Speaking of Culture

SPEAKING OF CULTURE

Nolan Weil

Speaking of Culture by Nolan Weil is licensed under a Creative Commons

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Contents

A Note to Students

Nolan Weil ix

Introduction

Nolan Weil 1

PART I. MAIN BODY

1. Chapter 1: What is Culture?

Nolan Weil

Culture, simply de=ned 8 Brief history of a concept 10 Franz Boas and the birth of American anthropology

14

Later 20th & 21st century developments 16 Final reflections 19

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2. Chapter 2: The Human Family

Nolan Weil

Origins and Diversity of Humanity 28 Where did we all come from? 31 The Multiregional Origin Hypothesis 31 The Recent African Origin Hypothesis 32 But why do we all look so different on the surface?

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Race is not a biologically meaningful concept 39 Final Reflection 44

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3. Chapter 3: Origins and Early Developments of

Culture

Nolan Weil

Culture as a product of human activity 49 Paleolithic material culture 50 Stone tools 53 Carved Figurines 55 Painting 58 Origins of mythology 61 Stories of creation – A sampling 62 Similarities among creation stories 69 Accounting for common motifs 72 The Laurasian “Novel” 75 Final Reflection 82 Video Clips & Documentaries 83 References 84

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4. Chapter 4: Material Culture

Nolan Weil

The things we make 89 Taking to the road 89 From one end of the country to another 100 Final reflection 103

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5. Chapter 5: Culture as Thought and Action

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Non-material aspects of culture 107 Beliefs 108 Values 109 Norms 110 Customs and Traditions 111 Rituals 112 Final reflection 116

106

6. Chapter 6: Beliefs, Values, and Cultural

Universals

Nolan Weil

Value Orientations Theory 120 Hofstede’s dimensions of culture theory 124 Critique of Hofstede’s theory 133 Final reflection 135

119

7. Chapter 7: Group Membership and Identity

Nolan Weil

Preliminary remarks 139 Cultures and subcultures 140 Ethnicity 141 Racial identity 144 Social class and culture 148 Nationality 150 The origin of nations 154 National identity 159 Final reflection 161

138

8. Chapter 8: Religion and Culture

Eliza Rosenberg

What is religion? 167 What religion is not 169 The world’s religions 170 Some common religious questions 171 Religion and right behavior 179 Conclusion 183

166

9. Chapter 9: Roots of American National

Culture

Nolan Weil

Preliminary remarks 187 American beliefs and values 188 A closer look at American cultural diversity 195 Understanding U.S. Cultural Landscapes 197 Spanish influence 199 French influence 200 Dutch influence 201 Albion’s Seed 204 Englanders from Barbados 213 The Westward Expansion 216 Final reflection 218

186

A Note to Students

Nolan Weil

If you are a student, you may be reading this book because

you are enrolled in:

• IELI 2470—Cross-Cultural Perspectives, or perhaps

• IELI 2475—Cross-Cultural Explorations

These courses are designed to ful<ll General Education

breadth requirements in social sciences at USU (Utah

State University). As the USU Catalog states:

General Education breadth requirements are intended to

introduce students to the nature, history, and methods of

different disciplines; and to help students understand the

cultural, historical, and natural contexts shaping the human

experience.

The title of this book is Speaking of Culture and its

purpose is to de<ne culture and other concepts associated

with it. My hope is that the readings in this book will help

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | I X

you to better understand the breadth of the concept of

culture and provide you with a vocabulary for discussing it

more articulately.

Culture is one of those broad concepts that is used

widely, although somewhat imprecisely, in everyday

English. It also cuts across many academic disciplines, and

this book draws on many of them. It touches, for instance,

on anthropology, biology, history, mythology, political

science, psychology, and sociology.

This book will not be the only material you will study in

IELI 2470/2475. Your professor may provide you with

additional readings and/or encourage you to do

independent research on topics of interest. You may watch

culturally relevant movies or documentaries. You will, I

hope, also have grand conversations with your peers.

My name, by the way, is Nolan Weil. I have been a

professor in the Intensive English Language Institute

(IELI) since 2004 and have taught this course or similar

courses many times over the years. Perhaps I will be your

teacher for this course, or perhaps you will have another

professor from IELI. If I am your teacher, you will get to

know me better as we meet regularly face-to face

throughout the semester. If I am not your teacher, you

may know me perhaps only as the voice behind this text.

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Introduction

Nolan Weil

Suggested Focus

This introduction to the book will give you a brief survey of the

topics covered in each chapter. Identify two chapters that you think

might be particularly interesting. Why do you think so? Be

prepared to discuss your choices with other readers.

The word culture is among the most frequently used words

in English. We use it frequently in daily speech and

encounter it often in both popular and academic texts.

Directly or indirectly, it is the subject matter of many

university courses. Even when it is not the exclusive focus,

it plays a role in many discussions across the humanities

and social sciences. But most of the time, we use it without

de<ning it or even thinking much about exactly what we

mean by it.

Despite the ease with which we use the term, culture is

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1

not a simple concept. The primary purpose of this book is

to promote a better understanding of the scope of the idea.

Indeed, the word has a very wide range of meanings, and

they are not all consistent with one another. For one thing,

it has a relatively long history, and its primary uses have

changed markedly over several centuries. Even in my

lifetime (I was born in 1953) the ways in which scholars

have de<ned culture have only become more diverse.

To come to grips with culture then will require that we

give an account of the various ways that culture has come

to be de<ned. It also goes without saying that one cannot

de<ne any concept without introducing still other

associated concepts, so this book is rich in such secondary

concepts.

We begin our mission of de<ning culture in Chapter 1

with a brief recounting of the history of the word. We

point to its Latin root and recount the senses attached to it

in 18th century France, and later, in 19th century England,

before 20th century anthropologists made it a central

concept of their discipline. We round out the chapter by

calling attention to the proliferation of de<nitions of

culture over the last 50 years. We end by introducing seven

themes that Faulkner, Baldwin, Lindsley and Hecht (2006)

have identi<ed as encompassing all of the most common

ways in which scholars have sought to de<ne culture.

In Chapter 2, we put de<nitions of culture on the shelf

temporarily, and put on the hat of the physical

anthropologist. Our purpose is to emphasize the idea that

culture, as anthropologists originally conceived it, is

characteristic of the human species. That being the case,

we want to remind readers of the antiquity of our species

because it lays a foundation for putting human culture

into a historical perspective in the chapter that follows. We

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also want to shine a light on the relationship between

human diversity and geography and advance the

argument that “race” is, biologically speaking, a

meaningless category. Concepts such as those of race and

ethnicity are often seen as bound up with culture, but my

hope is that readers leave Chapter 2 with a sense that when

it comes to humanity, the only “race” is the “human race.”

In Chapter 3, we return to an explicit focus on culture,

de<ning it as a product of human activity. We learn that

the <rst modern humans came into a world already

swimming in culture. Their hominid precursors, for

example, were already tool users. The <rst half of the

chapter features a discussion of the material culture of the

Paleolithic, a time stretching from roughly 50,000 to

10,000 years ago. You will no doubt marvel at the

remarkable tools of stone, bone, horn and ivory, and the

various other artifacts that are hard to describe as

anything less than art. The second half deals with the

remarkable similarities in the world’s mythologies, tracing

their major themes back to Africa, and proposing that a

major innovation that took place roughly 40,000 years ago

may have given rise to most of the world’s mythologies as

they have come down to us today.

Chapter 4 might best be regarded as a bridge from the

Paleolithic to the present. There is no grand theory in the

chapter and no technical terminology to master. It merely

begins with a quote from a renowned folklorist, who

declared that “Material culture records human intrusion in

the environment” (Henry Glassie, 1999: 1). Taking

inspiration from the quote and from Glassie’s descriptive

approach to material culture, I was moved to write a

simple homely narrative based on my travels across several

regions of the country. I caught hold of the <rst

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 3

impressions that came to mind when I recalled several

memorable travels. These recollections were of

waterscapes and landscapes, and the most obvious

intrusions were boats and buildings.

Structural de<nitions of culture often consist of lists of

elements that refer to products of thought (or those things

that can be expressed by means of language) and those

things which are recognizable primarily as actions (i.e.

performances, or ways of doing things). The intent of

Chapter 5 is to de<ne a handful of terms that are generally

regarded as aspects of culture: beliefs, values, norms,

customs, traditions, and rituals. This certainly does not

exhaust the list of elements typically mentioned as integral

to culture, but they are terms that we routinely fall back on

when challenged to de<ne culture. They are also terms that

we <nd dif<cult to differentiate. What, for example, is the

difference between a custom and a tradition? Although it

may be a fool’s errand, we will do our best to distinguish

this handful of interrelated terms one from another.

In Chapter 6, we take a closer look at several ways in

which anthropologists have put beliefs and values to work

in the service of cultural inquiry. We look at the theory of

Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck, known as Values

Orientation Theory, which proposes that human societies

can be compared on the basis of how they answer a limited

number of universal questions. We then summarize the

results from another approach to universal values, that of

Geert Hofstede, who has proposed a theory purporting to

identify different orientations across national cultures.

We contrast that with a Chinese Values Survey reflecting a

Confucian worldview. We wrap up the chapter with a

critique of Hofstede’s theory, motivated by a suspicion

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that the persistence of the theory is due more to charisma

than to the veracity of the theory.

Chapter 7 takes up the theme of culture as group-

membership, questioning the labeling of large national

groups as cultures on the grounds that few people in

today’s multicultural societies actually live in groups where

everyone shares the same culture. In other words, we

argue, culture is not something that is contained within

groups. We de<ne some social categories often discussed

by sociologists including race, ethnicity and social class.

We then examine group-membership as historians and

political scientists have often discussed them through the

lens of nationalism.

Chapter 8 explores some relationships between religion

and culture, not the least of which is the fact that the word

“religion,” like the word “culture,” comes to us from the

Latin. Therefore, like the word, “culture,” the word

“religion” does not have exact equivalents in many

languages. Throughout the chapter, we will touch on many

of the world’s historically prominent religions. Along the

way, we will see that while some religions are rooted in

particular shared beliefs, other religions place more

emphasis on everyday practices. In the end, exploring all

the various aspects of religion might lead us to wonder

whether “religion” and “culture” aren’t simply two different

terms for referring to the same things. On the other hand,

it seems unlikely that ordinary speakers of English could

get by without distinguishing that which is simultaneously

religious and cultural from that which is “merely” cultural.

In Chapter 9, we explore the roots of American culture.

In doing so, we employ many of the elements of culture

discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, most particularly: beliefs,

values, and folkways. But whereas Chapter 5 focused on

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 5

de<ning the terms, and Chapter 6 looked into beliefs and

values as cultural universals, Chapter 9 examines some

beliefs and values particularly associated with the United

States. We start with a conventional depiction of the

United States as exemplifying values such as

individualism, freedom, equality, and beliefs in change and

progress, and as embracing norms of competitiveness,

informality, and so on. We continue by challenging that

as perhaps too much of a stereotype. Then, drawing on

the “nation” concept from Chapter 7, we take a historical

view of the United States as a country of eleven nations

all exerting regional influence, and four dominant cultures

dueling for political authority.

This book does not explicitly cover all of the seven

themes introduced in Chapter 1. There isn’t really much

about culture as process or culture as re<nement. And

culture as power and ideology is only suggested in Chapter

9. However, perhaps there is enough here for every student

to gain some small measure of appreciation for the many

ideas we might want to keep in mind when speaking of

culture.

References

Faulkner, S. L., Baldwin, J. R., Lindsley, S. L. & Hecht, M. L.

(2006). Layers of meaning: An analysis of de<nitions of

culture. In J. R. Balwin, S. L. Faulkner, M. L. Hecht & S.

L. Lindsley, (Eds.), RedeQning culture: Perspectives across the

disciplines. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Glassie, H. (1999). Material culture. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press.

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1

Chapter 1: What is Culture?

Nolan Weil

Suggested Focus

Here are some questions and some tasks to guide you in your

reading of the chapter. If you can address everything on this list,

you will be off to a good start.

1. Simply stated, what is culture?

2. How has the meaning of the word changed over time?

Trace its evolution over the centuries.

3. Contrast Sir Edward Tylor’s 19th century view of culture

with that of Franz Boas at the beginning of the 20th

century. How are they similar? How are they different?

4. What is the signiTcance of Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s

classic work published in 1952?

5. List the seven themes that seem to capture the

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 7

scholarly literature on culture. Which theme(s) do you

Tnd most compelling?

Culture, simply deTned

Trying to settle on a simple de<nition of culture is not an

easy task. Maybe you will feel the same as you work your

way through this chapter. You will see, for example, that

the idea of culture has changed many times over the

centuries and that in the last 50 years, scholars have made

the idea more and more dif<cult to understand. But in this

chapter, I will try to offer the simplest de<nition that

seems reasonably up to date. Scholars might object that

this de<nition is too simple, but I hope it will be useful for

the purpose of furthering cross-cultural understanding. In

that spirit, we shall regard ‘culture’ simply as a term

pointing to:

all the products of human thought and action both material

and non-material, particularly those that exist because we live

in groups.

Or to repeat the same idea in a slightly different way:

culture consists of all the things we make and nearly

everything that we think and do, again, to the extent that

what we make, think and do is conditioned by our experience

of life in groups.

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The <rst thing to emphasize is that we are not born with

culture, like we are born with blue or brown eyes, or black

hair. We are born into culture, and we learn it by living in

human social groups. The way this idea is often expressed

is to say that culture is something that is transmitted from

one generation to the next. This is how we become

‘enculturated.’

But we humans are clever animals, so although much of

what we make, think, and do is a result of the cultural

environment into which we were born, not every material

object that a person may make, or every thought, or every

action is the result of enculturation. Think about it for a

moment. While much of what we call culture is

transmitted from generation to generation, new items of

culture are invented from time to time. That is to say,

sometimes, some of us make things, think things, or do

things that are new and different. We are then either

honored as innovators or even geniuses, or we are

punished as heretics or criminals, or dismissed as

eccentric, depending on how open or how closed our

societies are to change.

Of course, few things are ever entirely new. For the most

part, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before

us. Still, suppose some clever person creates a completely

unique tool to serve some entirely personal purpose of no

interest or use to another living person. Then by our

de<nition of culture (above), that tool would seem to have

all the marks of culture except one; it would play no role in

the life of any group. The same would go for an idea. Any

idea not shared by one’s fellow group members would not

seem to belong to culture. And similarly, a completely

idiosyncratic practice marks a person as merely different,

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 9

if not strange, not as a person participating in a shared

cultural practice.

