Culture

 The human experience is not all that hard to understand. If we do not eat, we get hungry. If we lack water, we feel thirst. In differing circumstances, we feel lonely, or angry, or joyful, or excited, or bored, or frightened. Mosquito bites itch. Sunshine warms us. Freezing winds leave us cold. And, we can be confident that every human being of every human era, of every race, culture, and political persuasion, has felt the same. Biologically, humans show remarkably little variety. Some individuals are bigger than others, or smarter, or darker of skin and hair, but fundamentally, we all share the same basic experiences and emotions and sensations. This is the biology of being human. It makes it possible for us to have sympathy one for another, to share one another’s feelings, to love one another even.

But though hunger might feel the same, we satisfy that hunger differently. The foods people in one social group finds delicious might be revolting to a neighboring group. In Japan, for example, fresh eggs are cured for several months in a combination of clay, quicklime, tea, wood ash, and sea salt. During this curing process, the yolk turns green and develops a strong flavor while the egg white becomes a brown jelly. When the curing process is finished, the eggs are marketed as “century eggs” though they are, in reality, only a few months old. They are, I have been told, quite delicious.

On the other hand, cheese—which is essentially milk to which bacteria have been added and the moisture taken away —is virtually unknown in East Asia (except in those enlightened locations where one can order a Big Mac) and considered by most people there as more than a little disgusting. Many Asians don’t drink milk at all, and traditionally, cattle were kept for the work they could perform, not for the milk they could produce.

Some cultures eat meat. Some don’t. Some consume alcoholic beverages; others consider drinking alcohol a sin. In Germany and Iceland, horse meat is regularly consumed. In the United States, killing a horse for food is illegal. Lobsters, an expensive delicacy today, were once so common that a host would be embarrassed to serve one to a guest, and prisoners in Boston once rioted when all they were given to eat was lobster.

Thus, when we think about human cultures, we not only encounter all of the diverse and conflicting ways that human communities have found to satisfy their biological needs, but we also examine all the things people eat and drink, how they name their children, wear their clothes (or not wear any clothes), work, pray, and, most importantly perhaps, use language.

Not only do different regions of the planet provide homes to different cultures, but different cultures live side by side, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in harmony. When cultures come into contact with one another, they inevitably influence one another—sometimes by sharing stories and technologies and sometimes by seeking to enslave or destroy one another. Examples of this are too numerous to name, but we refer to this cross cultural influence as “diffusion.”

Above all, culture is what we learn. No one had to show us how to be hungry or to cry. Babies do those things naturally. But the fact that, sometimes when I am hungry I want barbecue, or bacon and eggs, or pizza, but not a century egg, are behaviors I have learned. I am sure century eggs are wonderful, and If I find myself confronted with one, I may eat it because I have also learned that, sometimes, you have to try things.

Language is the first and most important thing we learn as we grow up, and an important part of our cultural membership comes from being able to speak the language of that culture. Language begins with grammar and vocabulary and we learn both quite naturally in the first few years of our lives. Vocabulary refers to the individual words that are the building blocks of human languages. Grammar refers to the systematic ways in which different languages modify and put words together to give them meaning.

There are, according to the Ethnologue website, at the time of writing, 7,117 languages spoken in the world. The number tends to change from year to year as linguists discover and describe a new language or (all too commonly) discover that the last speakers of a tribal language have died. Most of these seven thousand languages are spoken by only a few thousand people. Some are spoken in a single village, or only by older people within a larger community. It is likely that, over the next century, half of the world’s languages will become extinct. Because languages are so much a part of culture, when a language dies out, much of the culture is lost with it. There are jokes that can only be told in a single language, religious rituals that require a specific language, and tales that cannot be translated. When the last few speakers die, all of this is lost.

A small number of languages, of course, have come to dominate human culture. Today, the most commonly spoken language is Mandarin Chinese. Almost a billion people speak Mandarin, but almost all of them live in China. English, on the other hand, is the native language of only 379 million people, living mostly in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. English, however, is a second language for 753 million additional people living around the world. Hundreds of millions of people in India speak English at work and in school. They hear it on TV and radio, and read English language newspapers, even though Hindi or one of dozens of other regional languages, is the language they speak at home, English has become their familiar second language.

The relationship between languages can become complicated, especially when one is the language of power and money and the other is the language of family, friendship, and home. In Wales, for example, everyone learns English, either at home or at school. Since Wales is, along with England and Scotland, part of the United Kingdom, that makes sense. Welsh, the ancient language of Wales, was on its way to extinction in the first part of the 20th century, since it was no longer taught in schools and English had long been the language of business and politics. but Welsh continued to be spoken by about twenty percent of the population (or about half a million people) and that number was in decline. In the 1960s, however, the people of Wales decided that they did not want to forget their ancestral language or lose themselves in a sea of Britishness. An intense effort on the part of the Welsh government, schools, and individuals secured the speaking of Welsh for at least another generation.

