1. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology
Chapter 2

2. Culture and a McDonald’s Happy Meal
Something as simple as the food we eat can reveal a lot about culture.
Culture is made up of shared meanings, belief systems, and knowledge. It includes shared ways of seeing and understanding the world.
Looking at culture like an anthropologist helps us see the hidden complexity in things that seem normal or obvious.
For instance, although we may consider eating as a simple biological need or natural function, the kind of food we buy, when we eat it, and who we eat with vary across cultures.
More broadly, we can think about who grows our food, who harvests it, and where and by whom it is processed to be shipped somewhere that we can buy it.
Culture underlies all of these processes.

3. Culture and a McDonald’s Happy Meal
Most iconic menu item
119 countries/68 million customers
Process and packaging – like our food fast, cheap, processed, predictable, and entertaining
Shaped by ideas of American diet (apples in response from pressure for healthier food), government regulation (Dept. of Agriculture), industrial agricultural production (water needed to produce 10 pounds of beef is equal to that used by average American family in one year), the environment (expanding cattle ranching destroys climate-cooling rainforests in Central and South America), social movements, health concerns, labor practices (young women in Chinese sweatshop factories), gender norms (which toy the child receives), and connections to workers and consumers across the globe
Costs of making a happy meal far exceed its price

4. Culture and a McDonald’s Happy Meal
Food is linked to power
Who eats and who doesn’t
11% of world population doesn’t have enough food
663 million people do not have access to clean drinking water
30% of world’s children are undernourished
Patterns of stratification and inequality
Food plays important role in cultures
Family gatherings, romantic encounters, celebratory events, religious rituals

5. What is Culture? The term “culture” has many meanings.
Often equated with distinctive traditions of different ethnic groups. Examples: Mexican mariachi music, Chinese food, or British theater.
Culture is also popularly used to denote so-called refined sensibilities. That is to say, one can be called “cultured” for enjoying classical music and the theater (in contrast to pop music and Hollywood blockbusters).
For anthropologists, culture is a very broad concept

6. What is Culture?
“Culture is a system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared and contested by a group of people.”
Our manual for understanding and interacting with the people and the world around us
Includes shared norms, values, symbols, mental maps of reality, and material objects as well as structures of power in which our understanding of the world is shaped, reinforced, and negotiated
Media, Education, Religion, politics
Much diversity – religion, region, race, gender, sexuality, class, generation, and ethnic identity
May not be accepted by everybody

7. Culture is Learned and Taught
Culture is that it is learned, not inherited
Example: adopted children from foreign countries
Enculturation – the process of learning culture
Social learning is not unique to humans, but it is the most advanced
Wolves learn hunting strategies
Whales learn to make and distinguish unique calls of their pod
Chimps teach their young to create rudimentary tools, stripping bark of twigs and inserting them into anthill to remove food/ants

8. Culture is Learned and Taught
Through formal instruction
School, religious instruction, visits to doctor, history classes, dance lessons, parents explaining to children, legal systems
Schools often form a core function of cultural education. Not only do students learn math, history, and science, but they also learn about birthday parties, national holidays, and traditional forms of celebration
Social activities with other people
Children quickly learn what is and is not acceptable in group interaction. Stealing toys, for example, quickly results in group sanctions: other children don’t want to play with you.
Rules, regulations, laws, teachers, doctors, religious leaders, police officers, and military promote and enforce what is considered appropriate behavior and thinking

9. Culture is Learned and Taught
Learned through informal instruction (may be unconscious)
Absorb culture from family, friends, and media
 All humans are equally capable of learning culture
This idea of culture being learned is contrary to older notions (often racially motivated ones) that one is born into a culture.
As culture continues to change, cultural learning and teaching becomes a lifelong activity.