Having proposed a brief, simple and fairly modern

de<nition of culture that not every scholar of culture

would <nd satisfactory, let us next survey some of the

complications one <nds in academic studies of culture.

Brief history of a concept

Since this discussion is intended for an international

audience, it is important to know that the English word

‘culture’ does not refer to a universal concept. In fact, it

may not even have direct counterparts in other European

languages closely related to English. For example, even

though the German word ‘Kultur’ and the Polish

word ‘kultura’ resemble the English ‘culture’, there are

important differences in meaning, and in more distant

languages like Mandarin Chinese (wen hua), we might

expect the differences to be even greater (Goddard, 2005).

What this means is that if you are a speaker of Mandarin,

you cannot rely on a simple translation of the term from a

bilingual dictionary or Google Translate.

Scholars often begin their attempts to de<ne culture by

recounting the historical uses of the word. As Jahoda

(2012) has noted, the word ‘culture’ comes originally from

the Latin, colere, meaning “to till the ground” and so it has

connections to agriculture. Now for historical reasons, a

great many English words have Latin and French origins,

so maybe it is not surprising that the word ‘culture’ was

used centuries ago in English when talking about

agricultural production, for example, ‘the culture of

barley.’ Gardeners today still speak of ‘cultivating’

tomatoes or strawberries, although if they want to be more

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plain-spoken, they may just speak of ‘growing’ them.

Moreover, biologists still use the word culture in a similar

way when they speak of preparing ‘cultures of bacteria.’

Later, in 18th century France, says Jahoda, culture was

thought to be “training or re<nement of the mind or

taste.” In everyday English, we still use the word in this

sense. For instance, we might call someone a cultured

person if he or she enjoys <ne wine, or appreciates

classical music, or visiting art museums. In other words,

by the 18th century, plants were no longer the only things

that could be cultured; people could be cultured as well.

Still later, culture came to be associated with “the

qualities of an educated person.” On the other hand, an

uneducated person might be referred to as “uncultured.”

Indeed, throughout the 19th century, culture was thought

of as “re<nement through education.” For example, the

English writer Matthew Arnold (1896, p. xi) referred to

“acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known

and said in the world.” If Arnold were still alive today, he

would no doubt think that the person who reads

Shakespeare is ‘cultured’ while the one who watches The

Simpsons or Family Guy is not.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 1

Sir Edward Tylor

Near the end of the 19th

century, the meaning of

culture began to converge on

the meaning that

anthropologists would adopt

in the 20th century. Sir

Edward Tylor (1871, p. 1), for

instance, wrote that:

Culture, or civilization … is that

complex whole which includes

knowledge, belief, arts, morals,

laws, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired

by man as a member of society.

Notice that Tylor viewed culture as synonymous with

civilization, which he claimed evolved in three stages.

CAUTION: Today we generally regard Tylor’s theory as

mistaken, so please do not get too excited about the details

that follow, but according to Tylor, the <rst stage of the

evolution of culture was “savagery.” People who lived by

hunting and gathering, Tylor claimed, exempli<ed this

stage. The second stage, “barbarism,” Tylor said, described

nomadic pastoralists, or people who lived by tending

animals. The third stage, the civilized stage, described

societies characterized by: urbanization, social

strati<cation, specialization of labor, and centralization of

political authority.

As a result, European observers of 19th century North

America, noticing that many Indian tribes lived by

hunting and gathering, thought of America as a “land of

savagery” (Billington, 1985). Presumably, tribes that

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farmed and tended sheep were not savages but merely

barbarians. But by this de<nition, many early English

settlers in North America, as well as some populations still

living in England, in so far as they lived mainly by farming

and tending animals, could rightly be called barbarians. In

fact, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, many

‘cultured Europeans’ did regard Americans in the colonies

as barbarians.

Now just to be clear, Europeans were not the only

people with an inflated sense of their own superiority. In

China, those living within the various imperial dynasties

thought of people living far away from the center of the

empire as barbarians. Moreover, they regarded everyone

outside of China as barbarians. And this included the

British.

But let’s return to Sir Edward Tylor and the elements

that he identi<ed as belonging to culture–knowledge,

beliefs, arts, morals, laws, customs, and so on. This view of

culture is certainly not far from 20th and 21st century

views. But contemporary cultural scholars <nd Tylor

mistaken in equating culture with civilization. Among the

<rst scholars to drive this point home was Franz Boas.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 3

Franz Boas

Franz Boas and the birth of American

anthropology

Franz Boas is widely

regarded as the father of

cultural anthropology in

the United States. Boas

was a German of Jewish

heritage (though from a

not religiously observant

family). Educated in

Germany, Boas was

exposed to two competing

intellectual traditions, the

Naturwissenschaften

(natural sciences) and the Geisteswissenschaften (human

sciences). Boas embraced both, as a student of physics on

the one hand and geography on the other. In 1896, Boas

immigrated to the United States (Liron, 2003). Without

the contributions of Boas, American anthropology might

have developed very differently.

Unlike the British scholars of the time, Boas insisted

that the study of culture should be based on careful

observation, not speculation, which was the tendency of

writers like Matthews and Tylor. Boas spent many years

studying Native American cultures, and over the course of

his career, he collected volumes of information on

linguistics, art, dance, and archaeology. Boas’ studies

convinced him of the sophistication of Native cultures, so

in contrast to Tylor, Boas and his students rejected the

idea of indigenous cultures as inferior stages along the

route to civilized re<nement presumably represented by

“Western” cultures (Franz Boas, 2017).

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In fact, Boas is responsible for a number of tendencies

in American anthropology:

For one thing, as we have just suggested, Boas rejected

the idea that culture was something that evolved within

societies by stages from lower forms to higher. Instead, he

argued that culture was a historical, not an evolutionary

development. Boas insisted that cultural ideas and

practices diffused across groups who were living in

proximity and interacting within similar environments.

For Boas cultural developments were in many ways just

accidents of history (Franz Boas, 2017).

Moreover, Boas was a vehement opponent of the

scienti<c racism of the era (Liron, 2003). Scienti<c racists

pushed the idea that race was a biological characteristic

and that it was possible to explain human behavior by

appealing to racial differences. During the 19th and 20th

centuries, scienti<c racism had many proponents, not just

in Europe and North America but as far away as China and

Japan (Dikötter, 1992). Many anthropologists in Boas’ day

busied themselves in activities like describing and

measuring the skulls of various groups of people and using

this data to draw conclusions about the intellectual and

moral characteristics of people. Boas, however, conducted

his own studies of skeletal anatomy, and argued that the

shape and size of the human skull was greatly affected by

environmental factors like health and nutrition (Franz

Boas, 2017).

For better or for worse, Boas is also responsible for

transforming culture into a count noun, or a noun with

both singular and plural forms. Before Boas, culture was

an abstract idea, not countable, like beauty, knowledge, or

love. After Boas, one could refer to “cultures,” that is,

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 5

groups sharing a common set of ideas, beliefs, practices,

etc.

Finally, we also owe the notion of cultural relativism to

Franz Boas. Cultural relativism is the idea that cultures

cannot be objectively evaluated as higher or lower, better

or worse, right or wrong. From the perspective of the

cultural relativist, cultures can only be judged on their own

terms. For the cultural relativist, the job of the

anthropologist is to understand how a culture works, not

to make aesthetic or moral judgments about other

cultures. (Cultural relativism though was a double-edged

sword. On the one hand, it may have helped students of

culture combat their own ethnocentrism. After all, most of

the practices of any given culture are surely neither right

nor wrong relative to those of another culture but only

different. On the other hand, a cultural relativist would be

forced to admit that there was nothing morally wrong with

chattel slavery as practiced across wide regions of the

country in 19th

century America. That idea clearly offends

the moral intuitions of most contemporary Americans.)

Franz Boas had extraordinary influence on American

anthropology. He not only introduced important ideas and

methods but also nurtured a generation of students that

would turn anthropology into a thriving and popular

academic <eld. Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Edward

Sapir, and Margaret Mead were just a few of Boas’ most

well-known students (Franz Boas, 2017).

Later 20th & 21st century developments

Academic interest in culture flourished in the 20th century

and still continues today. Scholars who try to de<ne the

subject often begin with the classic work of Kroeber and

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Kluckhohn who in 1952 reviewed over 160 de<nitions from

the literature of their day. And as if 160 de<nitions were

not enough, Kroeber and Kluckhohn went on to offer their

own:

Culture consists of patterns … of … behavior acquired and

transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive

achievement of human groups, including their embodiments

in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional,

… historical … ideas and especially their attached values;

culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as

products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of

further action. (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952: 181)

Since Kroeber and Kluckhohn, scholars have continued

to revise old de<nitions and invent new ones. A recent

survey identi<ed 313 de<nitions in the scholarly literature

comprising seven distinct themes! These included

de<nitions framed in terms of:

1. Structure/pattern – culture as a system or framework

of elements (e.g., ideas, behavior, symbols, or any

combination of these or other elements)

2. Function – culture as a means for achieving some

end

3. Process – culture as an ongoing process of social

construction

4. Product – culture as a collection of artifacts (with or

without deliberate symbolic intent)

5. ReQnement – culture as individual or group

cultivation to higher intellect or morality

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 7

6. Group membership – culture as signifying a place or

group of people, including a focus on belonging to

a place or group

7. Power or ideology – culture as an expression of

group-based domination and power

(Faulkner, Baldwin, Lindsley & Hecht, 2006: 29-30)

Given so many themes, you might feel like agreeing with

Jahoda (2012: 299) who complained that:

more than half a century after Kroeber and Kluckhohn, and

a literature that could easily Tll a sizeable library, the most

striking feature of these deTnitions is their diversity.

But perhaps this laundry list of themes need not be

confusing. Perhaps they are not even as inconsistent as

they might seem. I am reminded of the parable of the blind

men and the elephant.

Six blind men confronting an elephant for the <rst time,

came away from the experience with six different

descriptions owing to their different angles of approach.

One blind man, reaching up to touch the animal’s broad

side, concluded that the elephant was like a wall. Another

man running into a leg, decided that an elephant was like

a tree. A third man seizing the elephant’s trunk,

proclaimed the elephant to be a snake, while the fourth

man grasping the tail, declared the elephant to be more

like a rope. Meanwhile, a <fth man grasping the ear was

sure the elephant was like a fan, while the sixth man

encountering a tusk was equally sure the elephant was a

spear. Only by bringing all of the separate parts of the

1 8 | N O L A N W E I L

elephant together could anyone hope to acquire a complete

and coherent impression of an elephant. Perhaps culture is

a bit like this. Our concept of it is enriched when we are

able to see it from many different angles.

Blind monks examining an elephant by Itcho Hanabusa (1652-1724)

Still maybe some of the themes of Faulkner and

colleagues seem more basic than others, so in rounding

out this chapter, I attempt a <nal synthesis bringing

together the simple de<nition with which I started the

chapter and relating it to the seven themes of Faulkner et

al.

Final reflections

How does the simple de<nition of culture offered at the

beginning of the chapter intersect with those of Faulkner

and colleagues? If you go back and review the simple

de<nition carefully, you will see that it encompasses items

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 9

1 and 4 from the list, with a nod to item 6 as well. It

emphasizes that culture is a product of human making. It

allows that those products can be material artifacts, or

merely expressions of cognitive activities, i.e., thoughts, or

both. A story passed along by word of mouth is a product

of thought. Retelling the story to an audience is an action.

A story written down on a scroll or printed in a book

means that the thoughts of the story-teller are preserved in

material form. In emphasizing that culture consists of

elements, we have tried to reduce those elements down to

two basic categories: thought and action. In later chapters,

we will expand upon each category.

Our de<nition does not rule out the possibility that

some elements of culture, what we call material culture,

can remain long after the people that produced it are gone,

e.g., stone tools from prehistoric times. On the other hand,

it implies that material artifacts do not come into being

without human intervention. Somebody made the stone

tools. And it leaves open the possibility that some elements

of culture are behavioral; in other words, they are

performances that require no props, e.g., shaking hands in

greeting. Finally, my simple de<nition acknowledges that

in so far as people are not solitary animals but live in

groups, culture is a collective phenomenon. We will revisit

all of these themes in the chapters that follow.

As for de<nitions that emphasize culture as a function

or culture as a process, my de<nition is silent. I would say,

of course, one can look at culture from a functional point

of view, or one can emphasize the processual aspects of

cultural phenomena. But are these not secondary

considerations? Don’t they follow only after some initial

observation and description? We <nd a stone arrow head

buried in the ground. Isn’t the <rst order of business to

2 0 | N O L A N W E I L

gaze in wonder at the object, to describe it and name it? Of

course, we soon want to know: What was this used for?

What was its function? In what ways does it <t together

with other objects? And how was it made? And knowing

full well that crafting a tool requires learning, we wonder,

how did novices learn this craft, by what process? But in

the interest of brevity, I have purposely tried not to cram

every conceivable quali<cation into the basic de<nition.

Looking over Faulkner et al’s list for other items about

which our opening de<nition is silent, we also note the

preservation of one of the oldest notions of culture, culture

as re<nement. With the career of Franz Boas freshly in

mind, we might imagine that Boas would wonder how

such an anachronism appears in our modern context. (An

anachronism is something old-fashioned, something

belonging to an earlier time and place than the one

portrayed.) However, while Tylor may have been wrong to

think that the culture of Native Americans or Africans was

rudimentary compared to that of Englishmen, perhaps we

should not be too quick to banish the idea of re<nement as

an integral aspect of culture. One could well imagine our

stone-age tool master, for instance, becoming better and

better at the craft and teaching others the <ner points of

arrowhead making. Indeed, human culture may have built

into it the urge to perfection, and so the idea of culture as

re<nement need not necessarily be an elite pretension of

either Western (or imperial Chinese) “high society.”

Finally, there is the idea that culture is an expression of

group-based domination and power. In my <rst

reflections on this theme I was inclined to say that surely

this does not reflect the most basic de<nition of culture

but is instead an observation about a dynamic that might

come about when populations grow and splinter into

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 1

multiple groups that inevitably vie with each other. (Come

to think of it, isn’t that exactly what a study of Neolithic

China will reveal.) And so I may be forced to acknowledge

that perhaps culture as power and domination over others

deserves a more prominent place in my scheme of things,

but for now I will have to leave things stand as they are,

i.e., incomplete.

To sum it all up, the English word, “culture,” has a long

history, and it has also undergone many modern

developments. In contemporary discourse, it continues to

be used in all the old ways, even as it has acquired new

meanings. It is a product of human thought and action.

