This lesson introduces you to the concept of culture, a system of knowledge, beliefs, behavioral norms, values, traditions, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people, often to be challenged and transformed over time. The lesson begins with a discussion of how we can learn about groups of people and their cultures through stories, and how anthropologists themselves are storytellers. It then overviews the history of the field of cultural anthropology, and significant moments, perspectives and people in that history. 

Stories as a Reflection of Culture by Emily Cowall and Priscilla Medeiros

Stories are told in every culture and often teach a moral lesson to young children. Fables are similar, but often set an example for people to live by or describe what to do when in a dangerous situation. They can also be a part of traditions, help to preserve ways of life, or explain mysteries. Storytelling takes many different forms such as tall tales and folktales. These are for entertainment or to discuss problems encountered in life. Both are also a form of cultural preservation, a way to communicate morals or values to the next generation. Stories can also be a form of social control over certain activities or customs that are not allowed in a society.

A fable becomes a tradition by being retold and accepted by others in the community. Different cultures have very similar stories sharing common themes. One of the most common themes is the battle between good and evil. Another is the story of the quest. The quest often takes the character to distant lands, filled with real-life situations, opportunities, hardships, and heartaches. In both of these types of stories, the reader is introduced to the anthropological concept known as the Other. What exactly is the Other? The Other is a term that has been used to describe people whose customs, beliefs, or behaviors are different from one’s own.

Figure 1: Travel writer Lemuel Gulliver is captured and tied down by the Lilliputians.

Can a story explain the concept of the Other? Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is about four different voyages that Gulliver undertakes. His first adventure is the most well-known; in the story, Lemuel Gulliver is a surgeon who plans a sea voyage when his business fails. During a storm at sea, he is shipwrecked, and he awakens to find himself bound and secured by a group of captors, the Lilliputians, who are six inches tall. Gulliver, having what Europeans consider a normal body height, suddenly becomes a giant. During this adventure, Gulliver is seen as an outsider, a stranger with different features and language. Gulliver becomes the Other.

What lessons about culture can we learn from Gulliver’s Travels? Swift’s story offers lessons about cultural differences, conflicts occurring in human society, and the balance of power. It also provides an important example of the Other. The Other is a matter of perspective in this story: Gulliver thinks the Lilliputians are strange and unusual. To Gulliver, the Lilliputians are the Other, but the Lilliputians equally see Gulliver as the Other—he is a their captive and is a rare species of man because of his size.

The themes in Gulliver’s Travels describe different cultures and aspects of storytelling. The story uses language, customary behaviors, and the conflict between different groups to explore ideas of the exotic and strange. The story is framed as an adventure, but is really about how similar cultures can be. In the end, Gulliver becomes a member of another cultural group, learning new norms, attitudes, and behaviors. At the same time, he wants to colonize them, a reflection of his former cultural self.

Stories are an important part of culture, and when used to pass on traditions or cultural values, they can connect people to the past. Stories are also a way to validate religious, social, political, and economic practices from one generation to another. Stories are important because they are used in some societies to apply social pressure, to keep people in line, and are part of shaping the way that people think and behave.

Anthropologists as Storytellers by Emily Cowall and Priscilla Medeiros, and Melanie A. Medeiros

People throughout recorded history have relied on storytelling as a way to share cultural details. When early anthropologists studied people from other civilizations, they relied on the written accounts and opinions of others; they presented facts and developed their stories, about other cultures based solely on information gathered by others. These scholars did not have any direct contact with the people they were studying. This approach has come to be known as armchair anthropology. Simply put, if a culture is viewed from a distance (as from an armchair), the anthropologist tends to measure that culture from his or her own vantage point and to draw comparisons that place the anthropologist’s culture as superior to the one being studied. This point of view is also called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is an attitude based on the idea that one’s own group or culture is better than any other.

Armchair anthropologists were unlikely to be aware of their ethnocentric ideas because they did not visit the cultures they studied. Scottish social anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) is well-known for his 1890 work The Golden Bough: A Study of Comparative Religions. Its title was later changed to A Study in Magic and Religion, and it was one of the first books to describe and record magical and religious beliefs of different culture groups around the world. Yet, this book was not the outcome of extensive study in the field. Instead, Frazer relied on the accounts of others who had traveled, such as scholars, missionaries, and government officials, to formulate his study.

Figure 2: Sir James Frazer

Another example of anthropological writing without the use of fieldwork is Sir E. B. Tylor’s (1832-1917) book Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor, who went on to become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in 1896, was an important influence in the development of cultural anthropology as a separate discipline.

Frazer, Tylor and Morgan contributed important and foundational studies even though they never went into the field to gather their information. Armchair anthropologists were important in the development of anthropology as a discipline in the late nineteenth century because although these early scholars were not directly experiencing the cultures they were studying, their work did ask important questions that could ultimately only be answered by going into the field.

