The Elements of Culture

Two Key Elements of Culture: Language and Belief

John J. Macionis

There are any things that one could address in an article on culture, which, by definition, is a people's total way of life. I have chosen to look at two cultural elements, language and beliefs, in part because both are elements that appear to be unique capacities of humans among all of the earth's animal species.

Another part of the reason for focusing on these two elements is that these have played central roles in the creation and transmission of culture itself. A third part of the reason is that both of these elements are in a sense endangered species as elements of culture at least insofar as their maintaining and fulfilling their traditional roles in culture is concerned.
 
Before you jump to the conclusion that I must be crazy to assert that language and beliefs are endangered species of culture because everyone knows we use words every day and we all have beliefs, let me explain what I mean, first with respect to language and then with respect to beliefs.

Both Genesis, the first book of both Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and Matthew, the first book of Christian New Testament, begin by asserting that all of creation came from the word of God. In Genesis, we are told that God says, "Let there be . . ." and what God names comes into existence.

Later in Genesis, when God gives Adam dominion over all of the other animals on the earth, that power is conveyed via the power to name the animals. In virtually all ancient cultures, the word is a thing of magnificent and mystical power. In some societies, blessings and curses were believed to work in the same way.  Words, and often other symbols, too, were powerful thing to be used only with precision, care, and forethought. In the ancient view, once released, the words could not be recalled; but more importantly, the power of the words would remain unleashed in the
world. The same held for other symbols as well.

People in twentieth century industrial societies do not think of words or other symbols in that way. Not only are we careless in the ways in which we use them, we sometimes use them in ways intended to deceive. Politicians are not the only ones who make statements intended to "misdirect" those who hear or read them; almost everyone does it, at least on occasion. We also use symbols other than words in similar ways.

In pre-industrial societies, the purpose of language was not just to communicate but to engage in the same sort of creative act that the society's god or gods engaged in by creating the universe, although on a human scale rather than on a cosmic scale. The incantation is a good example of man's use of the word with the intention of creating. So is the curse. Moslem practitioners of tribal medicines in some parts of Africa today mix their herbs with water to create a thick liquid; they then use the liquid to write a relevant verse or two of the Koran on a slate; then they scrape off the liquid, which they believe has taken on the power of the words as well as the power of the herbs, and direct the patient to drink the liquid. Moslem villagers as well as many who are not Moslem seek out those doctors because they believe that holy words, even if they are not the holy words of their own faith, add power to the medicine. There is more than just faith involved here; there is a whole different idea of language and it role in the universe. Language is seen as a force as real as gravity in its effects on things.

Many American Indian tribes believed that an individual's name contained his powers and special gifts. Names were thus chosen with great care. Apaches, while they did not worship ancestors, per se, did believe that they could invoke the powers of ancestors by invoking their names.

Geronimo, leader of the Apache nation of the Cherokawa, and his followers believed that through his name he was given the  power to heal, the power of prophecy, and even the power to control the sun. Geronimo, but not others, could sing certain songs and be told by the Great Spirit when and where the soldiers would try to attack him and where to find water and food during the many years when a small band of  36 Cherokawa who refused to live on a reservation successfully evaded and fought off about a quarter of the U. S. Army. According to one legend, on one occasion
when the Apache, who often traveled at night, needed more time to make good an escape into Mexico, Geronimo sang a sacred song and thereby delayed the sunrise by two hours.

Language, of course, includes not only words but other symbols; it also includes the rules for combining them in sentences songs, pictures etc. The following sentence contain exactly the same words as the previous sentence:

Language course words symbols it rules sentences songs pictures of not only but the for in also combining includes includes; etc.

 In the traditional view, visual symbols have the same power as words. Some of the Southwestern Indian tribes make elaborate sand paintings for use in religious rituals. The sand paintings are destroyed at the end of the ritual so that their power will not remain at large in the universe. Many sand paintings are so impressive as art objects, independent of their religious meaning, that museums have asked for copies to display permanently. Those who make the copies for museums' permanent collections always leave out a symbol or rearrange some elements so that the power contained by the authentic sand painting will not be activated and unleashed permanently in the world. The power of the sand painting derives from the whole, including the arrangement, not from any one symbol. A different arrangement, which is equivalent to a violation of the rules for combining the symbols, even when the difference seems slight, does not result in the painting having the power it would have had if the rules for making it had been followed.

Christians, and to some extent Jews, have been slowly losing their sense of the power of the language over the past several centuries. While the rituals and prayers still often contain the traditional words, they do not mean the same things to today's young Christians and Jews that they meant to their grandparents and great-grandparents, let alone to their ancestors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When people of earlier times prayed in the name of the Lord, they knew that they were investing their petitions and praise with the awesome and terrifying supreme power of the universe. Many people today simply add the words because it is traditional to say them, but they lack the same sense of awe and wonder that the mere thought of the magnitude of that power inspired in their ancestors because they no longer have the same sense of the power in the words they use.

This sense of the power of words and symbols had important consequences. A connection developed between words/symbols and truth. To many people today, truth is relative; often it is a probability statement the summarizes research results. But when there was a stronger belief in the power of words, there was also a stronger belief that an absolute truth existed. Before the scientific revolution, people believed that the words, symbols, and sentences which contained genuine power also conveyed truth. But during the Enlightenment, Western civilization began to devise another standard for truth: rationality and correspondence to rational or empirical criteria. More recently, literary critics and philosophers known as deconstructionists have attacked rationality as the basis for truth and have even called into question whether there can be anything that is universally true.

