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Anatomy of Culture
by Alexandre Kimenyi
Culture is the subject of inquiry of different disciplines such as anthropology,
sociology, linguistics, economics, geography, psychology, history, philosophy,
and political science. Each discipline has its own definition. This is not a
ground-breaking essay on the subject of culture, nor is it reinventing the wheels
since culture is the most studied subject in all academic fields. It only offers
a new look, perspective and interpretation. The views that are expressed in
the present article are based on my own studies but they are also supported
by data. Culture is not an abstraction. Thus any assumptions, presuppositions
about culture to be valid, have to undergo the scrutiny of empirical investigation.
The goal of this article is not only to present a fresh look but also to renew
a high level debate on the subject and to show its importance especially in
social sciences and more importantly for students of ethnic studies.
1. Explaining the title of the essay
The two nouns which make up the title of this essay are metaphors. Although
anatomy is recognizable as a dead metaphor from biology, very few people are
aware of the fact that culture is a metaphor as well. It has been part of the
unconscous mind. Etymologically, it comes from Romance languages as a conceptual
metaphor from plantation , meaning 'cultivation'. In French, a learned person
is called " cultivée " cultivated. The word culture falls thus
in the general category of visual metaphors, in which light is used as the embodiment
of knowledge and lack of it as ignorance as shown in Kimenyi (2003). A non-cultivated
area such as a forest lacks light whereas a cultivated area does. Hence the
expression " It is a jungle out there " meaning total darkness, thus
ignorance. Synonymous conceptual metaphors are journey metaphors, as "
advanced " versus " backward " or " retrograde ", food
metaphors , such as " seasoned " versus " raw" or tectile
metaphors such as " polished " versus " rough ". The onomatopeic
word " barbarians " which etymologically means people who speak an
incomprehensible language was extended to mean people " without culture
" because they do things differently. The name Berber which refers to the
indigenous people of Northern Africa who waged many wars with both Greeks and
Romans is clearly a phonetic variation of " barbare " .
Some social scientists equate culture with civilization which implies a people
or society that have made a specific and significant contributation to humanity
in science, technology, arts, religion and ideas. It is the reason why for instance,
the Southeast Native American groups namely Cherokees, Choctaws, Chicasaws,
Creeks and Seminoles were labeled the Five Civilized Nations by the first European
settlers when other groups were called savages and primitive. The new settlers
were impressed by this Native American group because they were advanced in agriculture
and had everything Europeans wanted namely tobacco, cotton, indigo and corn.
This group was , unfortunately the first one to be affected by the 1830 Removal
Act which is responsible for the creation of Indian reservations that inspired
the building of " bantustans " or " homelands " for blacks
in South Africa by the white apartheid regime. The journey to the new territory
is referred to, in history books, as the Trail of Tears because thousands of
people : children, old people, thesick , pregnant women, who were forced to
walk on foot thousands of miles under harsh conditions to the Indian Territory,
the present-day Oklahoma, died along the way , before reaching their destination.
This etymological definition of culture is not only eurocentric and elitist
but wrong. There is no society without culture. Even today, there are still
some scientists who stubbornly continue to call African languages, American
Indian languages and Asian languages, dialects, their ethnic groups tribesmen
, rebel leaders in developing countries, war lords and tradional healers, witch
doctors. These labels are used because of eurocentrism. Those who use these
expressions believe that their respective cultures are not as advanc ed as the
Western culture. In the former African Belgian colonies, for instance, Africans
who were educated in European schools were called " evolués ",
evolved in the Darwinian sense and the rest indigènes, indigenous, a
term which had a negative connotation that time. There is no primitive language,
however. All languages have rules and all have dialects, which are either regional,
socio-economical or ethnic. The so called high culture and low culture are also
found in all hierachical societies of both city-states and nation-states.
The anatomy metaphor is used to illustrate that eventhough it is abstract,
culture like the human body, is indeed biological and can also be dissected
and analyzed to study its structure which consists of components with their
respective formal and functional properties.
2. The importance of culture
Culture is a very important driving force. It is the reason why , together
with space , it is the major cause of conflict in all pluralistic societies
and colonized countries. The dominant group not only removes the minority from
the most desirable space and creates spatial segregation but it also always
imposes its culture on subordinate groups and occupied territories. The minorities
resist the assimilation because they consider their culture not only as their
character, personality and identity but mostly as their " soul ".
It is the reason why even here in the United States, against all odds the Amish
culture of Pennsylvania and the black Gullah or Geeche culture of South Carolina
have been able to survive. The cultural conflict also exists at the global level.
The cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States which have fought
in proxy developing countries was largely ideological. The US and European military
interventions in Asia and the Middle East as well as the treatment of people
in the Middle East in the West have prompted scholars to coin the terms Orientalism
and Occidentalism. Orientalism was created by the late Columbia University Professor
Edwald Said to refer to the negative stereotypes that Europeans have of Asians
and Occidentalism was conceived by Ian Buruma and Margalit Avishal (2004) to
refer to the caricatural view that people have of Europe which is seen as materialistic,
spiritually wanting and morally bankrupt. Culture is a collective behavior,
a code of conduct or societal attitudes.
3. Components of Culture
All cultures consist of concepts, values, customs, systems, icons, symbols,
rituals, aesthetics and entertainment. What makes cultures distinct from each
other is either the maximization or the variation of the properties of these
components.
3. 1. Concepts
Concepts have to do with how we conceive and perceive both physical and metaphysical
phenomena. Depending on our cultural background the same " reality "
may be perceived or coinceived differently or may not be perceived and conceived
at all. For instance, eventhough death is universal, there are societies in
which it is viewed as the end of life but there are others where it is seen
as the beginning of life.The concept of beauty not only varies from culture
to culture but also shifts from generation to generation. Natural gaps between
teeth and black gum are signs of beauty in Rwanda but in the US gaps have to
be filled. Fat is seen today as a sign of poverty and bad eating habits and
slimmess as a symbol of wealth and aristocracy, but it used to be the opposite.