Some products are tangible and some are not. Culture is

learned. Culture is passed from one generation to another.

Sometimes culture is invented anew. Culture is the

instrument by means of which humans both adapt to the

physical environment and regulate their lives in groups.

Culture is not <xed once and for all but changes in

response to changing circumstances. Culture can be a

source as well as an instrument of conflict. Culture is

complicated.

Application

For Further Thought and Discussion

Below are some excerpts of deTnitions from various sources,

organized in seven groups. Keep in mind the proposal of Faulkner,

Baldwin, Lindsley and Hecht that scholarly deTnitions tend to fall

into one (or more) thematic categories:

1. Structure

2 2 | N O L A N W E I L

2. Function

3. Process

4. Product

5. ReTnement

6. Group Membership

7. Power/Ideology

For each cluster of deTnitions below, name the category from

above that best describes the theme represented by the items

included in the cluster.

Cluster 1: Culture as _______________

• the moral and social passion for doing good; it is the study and pursuit of perfection, and this perfection is the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality (Harrison, 1971)

• the attainment of higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations (Gramsci, 1981)

Cluster 2: Culture as _______________

• what happens when people makes sense of their lives and the behavior of other people with whom they have to deal (Spindler and Spindler, 1990)

• how information is transmitted, particularly in teaching and learning (Bonner, 1980)

Cluster 3: Culture as ________________

• a community or population sufFciently large enough to be self-sustaining, i.e., large enough to produce new generations of members without relying on outside people (Jandt, 2016)

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 3

• people who share learned patterns of behavior (Winkelman, 1993)

Cluster 4: Culture as ________________

• a contested zone in which different groups struggle to deFne issues in their own interests (Moon, 2002)

• a Feld on which a cacophonous cluster of diverse voices plays itself out (Shore, 1996)

Cluster 5: Culture as ________________

• the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving (Samovar and Porter, 1991)

• an organized group of learned responses characteristic of a particular society (Linton, 1955)

• a commonly shared system of symbols, the meanings of which are understood on both sides with an approximation to agreement (Parsons, 1964)

Cluster 6: Culture as ________________

• that which gives people a sense of who they are, of belonging, of how they should behave, and of what they should be doing (Harris & Moran, 1996)

• means and mechanisms through which the general biological nature of the individuals comprising the society is regulated, their behavior is programmed and directed … (Markarian, 1973)

Cluster 7: Culture as _________________

• the artifacts that are produced by society, e.g., clothing, food, technology, etc. (Barnett & Kincaid, 1983)

2 4 | N O L A N W E I L

• popular production of images . . . as part of a larger process which . . . may be called popular culture (Fabian, 1999)

References

Arnold, M. (1896). Literature and dogma. (Preface). New

York, NY: The Macmillan Co.

Baldwin, J. R., Faulkner, S. L., Hecht, M. L. & Lindsley, S. L.

(Eds.), (2006). RedeQning culture: Perspectives across the

disciplines. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Billington, R. A. (1985). Land of savagery, land of promise: The

European image of the American frontier in the nineteenth

century. University of Oklahoma Press.

Dikötter, F. (1992). Discourse of race in modern

China. Stanford University Press.

Faulkner, S. L., Baldwin, J. R., Lindsley, S. L. & Hecht, M. L.

(2006). Layers of meaning: An analysis of de<nitions of

culture. In RedeQning culture: Perspectives across the

disciplines. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Franz Boas. (2017, June 2). In Wikipedia, The Free

Encyclopedia.

Goddard, C. (2005). The lexical semantics of ‘culture’.

Language Sciences, 27, 51–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/

j.langsci.2004.05.001

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 5

Jahoda, G. (2012). Critical reflections on some recent

de<nitions of ‘‘culture.’’ Culture & Psychology, 18(3),

289–303.

Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical

review of concepts and deQnitions. Cambridge, MA: Peabody

Museum.

Liron, T. (2003). Franz Boas and the discovery of culture.

Senior Honors Thesis, Amherst College.

Tylor, E. B. (1871/1958). The origins of culture. New York, NY:

Harper & Brothers.

Image Attribution

Image 1: “Edward Burnett Tylor” by The GNU Project is

licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Image 2: “Franz Boas” from the Canadian Museum of

Civilization is licensed under Public Domain-1923

Image 3: “Blind monks examining an elephant” from

Wikimedia Commons is licensed under Public

Domain-1923

2 6 | N O L A N W E I L

2

Chapter 2: The Human

Family

Nolan Weil

Suggested Focus

There are several important arguments in this chapter. If you

follow them carefully, you may come away with all the necessary

resources to address the following questions and tasks.

1. What does it mean to say that human diversity is

geographically structured?

2. Explain the essential difference between the

Multiregional Origin Hypothesis and the Recent African

Origin Hypothesis. How does your previous

understanding of human origins compare with these

explanations?

3. List at least three genetically determined traits

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 7

discussed in the chapter. Which two seem linked to

geography and climate? Which one might be due

mainly to chance?

4. Explain the connection between geography, human

nutritional requirements, and skin color.

5. How has the concept of race changed since the time of

Carl Linnaeus?

Origins and Diversity of Humanity

In the chapter after this one, we will trace human culture

back to its earliest origins and then linger for a while in the

Upper Paleolithic, which lasted from about 50,000 to

10,000 years ago. But in this chapter, we will set the stage

for that story by looking at the origins and diversity of

Homo sapiens, which is the scienti<c name of our species.

Although we humans are not the only species to exhibit

culture, we depend on it in a way that no other species

does. Moreover, human culture is certainly as old as the

human species itself. But how old is that? And how do we

explain human diversity? Finally, how did our species

come to be distributed across the whole earth?

Anyone who has ever visited an ethnically diverse city

like New York, London, Toronto, or Sydney, is surely

impressed by the diversity of people living in these cities.

These cities, and others like them, have attracted migrants

from every corner of the world. Noticing this diversity may

naturally make some of us curious. Where is this or that

person from? Or to be more precise, where are the person’s

ancestors from (for the person in question may be truly

2 8 | N O L A N W E I L

from New York, having been born there and having never

lived anywhere else). Sometimes it is hard to guess from a

person’s appearance where his/her ancestors are from

originally. But sometimes it is not so hard. Where do you

suppose the ancestors of the people depicted below

probably originated?

Indeed, a person’s physical appearance can be a good

clue from where in the world the person’s ancestors came.

We see a person with a particular face, and we think —

India, while for others, we think — China, or Africa, or

Europe. Sometimes we can be even more precise—that

person looks Somali, we think (if we are familiar with

Somalis), while another we guess is an Eastern European

of some sort. Of course, we can be mistaken, but those of

us who have met people from many different places may

become quite good at guessing a person’s ancestral

origins. On the other hand, many people in the world

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 9

today have mixed ancestry, which complicates the point I

am trying to make. You may be wondering, “just what is

that point?”

Only that humans exhibit a lot of genetic diversity (for it

is our genes that determine our physical characteristics)

and also that genetic diversity is geographically

structured, which is the geneticist’s way of saying that

people from particular regions resemble each other more

than they resemble people from other regions. In the past,

this observation led both laymen and scholars to believe

that people could be neatly classi<ed into easily

distinguishable groups, called ‘races.’

Today, most biologists believe that (biologically

speaking) the only race is the human race. What does this

mean? Where did our respective ancestors come from in

the <rst place? Did our ancestral groups just spring into

existence independent of all other groups? Or is each

group a branch from the trunk of one great tree, which

came from a single seed? In other words, if we trace our

ancestry back far enough, will we discover that we really

belong, not to different regional tribes, but to one original

tribe?

The academic discipline most intimately connected with

the search for answers to questions about human origins

is physical anthropology (also known as biological

anthropology). We thus begin our cross-cultural

explorations by <rst situating ourselves as a species.

3 0 | N O L A N W E I L

Artist’s depiction of Homo erectus

Where did we all come from?

Scienti<c knowledge of

human origins is based on

the study of skulls and

other skeletal remains,

many of which were

unearthed in the 20th

century. In the last 30

years, advances in

molecular genetics have

also advanced our

knowledge. Based on this

material, many

anthropologists have concluded that our <rst fully human

(but not quite modern) ancestors appeared in Africa about

2 million years ago. We know them as Homo

erectus (“upright man”). We call ourselves Homo sapiens

(“wise man”), meaning that while we might see these

distant cousins as somehow human, we do not see them as

belonging to our species. But their exact relationship to us

has been a subject of controversy over the last half-century,

as scholars have debated two competing theories for

explaining how human beings populated the planet. Let’s

look at these two theories.

The Multiregional Origin Hypothesis

There are many variations of the Multiregional Origin

Hypothesis, making it hard to construct a simple narrative,

but the basic story goes something like this.

As suggested above, Homo erectus, <rst appeared in

Africa about 2 million years ago. From fossil evidence, we

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 3 1

guess that some groups migrated out of Africa reaching

Indonesia, China, and Georgia about 1.7 million years ago.

Other groups may have wandered into Europe about 1.5

million years ago. According to multi-regionalists, (e.g.,

Thorne & Wolpoff, 2003), as Homo erectus spread across

Asia and Europe, they established separate regional

populations. These populations gradually evolved with

some gene mixing occurring when migrating groups

sometimes came into contact with one another. Multi-

regionalists propose that Homo erectus gradually evolved to

eventually become Homo sapiens. If this theory is correct,

say the multi-regionalists, it explains why Homo sapiens

appeared suddenly across Europe, Asia and Australia

about 50,000 years ago.

The Recent African Origin Hypothesis

Not every anthropologist accepts the Multiregional Origin

Hypothesis. Supporters of the Recent African Origin

Hypothesis agree that various species of the genus Homo,

including Homo erectus <rst appeared in Africa and that

some groups migrated out of Africa. They doubt, however,

that Asian populations of Homo erectus gave rise to Homo

sapiens. Instead, they argue, there were many migrations

of various archaic humans out of Africa over 1.5-2.0 million

years, none of which gave rise to Homo sapiens. According

to the Recent African Origin Hypothesis, our immediate

ancestors evolved—perhaps from Homo erectus, yes,

although not of the world travelling Asian variety, but

instead from those Homo erectus who had remained,

evolving, in Africa (Cann & Wilson, 2003).

According to the Recent African Origin Hypothesis, our

closest ancestors originated in East Africa about 150,000 –

3 2 | N O L A N W E I L

200,000 years ago and migrated out of Africa in several

waves beginning about 100,000 years ago. Some of these

waves may have died out. But one wave, which began

about 90,000 years ago, carried early humans out of Africa,

possibly through present day Yemen. Over the next 15,000

years, groups of early moderns followed the coast of the

Indian Ocean, around the Indian subcontinent as far as

present day Indonesia and southern China. By about

65,000 years ago, some groups reached Australia, Borneo

and New Guinea. About 50,000 years ago, after the climate

in Europe began to warm following an Ice Age, some

groups moved north and east across the European

continent (Oppenheimer, 2003).

Map of hypothesized global migrations of humans out of Africa

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 3 3

Artist’s depiction of Neanderthal Man

On these migrations,

Homo sapiens may have

encountered various

hominid cousins,

including Homo

neanderthalensis

(Neanderthal man). Some

geneticists believe modern

humans may carry a small

amount (~2.5%) of

Neanderthal DNA (Green,

et al., 2010). Otherwise

there is not much evidence of interbreeding between

moderns and archaic humans. Eventually, all

representatives of the genus Homo other than Homo sapiens

disappeared; we do not know exactly why.

About 40,000-45,000 years ago, modern humans began

spreading north throughout Asia. Then beginning about

25,000 years ago, some groups crossed over a Bering land

bridge from Siberia to Alaska. Gradually, over the next

10,000 years, these migrants from Asia spread throughout

all of North and South America. Of course, not everyone

left Africa. Some descendants of groups that left may have

even returned. We do not know all of the details, but over

the past 30 years, a lot of evidence has been discovered that

supports the Recent African Origin hypothesis

(Oppenheimer, 2003). Today, it is probably fair to say, it is

the consensus view among anthropologists although few

would say the matter is completely settled.

If the Recent African Origin theory is correct, it means

every living human being can trace his/her ancestry to

Africans who left Africa roughly 90,000 years ago. In other

words, there is a fundamental sense in which deep down

3 4 | N O L A N W E I L

we are all African, and ultimately as different as we may

seem to be, we are all one big family.

But why do we all look so different on the

surface?

If our ancestors all came from Africa, you may be

wondering, why do we all look as different as we do? To

answer this question, we have to draw on principles from

evolutionary biology and population genetics.

To survive, a species must be well adapted to its

environment. Some species occupy a very narrow

geographic range; we say it is specialized. For example,

the koala lives only in Australia and eats primarily the

leaves of eucalyptus trees. Koalas do not exhibit much

variation and cannot live in very many places. Other

species, however, are generalized; they inhabit a wide

range of environments and exhibit a greater degree of

variation. We humans are an example of a generalized

species. We inhabit environments from the tropics to the

arctic, from deserts to rainforests, and from sea level to

high mountains. Many of the traits we possess are what

biologists call polymorphic, that is they exist in many different forms, which allow us to adapt to a wider range

of environments (Feder and Park, 1993: p. 328).

One trait that shows great variation in humans is skin

color. If we look at a map showing the distribution of skin

color across the world today, we <nd that darker skin is

concentrated near the equator while lighter skin is

concentrated in the northern latitudes. If the recent

African origin theory is correct, our earliest modern

human ancestors evolved in Africa for about 100,000 years

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 3 5

before leaving on their journeys to the far ends of the

earth. Those ancient ancestors were most certainly black,

having evolved in the intense equatorial sun.

Global human skin color distribution

Black skin provides some protection against sunburn

and skin cancer. That much is true. But this is probably not

the reason our African ancestors evolved dark skin.

More important may have been a connection between

skin color, ultraviolet radiation (UV), and an important

vitamin. According to Jablonski & Chaplin (2010), dark

skin is the body’s way of preserving folate (Vitamin B),

which is rapidly destroyed by UV radiation leading to

folate de<ciency, a major cause of birth defects,

developmental disorders, and various degenerative

diseases (Lucock et al., 2003). Light skinned people would

not have thrived in such an environment; therefore, the

frequency of genes for light skin would have been greatly

reduced or eliminated from the gene pool.

