Unit-6-culture.docx

第六课. Culture文化1One of the interesting things about human beings is that they try to understand themselves and their own behavior. While this has been particularly true of Europeans in recent times, there is no group which has not developed a scheme or schemes to explain mans actions. To the insistent human query “why?” the most exciting illumination anthropology has to offer is that of the concept of “culture”. Its explanatory importance is comparable to categories such as evolution in biology, gravity in physics, and disease in medicine. A good deal of human behavior can be understood, and indeed predicted, if we know a peoples design for living. Many acts are neither accidental nor due to personal peculiarities nor caused by supernatural forces nor simply mysterious. Even those of us who pride ourselves on our individualism follow most of the time a pattern not of our own making. We brush our teeth on arising. We put on pants-not a loincloth or a grass skirt. We eat three meals a day-not four or five or two. We sleep in a bed-not in a hammock or on a sheep pelt. I do not have to know the individual and his life history to be able to predict these and countless other regularities, including many in the thinking process, of all Americans who are not incarcerated in jails or hospitals for the insane.2All men undergo the same poignant life experiences such as birth, helplessness, illness, old age, and death. The biological potentialities of the species are the blocks with which cultures are built. The facts of nature also limit culture forms. No culture provides patterns for jumping over trees or for eating iron ore.3There is thus not “either-or” between nature and that special form of nurture called culture. Culture determinism is as one-side as biological determinism. The two factors are interdependent. Culture arises out of human nature, and its forms are restricted both by mans biology and by natural law. It is equally true that culture channels biological processvomiting, weeping, fainting, sneezing, the daily habits of food intake and waste elimination. When a man eats, he is reacting to an internal “drive,” namely, hunger contractions consequent upon the lowering of blood sugar, but his precise reaction to these internal stimuli cannot be predicted by physiological knowledge alone. Whether a healthy adult feels hungry twice, three times or four times a day and the hours at which this feeling recurs is a question of culture. What he eats is of course limited by availability, but is also partly regulated by culture. It is a cultural fact that a few generations ago, most Americans considered tomatoes to be poisonous and refused to eat them. Such selective, discriminative use of the environment is characteristically culture. In a still more general sense, too, the process of eating is channeled by culture. Whether a man eats to live, lives to eat, or merely eats and lives is only in part an individual matter, for there are also culture trends. Emotions are physiological events. Certain situations will evoke fear in people from any culture. But sensations of pleasure, anger, and lust may be stimulated by cultural cues that would leave unmoved someone who has been reared in a different social tradition.4I have said “culture channels biological process.” It is more accurate to say “the biological functioning of individual is modified if they have been trained in certain ways and not in others.” Culture is created and transmitted by people. However, culture, like well known concepts of the physical sciences, is a convenient abstraction. One never sees gravity. One sees bodies falling in regular ways. One never sees an electromagnetic field. Yet certain