Time also has been found to be conceived differently. Among Anglo-Saxons, time
is objectiv e, unidirectional and seen as a commodity, hence the saying "
Time is money ". It has very much affected their lives. Among the Latins
(French, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards) time can be subjective as demonstrated
by their languages : thus morning is either le matin or la matinée, day
is le jour or la journée, evening le soir or la soirée, year l'an
or l'année. The masculine form shown by the article le is objective whereas
the feminine form marked by the article la is subjective. Among Rwandans, however,
and some other Bantu groups, time is both phenomenological and cyclical. It
is phenomenological because it is produced by events and activities. If the
events that produce it such as change of seasons, sunset, sunrise, moonlight,
etc. fail to materialize, time doesn't take place either. This is seen in the
language use, thus hour is " watch " isáahá, month is
" moon " ukwéezi , year " crop " umwáaka and
a political regime " drum " ingoma.These temporal expressions are
metonymically related to the meanings of the primary plane of expression. A
watch is used to show the time, a new month is shown by a new moon in the sky,
crops are planted once a year and traditionally before colonialism the symbol
of authority was the drum during the monarchy. Time is also elastic. It can
be short or long depending on the length of the event. Among the Bantu time
is also cyclical. It comes back. For instance, " soon " is seen as
" recently ", " tomorrow " as " yesterday " and
" distant future " as " far past ". The expression for "
soon " and " recently " is the same in Kinyarwanda vuba , for
" tomorrow " and " yesterday " it is ejo, whereas "
the distant future " and "the far past " it is kera.
That people don't see or understand the same reality the same way even in the
same culture is demonstrated by language use. Thus a city may be seen as "
sitting ", " standing ", " lying ", " spreading
", " stretching ", " sprawling ", " rolling ".
In all cultures, all people also intuitively know that the same reality may
be seen and understood differently. This is again shown by linguistic expressions
such as …to see through the lens of or the prism of /to see with the eyes
of/front the point of view of/from the vintage point/or to see the bottle half-full
or half-empty, or to a hammer everything looks like a nail.
The classical example mentioned in anthropological linguistics literature about
differences in cultural perceptions and conceptions , although some scientists
think it is a hoax, is the concept of snow in Eskimo (Inuit-Aleut). Apparently,
the Inuit-Aleut have an analytic view rather than a synthetic view of snow.
Twelve terms are used to refer to different types of snow whereas English uses
one word to refer to all of them.
3. 2. Values
Values are things that matter for the society and play a very important role
in its members' behavior. They are not innate and don't have any intrinsic value.
Like many other components of culture , they are conventional because what is
important for one culture may not have any value whatoever in other societies.
In the Western culture , for instance, flowers , especially roses, are very
much valued. They have inspired great poets and painters. Flowers are appreciated
as presents by girls and women from their lovers. Some cultures don't understand
why people would be excited by flowers as presents when they can be picked up
for free from the bush. In Rwanda, on the other hand, the great present that
people give to the ones they love, admire, or are grateful to is a cow. During
the monarchy, cows were given as gifts to visiting heads of states, and there
were both military and cow parades everywhere in all regions when the king was
touring the country. This cow parade called kubyukurutsa still takes place at
weddings.
It is not flowers that inspire artists but cows. For instance, pastoral poetry
(cow praise-poems) called amazina y'inka in Kinyarwanda ranks first among the
three traditional elite poetic genres. The other two are dynastic poetry (praise-poems
for kings) ibisigo and panegyric poetry (praise-poems for national heroes and
great warriors) ibyivugo. Female folk dances imitate the cow's elegance and
its beautiful long horns. Not only are cow songs a genre of folk music that
are sung by herders when they take them to graze, to drink or in the evening
when they return home, but are also motifs in other music folk genres and modern
music as well. The popular stone game, called igisoro, which some people call
the African chess game consists of capturing the adversary's cows (game stones)
and children have cow dolls.
The cow is the icon par excellence of the Rwandan society. It is seen as the
quintessential paradigm of beauty, elegance and grace. In the Rwandan culture
it is thus a great complement to tell a woman that she has cows' eyes or walks
like a cow.
The cow has been integrated into the whole culture. It has also affected the
language. Many Rwandan names are related to cows, people swear by the name of
the person from whom they received cows, greeting expressions are about cows
and many metaphors come from cow vocabulary. The cow plays in Rwanda the same
role that the buffalo did among Great Plains Indian (Sioux, Cheyene, Comanche,
Kiowa, Apache, Blackfeet, Osage, Arapaho, Crow, Ojibwa, Omaha, Hidatsa, Wichita,
Pawnee, etc). There is a symbiotic relationship betrween cows and Rwandans.
It is a gift to them from the country's founding father, Gihanga, who the legend
says created both cows and drums (Gihanga cyahanze inka n'ingoma). Everything
from the cow whether it is its product, waste, body part , has a use and value.
Nothing from the cow is wasted.
In the Western culture youth is prized and celebrated and old people feel good
when they are told that they look young. In other cultures, however, it would
be an insult to call an adult young, since old age is respected as a sign of
experience and wisdom.