When the earliest migrations out of Africa took humans

around the coast of India, the selective pressures (with

regard to skin color) remained the same. Indeed, people

indigenous to southern India tend to be quite dark. But as

human populations moved northward, selective pressure

for dark skin diminished. In fact, populations in the

3 6 | N O L A N W E I L

northern most latitudes encountered a different kind of

adaptive challenge. Adequate Vitamin D synthesis requires

exposure to UV radiation. Humans in the northern

latitudes needed to absorb all the UV light they could for

Vitamin D synthesis. Since white skin allows in more UV

while dark skin <lters it out, populations that settled in the

north underwent selection for white skin. Dark skinned

people in the far north would have suffered from rickets, a

bone disease caused by Vitamin D de<ciency. The fact that

some northern people (like the Inuit) are darker than we

would expect is explained by their diet of <sh and marine

mammals, which is rich in Vitamin D. Because the Inuit

got adequate Vitamin D from their food, they did not

depend on sunlight for Vitamin D synthesis and so did not

face selective pressure for lighter skin.

Populations that settled in the middle latitudes

(between 23° and 46°) evolved yet another adaptive trait. In

the middle latitudes, UV radiation varies greatly by season,

so people indigenous to the middle latitudes evolved white

skin with the ability to tan (i.e., become darker). In

essence, they could change their color considerably,

becoming several shades darker in summer, and getting

pale again with the winter. In the modern era, of course,

people of all colors have migrated, or been otherwise

displaced, to places not originally inhabited by their

ancestors. Cultural adaptations compensate for any

environmental disadvantages associated with particular

skin colors. For instance, white people in sun-drenched

regions shield themselves from UV radiation with

clothing, and black children in sun-deprived regions may

drink milk, which in places like the U.S. is routinely

forti<ed with Vitamin D.

Body build is another trait that may have undergone

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 3 7

selection. People like the Maasai of Kenya, who live in a hot

climate, are often long limbed and slender, which

promotes heat loss. People like the Inuit (mentioned

above), who live in a cold climate, are often stocky with

short <ngers and toes, a body build that helps preserve

body heat. Similarly, people whose ancestors settled in

cold or dry areas often have long noses to warm or moisten

the air before taking it into the lungs. People whose

ancestors stayed in hot humid places (where the air is

already warm and moist) have noses that are short and

broad.

So one explanation for human physical variation is

natural selection, which is the idea that the environment

(e.g., geography and climate) selected particular traits and

not others. Why? Because those traits enabled the

individuals that possessed them to reproduce more

successfully and therefore to pass these genetically

determined traits to their offspring. As our African

ancestors settled in different regions over tens of

thousands of years, they gradually acquired physical traits

well suited to their environments. They began to look more

and more like the people that today we would tag as

Indian, and Chinese, and Northern European, and for that

matter African too.

But while natural selection shapes the physical

characteristics of populations, random processes also play

a role. Gene flow and genetic drift are random processes that

also surely affected our ancestors on their global

migrations. For much of human history, humans lived in

small, geographically separated groups of interbreeding

individuals. Sometimes, different populations came into

contact and interbred. When this occurred, there was gene

flow, or the mixing of genes between two populations.

3 8 | N O L A N W E I L

Gene flow served to reduce the genetic variation between

interbreeding groups. Physical differences between the

groups became blurred as a result of mixing.

On the other hand, sometimes a population may have

split into two or more groups, each of which went its own

way. This led to genetic drift. Especially when populations

are small, chances are that the frequencies of particular

genes in populations that split will be quite different. For

example, it is not likely that the (many) genes that control

height will be equally distributed when a relatively small

population splits into two groups. One group may retain

more of the genes that contribute to a taller stature, and

after several generations, the average height of one group

will tend to be greater than that of another (Feder & Park,

1993).

In conclusion, nearly 100,000 years of migrations have

shaped from an original population of Africans an

assortment of regional groups differing phenotypically

from each other in ways shaped by geography, climate,

and chance. At the same time, Africans themselves have

also continued to evolve. Today Africa remains the

continent with the greatest amount of genetic (and

linguistic) diversity anywhere on the earth, further lending

support to the idea that it all started in Africa.

Race is not a biologically meaningful concept

The topic of race is a sensitive one because race is

historically tied to issues of inequality and oppression that

still trouble us today. But what is race? Simply stated, race

involves the idea that humans can be classi<ed into a few

basic groups based on genetic and physical traits, ancestry,

or social relations. Today scholars think of race as a folk

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 3 9

concept, not a scienti<c concept although once upon a time,

the concept was treated with great scienti<c authority.

It is true that most groups tend to classify other groups

in relationship to themselves. A group with limited

knowledge and experience of another group living nearby

may merely create a simple category that distinguishes the

in-group from the out-group. For instance, the Abenaki

who inhabited the northern regions of North America, and

referred to themselves as Alnôbak, “real people,” referred to

their neighbors in the arctic as Eskimo, “eaters of raw

flesh,” or so it is widely believed. Meanwhile, the ‘Eskimo’

called themselves Inuit, or … you guessed it, “real people.”

Each group thought of itself as “real people,” while they

thought of the other group as, well, perhaps not real

people.

On the other hand, complex societies with considerable

knowledge of other people may produce elaborate systems

of classi<cation. It is often said that Europeans had no

particular awareness of race until the 1700s; however, a

variety of cultural documents from the European Middle

Ages show that during the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries,

Europeans were already creating a discourse of race even

before the development of an explicit vocabulary of race

(Heng, 2011).

Europeans had, of course, long been familiar with the

peoples of Africa and the Middle East. But from the

15th-18th centuries, Europeans also began to encounter

many of the world’s other peoples for the <rst time,

especially in the Americas, Australia and the Paci<c

Islands. These encounters along with the rise of science set

the stage for the development of scienti<c attempts to

explain human diversity, and the concept of race became a

subject of scienti<c interest.

4 0 | N O L A N W E I L

Scientists such as the Swedish botanist, physician and

zoologist, Carl Linnaeus, laid the foundation for a

scienti<c racism that would last well into the 20th century.

In 1735, Linnaeus invented a system for classifying living

organisms that would greatly influence European ideas

about race. Linnaeus classi<ed humans into four racial

types based on skin color and facial and bodily features.

He named the types after their assumed place of origin,

associating each type with a color: Africanus (black),

Asiaticus (yellow), Americanus (red), and Europeaeaus

(white). He even described behavioral traits he thought

distinguished each race. While biologists still regard the

Linnaean system as useful for classifying living organisms

generally, modern biologists eventually rejected Linnaeus’

classi<cation of humans by racial type (Jandt, 2016, pp.

9-10).

For centuries though, racial classi<cation was

considered scienti<cally legitimate. Moreover, Europeans’

embrace of scienti<c racism assured them of their own

racial superiority. From the 16th to the mid-20th century,

scienti<c racism made it easy for Europeans to justify

their colonial domination and exploitation of indigenous

populations in North and South America, Africa, the

Middle East, South Asia, Australia and the Paci<c Islands.

The history of nations in the ‘New World,’ from the United

States to Brazil, is still tarnished by the legacy of black

slavery, justi<ed by a theory of race reinforced by the

science of the day. Unfortunately, even after slavery was

<nally ended, racist assumptions continued, casting a long

shadow over the lives of the descendants of enslaved

peoples.

In the mid to late 20th century, Western nations began

the slow and painful work of confronting and redressing

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 4 1

racial injustices of the past. Biologists, working with the

bene<t of advanced technologies, particularly in the <eld

of genetics, began to realize that the centuries old theory

of race was genetically incoherent. Today, the scienti<c

consensus is that while human diversity is undeniable,

traditional systems of racial classi<cation have no

biological basis (Feder & Park, 1993).

Nevertheless, it is dif<cult for many people to accept

that when we think we see people of different races, we are

deceived. To understand how this is so, we should realize

that despite the visibility of a few (genetically determined)

traits, humans vary (genetically) in many other ways that

are not visible. And if we are going to <nd a genetic basis

for race, we should look at all of our genes, not just the

ones that result in a few visible traits. For a theory of race

to have any genetic basis, geneticists should be able to <nd

large groups of people that are genetically homogeneous

within their group but heterogeneous with respect to

contrasting groups. This is just not the case. A tremendous

amount of genetic variability is actually shared among

supposed racial groups, and genetic variation between

individuals of the “same racial group” is sometimes greater

than the genetic variation between individuals of two

“different racial groups.” In other words, geneticists are

not able to <nd any non-arbitrary way to draw boundaries

around groups (Marks, 2010).

But surely, some people may still argue, the fact that one

person’s skin is as black as mahogany while another’s is

almost as white as snow is evidence of some typological

difference. Indeed, skin color, in particular, continues to

be a salient feature for many, even if they agree that skin

color is just one trait among many. For any reader that is

not persuaded by the arguments against the reality of race

4 2 | N O L A N W E I L

articulated above, Relethford (2009, p. 21) has suggested

that comparing traits such as skin color to height might

help us understand the problem better. Borrowing from

Relethford’s argument, we might note, for instance, that

like skin color, height too is a continuous variable. In other

words, people come in all sizes from very short to very tall

and everywhere in between just as people come in many

different shades of color. In daily conversation, we may

use crude labels such as ‘‘short,’’ ‘‘medium,’’ and ‘‘tall,’’ but

do we think that these represent three precisely de<ned

groups. In most places in the world, 198 cm would

certainly be tall. But how about someone who is 218 cm.

Suddenly, we might feel the need for a new

category—“very tall.” And where exactly should we draw

the line between tall and very tall: 207 cm, 208 cm, or 207.5

cm? And how many categories would we feel we needed to

cover people of every height? Relethford’s point is that we

know that the labels we use in everyday life are subjective

and imprecise, but no one thinks that terms like ‘‘short,’’

‘‘medium,’’ and ‘‘tall’’ refer to discrete groups, and that

human beings comes in only three, or <ve, or seven

varieties of height.

In the end, Relethford says:

Race is a crude Trst-order approximation to human biological

variation that is arbitrary in terms of the number and

deTnition of races. As such, race may not provide the best way

of describing or analyzing human variation.

This does not contradict what we have said earlier, that

human variability is geographically structured, and that

based on a person’s appearance, we can often guess at the

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 4 3

geographical origins of his/her ancestors. But that is not

the same thing as saying that the person in question

belongs to some genetically coherent category that one

could call a race. In the end, there is only one race, the

human race.

Final Reflection

Although socially constructed concepts of race do not

appear to rest on <rm biological foundations, race will no

doubt continue to occupy a prominent place in the social

and political discourse, especially in countries with

colonial legacies or histories stained by slavery and racial

injustice. And scienti<c or not, the social construction of

race is often a basis for the formation of identity, although

whether that identity can in every instance be legitimately

called a cultural identity is another matter for debate.

Application

For Further Thought and Discussion

1. Now that you have Tnished reading Chapter 2 what is

your response? What was familiar to you? Did anything

surprise you?

2. How was the origin of humans explained in the

community where you grew up? Was there more than

one explanation?

3. How much attention do people where you are from pay

to skin color? Is skin color seen as a basis for

differentiating people in any way? If so, how?

4 4 | N O L A N W E I L

4. What is the writer’s point of view on race? Do you Tnd it

persuasive? Why or why not?

For Further Reading

Human skin color. Wikipedia contributors, (2019,

September 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

Retrieved 18:39, September 5, 2019, from

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/

index.php?title=Human_skin_color&oldid=914032650

References

Cann, R. L. & Wilson, A. C. (2003). The recent African

genesis of humans. ScientiQc American, 13, 54-61.

doi:10.1038/scienti<camerican0503-54sp

Feder, K. L. & Park, M. A. (1993). Human antiquity: An

introduction to physical anthropology and archaeology, (2nd

ed.). Mountain View, CA: May<eld.

Green, R. E., Krause, J., Briggs, A. W., et al. (2010). A draft

sequence of the Neanderthal genome. Science, 328(5979),

710-722. doi: 10.1126/science.1188021

Heng, G. (2011). The invention of race in the European

Middle Ages I: Race studies, modernity, and the Middle

Ages. Literature Compass 8(5), 315-331.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/

j.1741-4113.2011.00790.x

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 4 5

Jablonski, N. G. & Chaplin, G. (2010). Human skin

pigmentation as an adaptation to UV radiation.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (Suppl.

2), 8962-8968. doi:10.1073/pnas.0914628107

Jandt, F. E. (2016). An introduction to intercultural

communication: Identities in a global community, (8th ed.)

Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Lucock, M., Yates, Z., Glanville, T., Leeming, R., Simpson,

N. & Daskalakis, I. (2003). A critical role for B-vitamin

nutrition in human development and evolutionary

biology. Nutrition Research, 23, 1463-1475.

Marks, J. (2010). Ten facts about human variation. In M. P.

Muehlenbein (Ed.), Evolutionary Biology. New York:

Cambridge p. 270.

Oppenheimer, S. (2003). The real Eve: Modern man’s journey

out of Africa. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf.

Relethford, J. H. (2009). Race and global patterns of

phenotypic variation. American Journal of Physical

Anthropology, 139(1), 16–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/

ajpa.20900

Thorne, A. G. & Wolpoff, M. H. (2003). The multiregional

evolution of humans. ScientiQc American, 13, 46-53.

doi:10.1038/scienti<camerican0492-76

Image Attribution

Image 1: “Chinese woman” by Aldousleung is licensed

under Public Domain 1.0

Image 2: “Indian Man” is licensed under CC0 Public

Domain

Image 3: “Somali Man” is licensed under CC0 1.0

4 6 | N O L A N W E I L

Image 4: “Karolina Kurkova Shankbone 2009

Metropolitan Opera” by David Shankbone is licensed

under CC BY 3.0

Image 5: “Homo erectus adult female – head model –

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History” by Tim Evanson

is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Image 6: “Human Migration Out of Africa” by Ephert is

licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Image 7: “Neanderthals, based on the skull from

Shanidar 1, Iraq.” Artwork: John Gurche. Image credit:

Human Origins Program. Copyright, Smithsonian

Institution.

Image 8: “Unlabeled Renatto Luschan Skin color map”

by Dark Tichondrias/Dark Tea is licensed under CC BY-SA

3.0

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 4 7

3

Chapter 3: Origins and Early

Developments of Culture

Nolan Weil

Suggested Focus

This chapter is full of details. The questions and tasks below will

help you pick out the most important ones. Of course, main ideas

are important as well. As you pick out details, be sure to ask what it

all adds up to.

1. Identify two ways in which human culture differs from

the culture-like behavior of other animals.

2. List all of the tools named in the chapter. Identify the

material they were made from and their use. Identify a

major innovation in tool making that increased the

effectiveness of single tools.

