macrocultural thought away from "Scientism."
It also represents a tacit recognition on the part of its exponents that the human experience is larger than the western experience, that much of what western culture has deemed "universal" is merely cultural, that the scientific method is only one of many useful tools in the construction of knowledge, that intuition partners logic in evaluative and decision making processes, and most importantly, that man and nature are a unitary and that each can only be understood in relation to the other.
References
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Nobles, Wade W. Africanity and the Black Family: The Development of a Theoretical Model. Oakland, Ca.: A Black Family Institute Publication, 1985.
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