Individualism and mobility are some of the main characteristics of American
culture and are very much idealized. People don't owe any loyalty to any place
or institution. Americans can change jobs, religions, political parties any
time they want. They can move from one city to another or from one state to
another state. A house is not a home but a piece of real estate that can be
sold any time when its value has gone up. People here can marry or divorce many
times, choose not to marry or have children. In other societies, however, the
community comes first. For this reason, the mobility found in the United States
is inexistent, because of the loyalty to one's birth of place, employer and
other institutions. If I have turned down job offers from other universities
with better pay and I have been teaching at the same university for more than
a quarter of a century it is because of my culture which has followed me. I
would feel guilty if I left.
3. 3. Customs and traditions
Customs are recurrent activities or events in which actions, actors and stages
are predictable.. Greetings, eatings, naming ceremonies , dating systems, weddings,
funerals, rite of passage are examples of customs. Eating habits are part of
the customs. The society decides how many meals are eaten a day and what is
eaten at each meal. The naming system differs from culture to culture. In some
societies, naming ceremonies take place several days after the baby is born.
Th Some cultures give only one name. In others, there are two names, the first
name and the last name whereas Americans have a first name, a middle name and
a last name. Europeans and Americans think that Alexandre is my first name and
Kimenyi is my last name. In Rwanda we don't have the concept of first name and
last or family name. We just have a name. Everybody has his or her own name.
Children have their individual names. Wives don't take their husbands' names.
Those who become Christians, however, get a Christian name when they get baptized.
It is embarrassing to me when my wife's students and friends call me Mr. Mukantabana.
They assume that Mathilde is her first name and Mukantabana is my name. But
Mukantabana is clearly a female name for Kinyarwanda speakers because of the
onomastic prefix muka- found in many female names. There are , ofcourse, some
Westernized Rwandans who have adopted the European system but they are still
a minority. I got the name Alexandre when I started school, because to be admitted
everybody had to get a European name since all the schools belonged to the European
missionaries. Since in the American customs names are monosyllabic, such Joe
for Joseph, Dick for Richard, Bob for Robert, Fred for Frederick, Greg for Gregory,
Ted for Edward, Bill or Will for William, Tom for Thomas…those who think
that Alexandre is my first call me Alex whereas others call me Kim.
3. 4. Systems
Systems, institutions or societal organizations are the pillars on which the
society is built. Some of these institutions are the family structure, government
system, economy, justice, religion, and education.
Family structure
Families in various societies are either nuclear or extended, patriarchal or
matriarchal. For a family to be nuclear or extended seems to be dictated by
economics. During the agricultural period and the industrial revolution, America
had an extended family system, because of the share of labor for each member
of the family. In the computer age, however, any individual can be self-sufficient.
Because of this, the size of the family has shrunk and many single families
with single mothers or single fathers have increased exponentially.
In patriarchal societies, the father is the head of the family, children receive
the last name of the father, boys are the ones who inherit the family property
and in case of divorce, the wife goes back to her parents. A matriarchal system
is the mirror image of the former, the children get the mother's last name,
only girls inherit the family property, in the case of divorce, the husband
is sent back to his parents but the head of the family in many cases that have
been reported so far is not the mother but one of her brothers.
The family structure in some cultures dictates the rules of exogamy and endogamy.
In the Middle East, for instance, people marry parallel cousins (father's brother's
child) whereas in others it is cross cousins (father's sister's child or mother's
brother's child).
Economy
Economy has to do with wealth production and distribution and ownership.
The society decides who should participate in the work force, what and how much
should be produced. These policies are the ones which are responsible for the
existence of subsistence economies and consumer economies, capitalist economies
like the United States and welfare states like Western Europe and Canada. In
some societies, the land belongs to the state or the community like in many
African, Asian and American Indian nations before colonialism , in others it
belongs to the aristocracy, the landlords, like in Medieval Europe. It is unthinkable
and uncomprensible in many societies how an individual can own a river, a lake,
a forest or an island. They believe that like the sun, the moon, the sky, and
the air, all natural resources should be public.
The 1887 Indian Allotment Act also known as the Dawes Act was detrimental to
Native Americans. Not only did it steal 90 million acres from them from the
138 previously allocated , but did it destroy their culture as well. By giving
164 acres to one family, the extended family structure was destroyed and so
was the community because what united them was the communal property, the sharing
of space and their traditional leaders.
Government
All societies, besides hunter-gather and nomadic ones, have a system of government.
It can be the council of elders, monarchy, theocracy, plutocracy, gerontocracy,
etc. The monarchy can be constitutional or absolute.A republic can a presidential
system like the US and France or parliamentary system like the majority of European
countries. Democratic governments also differ from one another . They can be
ethnic democraties, liberal democraties, consociative democraties. The concept
of federal government applied here in the United States and which European countries
have started adopting was borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy also known
as the League of Six Nations, namely Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida
and Tuscarora. The reason why there is political instability in many developing
nations, it is because of the importation or the experimentation of alien systems
of government by the Western-educated elite in which the majority of the people
especially the traditional wise elders don't have a voice.
A new term, kleptocracy, has been recently introduced to refer to some of
the regimes of corrupt leaders such as the late dictator of the Democratic Republic
of Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Marcos of the Philippines,
Charles Taylor of Liberia, because these leaders are more interested in stealing
their countries' resources than managing them for the interest of the people.
Justice
To survice and keep a social balance and harmony, all societies have a system
of law and order. Some societies put more emphasis on the protection of community
rights than on individual rights.
Each society defines what is a crime and implements its own system of handling
these crimes.
Some African countries are undergoing turmoil because of the conflict between
the application of Western law brought in during colonialism, the traditional
legal system and Islamic law, called Shariah. In the United States, many immigrants
find themselves in legal trouble when they try to use the system of their home
country to punish their children.
" It takes a whole village to raise a child " is not a slogan in Africa.
Any adult who is not related to the child can reprimand a child, spank him/her
or use any other means if s/he misbehaving or doing things which are not acceptable.