10. Culture is Shared Yet Contested
Culture is inherently a shared experience and a group concept.
It is a shared experience that derives from living as a member of a group, although there may be smaller subcultures within larger cultures.
Example:
the culture of your college classroom is embedded within larger American culture.
What to wear, where to sit, when to arrive and leave, how to communicate with classmates and instructor, how to challenge authority

11. Culture is Shared and Contested
Culture is never static; it is constantly contested, negotiated, and changing
Intense debates often ensue
School curriculum, medical practices, media content, religious practices, and government policies
For example, American culture has recently been debating the topic of same-sex marriage.
In recent years, public opinion and legal opinion have made substantial movement toward a collective concept that same-sex marriage is permissible. This was not even remotely true twenty or even ten years ago.
2015 – Supreme Court rules same-sex marriage is legal in all states
The central idea here is that culture is contested.
When there are parts of it that people do not like, those parts can be changed; the act of changing a culture, however, is difficult, and can usually only be seen over long periods of time.

12. Culture is Symbolic and Material
Through enculturation, members of a culture develop a shared body of cultural knowledge and patterns of behavior
A common cultural core exists, at least among the dominant segments of a culture
Culture is structured, or created, through a variety of processes.
There are four main elements that can illuminate this process.
Norms
Values
Symbols
Mental maps

13. Norms
Norms - ideas or rules about how people should behave in particular situations or toward certain other people.
What is considered “normal” or appropriate
Examples:
what to wear to certain occasions such as funerals and weddings, work or school; what you can say in formal and informal conversations; how younger people should treat the old; who you can date;
Laws tell us what is normal and abnormal
System of medical or business ethics
Code of academic integrity

14. Norms Norms vary from group to group
Example: imposing different expectations on men and woman or children and adults
Cultural norms may be widely accepted, but they are also debated, challenged, and changed, particularly when norms enforced by dominant group oppress a minority group
Norms are constructed through regular practice; they are created by the most common actions of people within a group.
Marriage norms are a good example.
In some cultures, marriage is not a personal choice left to the whims of young people because the results are too important
Often it is two families that have arranged the marriage, not two individuals
Arranged marriage patterns are changing due to globalization
Norms may include marrying within the group (endogamy) or marrying outside of the group (exogamy).

15. Norms
Most people follow its norms, but culture change often arises from resistance to norms.
Hence the United States has seen a long-term movement toward accepting interracial (i.e., exogamous) marriages.
Looking at U.S. history, there has long been a cultural norm for marrying within one’s racial group. Some states even made laws banning interracial marriage to enforce this norm.
This cultural prejudice arose out of decades of racial segregation in the United States.
Finally in 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this prejudicial law was unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia.
Enforcing norms through: shunning, fines, imprisonment, punishment

16. Values VALUES - BACKGROUND
The United States is heavily influenced by Puritan colonists that helped to found many of the continent’s earliest settlements.
Values such as hard work and denial of pleasures were seen as worthy values.
Even to this day, many companies value workers who do not use their vacation days but instead, work straight through the year.
In other cultures, vacation is valued; it is thought that workers who take a break come back stronger and better able to do their jobs.
Values have a way of changing over time.
Not all values are shared values. Like cultural norms, there are some values that are common but not universal to a culture.

17. Values
Cultural values are the fundamental beliefs about what is important; what makes a good life; what is true, right, and beautiful.
Culture promotes a core set of values that develop out of shared history and background.
Cultural values can be debated and contested
Modesty vs public displays of affection in India
Economic growth vs environmental pollution in China
Land settlement vs peace in Middle East

18. Values America values contested and debated: privacy and security
Under what conditions should U.S. government be allowed breach privacy to listen to phone calls or unlock I-Phone (for matters of security)
Values are powerful cultural tools for clarifying cultural goals and motivating people to action
When enshrined in laws, values can become powerful political and economic tools
Values can be so important that some people are willing to kill or die for them

19. Symbols
Cultures include complex systems of symbols and symbolic actions – in realms such as language, art, religion, politics, and economics – that convey meaning to others
Cultural norms and values are often expressed through symbols, particularly when we consider that even language is a symbol.
Symbol - anything that represents something else.
Language is the ultimate tool for symbolic communication of cultural norms and values.
Language enables humans to communicate abstract ideas through the symbols of written and spoken words, as well as unspoken sounds and gestures
Shake hands, wave, whistle, nod, smile, give two thumbs up, thumbs down, middle finger
Much symbolic communication is nonverbal, action-based, and unconscious
Koran, Torah, the Christian cross, holy water, statues of Buddha – all carry greater meanings and value that the material they are constructed from
Flags