 The issues that they have raised have had some impact on all of us who live in today's world. So has their view of words and symbols, which is that these and the texts they are used to create are all a part of power relationships. In this post-modern, deconstructionist view, words are not the power itself, as they were in the traditional view, but rather the tools of power.

Words do not convey truth. Rather, they are the attempt of one person or group to assert and maintain power over another. There is a vast difference. In the deconstructionist view, there can be no truth, only power. One example of what the deconstructionists are talking about can be seen in the phenomenon we have come to call "spin,"  seen in political speeches, advertising, and even in news reporting.  "Spin" is someone's attempt to shape our perception of  facts and events in a way that benefits them without actually telling us a bald-faced lie.

 The purpose of putting a "spin" on an event or a speech or a situation is to get us to think more favorably (or less favorably) of one person or brand or situation than of some other person, brand, etc., so that we will be more likely to vote for one person than another, to buy one brand than another, etc.  "Spin" is clearly not about truth but about trying to exercise power, in this case, power over our minds and behaviors.

The link between language, truth, and beliefs becomes clear when we acknowledge and analyze the major alternative to the tradition of rationality and logic: the mythic tradition. We find this tradition in societies that do not have printing. By printing, I mean the technology to mass produce documents. In pre-print societies, most people have to acquire most of the knowledge that they have through what they hear. They have to depend on memory and to develop techniques for making the material people need to know memorable. One of the ways in which information is disseminated in
memorable form is through myths stories that have a clear structure, clear statements of what happened, and a point or "moral" of the story. Myths often undergo some evolution over the course of time as elements that have become alien or obsolete (because they refer to things that are not familiar to the current generation) are replaced by elements that fit better into the experience of the current generation of story tellers. What does not change over time is the point or the moral of the story, which remains valid even as societies change. The truth of the story, and thus its power, is not in its details, but in its moral lesson.

Let us assume that an oral society needs to teach its children that they should not talk to or go with strangers. How does it do that? One thing that always happens is that parents are given the responsibility to tell their children, "Don't do that." Most, if not all of the parents will have been told the same thing by their own parents. But we all know how children are. One of the fastest ways to get them to want to do something is to tell them not to do it or that they may not do it. Over time, the society learns that parents need to do more than say "don't do that"; they need to give their children
reasons not to do it. And one of the best ways to do that is to illustrate with a story, real or apocryphal, of the terrible consequences that followed when some disobedient child talked to or went off with a stranger. More than one story may even be developed so that the children will not come to think that what happened in the original story was just an isolated incident. The additional stories make the point that the negative outcome of violating the rule is inevitable.

My example is, of course, itself apocryphal and oversimplified. The point is that over time, all of an oral society's important cultural lessons eventually become embodied in stories or myths whose symbols are to be interpreted literally. The myths and stories collectively show how the universe works, what the rules are, and what happens to those who break the rules; they also provide models for how to play important roles, how to achieve whatever the society values, etc. The Talmud, the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran, the collection of Greek and Roman myths, the stories one finds
collected in The Golden Bough, the stories of the lives of the saints and countless other works collected by students of various other cultures all inform us of the myths and stories developed by various cultures as various times to fill this function. All cultures need a system of myths to support their very survival as cultures. Before the printing press, the only way people of one culture could learn the stories of another was to come into contact with another culture. But such contacts were relatively infrequent until about 500 years ago because populations were low and scattered, transportation and roads were poor, and maps were practically non-existent at most times and in most parts of the world. The stories and myths of a society could often remain largely unchanged and unaffected by outside influences for long periods of time, thereby taking on the attributes of enduring truths, and thereby keeping the culture intact.

It should be pointed out here that the "fact," as we know it, is a creation of the printed word and the advent of modern science. "Facts" are empirically verifiable entities. Joseph Campbell tells a  story of overhearing a conversation between mother, her son, and the son's classmate one day as he had lunch. The son told the mother that his classmate had submitted a science paper on the evolution of man and that the teacher had said he was wrong, that all humans were descended from Adam and Eve. The mother insisted that the teacher was right, that Adam and Eve were the first parents, to which the little boy responded that he knew that, but that his classmate had submitted a science paper. The mother shot back that scientists only presented theories. The boy replied that he knew scientists created theories, but she needed to realize that this particular theory had been "factualized" because they had found the bones. To the boy, evolution was a fact, and obviously for him facts had
an innate superiority over the religious myths and stories he had been taught. He knew the stories, and he even apparently accepted that they had validity within the framework of religious beliefs.

But he had also obviously dichotomized truth, i.e., divided it into two kinds: religious truth and real world truth.
 

Truth for those of us who grew up in the twentieth century, and particularly for those of us who grew up in the last half of it, is not the unitary thing it had been up to the Renaissance. Instead, for large percentages of present-day Americans, there is "church truth" and "real world truth"--or worse, "church truth," "work truth," "school truth," and a variety of other situational "truths." In other words, whatever one thinks he is supposed to believe in a particular setting becomes "truth" in that setting.
Because that happens and because values and norms derive from beliefs, values and norms also become situational. Because beliefs, values, and norms are situational and we live in a world of change in which we expect to be in changed situations, attachment to all of them becomes weakened. As that process occurs, the society develops not only competing cultures and subcultures but fundamental disagreements on what, if anything, is important enough to require of its members.