The Rwandan government is going back to the tradional justice system called
gacaca , which handled petty crimes, to judge Hutu responsible of genocide.
The outcome of this system which, in a sense looks like the American jury system,
was always reconciliation. Survivors of genocide , however, see the reintroduction
of gacaca as a travesty of justice by the government because traditionally it
dealt with small problems existing between neighbors whereas murders were handled
by the Royal Court, because all Rwandans considered themselves rubanda rw'umwami,
the king's people.
When the Southwest was taken from Mexico after its defeat in the 1846-48 American-Mexican
war by the United States after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
in 1848, Mexicans living in those territories lost their properties to the Anglos
and the US government because of the Anglo-Saxon law which required titles and
property taxes for all owners of businesses, houses, land and ranches. This
is how important individuals of that time such Salvador Vallejo of Napa and
the Swiss-born immigrant John Augustus Sutter got ruined.
Religion
All societies have their own religions and spiritual values. Many African religions,
for instance, have the same concept of God as Christians do. They are monotheistic.
God is conceived as transcendent, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. The
only difference is how they relate to him and the fact they respect other people's
religions, practice ancestor worship and don't try to prosetylize. To European
missionnaries, however, these religions are not religions but paganism. In many
cases, messianic religions in their holy wars, evangilizing and proselytizing,
have done more harm than good, by prosecuting those who don't believe in their
dogmas or refuse to convert to their religions.
Education
The educational system is there to maintain the society's values and the status
quo. Many European countries practice an elitist education, meaning that many
students fail to go to high school or the university. These educational systems
are mostly by-products of economics. The governments make sure that those who
graduate have jobs. The US has a similar system. Since agriculture is done by
Mexicans and migrant workers, children of migrant workers end up becoming migrant
workers as well, thus creating a caste system , because they cannot attend regular
schools which would allow them both socio-economical vertical and horizontal
mobility.
People who rule the US such a senators, CEOs of big companies, university presidents
come the elite universities, mostly private ones such as Stanford, the university
of Chicago or Ivy League schools. In France, however, public schools are more
prestigious and the majority of important personalities are graduates of Les
Grandes Ecoles.
Although he meant well, as recounted in the video In the White Man's Image,
Richard Henry Pratt is also responsible for the destruction of Native Americans'
culture by forcibly taking children from their parents to the Carlisle Indian
School thus missing their parents' education. The 1934 Indian Reorganization
Act was too late since separating children from parents had created a new generation
of Indians who were alienated , unable to live either in the White world or
the Indian world because they had lost their language and culture.
3. 5. Icons
All societies have objects or people that everybody identifies with which become
a unifying factor. They can be national heroes , religious leaders, intellectuals,
or pop stars such as athletes, musicians, actors, and products. Landmarks such
as rivers, mountains,and cities and monuments, even buildings can be icons as
well. Examples of rivers which hav e become icons are for instance, the Mississippi
river for Americans, the Seine for French, the Nile for Egyptians, the Yangtze
for Chinese, Nyabarongo for Rwandans. Examples of mountains are Mount Shasta
for Shasta Indians, Wintu, Tolowa, Karok, Yurok, Hupa, Chilula, Whilikut, Wiyot,
Chimariko, and others, Mount Kenya for the Kikuyu and Mount Kilimanjaro for
Tanzanians. The Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower are examples of monuments
which are icons for Americans and French respectively. The Taj Mahah, in Agra,
is not only a tourist attraction but the national icon of India. McDonalds,
Coca-Cola , etc. are icons of the United States abroad. Not only do these icons
inspire artists but they are part of collective heritage.
One of the major sources of conflicts between Native Americans and the US government
is that the government is destroying these icons or desacreting important landmarks
such burial sites, or sacred areas.
3. 6. Symbols
Symbols are objects which have a conventional meaning for a society. In semiotics,
however, the science of signs in general, linguistic and non-linguistic , it
has a specific meaning. A symbol means a sign whose relationship with the object
it stands for has become opaque.
There are two semiotic systems depending on how much information they can convey
: namely macrosemiotic sytems or speech surrogates and microsemiotic systems.
Microsemiotic systems such as uniforms, body wear, highway code, …give
a very much limited information such as profession, gender, religion or age
for the uniform, social status for bodywear, and driving information for the
latter. Macrosemiotic systems such as language, writing, sign language …
don't have any constraints on what can be communicated. It is the reason why
sign language was the lingua franca of Great Plains Indians, since coming from
many different linguistic backgrounds, it was the only way they could communicate.
Semiotics classifies signs defined as " something which stands for something
else " into three categories, namely icons, indices and symbols. Icons
which are either images, metaphors, and diagrams have a similarity either physical
or functional with objects they stand for. Indices namely signals and symptons
have an association with the objects they refer to such as cause and effect,
content and container, possession and possessor, part and whole, product and
producer, whereas symbols as said earlier fail to show any connection with their
referrents. Like linguistic signs, the majority of signs in all cultures belong
to the last category . The majority of words are symbols. Their etymological
history shows, however, that they initially started as either icons or indices.
It is the same for non-linguistic communication systems as well. We are born
in a society with symbols without any knowledge of their genesis and history.
Whether these signs are icons, indices or symbols, however, they all can be
polysemous or homonymous and this shows clearly that they are conventional.
Homonymy, the use of signs which look alike but have different meanings or functions
occur by accident. Polysemy, the use of the same sign for different meanings
or functions is very common because of the asymmetry which exists between symbols
and the real world. The real world is infinite but the number of signs is very
much limited. Within the same culture, the same object can be assigned different
meanings or functions such as the ring in the Western culture but it is also
possible for two or many objects which look similar but are not related to function
as symbols. This is referred to as homonymy. The cross, for instance, may show
that somebody is a Christian but it is also a luxury jewerly for others.