At the same time that Frazer, Tyler and Morgan were writing their armchair ethnographies about “the other,” members of otherized societies were writing their own portrayals of life in their communities.  Ohíye S’a (1858-1939) was an Indigenous Santee Dakota Sioux, born in what is now the state of Minnesota. He grew up in a semi-nomadic society before moving in with his father who had a European lifestyle. His father baptized him as Charles Eastman and he began learning English and attending colonial schools. Although Ohíye S’a was not trained as an anthropologist, his 1905 book Red Hunters and the Animal People is considered to be the first book about American history written by a Native American author and from the Native American point of view. The book describes Indigenous knowledge and perspectives on non-human animals, with whom who they had a kinship. Ohíye S’a was also an indigenous rights activist. Therefore, Ohíye S’a is one of the first engaged anthropologists, anthropologists who use their research to bring awareness to and address social problems.

Figure 4: Charles Eastman, Ohíye S’a

In the early 20th century, anthropologists continued to be storytellers, however the discipline transformed in such a way that the stories they told were beginning to be informed by in-depth, face-to-face interactions with the people about whom they wrote. While the perspective of the anthropologist always influences the story they tell, later anthropologists attempted to tell stories about groups of people that were informed by their experiences, conversations and perspectives of members of the community themselves.

Anthropologists as Cultural Participants by Emily Cowall and Priscilla Medeiros

The armchair approach as a way to study culture changed when scholars  took to the field and studied people by being participants and observers. As they did, fieldwork became the most important tool anthropologists used to understand the “complex whole” of culture.

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), a Polish anthropologist, was greatly influenced by the work of Frazer. However, unlike the armchair anthropology approach Frazer used in writing The Golden Bough, Malinowski used more innovative ethnographic techniques, and his fieldwork took him off the veranda to study different cultures. The off the veranda approach is different from armchair anthropology because it includes active participant observation: traveling to a location, living among people, and observing their day-to-day lives. Malinowski wrote The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), which was considered the first modern ethnography and redefined the approach to fieldwork. This book is part of Malinowski’s trilogy on the Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski lived with them and observed life in their villages. By living among the islanders, Malinowski was able to learn about their social life, food and shelter, sexual behaviors, community economics, patterns of kinship, and family.^[1] In The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski suggested that other anthropologists should “grasp the native’s point of view, his relations to life, to realize his vision of his world.”^[2] However, as we will see in the next lesson on ethnographic field work and ethics, Malinowski’s research presented problems from an ethical point of view.

Figure 5: Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, 1915–1918

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF CULTURE

European Structural Functionalism

The discipline of cultural anthropology developed somewhat differently in Europe, North America, and other countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many European anthropologists were particularly interested in questions about how societies were structured and how they remained stable over time. In every society, people are linked to one another through social institutions such as families, political organizations, and businesses. Anthropologists across Europe often focused their research on understanding the form and function of these social institutions.

European anthropologists developed theories of structural functionalism to explain how social institutions contribute to the organization of society and the maintenance of social order. Bronislaw Malinowski believed that cultural traditions were developed as a response to specific human needs such as food, comfort, safety, knowledge, reproduction, and economic livelihood. One function of educational institutions like schools, for instance, is to provide knowledge that prepares people to obtain jobs and make contributions to society.  The British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) was also interested in the way that social structures functioned to maintain social stability in a society over time.^[3] He suggested that in many societies it was the family that served as the most important social structure because family relationships determined much about an individual’s social, political, and economic relationships and these patterns were repeated from one generation to the next. In a family unit in which the father is the breadwinner and the mother stays home to raise the children, the social and economic roles of both the husband and the wife will be largely defined by their specific responsibilities within the family. If their children grow up to follow the same arrangement, these social roles will be continued in the next generation.

Figure 6: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown

European structural functionalism influenced the work of anthropologists outside of Europe as well. Hsiao-t’ung Fei (1910-2005) was a groundbreaking Chinese anthropologist and sociologist who studied under Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown at the London School of Economics. Fei’s 1939 book, Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley presents the findings of his ethnographic study of the economic life of Chinese peasants. Fei’s work was a testament that anthropologists do not need to travel outside of one’s home country to study culture and society. 

Figure 7: Hsiao-t’ung Fei

E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) was another respected European structural functionalist. His trilogy, The Nuer: A Description of Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (1940), Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer (1951), and Nuer Religion (1956) are classic examples of structural functionalism, examining specific social institutions in detail in each book. 

Figure 8: E. E. Evans-Pritchard

One of the biggest critiques of structural functionalism is that it views cultures as stable and orderly and ignores or cannot explain social change. Functionalism also struggles to explain why a society develops one particular kind of social institution instead of another. Functionalist perspectives did contribute to the development of more sophisticated concepts of culture by establishing the importance of social institutions in holding societies together. Functionalist theory helped to develop the concept of culture by demonstrating that culture is not just a set of ideas or beliefs, but consists of specific practices and social institutions that give structure to daily life and allow human communities to function.

Although Evans-Pritchard was also one of the first anthropologists to study the religion, and psychological effects of religion in his 1937 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, Ibrahim Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer from Martinique studied and wrote about the cultural and psychological life of Algerians. He also examined the psychological, social, and cultural impact of colonization and decolonization. His most well-known book the Wretched of the Earth was published shortly after his death in 1961 and was a controversial discussion of colonialism and resistance to it. 