happenings that can be seen may be given a neat abstract formulation by assuming that the electromagnetic field exists. Similarly, one never sees culture as such. What is seen are regularities in the behavior or artifacts of a group that has adhered to a common tradition. The regularities are due to the existence of mental blueprints for the group.5Culture is a way of thinking, feeling, believing. It is the groups knowledge stores up (in memories of men; in books and objects) for future use. We study the products of this “mental” activity; the overt behavior, the speech and gestures and activities of people, and the tangible results of these things such as tools, houses, cornfields, and what not. It has been customary in lists of “culture traits” to include such things as watches or lawbooks. This is a convenient way of thinking about them, but in the solution of any important problem we must remember that they, in themselves, are nothing bur metals, paper, and ink. What is important is that some men know how to make them, others set a value on them, are unhappy without them, direct their activities in relation to them, or disregard them.6“culture,” then, is “a theory.” But if a theory is not contradicted by any relevant fact and if it helps us to understand a mass of otherwise chaotic facts, it is useful. Darwins contribution was much less the accumulation of new knowledge than the creation of a theory which put in order data already known. An accumulation of facts, however large, is not more a science than a pile of bricks is a house. Anthropologys demonstration that the most weird set of customs has a consistency and an order is comparable to modern psychiatrys showing that there is meaning and purpose in the apparently incoherent talk of the insane. In fact, the inability of the older psychologies and philosophies to account for the strange behavior of madmen and heathens was the principal factor that forced psychiatry and anthropology to develop theories of the unconscious and of culture.7A culture constitutes a storehouse of the pooled learning of the group. A rabbit starts life with some innate responses. He can learn from his own experiences and perhaps from observing other rabbits. A human infant is born with fewer instincts and greater plasticity. His main task is to learn the answers that persons he will never see, persons long dead, have worked out. Once he has learned the formulas supplied by the culture of his group, most of his behavior becomes almost as automatic and unthinking as if it were instinctive. There is a tremendous amount of intelligence behind the making of a radio, but not much is required to learn to turn it on.8The members of all human societies face some of the same unavoidable dilemmas, posed by biology and other facts of the human situation. This is why the basic categories of all culture are so similar. Human culture without language is unthinkable. No culture fails to provide for aesthetic expression and aesthetic delight. Every culture supplies standardized orientations toward the deeper problems, such as death,. Every culture is designed to perpetuate the group and its solidarity, to meet the demands of individuals for an orderly way of life and for satisfaction of biological needs.9However, the variations on these basic themes are numberless. Some languages are built up of twenty basic sounds, others out of forty. Each culture dissects nature according to its own system of categories.10The essence of the cultural process is selectivity. The selection is only exceptionally conscious and rational. Once, however, a way of handing a situation becomes institutionalized, there is ordinarily great resistance to change or deviation. When