The society thus decides which objects will be used as symbols. Uniforms, headwear,
chestwear, bracelets, medals can give information about profession, religion,
social status. In Rwanda for instance, before colonization , married women and
unmarried women dressed differently and had a different hair style. Mothers
also, in formal ceremonies, have to wear a maternity crown called urugore. Symbols
may be icons of companies or organizations such as logos and mascots for schools
and sports teams. There are national symbols as well. Before the late nineteeth
century partition of Africa by European powers at the Berlin Conference, many
countries had drums with specific names as national emblems instead of flags
as in Europe. The capture of these drums was also a national defeat.
Although symbols seem to be arbitrary, anthropologists have found out that
totems are not. Clans in all societies are characterized by the existence of
totems and taboos. Clans are still found in Africa, Asia and among Native Americans.
I belong to the Abazirankende clan and our totem is inyamanza, a wagtail. The
majority of totems happen to be plants and animals. Totems grew out of the necessity
to protect the environment, explain the experts The clan whose totem is a certain
plant or animal is assured protection. The animal totem cannot be killed by
the clan and the plant cannot be cut down either.
3. 7. Rituals
Like symbols, rituals also have conventional meanings. They differ from the
former in that symbols are objects sometimes frozen in space and time whereas
the latter are actions or activities. They usually accompany customs and ceremonies
like greetings, eating, weddings, funerals, the rite passage, the transfer of
power, naming ceremonies, farewell, etc. Libation in Africa to thank the ancestors
at all important ceremonies, the 21-gun salute for visiting foreign dignataries
in the Western culture, the Japanese tea ceremony , the Ethiopian coffee ceremony,
, the breaking of kola nuts among the Igbos of Nigeria and the Wolof of Senegal
in various ceremonies , or in time of war the tying of yellow ribbons in the
United States and the wearing of the leaf from the plant impumbya by Rwandan
women are examples of rituals
3. 8. Entertainment
To survive, members of the society are busy, each, depending on age, gender,
or experience assigned a specific task. For a better performance , time for
leisure and relaxation is also put aside. For instance, in France, people work
35 hours instead of 40 hours like here in the United States.The society decides
the number of work days a week and how many hours people have to work. The American
concept of weekend is now being adopted by many countries.. In Europe, it used
to be half-days. The work would stop at noon on both Wesndays and Saturdays.
In France and Italy, for instance, all activites including banks, schools, hospitals,
… stop for lunch and nap from twelve to two in the afternoon. I made a
mistake once of going to Paris in the month of August. Many businesses including
hotels and restaurants were closed for a month because everybody had gone on
vacation!
It is the society which also decides how its members are going to kill the
time during this period of relaxation and which games and sports to play. It
is the reason why some games and sports such as soccer, cockfighting, bullfighting,
cricket, rugby, hockey, are popular in some countries but not in others. In
Japan , sumo wrestlers are treated like Hollywood movie stars, but the late
satirist Mike Royko compared sumo wrestler stars with fat babies wearing diapers.
When Americans talk about the " world series ", non Americans get
confused because they are expecting a real world competition and not about US
baseball teams.
There is a ranking and hierarchy in sports and games as well. If African-Americans
outnumber whites in football, basketball and boxing, it is not because of their
ethnicity which makes them superior athletes but because of the deliberate decision
of the establishment. Even in Ancient Rome, entertaining sporting events such
as the gladiators were performed by slaves. Elite sports and games such as golf,
tennis, horse riding, car racing, swimming, pheasant hunting, chess … are
the monopoly of the elite.
3. 9. Aesthetics
All societies express their aesthetic experiences through the same mediums
and genres. These are visual (paintings, sculpture, decoration, graphics, photography,
ceramics) , aural (music, poetry), kinetic (dancing and gymastics ), multimedia
(theater, cinema, opera). Each culture maximizes or selects these genres found
in the different mediums. It also ranks which ones are more important. In the
visual arts, for instance, calligraphy is very highly valued in both Islamic
and Japanese art. In Rwanda it is decoration whereas in West Africa it is masks
and figurines. In paintings and decorations, some socities prefer certain colors
and certain shapes. The appreciation of musical melodies differs from culture
to culture even musical instruments. The piano is the instrument of choice in
the Western culture, but in Rwanda it is the cithare inanga.
The tastes in rhythm, movement, body parts in dancing performance are also culturally
conditioned. The Middle East is the birth place of belly dancing. In Ethiopia,
dancing consists of lifting and moving shoulders. Among the Banyankore, women
dance while sitting. Among the Maasai dancing consists of jumping rhythmically
as high as they can without moving any other parts of the body. Congolese dance
moving hips whereas Rwandan women dance with their arms arched like horns of
Tutsi cows.
Visual arts of non-Western countries are collectively referred to as craft
and other genres such as music, dance, poetry, oral literature … as folklore.
These artistic objects are not considered as art because they are utilitarian,
their creators are not known, and are not housed in museums and galleries. To
consider them as craft, however, is a manifestation not only of lack of knowledge
of local cultures and history but what true art is as well. In Africa, both
high art and folk art existed before colonialism. Individual painters and sculptors
were known and their work was sometimes commissioned by the king or the chiefs.
Although literature was oral, there was a distinction also between elite literature
namely court literature in Rwanda and folk literature. These composers, poets,
singers, were also known by everybody in the country. The griots in West Africa
in the countries of Mali, Guinea, Senegal and Gambia, who were poets, story
tellers, oral historians belonged to this high culture and still do.
