Culture

The notion of culture as a term of reference or explanatory medium is and has been a developmental concept “always in the making.” In American anthropology, two major early figures—Franz Boas from Columbia University and Alfred Kroeber from Berkeley—were significant in its early reiteration: Boas for his work on “configurations” and outlines of ideas, practices, and features, not the least of which was language, which a society maintained in “traditional” practices, and Kroeber for the idea that culture was superorganic and had little to do with individuals but determined the practices and behaviors of groups. The difference between the two was that Boas's ideas were largely framed as timeless entities while Kroeber's ideas paid great attention to history and change of the “super-organic” features over time and context.

Both stressed that culture was associated with discrete groups, each bounded by the outlines of ideas and meanings and practices that made each group different. Thus whole identities were associated with specific groups, which made cross-cultural comparisons possible. This concept influenced generations of anthropologists, and public discourse through the 1950s with few exceptions basically followed a type of Boasian or Kroberian design. Thus discreteness of whole peoples was emphasized with different traits, languages, practices, rituals, ways of making a living, and political rules and interests. This point of view became very pervasive and in different variations of the same premise—even without the use of the label “culture”—came to be used (for example, in Africa, India, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East) as the raison d'être for colonial rule and maintaining categories of persons in place with very particular group designations like “tribe,” the Maya, or the Kwakiutl.

Such separateness made for easy stereotypes and, in a nutshell, populations—in spite of their internal variability, differences, and complexity—were often turned into nonconnected, isolated, bounded, and timeless “cultures” or “societies.” In addition, a major emphasis of these early concepts was that these were integrated and functioned like clockwork with politics, social relations, ideological systems, economy, ritual, and religion all contributing in some manner to sustaining traditional values and meanings over historical time. At the same time, these were interlocking, providing the platforms from whence future generations were enculturated to take their defined places and spaces.

But in the fifties and through the present, the recognition that human populations were not isolated wholes but were in reality, even in antiquity, interdependent and connected resulted in the shifting of premises of “culture” to “cultures” in which many populations—certainly from the ancient past to the present—in reality were connected by economy, trade, invasions, polities of various sizes, migrations, and population movements due to natural disasters like earthquakes and floods.

Thus these much more complex renditions of “cultures” in which economic, political, cultural, and social links and connections from regional to transnational to world systems of relations were emphasized became more normative, especially in the period following Vietnam. Thus new studies often included ecological changes that affected where humans lived and how they managed daily survival culturally by adopting new ways of thinking and meaning as well as by adapting to changing physical circumstances and relating to different populations that they encountered.

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