CHAPTER 2 THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT The culture concept. A number of anthropologists, as a result of comparative studies of many human societies, have come in recent years to use the term culture as a general name for the entire round of life activities exhibited by a group. The word is used descriptively, without any intention of conveying praise. Every group, no matter how simple or degraded it may appear to be, possesses a culture, and the culture enters into and affects almost everything that is done within the group, whether by single individuals, by aggregates of individuals, or by the entire society acting as a unit. The activities even of the simplest society are very numerous. There is the daily routine of tasks and duties, with its seasonal and other variations; there are the movements from place to place, the goings and comings for business and pleasure; there are the innumerable expressions of the feelings and emotions, and all the activities of thought, creation, and communication. All these goings on, these ways of looking at things and ways of doing them, together with the tools and devices that are required, make up the culture of a group. The term is inapplicable to but two kinds of activity which may be found in process among a given people: (1) Purely physical processes, i.e., such phenomena as storms, the falling of heavy bodies, etc., into which have entered no components of social derivation. Many physical processes, of course, are causally connected with social activities, and therefore form a part of the culture complex, as when the firing of siege guns leads to the coming of a storm (if, indeed, a storm can be caused this way), or when a lumber company fells trees. (2) Processes of purely individual origin. That there are such indiosyncratic actions seems beyond question, although they are not always easy to designate and are certainly much less numerous than we commonly believe. Efforts to retain one's balance upon stumbling, the watering of one's eyes when they are irritated by a bit of dust, drowsiness and lethargy after a long period of hard work, the need for something to eat from time to time, and other similar phenomena, however, are dependent only very indirectly upon social structures, and therefore do not seem to come characteristically under the category of culture. The distinction between processes of purely individual origin and processes affected by social components is seldom easy to make. In the matter of our metabolic requirements, for example, the general need for something to eat every now and then is clearly a purely organic matter, but the need for a particular food or for three meals a day is socially derived. The meal as we know it is a culture phenomenon peculiar to our own group, and of fairly recent origin. The household ordinances of Henry the Eighth of England, for example, provide for but two meals during the day, a dinner at ten o'clock and supper at four.1 Many primitive peoples eat when they can and as long as the food holds out. Among the islanders of the Torres Straits,2 There are two main meals in the day, one in the early morning and the other at sunset, but in addition they eat at all times of the day. There is an old saying, "Miriam and Dauar men you begin food to eat small daylight and at night (are) finishing," in other words, owing to the abundance of food, the Murray Islanders eat from sunrise to sunset or even later. A Murray Islander informed Dr. C. S. Myers, "Sun he come up, sun he go down, eat and drink all day before missionary come. Missionary he make him eat, breakfast sun there, dinner sun up there, and supper sun down there." If the purely biological components of so simple an activity as eating are difficult to determine, the situation becomes obscure to the point of rendering analysis almost impossible in the case of more complex behaviors. Who can say, for example, just how much of religion goes back to the individual considered in isolation from his group? The primary aspect of most culture traits is psychological. Although most (though possibly not all) culture traits secure a material embodiment, the most important aspect of nearly all such traits is not to be found in these material developments, but rather in the set of attitudes, conceptions, and adjustments evoked in the different members of the group. The material apparatus of a culture trait will consist of such things as natural objects, tools, instruments, machines, devices, furnitures, books, and in fact all the different kinds of manufactured and constructed articles, from the simplest to the most complex. There may be some culture traits without any such foundation, but it is beyond question that every cultural phenomenon involves some association or connection with human beings, and some alteration or adaptation of human nature. This relationship, or complex of relationships, in nearly all cases will define the culture trait and determine its importance. With much the same apparatus many different things can be done, depending on the way men are in the habit of using it. Techniques are much more important than tools. An ax, for example, is no tool at all to a man who does not know how to handle it; and axes are among the simplest of tools when compared with the instruments our culture every day puts under our control. Imagine all the machines and all the factories that collectively embody our great industrial system destroyed by an immense cataclysm which leaves, however, all the crafts, arts, skills, knowledges, and attitudes intact in the minds and muscles of those who operated it. The western world would be hard hit for a time, and extensive rearrangements would be necessary before it again got on its