Art is an aesthetic experience that the artist tries to share with the community
through creation using any of the mediums of expression. The perfect art is
the one which is able to bring the three types of pleasure : sensual pleasure,
intellectual pleasure and spiritual pleasure. So, whether the object is utilitarian,
the author is anonymous, or is not housed in the museum, doesn't not matter,
as long as the target consumers like it.
Because of other cultural contacts and new experiences aesthetics in all cultures
always keeps changing as shown by the influence of raggae and rap on world music
today or the history of Western visual arts, which from the 16 the century went
through the Italian Renaissance, Classism, Baroque, Rococco, Dutch art, Romanticism,
Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Minimalism, etc.
It is interesting to note that these universal cultural components are also
found in animals' cultures. All species have their symbols to commmunicate information,
they have their own rituals and their social organization is similar to that
of humans. Some animals are monogamous whereas others are polygamous. Some are
patriarchal when others like the bonobos of Congo are matriarchal. Some practice
endogamy while others practice exogamy. The only difference between the two
species is probably the last component. Are they capabable of sharing their
aesthetic experience through visual, aural, kinetic and multimedia creativity?
This is what I think should be the first priority of scientists to find out.
Research in further cultural studies should also shed more light on why the
Batwa and Pygmies of Central Africa and Gypsies (Bohemians) of Europe are natural
born artists.
4. Nature and nurture
The debate as to whether culture is natural, thus innate, being part of our
biological make-up or whether it is man-made, manufactured by societies has
not been settled yet. The proponents of culture as nurture advance five main
arguments to support their view : (a) culture is not connected to language,
race or ethnicity; (b) some aspects of culture are arbitrary, (c) there exist
societies with evidence of clearly manufactured cultures, (d) some individuals
find their culture to be unnatural and exile themselves to societies which have
cultures in which they feel less alienated and (e) finally, culture is learned.
In Central Africa, for instance, the Pygmies and the Batwa don't have a language
of their own but speak languages of the Bantu groups with whom they live. Here
in the United States, African Americans are Anglo-Saxon culturally and linguistically.
Arbitrariness of culture is used in Saussurian sense to mean conventional. This
arbitrariness is not only limited to symbols and rituals but to all components
of the society as the section on cultural components shows. The society abritrarily
decides what is important for its members. This is indeed supported by the fact
that what is important and meaningful for one culture may not mean anything
in other cultures. Even body gestures such as finger pointing, handshaking,
head bowing , head shaking, head scratching, shoulder shrugging, throat clearing,
whistling, which are universal and seem to be instinctive and natural don't
have the same meanings in all societies.
Pidgins and creoles found mostly on coasts and islands are also recent phenomena
, thus hybrids of languages and cultures of new immigrants who come from different
linguistic backgrounds. It is also true that counterculture movements and intergenerational
conflicts exist in all societies and migration has been occuring since times
immemorial not only to run away from bad economies but also from oppressive
regimes and oppressive cultures as well. That culture is learned from both informal
and formal education is also a fact. Abandoned wild children have never acquired
neither culture or language.
This has pushed behaviorarists led by B.E. Skinner to claim that children are
born with blank slates, tabula rasa, and that both culture and language are
learned through the process of stimulus-response.
For a culture to grow it has to have a a proper soil the way an infant cannot
survive without its mother. The proponents of culture as a social construction
miss the point, however, because these phenomena emerge as a result of language
death, cultural destruction, cultural contact and forced assimilation. Human
behavior is what distinguishes the homo sapiens from other species. All species
have strategies which help them to keep the balance and ensure their survival
: how they relate to each other, the protection of both private and public space,
mating practices, means of communication, social hierachy. This behavior is
hard-wired. It is part of the genetic evolution. The human culture is different
from that of animals in only that it is more elevated due to the fact that the
human brain has more genes than animals.
The studies of language, the existence of cultural universals and current research
in evolutionary biology and neuroscience support the biological basis of culture.
Language, a component of culture, through which culture is communicated and
transmitted is biological (Chomsky, Kimenyi). It is located in the brain. When
this location is damaged language is affected. All children from different linguistic
backgrounds are preprogrammed to master it within a specific time. There is
a critical stage as well. If the language is not acquired by the age of seven,
the child is doomed not to develop it. Linguists have also found out that rules
that govern language are so elegantly mathematically formulated that the child
and the average native speaker cannot make them themselves. Suprasegments such
as stress rules or tone rules are out of control of the conscious mind. Studies
also show that native speakers of tone languages are tone deaf. They are unaware
of tone rules and cannot tell which syllables have tones and which ones don't.
For instance, although I am a professional linguist and Kinyarwanda is my mother
tongue, it has taken me years to be able to understand, describe and explain
the tone patterns of this language. Cognitive linguists (George Lakoff&Mark
Johnson; Alexandre Kimenyi) also have found that speakers of all languages use
conceptual metaphors without being aware that they are metaphors. All this suggests
that there is a software in the human mind which is responsible for formal linguistic
rules of encoding , processing and decoding. Many rules happen also to be universal..
Because of their universality, cultures have the same deep structure and differ
only on the surface structure in Chomskian sense with their diverse physical
manifestations or parametric variations due to societies' individual environmental
and experiencial factors .
Evolutionary biologists have also found similarities between biological systems
and cultural systems such as common ancestry, adaptation and transmission. Death
and hybridity are also found in both. Studies of autism, a social learning disorders
disease, have found it to be caused by specific genes.
Although culture is biological, it is not genetically connected to race. Cultural
diversity is due environmental factors, cultural dynamism and people's different
existential experiences.
The négritude poets , Léopold Sédar Senghor, the late president
of Senegal and the Caribbean poets Aimé Césaire and Léon
Damas who were influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, a group of African-American
artists, poets and writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Richard Wright,
Countee Cullen, Irving Miller, Anne Spenser, Jean Turner and James Weldon Johnson,
were wrong when they attributed the difference between African culture and European
culture to race, ignoring geography, history and experience.