20. Mental Maps of Reality Symbols are connected to Mental Maps
Mental maps of reality are cultural classifications of what kinds of people and things exist, and the assignment of meaning to those classifications.
World presents us with overwhelming quantities of data (can’t focus on all the details) (Example: classroom)
Represent people’s attempt to make sense of the world around them by organizing them into understandable categories.
Are not fixed; they can be challenged and redrawn, especially with globalization
Mental maps are shaped through enculturation and heavily influenced by cultural constructs.
Norms and values influence what we think is important, and symbols suggest how we encode information.
We are products of our culture

21. Mental Maps of Reality
To emphasize the cultural nature of mental maps of the world, we can look at concepts of time.
Divided into centuries, decades, years, seasons, months, weeks, hours, minutes, morning, afternoon
Categories of time are thought of as scientific, universal, and natural
The clocks that we live our lives by create arbitrary structures.
The structure of twenty-four hours, sixty minutes to an hour, sixty seconds to a minute. There is no reason we could not divide the day differently.
Time units are an inherited cultural tradition.
Calendar – Gregorian replaced Julian calendar in 1756 in America
The Gregorian calendar (i.e., the January to December calendar that you use) is a relatively recent construct in the world (only 500 years old).

22. How has the Concept of Culture Developed in Anthropology?
Culture – Edward Tyler – Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society
It is a unified and complex set of ideas and behavior learned over tie, passed down from generation to generation, and shared by members of a particular group
Culture is such a broad concept that it has given rise to many debates within anthropology.
Debates:
How to define culture
How it should be understood and studied
How we should describe culture

23. Early Evolutionary Frameworks
The earliest anthropologists, such as E.B. Tylor (1832–1917) and his colleagues James Frazer (1854–1941) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), primarily subscribed to an evolutionary model of culture.
Armchair anthropologists – did not see cultures first-hand; developed theory based on other first-hand accounts (missionaries, military, explorers – motives for writing influenced their accounts)
Late 1800s - these scholars were heavily influenced by Charles Darwin and his new book On the Origin of Species.
Evolutionary theory was very popular and was broadly adopted in a variety of different disciplines.

24. Early Evolutionary Frameworks
Early European anthropologists noted that many cultures that had been encountered around the world were less technologically and socially complex
Began to argue for an evolutionary sequence in culture. They saw less complex cultures as “less evolved.”
Morgan and Tyler developed an evolutionary typology.
He classified cultures as belonging to one of three different stages of evolution:
savagery,
barbarianism,
civilized
Unilineal Cultural Evolution – theory that all cultures naturally evolve through the same sequence of stages from simple to complex
Setting aside the ETHNOCENTRISM of referring to other cultures as savages, anthropologists began to argue that the data simply did not fit this simple evolutionary concept.

25. American Historical Particularism
In the United States, the reaction against evolutionary frameworks was led by the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942).
Believed cultures arise from different causes, not uniform processes; must study the history of each culture to see how it developed
Outside of anthropology, Boas is best remembered for his work fighting against the racial stereotype that Eastern European immigrants faced in the United States.
His research with children of European immigrants revealed the remarkable effects of culture and environment on their physical forms, challenging the role of biology as a tool for discrimination
His work highlighted the dangers of racial stereotyping, challenged white supremacy, the inferior ranking of non-European people, and other expressions of racism
Boas argued that evolutionary frameworks for culture were narrow and restrictive, thus not the true picture of how a culture developed; it was ETHNOCENTRIC
He founded a school of historical particularism.

26. American Historical Particularism
Boas argued that in order to understand a culture, you needed to learn about its particular (i.e., unique) history. This idea, historical particularism, argues that cultures develop in specific ways because of their unique histories.
This argument helped to explain differences between the many Native American cultures. It also helped to achieve a measure of equality for European immigrants.
As a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Boas helped to train the subsequent generation of anthropologists. Thus his influence extended far down the line.
Perhaps the most famous of Boas’s students is Margaret Mead. Mead carried on the torch of historical particularism in her study “Coming of Age in Samoa.”

27. British Structural Functionalism

28. Culture and Meaning

29. Culture and Meaning

30. How are Culture and Power Related?

31. Power and Cultural Institutions

32. Hegemony

33. Human Agency

34. Nature versus Nurture