we speak of “our sacred beliefs.” We mean of course that they are beyond criticism and that the person who suggests modification or abandonment must be punished. No person is emotionally indifferent to his culture. Certain cultural premises may become totally out of accord with a new factual situation. Leaders may recognized this and reject the old ways in theory. Yet their emotional loyalty continues in the face of reason because of the intimate conditionings of early childhood.11A culture is learned by individuals as the result of belonging to some particular group, and it constitutes that part of learned behavior which is shared with others. It is our social legacy, as contrasted with our organic heredity. It is one of the important factors which permit us to live together in a organized society, giving us ready-made solutions to our problems, helping us to predict the behavior of others, and permitting others to know what to expect of us. 12Culture regulates our lives at every turn. From the moment we are born until we die there is whether we are conscious of it or not, constant pressure upon us to follow certain types of behavior that other men have created for us. Some paths we follow willingly, others we follow because we know no other way, still others we deviate from or go back to most unwillingly. Mothers of small children know how unnaturally most of this comes to ushow little regard we have, until we are “culturalized,” for the “proper” place, time, and manner for certain acts such as eating, excreting, sleeping, getting dirty, and making loud noses. But by more or less adhering to a system of related designs for carrying out all the acts of living, a group of men and women feel themselves linked together by a powerful chain of sentiments. Ruth Benedict gave an almost complete definition of the concept when she said, “culture is that which binds men together”.文化 Clyde Kluckhohn关于人类的一件有趣的事是他们试图理解他们自己以及他们自己的行为。虽然近来欧洲人尤其这样，实际上每一个人类群体都会建立一些研究计划来描述解释人们的活动行为。对于人们坚持的追问“为什么？”人类学家给出的最令人兴奋的解释是”文化“的概念。这个解释的重要性可以与下面那些范畴相提并论，比如生物学中的进化论，物理学中的引力概念，以及医学中的疾病概念。如果我们能够知道人们对生活的设计，那么人类的很多行为是可以被理解甚至能被预测。很多行为不是偶然发生的也不是由个人特性决定的，也不是由超自然的力量引发的，也不是完全神秘的。就算我们中间那些以个人主义为傲的人，大多数的时间也是按照一个不是由自己创造的模式来生活的。我们起床后刷牙，我们穿裤子而不是缠个腰带或穿个草裙，我们一日三餐而不是四餐五餐或两餐，我们睡在床上而不是吊床或是羊皮上。对于美国大众，除了那些被囚禁在监狱里或是精神不正常呆在医院里的，我不需要知道一个人的个性以及他的生活历史就能够预测这些以及其他无数的规律性行为，包含很多思考过程。所有的人都经历着同样深刻的人生经验，比如出生，无助，疾病苦痛，年老色衰以及生老病死。人类的生物特性是人类文化建立的砖石，自然现象也限制着文化形式，没有哪个文化能让人跳过树木或者让人以吃铁矿石为生。自然和叫做“文化“的特殊培养形式之间是没有”非此即彼“的关系。文化决定论跟生物决定论一样都是片面的，这两者是相互依存的。文化源自于人类的自然性，而且它的形式受限于人类的生物性和自然法则。真的是这样，文化引导生物过程-呕吐，哭泣，昏倒，打喷嚏，日常饮食习惯以及排便习惯。当一个人吃东西时，他是在对一个内在的”驱动力“做出反应，也就是由于低血糖产生饥饿的肠道收缩。但是他的这些对内刺激的精确反应不能仅仅由生理知识来预测。不管一个健康的成年人一天会感到饥饿二次，三次还是四次，以及这种饥饿感再次发生的时间数，就是文化问题。他所能吃的食物当然受到他所能获取的食物的限制，但是也和文化有部分关系。有些浆果是有毒的，这是一个生物事实，几辈人之前，大多数美国人认为西红柿是有毒的并拒绝食用，这是一个文化事实。象这样选择性的，带有偏见的使用环境资源是一种典型的文化现象。从更普遍的意义上来讲，也是这样，饮食过程是受文化引导的。不管一个人是为了活而吃，为了吃而活，或者仅仅是吃着并且活着，都仅仅部分上是个人问题，因为还有文化趋向性的。情绪是生理学反映，一些特定的情况会唤起来自任何文化的人们的恐惧感，但愉悦、愤怒和贪欲这些情感是受文化暗示刺激的，同样情况下那些在不同社会传统下长大的人就不会为之动容。我说过“文化引导生物过程。”更精确的说法是“如果人们受某种特定的方式训练（而不是其他方式）那么他们的个体生物功能会因此变化。”文化由人类创造并传播的，但是，正如物理科学中那些众所周知的概念一样，文化是一个方便的抽象概念。人们永远看不见引力，只能看见物体以规律性的方式掉落，人们永远看不见电磁场，但是通过假设电磁场的存在，某些能被看见的事物可以被一个灵巧的抽象公式描述。同样的，谁也没有见过文化，所看见的是依附于共同传统的那些规律性的行为或是有群体代表性的工艺品。群体的规律性是由思想蓝图的存在而决定的。文化是思考，感觉，信仰的方式，它是为未来使用所储备的某一群体的知识（储存在人的记忆中，在书里或物件中）。我们学习这些精神活动的产物，公开行为，语言，手势以及人类的活动，还有由此产生的可以处摸到的东西，如工具，房屋，玉米地等等。习惯上我们把手表，法律书这些东西都列到文化特色里，这是一个方便的方式来考虑他们，但是当解决任何重要问题的时候我们必须记住，他们本身只不过是金属，纸张，或者墨水。重要的是有的人知道怎样制造他们，有的人赋予他们价值，有的人离开他们就不开心，有的人用他们来指导自己的活动，或者漠视他们。因此“文化”还是“一个理论”，如果一个理论不与任何相关的事实产生矛盾并且能帮助我们来理解一堆其他混乱无序的想象，那么它就是有用的。如果达尔文只是将新的知识进行堆积而不是创建了能够将已知的数据有序组织的理论，他的贡献将小的多。如果只是积累实例，不管有多么多都不是科学，就如同一堆砖头不是房子一样。人类学的研究显示,最神秘风俗习都有其连贯性和秩序.这与现代精神病学的研究结果,即精神病患者明显不连贯的讲话中也有意义和目的有相同之处。事实上，旧的心理学和哲学无法理解