With their stereotypes and preconceived ideas that all Africans were primitive
and savages, European scientists came out also with the so-called Hamitic Hypothesis
when they found out that some Africans such as the Tutsi had a very advanced
culture. To the Europeans, African societies which impressed them were their
distant cousins who came before them to colonize the continent.
5. Archetype and stereotype
Although national character or identity is a reality, it is impossible to find
any single individual who is the exemplar, the embodiment of this culture because
of the existence of subcultures. Some of these subgroups are regional, ethnic,
socio-economic, educational , generational and gender related.
A society is characterized by members occupying the same space, although it
can be discontinous like in the case of Alaska and Hawaii which are distant
American territories. All physical cultural spaces have subregions : a north,
a south, an east, a west , a center and peripheries. These regions don't only
have a physical character but also a subcultural identity such as dialect, architecture,
food, customs, etc. People at the periphery hav e more in common with neighboring
cultures than their cultural center. The rural and urban population, the elite
and the masses differ everywhere mostly in values, and lifestyles. Although,
the US dominant culture is historically Anglo-Saxon, not only have other European
ethnicities and racial minority groups namely Native Americans, African Americans,
Asian Americans and Latinos, contributed to it but do they still practice their
respective ethnic cultures as well. Upper classes, middle classes and low classes
are defined by specific lifestyles and values. Men and women, children and adults
are supposed to behave differently in some situations. All these factors make
it impossible to find any individual in any society who is a prototype of the
culture. Culture is real but abstract. Because of this abstractness and dynamism,
it becomes very difficult to find the right metaphor , for instance ,which describes
ethnic and race relations in the United States. The ones that have been proposed
such as melting pot, salad bowl, kaleidoscope, quilt, fabric, grocery bag, mosaic,
all capture some of the defining characteristics of the American culture but
fail, unfortunately to account for others.
6. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
In cultural anthropology and anthropological linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
corresponds to both cultural relativity and cultural determinism. Edward Sapir
was the father of American linguistics and Benjamin Whorf his student. They
were specialists of American Indian languages. Their research and studies of
these languages convinced them that indeed language reflects and affects people's
view of the world and their behavior. Cultural relativity entails the fact that
there is no superior or inferior culture. It is thus against ethnocentrism,
the tendency to judge other cultures using the standard of one's own. In cultural
relativity there are no absolutes. There is no one way of looking or evaluating
things. This article has given abundant examples from all the components of
culture which show this to be the case. Cultural determinism implies that we
are products of our culture. The culture shapes our conception of the world.
Our tastes, smells, visions, sounds are acquired from it. We are freed from
this determinism through cultural dynamism which is caused by environmental
changes, cultural contact , and systemic changes.
It is from the Sapir-Wholf hypothesis that the concept moral relativism developed.
What is considered morally wrong for one culture, may be morally good for another.
For instance, polygamy which is condemned in the West was universally practiced
in Africa This practice emerged for both religious and practical reasons : the
desire for immortality and to give status to unmarried women with fatherless
children. Africans obtain immortality through ancestor worship. This can be
achieved only if the deseased has many offspring. In the African mind, people
die only when they are not remembered. It also happens that everywhere, not
only in Africa, women outnumber men. Studies show that there is a higher male
infant mortality than female. Because of gender behavior , more boys die in
their teen years than girls. And when there are wars, men are the ones who are
sent to the front. Monogamy thus prevents many women from finding husbands.
In many African countries single mothers are treated as prostitutes and their
children become outcasts. Polygamy gives a status to the women and makes children
legitimate. Celibacy for priests, nuns or other individuals might be a virtue
in Europe but is incomprehensible to the Africans. Africans believe that all
individuals have a responsibility to keep both the family and the community
alive through marriage and procreation. It is also common to find bare-breasted
women in all African countries and to breast-feed babies in public. This is
seen by Westerners as indecency These opposing views show that morality is indeed
in some cases culturally constructed.
When ANC led by Nelson Mandela was fighting against the supremacist regime
of South Africa , it was called a terrorist organization by the government and
its allies but hailed by the rest of the world as freedom fighters. When the
Contras financed by the US government trying to topple the Sandinista's regime,
they were called by the Reagan administration freedom fighters but to others
they were just criminals.
There are times when moral relativism is misused to condone fragrant violations
of universal inalienable human rights, to refuse to condemn them or remain in
active. In 1959 thousands and thousands of tutsi were massacred and others sent
into exile with the blessing of the archibishop André Perraudain and
the assistance of the Belgian government, because this was not a genocide but
a revolution. The late colonial Belgian governor of Rwanda, Jean-Paul Harroy,
he writes in his memoirs that he is proud to have " assisted the Hutu Revolution
". International organizations stationed in Kigali and churches didn't
do anything to plead for mercy for the victims of this pogrom. Apparently killing
thousands of innocent civilians is justified if it is done in the name of the
Revolution. The non-intervention in 1994 Tutsi in Rwanda although it was broadcast
live in people's homes everywher e in the world because according to the pundits,
there was a deep-hatred between Hutu and Tutsi and that they had been fighting
each other for centuries. This "root cause " explanation is ofcourse
both a cliché and a myth.
Conclusion
Cultures are means by which societies ensure their survival and create societal
balance and harmony. Because of the diversity of cultural spaces due to different
landscapes, fauna and flora, histories and experiences, each culture obviously
has a better way than others of seeing and understanding certain phenomena and
reacting in a more appropriate way to them. For instance, some societies which
have undergone certain universal experiences before others know how to handle
better the same situations when they reoccur. Like academic fields, some societies
are experienced and specialized in certain areas. Therefore other cultures have
to learn from them. In Rwanda , before colonialism, the only meat that was eaten
was beef, although there was plenty of fish, chickens, goats, pigs and sheep.