The language of the Tsoyaha, or Yuchi, people who once made their homes in the Southeastern United States but now live in Oklahoma is far less certain. In 2016, four elderly people spoke Yuchi as their native language. Nineteen others had learned it and could speak it as their second language. The future of the Tsoyah language remains very much in doubt.

This disappearance of languages and cultures has not been by accident but has been part of the human story of colonization and assimilation.

Enculturation, Acculturation, and Cultural Diffusion.

Culture is learned. Some creatures—lizards and snakes and fish for example—are born knowing everything they need to know in order to successfully meet their biological needs. Release a captive goldfish into the wild and, though it has been raised in an aquarium since it hatched, it will quickly settle into the business of being a goldfish in the wild—finding food, avoiding predators, and eating everything in sight.

Many other creatures have to learn the skills of survival. Wolf cubs learn how to hunt from older wolves in the pack. Mammals and birds, because they are born undeveloped and helpless, have to be taught the skills of survival if they are to survive at all. A wolf raised in captivity and released into the wild will almost certainly starve without some help from its human handlers. Humans, of course, are born almost completely helpless and dependent on adult humans to survive infancy and to learn the skills needed to thrive within a human community.

This long process of learning, which begins in early infancy and continues into adulthood, is called enculturation. We are all enculturated into the culture of our family and community. We learn the language and rituals of our families. We learn the rules—both formal and informal—for getting along. And, when we move from one culture to another—as when we leave home and go to school—we find that we must enculturate into another, somewhat different culture with different rules. If we move to another country, we must learn new rules and perhaps a new language. Enculturation can be a lifelong experience as society, and our place in it, continually changes.

Assimilation takes place when an individual, family, or entire community finds themselves immersed into a new and cultural environment—one with a different language, food ways, religious practices and beliefs, and ideas about work, play and life in general. This can happen when a group of people moves—voluntarily or not—into a new environment. Immigrants often find themselves needing to learn and re-learn all sorts of things, and often have difficulty navigating life in their new community. Gradually, however, often with help from members of their new community, the immigrants adopt the new language and adjust to the new patterns of living.

Most often, this assimilation is partial. A Hindu family from India might move to the United States or Britain, and, over time, happily adopt new styles of dress, different cuisines, and adjusts to unfamiliar patterns of work, education and play. But such assimilation is often partial. Traditions surrounding birth, marriage, religion, and death are often preserved for many generations as the family struggles to maintain at least part of its Indian cultural heritage.

Culture: Shared practices, technologies, attitudes, behaviors transmitted by a society.

Attitudes toward ethnicity, women in the workforce, ethnic neighborhoods, indigenous communities and lands.

cultural extinction

cultural relativism

Ethnocentrism

cultural landscape: combinations of physical features, agricultural, industrial practices, religious and linguistic characteristics, evidence of sequent occupancy, including traditional and post-modern architecture and land-use patterns.

Cultural Patterns:

Regional Patterns of language, religion, ethnicity, contribute to sense of place, placemaking, shape of global cultural landscape.

Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces

cultural imperialism

culture traits: food preferences, architecture, land use. . .

folk culture

popular culture

Transculturation

ethnic diffusion

ethnic identity

ethnicity

impacts of cultural diffusion

language classification 

language diffusion patterns 

religion classification 

religious diffusion patterns 

Types of diffusion

relocation diffusion

contagious diffusion

hierarchical diffusion:

Stimulus expansion diffusion: When a cultural change occurs as it spreads from its point of origin.

Historical Causes of Diffusion:

New forms of cultural expression grow out of interactions among cultural traits and global forces.

Creolization: Two or more languages converge to create a new language. Gullah represents a fusion of English and several West African languages.

Patois: A creole language that is less established, less widely used than a creole language. Calling a language a “patois” is usually uncomplimentary, suggesting that it is simply a crude form of English, French, or Spanish, and suggests that the speaker is unsophisticated. Jamaican English is often called a patois though it has the characteristics of a Creole.

Lingua Franca: A language that has become widely used as a second language by people involved in business, science, or culture. The term comes from the 18th century when French was the language of business and diplomacy in Europe and North America. English has largely surpassed French as a global lingua franca. In much of East Africa, Swahili serves as a lingua franca.

Urbanization

Globalization

Technological change, media, political forces, social and economic relations as causes of cultural change at various scales.

Communication Technologies (the internet, space-time convergence) reshape and accelerate interactions, changing cultural practices such as the increasing use of English, loss of indigenous languages, creating cultural convergence and divergence.

Diffusion of language families, dialects, religious patterns can be represented on maps, charts, toponyms and other representations.

Cultural Hearths/Religious points of origin

Religious Diffusion (world religions, missionary religions, ethnic and indigenous religions, syncretic religions)

Universalizing Religions: Expansion and Relocation Diffusion

Ethnic Religions: Found near the hearth or spread through relocation diffusion.

Diffusion and the Cultural Landscape

Acculturation

Assimilation

Syncretism

Multiculturalism