3. Make a list of all the objects mentioned in the reading

4 8 | S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E

that we moderns might regard as art. Indicate their

place of discovery, material, and a notable fact about

each item.

4. Explain the bold new theory of Michael Witzel. In what

way does Witzel’s theory draw on ideas from Chapter 2?

Culture as a product of human activity

Once upon a time, social scientists regarded humans as

the only species to exhibit culture. But if language and tool

use are both signs of culture, we must acknowledge that

other species may also possess some rudiments of culture.

Whales and dolphins, for instance, may have some

capacity for language. And chimpanzees have been

observed making tools, “<shing rods” so to speak, for

retrieving termites from their nests. Bottle-nosed dolphins

also appear to be tool-users. They have been observed to

break off pieces of sea sponge and use them in order to

probe for <sh along the sea bottom. Ethologists have even

observed that some species of songbirds, and some species

of <sh too, exhibit “socially learned cultural traditions”

(Mesoudi, 2011: 195-196).

However, no other species demonstrates the cultural

virtuosity of human beings. For one thing, the cultures of

non-human species do not seem to show the same

tendencies of development and innovation from one

generation to the next, as human culture does. For

example, the combining of two or more separate elements

into entirely new tools or practices does not seem to occur

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 4 9

among non-humans, whereas it is a hallmark of human

cultural development.

In the last chapter, we placed humanity in a biological

context. If the Recent African Origin theory is correct, we

said, our earliest ancestors came from Africa and spent

90,000 years migrating to every habitable continent on

earth. Along the way, they assumed a variety of different

regional appearances. But as they migrated to geographic

and climatic regions that sometimes differed from the

lands of their ancestors, they met new environmental

challenges. New environments required the invention of

new tools and new ways of doing things. In turn, the

continual development of culturally transmitted

knowledge and skill enabled people to become ever more

able to thrive in new environments.

In this chapter, we return to our story of human

migrations out of Africa and across the globe. This time,

however, we will focus on the origins of culture. As you

read, keep in mind the seven themes introduced in

Chapter 1. In this chapter, we shall frame culture as a

product of human activity. But be on the lookout for other

themes that may enter the discussion, in particular themes

that call attention to functions and processes.

Paleolithic material culture

Our knowledge of pre-historic culture is limited. We can

only guess at the beliefs and the daily social interactions of

early humans. Our best knowledge of pre-historic life

comes from the discoveries of archaeologists who have

uncovered many material objects buried or even laying

about in old river beds and elsewhere. Sometimes the

skeletal remains of early humans are found nearby. Of

5 0 | N O L A N W E I L

course, such found objects are limited to those made of

materials able to resist the natural forces of

decomposition. Among the most plentiful objects are

stone tools, the most important of which seem to have

served the purpose of securing and processing food. To the

casual modern observer, the tools seem rough and

unsophisticated. However, careful study of them suggests

that their creation required careful planning, detailed

knowledge of various materials, and skillful

craftsmanship.

To convince yourself that the knowledge and skill of

early humans is deserving of admiration and respect,

imagine the following situation. You (and a group of

friends) are dropped off in a remote wilderness, naked,

and with none of the tools or materials you now take for

granted. (OK, you may have some matches since it is

almost certain you would not know how to start a <re

without them.)

All around you is everything you need to survive: rock,

wood, edible plants and animals. How will you get food?

How about some clothing? You probably will not even

know what plants you can eat. You might have some idea

what animals you could eat. Suppose you are lucky enough

to catch a <sh, or a rabbit, perhaps a deer. What will you do

with it? With no metal knives, you will have to reinvent

stone blades for skinning and cutting up the deer. Stone

blades will also be your best bet for scraping the deerskin

to make leather for clothing. Good luck (unless you already

know something about both stone tools and leather

making).

Of course, the exercise imagined above is clearly unfair.

If you had been born in the Upper Paleolithic (say 40,000

years ago), you would have been born into a group of

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 5 1

people who already had all the necessary tools for hunting,

skinning, butchering, and everything else necessary for

survival. You would have grown up under the watchful eye

of people who knew how to make and use the tools. You

probably would have learned by watching and doing, and

those more skillful than you would have guided you

(Barham, 2013).

When our ancestors left Africa 90,000 years ago, they

already possessed technologies for exploiting the

environment. At that time, our people, Homo sapiens, were

not the only cultural species in the world. Our close

cousins, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis were still

around, and there is evidence that both of them knew how

to control <re. They were makers and users of tools as well.

Even the much earlier Homo habilis may have been a

toolmaker. Maybe even Australopithecus. Many of the tools

that Homo sapiens used had already been in use for over 2

million years. In other words, our ancestors came from a

long line of hominid species that survived by means of

cultural know-how. So our ancestors ventured forth out of

Africa with the best (Stone Age) technology of the day.

Encountering new environments and new needs, they

re<ned those tools and developed new ones too (Brown,

1990).

Archaeologists refer to the time between 50,000 and

10,000 years ago as the Upper Paleolithic. It was a

remarkably creative period of human cultural

development (Feder & Park, 2007). Let’s have a look now at

some of the material culture typical of the Upper

Paleolithic.

5 2 | N O L A N W E I L

Stone tools

Stone tools were among the most important early tools.

Items like the ones shown below enabled early humans to

secure protein rich diets. Hammerstones and hand axes

were the oldest stone tools in the ancient human “toolkit.”

Hammerstones were

used for smashing animal

bones to get the nutritious

marrow inside (“Stone

Tool Technology,” 2015).

Hammerstones were also

used to manufacture sharp

stone tools such as hand axes, and a wide variety of other

stone blades and projectile points. Toolmakers used a

technique known as knapping. By striking a hard

sedimentary rock, such as flint, a toolmaker fractured the

stone to create a sharp edge. By carefully chipping the

edges of the entire rock, the knapper created large hand

axes and various smaller blades of stone. Hand axes and

blades were used for jobs like cutting meat, scrapping

animal skins to make leather for clothing, and for carving

or whittling wood (“Stone Age Tool Makers,” 2010; “Stone

Tool Technology,” 2015).

A major innovation involved the insight that blades

could be attached to shafts and handles. We call this

technology hafting. For example, a projectile point, such as

the one shown above, was attached to a long, straight

shaft, fashioned from an appropriate tree branch. This

involved considerable knowledge of materials and design.

The shaft had to be notched to create a slot to insert the

projectile point. A sticky material needed to be added to

help hold the stone projectile point in place. This required

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 5 3

Harpoons carved from bone

some knowledge of natural glues and how to get them,

e.g., the resins of tree bark, or bitumen from tar pits. The

point also had to be tightly bound to the shaft. This was

usually done with strips of leather or sinews. Toolmakers

learned that if the leather was soaked in water, and tightly

wrapped around the point and shaft, the leather would

shrink as it dried, creating a very tight wrap, holding the

point <rmly in place (Barham, 2013).

Besides stone,

early humans also used

bone to make things like

knives, <shhooks,

harpoons, and sewing

needles. Of course,

materials like stone and

bone remain long after

other types of materials

have decomposed. The

animal skin clothing, for instance, is long gone even

though the needles used to make it can still be found. And

speaking of clothes, early humans were not so busy with

survival that they had to neglect fashion. They may have

adorned their clothing with beads, made from soapstone

through which they punched small holes (Feder & Park,

2007; “Great Human Odyssey,” 2015).

5 4 | N O L A N W E I L

Bone Needles

Carved Figurines

In a sense, our species simply improved upon the tool

making traditions of earlier hominids. On the other hand,

as far as we know, we were the <rst to create objects of

art. Carved <gurines are found in abundance in the Upper

Paleolithic. Examples include items like the

Löwenmensch, found in a cave in Germany. The

Löwenmensch, carved from wholly mammoth ivory, is

about 35,000-40,000 years old (“Lion-Man,” 2017). The

“Venus of Dolní Věstonice,” (2017) depicting a nude female

was found in the Czech Republic. It is the oldest known

ceramic <gurine at about 25,000-30,000 years old. More

well-known perhaps is the “Venus of Willendorf,” (2017),

discovered in Austria. Carved out of limestone, it is about

27,000-29,000 years old. In fact, many <gurines

resembling, in form, these Venus <gurines have been

discovered, so many that we could regard the artifact as an

Upper Paleolithic meme. The “Venus of Brassempouy,”

(2017), made of ivory and discovered in a cave in France, is

one of the earliest realistic representations of a human

face. It is about 25,000 years old. Notice the hairstyles on

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 5 5

the Venuses. Don’t they suggest that hairstyling is a

thoroughly ancient cultural practice? (“Great Human

Odyssey,” 2015).

5 6 | N O L A N W E I L

Löwenmensch (upper left); Venus of Dolní Věstonice (upper right); Venus of Willendorf (lower left); Venus of Brassempouy (lower right)

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 5 7

Painting

Painting too is an ancient achievement. There is evidence

of it in every part of the world. Perhaps the oldest and

most remarkable paintings are those that have been

discovered in caves in France and Spain. Particularly

awesome are the 30,000-32,000-year-old paintings

discovered in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France. In

the interest of preserving and protecting the site, the cave

is no longer open to the public, but today, tourists can visit

a facsimile of the cave, where full-scale replicas of the

paintings are on display. The museum faithfully

reproduces the ambience of the cave its silence, darkness,

temperature, humidity and acoustics (“Chauvet Cave,”

2017). The documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams by the

renowned German cinematographer, Werner Herzog, is

also a great way to experience the mystery of the Chauvet

Cave.

5 8 | N O L A N W E I L

Flute, discovered in Hohle Fels Cave (Germany), carved from wing bone of a griffon vulture

Paleolithic animals depicted with stunning realism (Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, France)

Hundreds of animals of

at least 13 different species

are depicted with

astounding realism. The

paintings have a

3-dimensional quality

that suggests movement,

and some animals are

even depicted interacting,

for example, wholly

rhinoceroses butting horns. Of course, we do not know

what the artists of the Upper Paleolithic thought about

their painting. Was it simply an expression of aesthetic

sensibility? Or was it connected with ritual and magic

intent, as some interpreters have suggested? There is

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 5 9

more to know about the material culture of the Upper

Paleolithic than we can summarize here. There is evidence,

for instance, that the <rst musical instruments may have

emerged at that time. Indeed, flutes made of bone and

even ivory, some as old as 40,000 years, have been

discovered in caves in southern Germany (Conard, Malina

& Münzel, 2009).

Although this discussion has featured the Upper

Paleolithic of Europe as a center of pre-historic art, we

cannot conclude that therefore the early humans of

Europe were more advanced than people elsewhere on the

earth. It may simply be that Europe provided an

environment more conducive to the preservation of

artifacts such as cave paintings. In fact, in 2014 a cave

painting depicting a pig, and dated at 35,000 years old,

was discovered in Indonesia, and other paintings have

been discovered in Australia, depicting animals thought to

have become extinct 40,000 years ago. The Australian

<nds though have not been de<nitively dated, and it is

possible that scientists are wrong in their estimates of the

time of extinction of the depicted animals. But it seems

possible if not probable that people all over the world were

painting during the Upper Paleolithic.

In conclusion, with the tool use of Paleolithic humans,

we see cultural continuity with the hominids that came

before us. But we see evidence of a dramatic development

of culture in Homo sapiens beginning about 40,000 years

ago with the rise of art and music. If culture is de<ned as

“re<nement,” it was surely in full swing in the Upper

Paleolithic.

6 0 | N O L A N W E I L

Origins of mythology

While some products of human activity can be classi<ed as

material culture, other products are non-material. Stone

tools, for instance, that remain long after their creators are

gone, are obviously material. Music, on the other hand, is

ephemeral. We suppose, quite reasonably, that flute music

drifted through the valleys of Ice Age Europe only because

we have found flutes, and where there were flutes (a

material product), there must have been music (a non-

material product). Was there also spoken language? There

is certainly no good reason to doubt it. Then how about

stories? Music and stories would be examples of cultural

products that are non-material.

If anything, storytelling may be more ancient than

painting, sculpting, and music. Even more surprising is

that just as all humans may have come from an original

population of Africans, there may have also been a single

African source for all of our collective creation myths.

Creation myths are stories that seem intended to answer

our deepest human curiosities. On the surface, at least,

these myths seem to answer questions such as:

• Where did this world in which we <nd ourselves

come from?

• How did it arise?

• How did we humans come to be here?

• What will become of us?

In this section, we’ll summarize a remarkable piece of

scholarship by Michael Witzel (2012) on the origins of the

world’s mythologies. Witzel’s work was inspired, in part,

by the Recent African Origin hypothesis. In brief, Witzel

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 6 1

claims that when humans left Africa, they did so telling a

particular story about the origins of the world, (today we

would call it the universe). The story told of the beginnings

of the earth and everything in it, as well as the sky above. It

included a recounting of the appearance of generations of

humans, and it ended with a <nal destruction.

But before we examine Witzel’s ideas about the origin of

world mythology, let’s sample some of the creation stories

of various peoples around the world.

Stories of creation – A sampling

In the beginning, neither heaven nor earth had names.

Apsu, the god of fresh waters, and Tiamat, the goddess

of the salt oceans, and Mummu, the god of the mist

that rises from both of them, were still mingled as one.

There were no mountains, there was no pastureland,

and not even a reed-marsh could be found to break the

surface of the waters.

It was then that Apsu and Tiamat parented two gods,

and then two more who outgrew the Trst pair. These

further parented gods, until Ea, who was the god of

rivers and was Tiamat and Apsu’s great-grandson, was

born. Ea was the cleverest of the gods, and with his

magic Ea became the most powerful of the gods, ruling

even his forebears.

Apsu and Tiamat’s descendants became an unruly

crowd. Eventually Apsu, in his frustration and inability

6 2 | N O L A N W E I L

to sleep with the clamor, went to Tiamat, and he

proposed to her that he slay their noisy offspring.

Tiamat was furious at his suggestion to kill their clan,

but after leaving her Apsu resolved to proceed with his

murderous plan. When the young gods heard of his

plot against them, they were silent and fearful, but

soon Ea was hatching a scheme. He cast a spell on Apsu,

pulled Apsu’s crown from his head, and slew him. Ea

then built his palace on Apsu’s waters, and it was there

that, with the goddess Damkina, he fathered Marduk,

the four-eared, four-eyed giant who was god of the

rains and storms.

Enuma Elish – Babylonia, 1100 BCE in writing; possibly existed from c. 1800 BCE, (Creation Stories from Around the World)

* * *

There was neither “being” [sat] nor “nonbeing” [asat]

then, nor intermediate space, nor heaven beyond it.