Figure 9: Frantz Fanon

Anthropology in the Americas: Historical Particularism

The participant-observation method of fieldwork was a revolutionary change to the practice of anthropology, but at the same time it presented problems that needed to be overcome. The challenge was to move away from ethnocentrism, racial stereotypes, and colonial attitudes, and to move forward by encouraging anthropologists to maintain high ethical standards and open minds.

Franz Boas (1858-1942), an American anthropologist, is acknowledged for redirecting American anthropologists away from theories of cultural evolutionism and toward cultural relativism. Boas first studied physical science at the University of Kiel in Germany. Because he was a trained scientist, he was familiar with using empirical methods as a way to study a subject. Empirical methods are based on evidence that can be tested using observation and experiment. In 1883, Franz Boas went on a geographical expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. The Central Eskimo (1888) details his time spent on Baffin Island studying the culture and language of the central Eskimo (Inuit) people. He studied every aspect of their culture such as tools, clothing, and shelters. This study was Boas’ first major contribution to the American school of anthropology and convinced him that cultures could only be understood through extensive field research. As he observed on Baffin Island, cultural ideas and practices are shaped through interactions with the natural environment. The cultural traditions of the Inuit were suited for the environment in which they lived. This work led him to promote cultural relativism: the principle that a culture must be understood on its own terms rather than compared to an outsider’s standard. This was an important turning point in correcting the challenge of ethnocentrism in ethnographic fieldwork.^[4] 

Figure 10: Franz Boas, One of the founders of American Anthropology, 1915

Although Boas’s contribution of cultural relativism and his challenge of the theory of cultural evolution was critical to the development of the discipline of cultural anthropology, it is important to note that Boas was not only scholar openly challenging the notions of cultural evolution and racial hierarchies that had been popular for decades. In his book, The Equality of Human Races (1885), Anténor Firmin (1850-1911), a Haitian anthropologist, lawyer and journalist, challenged the racist ideas of early anthropologists, arguing that “all men are endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of color or anatomical form. The races are equal” (450). Not only did his work predate that of Boas, it was also influential in the Pan-African movement, which advocated for the rights of all people of African descent around the world. 

Figure 11: Anténor Firmin

Additionally, although W.E.B DuBois (1868-1963)–an American sociologist, historian, writer, and civil rights activist–was not trained as an anthropologist, his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) critically examines the effects of “race” on society. DuBois demonstrated the negative and divisive effects of racism on society, and for individual sense of self. He outlined the rights he believed should be afforded to all people irrespective of race, including voting rights, education, and fair treatment. Like Firmin, DuBois’s work was central to the Pan-Africanist movement and later to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Figure 12 : W.E.B. DuBois in 1918

Franz Boas also influenced American anthropology through his students. Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) was one of Boas’s first female students. Benedict continued to use the approach of cultural relativism as a starting point for investigating the cultures of the American northwest and southwest. Her best-selling book Patterns of Culture (1934) emphasized that culture gives people coherent patterns for thinking and behaving. She argued that culture affects individuals psychologically, shaping individual personality traits and leading the members of a culture to exhibit similar traits such as a tendency toward aggression, or calmness.

Figure 13: Ruth Benedict, 1936

Figure 15: Margaret Mead in 1950

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was another engaged anthropologist, as well as a dancer, choreographer, and activist. She shared the findings of her fieldwork in Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad and Tabago, and Haiti through her choreography and dance. “Among her many lasting contributions is the deep concern for the politics of representation that she brought to her work. She recognized early on that not all stories were hers to tell and carefully attended to the responsibilities that came with translating across places, audiences, languages, and genres throughout her acclaimed career.” “Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology.”

Figure 16: Katherine Dunham

Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960) is another well-respected anthropologist who helped develop the American school of anthropological thought. Hurston embodied the anthropologist as participant observer and story-teller. In 1925, Hurston started studying anthropology as an undergraduate student at Barnard College of Columbia University, where she was the only black student. After graduating with her B.A. in 1928 she began a graduate program in anthropology at Columbia, where she worked with Boas, Benedict and fellow student Mead. Hurston was interested in Southern, African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to a community’s identity. She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston wrote and published her literary anthropology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti. Hurston’s works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman.

Figure 17: Zora Neale Hurston

In summary, anthropologists in the Americas have used cultural relativism to add depth to the concept of culture in several ways. In the late 19th century British anthropologist Tylor defined culture as including knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, capabilities and habits. Anthropologists in the Americas added to this definition by emphasizing the importance of enculturation, the process of learning culture, in the lives of individuals. They established that through enculturation culture shapes individual identity, self-awareness, and emotions in fundamental ways. They also emphasized the need for holism, approaches to research that considered the entire context of a society including its history.

Late 20th Century Interpretive Anthropology

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), the founding member of interpretive anthropology, noted in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) that culture should not be seen as something that was “locked inside people’s heads.” Instead, culture was publicly communicated through speech and other behaviors. Culture, he concluded, is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life.”^[5] Geertz’s definition, which continues to be influential today, reflects the influence of many earlier efforts to refine the concept of culture in anthropology.