feet; but before long the situation would be under control, new tools would have been devised to take the place of the old, and industrialism would again be solidly established. Continuity with the past would have been maintained by the persistence of characteristic ways of thinking, acting, and feeling. There might even be great gains from such a disaster; for we can often do a thing better when we do it a second time. Certainly much of the chaos and cost of the early Industrial Revolution would be avoided in the rebirth. If the situation were reversed, however, and all the machines and factories were left standing, while the techniques and attitudes necessary to their use were subtly abstracted from men's minds and muscles, the denudation would probably be so extensive as at once to reduce us to a subhuman level. Or, if the disaster proved not so complete and overwhelming, the machines would no doubt strike our eyes merely as curious and meaningless survivals from an irrelevant past, and we should regard them somewhat as we do the Pyramids or Stonehenge, with mingled interest and wonder that men should ever have thought it worth their while to produce such eminently useless things.3 While the most important aspects of culture are psychological, the material embodiments of culture traits are by no means insignificant to an understanding of social processes. In a living culture tools will generate and extend techniques. In addition, the inert mass of material culture often offers a stubborn resistance to change long after the time has arrived when many men look forward with eagerness to a new order of things. A large part of culture works below the level of consciousness. Although the focus and nub of culture is to be found in human beings rather than in natural objects, no person can hope to have any precise conscious knowledge of more than a very small part of the whole sum of cultural forces at work in his life. A large part of every culture will be made up of unnamed and unnameable elements which are completely taken for granted (because below the threshold of recognition). Only occasionally do we catch fleeting glimpses of these subliminal cultural forces. In even the simplest situations, when we follow what seem to us the only sensible, indeed the only possible, lines of action, we are as often as not merely acting within the confines of our culture pattern. This fact no doubt in large measure accounts for the difficulty of making translations from a foreign tongue. Authors unconsciously depend on the "haloes" of words-on the fringe of unexpressed though suggested images and attitudes they evokeand these will differ widely from language to language. When we read a poem written by a member of our own group, the words, especially if we are in the habit of reading poetry, carry us beyond their immediate dictionary meanings, and create an atmosphere which is one of the chief bases of our pleasure. This atmosphere is almost entirely lacking when we read (say) a Navaho song, and the whole production is likely to seem queer, childish, bizarre, obscure. Consider the following rain songs: * (1) The corn comes up; the rain descends Nayayaie anhane I sweep it off. I sweep it off. Anhane. (2) In Tse 'gihi, In the house made of dawn, In the house made of the evening twilight, In the house made of the dark cloud, In the house made of the he-rain, In the house made of the dark mist, In the house made of the she-rain, In the house made of pollen, In the house made of grasshoppers, Where the dark mist curtains the doorway, The path to which is on the rainbow, Where the zig-zag lightning stands high on top, O male divinity! With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us. It is almost impossible to appreciate such productions without a fairly intimate acquaintance with Navaho culture. Those who have this acquaintance begin to see the poetic values embodied in these semi-ritualistic songs. Almost the only way really to translate them would be write a bulky anthropological treatise by the careful study of which one might hope to experience some of the simpler feelings they are capable of exciting in the Navaho themselves. Every group will apply certain principles of order and appropriateness to its literary productions. Chesterton has pointed out in the first of the following passages some of the things that English poets cannot easily do; while in the second another author refers to the attitude with which a certain Indian tribe approaches its poetry: 5 (1) A poet indifferent to form ought to mean a poet who did not care what form he used as long as he expressed his thoughts. He might be a rather entertaining sort; telling a smoking-room story in blank verse or writing a hunting-song in the Spenserian stanza; giving a realistic analysis of infanticide in a series of triolets; or proving the truth of Immortality in a long string of limericks. (2) In Sia songs there must be six parts, for north, south, east, west, zenith, and nadir. If a song had not six lines in a certain order, six stanzas in the same order, the Sia listening would be completely perplexed and troubled. To him the song would be unfinished; out of it he would get no aesthetic experience at all. Human needs and cultural offerings. Every culture complex contains many elements arranged in an intricate and varied pattern. This pattern of relations will always correspond fairly closely to the basic human needs discussed in the preceding chapter, as can be seen from the following classifications of (a) human needs, (b) cultural offerings. (a) A human being needs: (1) To be born, to be protected against brute annihilation, (2) To be brought to maturity, and to become acquainted teed he is bound to feel dissatisfied with his lot. |