What turned around? Where? In whose protection?

Was there water? —Only a deep abyss.

There was neither death nor immortality then, nor was

there a mark of day and night. It breathed, windless, by

its own determination, this One. Beyond this there was

nothing at all. Darkness was hidden by darkness, in the

beginning.

A featureless salty ocean was all this (universe). A germ,

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 6 3

covered by emptiness, was born through the power of

heat as the One. Desire arose then in this (One), in the

beginning, which was the Trst seed of mind. In

“nonbeing” the seers found the umbilical cord

[relationship] of being, searching (for it) in their hearts

with planning. Obliquely stretched out was their cord.

Was there really “below”? Was there really “above”?

There were the ones bestowing seed, there were

“greatnesses” [pregnancies]. Below were their own

determinations, above was granting.

Who then knows well, who will proclaim here, from

where they have been born, from where (came) this

wide emanation? Later than its emanation are the gods.

Who then knows from where it developed?

From where this emanation developed, whether it has

been created or not—if there is an “overseer” of this

(world) in the highest heaven, he alone knows it—or

(what) if he does not know?

Rig Veda – India, c. 1000 BCE, (Witzel, 2012: 107)

* * *

Verily, at Trst Chaos [void] came to be, but next wide-

bosomed Earth, the ever sure foundation of all … and

Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods… From

Chaos came forth Erebus [darkness] and black Night;

6 4 | N O L A N W E I L

but of Night were born Aether and Day, who she

conceived and bore in union with love from Erebus. And

Earth Trst bore starry heaven, equal to herself, to cover

her on every side.

Theogony – Greece, c. 700 BCE, (Witzel, 2012: 108)

* * *

In the beginning the Elohim made the sky and the

earth, but the earth was shapeless and everything was

dark. The Elohim said “Let there be light,” and there was

the light that made day different from night. And that

was the Trst day.

The Elohim said, “Let there be a dome to separate the

heavens from the waters below,” and there were the

heavens. And that was the second day.The Elohim said,

“Let the waters of the earth gather so that there are seas

and there is dry land,” and so it was. The Elohim said,

“Let there be vegetation on the land, with plants to yield

seeds and fruits,” and so it was. And that was the third

day.

The Elohim said, “Let there be light in the heavens, and

let them change with the seasons,” and so there were

stars. Then the Elohim made a sun and a moon to rule

over the day and to rule over the night. And that was the

fourth day.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 6 5

The Elohim said, “Let there be creatures in the waters,

and let there be birds in the skies,” and so there were

sea monsters and sea creatures and birds. The Elohim

blessed them, saying “Be fruitful and multiply”. And

that was the Tfth day.

The Elohim said, “Let the earth have animals of various

kinds”, and so it was. Then the Elohim said, “Let us make

humans after our own likeness, and let them rule over

the Tsh of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the

cattle and creeping things of the land, and over all the

earth.” The Elohim said to these humans, “Be fruitful

and multiply, and Tll the earth and subdue it, ruling

over the Tsh and the birds and the animals of the land.

We have given you every plant and tree yielding seed.

To every beast and bird of the Earth we have given every

green plant for food.” And that was the sixth day.

And on the seventh day the making of the heavens and

earth was Tnished, and the Elohim rested.

The Elohim – Hebrew, c. 600 BCE, (Creation Stories from Around the World)

* * *

In a time when Heaven and Earth still were without

form, was called the great beginning. The tao began in

the great emptiness… Then “breaths” were born from

space and time. What was light moved and formed the

6 6 | N O L A N W E I L

sky (easily); what was heavy, the earth … this process

was difTcult.

Huainan zi – China, c. 150 BCE, (Witzel, 2012: 107)

* * *

Once there was the age when Ymir lived.

There was neither sand, nor sea, nor salty waves,

Not was Earth found, not Upper Heaven,

A yawning gap [abyss], and grass nowhere.

Edda – Iceland, c. 1177 CE, (Witzel, 2012: 109)

* * *

Io dwelt within the breathing space of immensity.

The Universe was in darkness, with water everywhere.

There was no glimmer of dawn, no clearness, no light.

And he began by saying these words—

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 6 7

That he might cease remaining inactive:

“Darkness become a light-possessing darkness.”

And at once light appeared

…Then (he) looked to the waters which compassed him

about, and spake a fourth time, saying:

“The waters of Tai-kama, be ye separate.Heaven be

formed.” Then the sky became suspended.

“Bring forth thou Tupua-horo-nuku.”

And at once the moving earth lay stretched abroad.

Maori – New Zealand, compiled 1840-50s, (Witzel, 2012: 109)

* * *

The Trst world was Tokpela [Endless Space].

But Trst, they say, there was only the Creator, Taiowa. All

else was endless space. There was no beginning and no

end, no time, no shape, no life. Just an immeasurable

6 8 | N O L A N W E I L

void that had its beginning and end, time, shape, and

life in the mind of Taiowa the Creator.

Then he, the inTnite, conceived the Tnite. First he

created Sótuknang to make it manifest, saying to him,

“I have created you, the Trst power and instrument as a

person, to carry out my plan for life in endless space…

Go now and lay out these universes in proper order so

they may work harmoniously with one another

according to my plan.

Sótuknang did as he was commanded. From endless

space, he gathered that which was to be manifest as

solid substance, molded it into forms, and arranged

them in nine universal kingdoms: one for Taiowa the

Creator, one for himself, and seven universes for the life

to come…

Hopi – Arizona, compiled in 1950s, (Waters & Fredericks, 1977)

Similarities among creation stories

Upon <rst reading, the stories may seem quite different.

But perhaps you noticed that beyond the differences in

style, and in particular details, the basic theme is the same.

Each myth, for instance, begins in much the same way.

The world comes into existence out of chaos, formlessness,

and darkness. Or, in some cases, out of primordial sea. At

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 6 9

<rst, the world comes about not by an act of creation, but

as an emergence, an emanation.

Some accounts are more abstract and philosophical. The

passage from the Rig Veda, for instance, begins in

philosophical abstraction making the distinction between

“being” [sat] and “nonbeing” [asat]. Moreover, it remains

reflective, never quite becoming something the reader can

easily visualize. (If you need to be convinced, please read it

again.)

Other accounts, like the Babylonian Enuma Elish or the

Greek Theogony portray the emergence of the world using

more sensual, anthropomorphic images. However, the

basic theme is the same. You may have noticed in many of

these stories that powerful beings, such as gods, come only

after the world has emanated out of the void:

• Apsu, the god of fresh waters, and Tiamat, the goddess of

the salt oceans, and Mummu, the god of the mist that rises

from both of them, were still mingled as one. There were no

mountains, there was no pastureland, and not even a reed-

marsh could be found to break the surface of the waters. It

was then that Apsu and Tiamat parented two gods, and then

two more who outgrew the Qrst pair. (Enuma Elish)

• Later than its emanation are the gods. (Rig Veda)

• … at Qrst Chaos [void] came to be, but next wide-bosomed

Earth, the ever sure foundation of all … and Eros (Love),

fairest among the deathless gods… From Chaos came forth

Erebus [darkness] and black Night… (Theogony)

And notice how many of the narratives emphasize the

emergence of mind or a primordial consciousness arising

out of the void:

7 0 | N O L A N W E I L

• Desire arose then in this (One), in the beginning, which was

the Qrst seed of mind. (Rig Veda)

Sometimes this emergence is characterized in terms of

breath or breathing:

• The Tao began in the great emptiness… Then “breaths” were

born from space and time. (Huainan Zi)

Breathing, or mind are sometimes characterized as co-

existent with the void:

• Io dwelt within the breathing space of immensity. (Maori)

• There was no beginning and no end, no time, no shape, no

life. Just an immeasurable void that had its beginning and

end, time, shape, and life in the mind of Taiowa the Creator.

(Hopi)

In some versions of the story, the qualities of the material

world are sometimes brought into existence by an act of

imagination:

• Then he, the inQnite, conceived the Qnite. (Hopi)

In other versions, the qualities of the world are brought

about by an act of speech:

• And he began by saying these words—That he might cease

remaining inactive: “Darkness become a light-possessing

darkness.” And at once light appeared …etc. (Maori)

• … but the earth was shapeless and everything was dark. The

Elohim said “Let there be light,” and there was the light that

made day different from night. (Hebrew)

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 7 1

Witzel has hypothesized that the Laurasian myth complex originated in Southwest Asia

Accounting for common motifs

What do we make of these worldwide similarities? Are

they simply coincidental? Scholars of comparative

mythology have proposed several possible theories.

1. Diffusion

One theory is that

individual motifs spread

outward from an early

civilization, such as Egypt

or Mesopotamia to the

older hunter and gatherer

cultures living on the

frontiers of the empire.

These tribal peoples then

adopted the “parent”

myths and developed their

own local variations of the

myth based on their own local experiences.

Witzel acknowledges that some religious mythologies,

e.g., Judeo-Christian-Islamic and Buddhist are known to

have spread regionally in this way. However, he notes that

the many myths continue according to a complex

sequence of episodes. In literature, we would call this a

plot. Witzel questions whether an entire myth complex

could really successfully spread worldwide across such

great distances to end up as far away from the early

centers of civilization as South America and the Paci<c

Islands.

7 2 | N O L A N W E I L

2. Myths as universal features of human

psychology

Other scholars see myths as expressions of universal

patterns of human thought (Campbell, 1949; Jung, 1953).

According to this theory being human naturally involves

universal experiences: of human relationship, of

nurturance, of struggle for survival, of conflict, of passing

through life stages, of death, and so on. Moreover, humans

evolved as language using and concept-forming animals,

and as creators of symbolic forms of expression. As a

result, certain thoughts and images arise spontaneously in

human imagination by virtue of our common humanity.

Supporters of this theory suggest that the motifs

expressed in myths arose independently in many different

places around the world because human experience, out of

which the mythical imagination arises, is similar

everywhere. But the myths differ in speci<c details

because the imagery is also influenced by local geography

and history. (Hmmm, a kind of Multiregional Origins

hypothesis?)

Witzel agrees that humans may be biologically

structured, with the kind of brain that produces similar

images in people everywhere. However, he argues, it is

hard to believe that the motifs would be organized

everywhere into the same long, elaborately structured

tales. Instead, Witzel offers a third explanation.

3. Creation myths all arose from a single (very)

ancient source

Witzel has argued that an original mythology sprang up in

ancestral Africa. From there, it was told and retold by our

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 7 3

ancestors as they began their global migrations out of

Africa 90,000 years ago. Ah-ha, the Recent African Origin

hypothesis applied to mythology. Witzel’s argument is

quite persuasive and seems to be supported by major

discoveries over the last 30 years in linguistics, population

genetics, and archaeology.

Based on extensive study of the themes and storylines

across mythologies all over the world, Witzel has identi<ed

two classes of myths. He calls these two types Gondwana

and Laurasian. Of the two, the Gondwana type appears to

be older and less elaborately developed. Gondwana

mythology is still found today among people in sub-

Saharan Africa, and in Melanesia, Australia, and the

Andamanese Islands. Laurasian mythology is found across

Europe, Asia, northern and eastern Africa and the

Americas. (Witzel hypthesizes an even earlier, Pan-Gaian

mythology, ancestral to both the Gondwanan and

Laurasian but doubts that we have the means to learn very

much about it.)

Witzel thinks the Laurasian myth probably diverged

from the Gondwana myth at least 40,000 years ago,

originating somewhere in southwestern Asia, before

spreading to northern and eastern Africa, Europe,

northern and eastern Asia, and eventually throughout the

Americas. If Witzel is correct, Laurasian mythology

thrived long before the great early civilizations and the

major religious traditions of the world. In other words, the

world’s mythologies did not spread outward from the

great civilizations. On the contrary, the <rst great

civilizations (including those of Mesopotamia, Egypt,

India and China) adopted oral traditions that were already

tens of thousands of years old by the time these early

civilizations arose. Today we engage with Laurasian

7 4 | N O L A N W E I L

Pangu

mythology when we study the literature of classical

civilizations. And many of the motifs are still discernable

in the great religious traditions of today, in Hinduism,

Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The Laurasian “Novel”

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 7 5

The Laurasian Novel

Witzel characterizes

Laurasian mythology as a

sort of <rst novel. By this

he means that the creation

myths found among

people everywhere in the

world all seem to be

variations on one basic

plot as shown in the

sidebar. Although

particular elements may

be minimized or missing

in some myths, or more elaborately developed in others,

the basic storylines are remarkably similar. The Laurasian

novel begins with the primordial creation, the earth

emerging <nally out of chaos, darkness, or water. In

versions where the earth emerges out of water, an “earth

diver” pulls the earth up out of the sea. In some versions,

the earth comes out of a great, cosmic egg (for example

Pangu in Chinese mythology).

In some versions, the earth is formed when a giant who

existed before the world emerged is killed and carved into

pieces and whose body parts become the heavens and

earth (Pangu again, or Ymir in Norse mythology, and

Kronos in Greek mythology). In many creation myths, the

earth is closely associated with the idea of a Great Mother

and in many myths is personi<ed by woman. At the same

time, the sky makes an appearance as the counterpart of

the earth, and the idea, the image, of a Sky Father is born.

Interestingly, in the Egyptian relief from the Book of the

Dead of Nesitqnebtashru (below), the usual arrangement

is reversed. The sky is the goddess, Nut (held up by the air

god, Shu, and two ram-headed deities). The Earth God,

7 6 | N O L A N W E I L

Geb, reclines beneath. Originally, however, Nut was

regarded as goddess of the nighttime sky, so this may

depict the situation at night, when the daytime sky is

overshadowed by the darkness of earth (Campbell, 1988,

cited in Witzel, 2012: 380).

Egyptian relief from the Book of the Dead of Nesitanebtashru

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 7 7

Maori primal couple, Papa and Rangui

But <rst in the

imagination of some early

storytellers, the father is

laying with the mother in

sexual union and they

must be pulled apart. The

sky is pushed into place

sometimes by the children,

the offspring of the

original parents. The

theme is illustrated (right)

in a Maori carving

depicting the primal

couple, the earth

mother—Papa, and the sky

father—Rangui, locked

together in a tight

embrace.

Sometimes the sky is propped into place by a world tree,

or a stone pillar, or a world mountain. The cosmos is

beginning to take the shape that we know. Now there is an

earth and sky, but it is often a watery earth, and so the

early storytellers must make provisions for the creation of

dry land.