Chickens were used only for divination purposes. Eggs were not eaten. Sheep
were sacred animals. Only the Batwa, the pariah of the society like the Burakumin
in Japan and the Dalit or Untouchables in India, ate lamb. The only use of sheep
was their skins, which were used to carry babies. A Hutu or a Tutsi who ate
lamb became automatically an outcast. Pork was eaten for the first time in the
late 1950's by the European educated elite. This action caused such a sensation
and scandal that a very popular satiric poem by the Rwandan scholar Alexis Kagame,
called Indyoheshabirayi , meaning " what makes potatoes taste better "
is still the most popular written work among Rwandans inside the country and
in the diaspora. It is from Congolese also that Rwandans learned that cassava
leaves make a delicious relish called isombe and that when pounded these roots
produce a flour from which a dough called ugari is eaten with all types of sauces.
There are certain plants which are found in all parts of the world whose parts
such as barks, roots, leaves, seeve, are used as medicine or food but whose
use other cultures are not aware of even if they are found in their ecosystem.
For instance, gum arabic, a sap from acacia trees, which is used in soft drinks,
beauty products, and pharmaceuticals is the lifeblood of Sudan's economy since
three-thirds of gum arabic come from there. Many African countries in the tropics,
however, which also have these types of acacia trees, are not aware of this
use. It was discovered recently , as reported in the New York Times issue of
April 1, 2003, that the !Kung (also known as the San) of the Kalahari desert
have a plant called hoodia cures impotency and functions like Viagra and that
they have been using it for centuries. This plant was recently bought by the
giant pharmaceutical company, Pfizer. These examples support the concept of
cultural relativity and cultural complementarity . No culture holds the monopoly
on truth, knowledge and wisdom. Cultures need to borrow from each other. It
is also evident that what works for one culture may not necessarly be prescribed
as the right medicine for another. The attempt, for instance, by the US government
to impose the American type of democracy in the Middle East is already dead
on arrival because of different respective history and experience. The American
type of government was not imported; it was created from the botton up.
Globalization and nationalism are both a threat to cultural pluralism . Globalization
is seen by its critics not only as an attempt to prevent developing countries
from being able to compete in the world market but mostly as the McDonaldization
and Hollywoodization of the world, that is flooding the world with fast food,
cheap products and loosened morals. It is viewed as neo-colonialism of developing
countries with a different face and a different approach. Not only should the
majority group allow minority cultures to exist because of cultural complementarity
but members of the majority should also be tolerant of cultural pluralism. Multiculturalism
should not be confused or equated with symbolic ethnicity which only allows
ethnic groups to celebrate their heritage once a year such as Cinquo de Mayo
for Mexicans, St Patrick's for Irish, Ockoberfeist for Germans, Kwanzaa for
African Americans, Columbus Day for Italians, Hanukkah for Jews, …The majority
has to make an effort to understand other cultures.
Nationalism is not the best way to protect the culture. Purists, assimilationists
and nativist movements can succeed in destroying minority cultures but they
cannot prevent the majority culture from changing . The French Academy should
serve as a lesson. This institution was created in the 17th Century to protect
the purity of the French language but it has not succeeded.
In California navitist movements have been trying to make English the only official
language. Although this is against the spirit and the letter of the text of
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, there is no reason for Anglos to panick. Similarly,
assimilationists such as the Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington should not
be afraid that the new immigrants especially Hispanics are going to affect the
core of the American culture namely individualism and work ethic as he states.
Both " work ethic " for Anglo-Saxons and " the culture of poverty
" for Hispanics and African-Americans are myths and clichés that
have already been debunked. If the majority of Hispanics live in poverty it
is not because they come from " a culture of poverty " background.
Their work ethic is also demonstrated by the fact that they work hard to feed
their families and contribute to the economy of this country. An effort should
be made instead to explain the so-called " Hispanic Paradox ". Scientists
have found that eventhough the majority of Hispanics live in poverty, they have
less health problems and chronic deseases than middle class whites who have
better education and income.
There is no mechanism which will stop the change of the American culture, since
all cultures are dynamic. Insular cultures are the ones that die. Eventhough
, for instance, English is an Anglo-Saxon language, its vocabulary in great
majority is French not only in the area of superstratum such as administration,
justice, army, science, religion, art, but in the substratum as well including
even kinship terms such as family, grandparents, uncle, aunt, cousin. The borrowing
has not affected the English language identity, but it has made it richer. There
is anxiety and fear among many European countries right now because countries
of East Europe, former states of the Soviet Union are going to be integrated
into the European Union. Although many European countries share many cultural
elements such as religion, traditions and values, some members of the European
Union are afraid that their culture might be affected. These fears are unfounded
because the borrowings make the culture stronger and richer without losing its
identity. And since today many individuals, organizations and groups with similar
interests live in " a world without borders ", in virtual spaces,
all attempts to protect national cultures will fail.
Multiculturalism and multilingualism make people more complete. Learning other
cultures opens our eyes, makes us hear new sounds, helps us develop new tastes
and expand our horizons and allows us to have different worldviews with a magnifying
glass. Our knowledge becomes richer, deeper and broader.
Many cultures , unfortunately, have become extinct because of colonialism,
invasion, genocide and there are many endangered cultures today especially the
indigenous people. Policy makers and the elite have a responsibility to make
sure that endangered cultures don't disappear. All of us in privileged positions
have a responsibility to protect these cultures. Failing to do so will be not
only be a disservice to humanity but will make us willing participants in ethnocide.
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