In many myths, there is a demiurge, a being who must form the whole of the material world, who must prepare

the world for habitation. The demiurge may come out of

the mind of a Supreme Being and be sent to build the

world and put into it all of the things, animate and

inanimate. The demiurge brings light to the world and sets

the sun in place. Once there is a sun and an alternation of

day and night, the earth is ready to support life. The earth

then receives moisture (water); in some traditions, there is

7 8 | N O L A N W E I L

The Fall of the Titans, oil painting by Cornelis van Haarlem (1588–1590)

the slaying of a dragon and the earth is fertilized in its

blood.

The demiurge, sometimes known too as a trickster, not

only prepares the world but brings human life into it as

well. The trickster also brings culturally important

elements to humans such as “<re” and “the heavenly

drink,” (i.e., alcoholic drink). But the creation of humans

and many of these cultural developments do not emerge

until later in the story, so as with any good novel, we can

leave the trickster, lurking in the background as we turn to

the next important chapter in our Laurasian novel.

Back to the two original

gods, Earth and Sky. Earth

and Sky produce children.

These are the <rst gods

and goddesses, and the

story progresses through

an epic spanning four or

<ve generations of gods/

goddesses and their

exploits. These are tales of

conflict and treachery

among the gods but in the process the lands of the earth

are laid out and the earth is peopled. In some versions of

the story an original giant, sometimes one of the

primordial gods is cut into pieces, and scattered to form

the dry land. Themes of incest among the various gods or

deities and continuing competition and conflict dominate

many versions of the Laurasian novel. There is often

warfare between two groups of gods who sometimes agree

to share power; sometimes, defeated gods leave the

inhabited center of the world. In Greek mythology, for

example, the younger generation of gods, the Olympians,

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 7 9

Huitzilopochtl, Aztec god of the sun

go to war with the older generation, the Titans, to see who

will reign over the universe.

After several

generations of gods,

human beings make their

appearance and the plot

follows the succession of

noble lineages of humans.

The <rst humans are

semidivine. Across the

globe, from Egypt and

Mesopotamia and on to

India, China, Japan, and

Polynesia, and into the

Americas, there are stories

of noble lineages; often the characters in these

lineages trace their ancestry to a sun deity. A common

feature of these stories is that after one or two

generations, the descendants of the sun deity lose their

immortality; i.e., humans become mortal.

In some myths, there is a competing storyline though.

Many creation stories involve the creation of humans from

clay. In other stories humans come from trees, maize, an

egg, or a gourd. However, according to Witzel, this

particular storyline is more representative of Gondwana

mythology. Witzel surmises that Laurasian mythology is

intimately tied to shamanism—a male vocation—and that

when older Gondwana motifs <nd their way into the

Laurasia storyline, it may be because of the co-existence in

various cultures of “grandmothers tales,” motifs kept alive

through stories told by women.

A dramatic chapter in the story of humans comes after

humans have lived for many generations on the earth.

8 0 | N O L A N W E I L

Somehow humans displease or anger a powerful being

who destroys most of humankind in a great flood. The

Laurasian saga then continues with the reemergence of

humans and there are many overlapping tales of heroes.

Some heroes are semidivine, and their exploits coincide

with those of the gods. Sometimes, there is an age of

heroes after the gods.

Finally, the Laurasian novel ends in a <nal destruction

of the world. Even the gods are destroyed. The Ragnarök in

Norse mythology is one of the most detailed stories of the

<nal destruction. Odin and Thor and all the major gods

and their adversaries, Fenrir, the wolf and the giant

poisonous serpent, Jörmungandr are all destroyed. The

sun turns black, the earth sinks into the sea, the stars

vanish, steam rises, and flames touch the heavens. After

the destruction, the world resurfaces new and fertile.

Some surviving gods return and the world will be

populated anew by two human survivors. The <nal

destruction is thus paired with the hope for a new, more

perfect world. In many myths, the world is created anew

and there are a series of Four or Five Ages, each age ending

in a <nal destruction.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 8 1

The Ragnarök in Norse mythology is one of the most detailed stories of the Snal destruction.

Final Reflection

What does this discussion about an apparently very old

plot have to do with us today? Well if Witzel is correct, the

basic storyline of creation and human origins found in

both oral and literary traditions worldwide was conceived

a very long time ago, and we humans have been telling

various versions of this same story for over 100,000 years.

Following the stories of our own traditions back to their

earliest origins, we all <nd ourselves, perhaps, sitting in

the same circle. In this chapter, we have suggested that the

well-known creation myths found in the literature and oral

traditions from every corner of the world are a dramatic

reminder of the power of cultural transmission in shaping

the human imagination.

8 2 | N O L A N W E I L

Application

For Further Thought and Discussion

1. Review the seven themes of culture from Chapter 1.

Which themes do you think are reflected (either

explicitly or implicitly) in this chapter? Make a case for

several of the themes, i.e., explain how they are relevant

to the chapter.

2. Read through the myths again in the Stories of Creation section. Which, if any, were you already familiar with?

Which were new? Which one do you Tnd the most

interesting? Why?

3. In what way is culture different from civilization? (This

question is not answered directly in the chapter. You

must infer it.)

4. In what way(s) has your knowledge of culture changed

after reading this chapter? What did you already know?

What was new? Did anything surprise you?

Video Clips & Documentaries

“Great human odyssey.” 5 Oct. 2016. Webcast. NOVA. PBS.

KUED, Salt Lake City. Accessed on 24 June 2017.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/great-human-

odyssey.html

Scenes from ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams.’ YouTube.

“Stone Tool Technology of Our Human Ancestors.” 27

March 2015. HHMI BioInteractive Video. YouTube.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 8 3

Accessed on 24 June 2017. https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=L87Wdt044b0

“The Minds of Stone Age Tool Makers.” 3 Nov. 2010.

YouTube. Accessed on 24 June 2017.

References

Barham, L. (2013). From hand to handle: The Qrst industrial

revolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford.

Brown, M. H. (1990). The search for Eve. New York: Harper &

Row.

Campbell, J. (1968). The hero with a thousand faces, (2nd ed.).

Princeton, NJ: Princeton.

Campbell, J. (1988). Historical atlas of world mythology, (vol 1).

New York: Harper & Row.

“Chauvet Cave.” (2017, May 18). In Wikipedia, The Free

Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 25, 2017 from

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/

index.php?title=Chauvet_Cave&oldid=780942868

Conard, N. J., Malina, M. & Münzel, S. C. (2009). New

flutes document the earliest musical tradition in

southwestern Germany. Nature 460,

737-740. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08169

Creation stories from around the world. Retrieved June 25, 2017

from http://railsback.org/CS/CSIndex.html

Feder, K. L. & Park, M. A. (2007). Human antiquity: An

introduction to physical anthropology and archaeology, (5th

ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

“Great human odyssey.” 5 Oct. 2016. Webcast. NOVA. PBS.

KUED, Salt Lake City. Accessed on 24 June 2017.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/great-

human-odyssey.html

8 4 | N O L A N W E I L

Herzog, W. (2010). “Cave of Forgotten Dream.” YouTube.

Jung, C. G. (1953). Two essays in analytical psychology.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton.

“Lion-man.” (2017, June 24). In Wikipedia, The Free

Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 25, 2017 from

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lion-

man&oldid=787303025

Mesoudi, A. (2011). Cultural evolution: How Darwinian

evolution can explain human evolution and synthesize the

social sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

“Stone Tool Technology of Our Human Ancestors.” 27

March 2015. HHMI BioInteractive Video. YouTube.

Accessed on 24 June 2017. https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=L87Wdt044b0

“The Minds of Stone Age Tool Makers.” 3 Nov. 2010.

YouTube. Accessed on 24 June 2017.

“Venus of Brassempouy.” (2017, March 15). In Wikipedia,

The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 25, 2017

from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/

index.php?title=Venus_of_Brassempouy&oldid=770380

639

“Venus of Dolní Věstonice.” (2017, June 17). In Wikipedia,

The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 25, 2017

from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/

index.php?title=Venus_of_Doln%C3%AD_V%C4%9Bston

ice&oldid=786138534

Venus of Willendorf. (2017, May 28). In Wikipedia, The Free

Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 25, 2017

from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/

index.php?title=Venus_of_Willendorf&oldid=782669278

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 8 5

Waters, F. & Fredericks, O. W. B. (1977). Book of the Hopi.

New York: Penguin.

Wilford, John N. (June 24, 2009). “Flutes Offer Clues to

Stone-Age Music”. Nature. 459 (7244): 248–52. Retrieved

June 25, 2017

from http://www.nature.com.dist.lib.usu.edu/articles/

nature08169

Witzel, E. J. M. (2012). The origins of the world’s mythologies.

New York: Oxford. Image Attribution

Image 1: “Makavot-even” by The GNU Project is licensed

under CC BY-SA 2.5; “Happisburg handaxe” by Portable

Antiquities Scheme is licensed under CC BY-SA

3.0; “Burins and blades – Bernifal – Meyrals – MNP” by

Sémhur is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; “Blombos point”

by Vincent Mourre is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0;

Image 2: “Hafted stone pick” by Mark Marathon is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Image 3: “Magdalenian” by Rama is licensed under CC

BY-SA 2.0 FR

Image 4: “Aiguille” by Didier Descouens is licensed

under CC BY-SA 4.0

Image 5: “Loewenmensch2” by Thilo Parg is licensed

under CC BY-SA 3.0; “Vestonicka venuse edit” by Petr

Novák, Wikipedia and is licensed under CC BY-SA

2.5; “Willendorf-Venus-1468” by Don Hitchcock is licensed

under CC BY-SA 3.0; “Venus of Brassempouy” by Jean-

Giles Berizzi is licensed under Public Domain 1.0

Image 6: “Paintings from Chauvet Cave” is licensed

under Public Domain-1923; “Rhinos” is licensed under

Public Domain-1923;“Chauvethorses” is licensed under

Public Domain-1923; “Lions” is licensed under Public

Domain-1923

8 6 | N O L A N W E I L

Image 7: “Bone flute from Hohle Fels archaeological

horizon Vb” is licensed under Nature Research

Image 8: “Southwest-Asia-map” by Vervictorio is

licensed under Public Domain 1.0

Image 9: “Laurasian Novel” by Nolan Weil is licensed

under CC BY 4.0

Image 10: “Pangu” by Wang Qui is licensed under Public

Domain-1923

Image 11: “Geb, Net, Shu” photographed by the British

Museum is licensed under Public Domain-1923

Image 12: “WahineTane” by Kahuroa is licensed under

Public Domain 1.0

Image 13: “Cornelis Cornelisz. Van Haarlem – The Fall of

the Titans” by Cornelis Van haarlem is licensed under

Public Domain 1.0

Image 14: “Huitzilopochtli telleriano” is licensed under

Public Domain-US

Image 15: “Kampf der untergehenden Götter” by F.W.

Heine is licensed under Public Domain 1.0

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 8 7

4

Chapter 4: Material Culture

Nolan Weil

Suggested Focus

This chapter is more impressionistic than the preceding ones. Don’t

expect to Tnd answers to the following questions in the text. The

best way to get something from the chapter is to read yourself into

the text.

1. In your own words, explain the point that Henry Glassie

is making in the quote that kicks off the chapter. Take it

apart and explain phrase by phrase with concrete

examples that might illustrate Glassie’s meaning.

2. This chapter discusses the differences (rather than the

similarities) in material culture from one region to

another in the U.S. What are some factors that seem to

affect material culture?

3. How is material culture a reflection of the life of

8 8 | S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E

particular places?

The things we make

“Material culture records human intrusion in the

environment,” says Henry Glassie (1999: 1) in his book

Material Culture. “It is the way we imagine a distinction

between nature and culture, and then rebuild nature to

our desire, shaping, reshaping, and arranging things

during life. We live in material culture, depend upon it,

take it for granted, and realize through it our grandest

aspirations.”

In many ways, material culture is the most obvious

element of culture. Of particular interest to the cross-

cultural explorer is the way that material culture changes

as one crosses otherwise invisible cultural boundaries. In

traveling from one place to another, it is often the visible

change in the manmade environment that <rst alerts the

traveler to the fact that she has crossed from one cultural

environment to another. This is not to ignore differences

one might notice in spoken (or written) language, or the

behavioral routines of people. There may be those too, of

course.

Taking to the road

Reflecting on Glassie’s characterization of culture as a

record of “human intrusion in the environment,” I am

reminded of my encounters with these intrusions in my

many travels–east, west, north, and south–across the

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 8 9

United States. Traveling by car in 1985 from my hometown

of Toledo, Ohio on the west end of Lake Erie through

Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Vermont, and New

Hampshire to the coast of Maine, I heard English

everywhere, of course. But when I arrived in Maine, the

accent of the natives was obviously different from my

northern Ohio, mid-Western accent. It amused me, for I

had previously traveled in the Deep South and was

familiar with the many accents of Southerners, but I had

never spoken with a native resident of Maine. However,

what impressed me more were the differences in cultural

landscapes.

In many respects, Maine was strangely familiar to me

although the geography is hardly the same as Ohio’s. Let

me explain. Northern Ohio is situated in a region of Ohio

known as the Lake Plains. Largely flat, much of northern

Ohio lies on the southern shores of Lake Erie, claiming

about 312 miles (502 km) of Lake Erie’s shoreline. On the

other hand, Maine, the northeastern most state of the U.S.,

is on the Atlantic coast and has a rugged, rocky coastline.

Both states have river systems that flow into large bodies

of water. The rivers of northern Ohio flow into Lake Erie.

The rivers of Maine flow to the Atlantic. Both states have

flourishing marine cultures. But it is not the geography I

want to focus on.

What struck me just as much as the differences in geography

were the differences in the marine cultures of Ohio and Maine. Of

course, whether traveling the shoreline of Lake Erie or the Atlantic

coast of Maine, one sees many boats. But my impression as a

traveler was that the proportion of boats of different types seemed

quite different.

On Lake Erie one sees huge lake freighters, especially near big

industrial cities like Toledo and Cleveland.

9 0 | N O L A N W E I L

“As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most, with a crew and good captain well seasoned” (song lyric from The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

I am old enough to remember when the Edmund Fitzgerald

went down in a ferocious storm on Lake Superior on November 9,

1975. It was subsequently immortalized by Canadian folk-rock

singer Gordon Lightfoot in a song called The Wreck of the Edmund

Fitzgerald.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 9 1

Powerboats docked in Skyway Marina, Toledo, Ohio

Commercial <shing boats are also sometimes spotted in the

Great Lakes too. Otherwise, the Great Lakes seascape is

dominated by recreational craft. Powerboats seem most popular

although sailboats can be seen as well. Marinas in Ohio are

generally laid out in a series of piers. Since there are no

appreciable tides in the Great Lakes, Lake Erie boaters can

tie their boats at docks near shore and walk right to them.

9 2 | N O L A N W E I L

Marinas lining the shore of Lake Erie in Sandusky, Ohio

The impression is quite different along the Maine coast. Large

ships, while sometimes spotted, are more often seen only on the

distant horizon. On the other hand, commercial <shing is the

lifeblood of coastal Maine, and the lobster boat is an especially

common sight. I saw them everywhere.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 9 3

Lobster boat on Maine coast

There are many recreational boats too, and these certainly

include powerboats, but somehow powerboats do not dominate

my recollections of the Maine coast as they do that of Lake Erie.

Instead Sailboats seem somewhat more prevalent. And because

there are substantial tides along the Atlantic coast, boats are

anchored to the sea floor at some distance from shore rather than

tied to docks on the edge of the shoreline. A boat owner typically

needs to use a small rowboat (or dinghy) to get to the boat (unless

she wants to swim). One is also much more likely to encounter a

sea kayak in the waters off the Maine coast than in Lake Erie.

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Northeast Harbor, Mt. Desert Island, Maine

Sea kayaking is popular along the Maine coast

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 9 5

Heading Inland

Leaving the shores of Lake Erie and the coast of Maine and

traveling inland, both states quickly undergo a cultural

metamorphosis. We leave the vehicles and implements of

the sea behind and encounter those of the farm and small

town. In this sense, whether in Ohio or in Maine, one

moves from one cultural setting to another by traveling

just a few miles inland. But as we did with coastal Ohio

and coastal Maine, let’s compare a couple of material

features found in abundance in both rural Ohio and rural

Maine.

Whether traveling across Ohio or Maine one cannot go

far without seeing a barn. Barns in both Ohio and Maine

are generally of two basic types. There are barns with

simple gabled roofs and gambrel style barns. Other shapes

are sometimes found as well, but the simple gable and the

gambrel are typical. Perhaps gambrel barns are more

numerous in Ohio than in Maine although I cannot prove

it. Barns are often painted red and sometimes white, or

maybe not painted at all. But whether red, white, or

unpainted, what is notable is that the siding on the barns

in Maine is sometimes nailed horizontally, while in Ohio,

the boards are often wider, and they are nailed vertically. If

there is a reason for these differences other than simple

local custom, I do not know. But it does not really matter,

for what concerns us here is the raw visual encounter.

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Red barn with simple gabled roof

Barn with gambrel-style roof

Another obvious example of “human intrusion in the

environment” is the existence of houses (and other buildings:

churches, stores, government buildings, etc.) Houses in both

states come in many styles. The ways of building in both states have

been influenced by other regions, of course, and by historical

developments in architecture. This makes it hard to summarize

similarities and differences in the ways of building.

But crossing Maine, the traveler will surely see an

abundance of variations on the simple, classic, cuboid

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 9 7

Cape Cod style house

designs found throughout New England, including the

Cape Cod and the Saltbox.

Saltbox style house

Moreover, it would not be hard to <nd houses sided with

cedar shakes.

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Cedar siding is common on traditional New England houses.

Nevertheless, except for differences in geography, it

might be hard for the traveler to tell from a casual

observation of houses whether she is in Ohio or in Maine.

And frankly, as an Ohioan, I would be hard pressed to

name the typical architectural style in Ohio. According to

Zillow, an online real estate database company, the most

prevalent architectural style in Maine is the Cape Cod

design, whereas in Ohio, it is Colonial. In this respect,

Ohio resembles Massachusetts or Connecticut more than

Maine does. Indeed, architectural preferences in Ohio are

somewhat more similar to those of New England

generally, than to those of other Midwestern states, such

as Minnesota or Nebraska (Home architecture, 2017).

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 9 9

Historic Moss-Foster house, Colonial Revival style home in Sandusky, Ohio

From one end of the country to another

For a more obvious contrast in American architectural

styles, the traveler can head south and west from Ohio,

down the Mississippi River to New Orleans where the

dominant building style is French.

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French Quarters in New Orleans

Continuing west into Texas, the traveler begins to

encounter Spanish architecture. Further west still, in New

Mexico, the cultural landscape features an abundance of

buildings in the Native American Pueblo style. Perhaps

nothing captures the differences between Texas and New Mexico

better than touring the campuses of the University of Texas, in

Austin and the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 0 1

Battle Hall, University of Texas, Austin

Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

While the Zimmerman Library at the University of New

Mexico was built in 1938, one <nds examples of the

indigenous architecture that inspired it 60 miles west of

Albuquerque atop a 365-foot high mesa in the village of Sky

City in Ácoma Pueblo, home to the Ácoma people.

According to legend, the Ácoma people have lived there

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since before the time of Christ. Archaeologists cannot be

certain of that but have con<rmed that the site has been

inhabited since at least 1200 CE, making it perhaps the

oldest continuously inhabited community in the United

States (Minge, 2002).

Ácoma Pueblo, village of Sky City, New Mexico

Final reflection

So far, we have barely scratched the surface in pointing

out some architectural differences across broad regions of

the United States. Our purpose, however, is not to make an

exhaustive study of American architectural styles. It is only

to illustrate Glassie’s characterization of material culture

as “human intrusion in the environment” and to call

attention to the ways in which that intrusion differs

according to local customs, heritage, needs, and tastes.

Buildings are obviously large intrusions in the natural

environment, and we have not even begun to look at all the

various kinds of structures that comprise the built

environment from churches, synagogues, and mosques to

government buildings, storefronts, and stadiums. Of

course, material culture also includes the associated

furnishings, appliances, tools, implements, and personal

possessions within buildings.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 0 3

We are surrounded by material culture. As Boivin (2008:

225) reminds us: “From the moment we are born, we

engage in an ongoing and increasingly intensive

interaction with environments that are to varying degrees

natural and human-made.” They are environments that we

have shaped and that in turn have shaped us, “and yet,”

notes Boivin, “in many ways, we have barely begun to

study its role in our lives.”

References

Boivin, N. (2008). Material cultures, material minds: The

impact of things on human thought, society, and evolution.

New York: Cambridge University Press.

Celebrating Zimmerman@75. UNM University Libraries.

Retrieved December 28, 2017 from

https://library.unm.edu/zimmerman75/

Glassie, H. (1999). Material culture. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press.

Home architecture style: Regional or not? Zillow.

Retrieved August 2, 2017 from https://www.zillow.com/

research/home-architecture-style-regional-or-not-4388/

Minge, W. A. (2002). Ácoma: Pueblo in the sky, (Revised

edition). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Image Attributions

Image 1: “Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971” by Greenmars is

licensed under CC 3.0

Image 2: “Skyway Marina (Formerly Glass City Marina) –

Toledo, Ohio, Ohio DNR” by USFWSmidwest is licensed

under CC 2.0

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Image 3: “Sandusky Ohio aerial view.jpg” by Ken Winters,

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is licensed under Public

Domain

Image 4: “ The Lobster Boat“ by DelberM is licensed under

CC0

Image 5: “Northeast Harbor Autumn – Mt. Desert Island,

Maine (29773118253).jpg” by Tony Webster licensed by CC

2.0

Image 6: “Sea Kayak” by Thruxton licensed by CC 3.0 “Wood

Shingles” by “Malcolm Jacobson” licensed by CC 2.0

Image 7: “Red Barn” by Daniel Case licensed by CC 3.0

Image 8: “Gambrel-Style Barn” by Nicholas Tonelli

licensed by CC 2.0

Image 9: “William and Jane Phinney House, 1730” by

Kenneth C. Zirkel licensed by CC 3.0

Image 10:“Nehemiah Royce House, Wallingford,

Connecticut” by Daderot licensed by CC 3.0

Image 11: “Wood Shingles” by “Malcolm Jacobson” licensed

by CC 2.0

Image 12: “Moss-Foster House” by Nyttend licensed by

Public Domain

Image 13: “French Quarter in New Orleans” by llambrano

licensed by CC0

Image 14: “Battle Hall” by Larry D. Moore licensed by CC

3.0

Image 15: “Public Library” by PerryPlanet licensed by

Public Domain

Image 16: “Pueblo Sky City” by Scott Catron licensed by CC

2.0

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 0 5

5

Chapter 5: Culture as

Thought and Action

Nolan Weil

Suggested Focus

The following task will help you gain a better grasp of some

commonly mentioned elements of culture. DeTne the following

terms. For each term provide the information indicated.

1. Belief: basic deTnition – three types – characteristics of

each type – unique examples from your own experience

2. Value: basic deTnition – examples from the reading –

unique examples from your own experience

3. Norm: basic deTnition – two types – deTnition of each

type – difference between each type – example of each

from text – unique example of each

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4. Custom: basic deTnition – several characteristics

5. Tradition: basic deTnition – several characteristics –

difference between custom and tradition

6. Ritual: basic deTnition – six genres of ritual – unique

example from your own experience of each genre

Non-material aspects of culture

Social scientists have long distinguished material from

non-material culture despite the fact that they are closely

intertwined. Material culture consists of tangible objects

that people create: tools, toys, buildings, furniture, images,

and even print and digital media—a seemingly endless list

of items. As we saw in Chapter 3, material culture can tell

us a lot about the activities of people as remote in time as

the Upper Paleolithic (and earlier). In fact, material culture

is almost all we have to inform us about human culture in

the deep past before the existence of written records.

While material culture provides clues about the lives of the

people who create and use it, material culture alone is

silent about many other details, for much of human

culture is non-material.

Non-material culture includes such things as: beliefs,

values, norms, customs, traditions, and rituals, to give just

a few examples. In this chapter, we will discuss these

typical categories of thought and action often associated

with the concept of culture.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 0 7

Beliefs

A belief is a propositional attitude, a settled way of

thinking. Beliefs when publicly expressed generally take

the form of declarative statements. As Schwitzgebel (2015)

has pointed out, the vast majority of our beliefs are

actually quite mundane. We rarely bother to express them

at all, and we certainly never question them. Here are a

couple of examples of some pretty mundane beliefs:

• All people have heads.

• The hand on the end of my arm is my hand (not

someone else’s).

Mundane beliefs are, for the most part, universally

shared by all normally functioning people. Of course, not

all beliefs are universally shared. Some beliefs are purely

personal. Mary may believe, with good reason, that eggs

give her indigestion. George may believe, without very

good evidence, that the best way to guarantee rain is to

wash his car. Personal beliefs may be well founded or not

so well founded. At any rate, mundane beliefs and purely

personal beliefs are of no particular cross-cultural interest.

Of greater interest for students of culture are the beliefs

(and systems of beliefs) that are widely shared among

members of particular communities of people. While

mundane beliefs may be universally shared across most

cultures, culturally shared beliefs tend to have boundaries.

The members of one group may consider their own,

shared cultural beliefs as self-evidently true, while

members of other groups might consider the same beliefs

as questionable, if not strange and arbitrary. Culturally

relevant beliefs govern every conceivable aspect of social

1 0 8 | N O L A N W E I L

life: religious, political, economic, and domestic to

mention only a few.

Values

Cultural values are closely associated with both the beliefs

and norms of a cultural community. Values can be de<ned

as the abstract concepts or standards that represent the

ideals of a group. They point to what the group most

regards as right, good, beautiful, desirable, etc. Values are

often identi<ed in discourse by means of words or

phrases, e.g., “freedom,” “equality,” “<lial piety,” “respect

for elders.” Values, though, go hand in hand with beliefs.

Think of a value, when articulated, as a short hand way of

referring to a belief. But of course, a value is hardly a value

unless it is acted upon. In other words, we generally think

of a value as a guide to conduct.

What purpose do values serve? – we might want to ask.

For one thing, shared cultural values may help promote

group cohesion. They encourage group members to behave

in ways that the group considers appropriate, proper,

honorable, praiseworthy, and the like. As is true also with

beliefs and norms though, not everyone necessarily

adheres to the widely shared values of a culture to the

same degree, and sometimes not at all. In fact, some

cultural values may even be in conflict with other values.

Cross-cultural comparisons of values using

questionnaires have been particularly popular with social

scientists for well over a half-century. Later in our

explorations, we will examine several different

frameworks that social scientists have proposed for

studying differences in values across cultures.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 0 9

Norms

Norms are the expectations or rules, formal or informal,

about how one should behave in a particular social

situation. Sociologists since the time of William Graham

Sumner (1906) have generally distinguished two different

types of norms: folkways and mores. Folkways are a loose

collection of usual or customary ways in which the

members of a particular cultural community behave.

Examples include: how people greet one another, how they

dress, what they eat, how they prepare it, and how they eat

it, how they handle inter-personal conflict, etc. Mores

(pronounced “more-rays”) are stricter than folkways. They

are the standards of moral conduct and ethical behavior

that the people in a cultural community expect of one

another. They include such things as rules against killing,

rules about who can or cannot have sex with whom, and so

on.

The mores of a society are enforced in various ways. The

most important mores are upheld by means of laws, which

are explicitly stated rules. People who violate laws may

have to pay a penalty, for example, going to jail, or paying a

monetary <ne. Other mores may not be strictly against the

law but are nevertheless strongly endorsed by a society.

Such mores may be upheld mainly by means of social

sanctions, which are ways of communicating disapproval

or putting pressure on people who violate a community’s

mores. For example, people who violate mores for which

there are no formal laws may <nd that the people of a

community make life uncomfortable for them. The

community may publically condemn the person

(“shaming”) or avoid interacting with the person

(“shunning”).

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One way to look at the difference between folkways and

mores is to say that folkways reflect what a cultural

community regards as appropriate or inappropriate, polite

or rude. Mores, however, reflect what a community

considers as morally or ethically right or wrong.

Customs and Traditions

Customs and traditions are two more terms often

employed in discussing culture. A custom is a widely

accepted way of doing something, speci<c to a particular

society, place or time, and that has developed through

repetition over a long period of time. So de<ned, it is hard

to see how customs differ from folkways as discussed

above. I am not sure they do. Whether a practice is called a

folkway or custom might revolve around whether the

practice is being discussed by a sociologist or a social

historian.

But what is a tradition? David Gross (1992: 8) de<nes

tradition as “a set of practices, a constellation of beliefs, or

mode of thinking that exists in the present, but was

inherited from the past.” Gross further elaborates, writing

that a tradition “can be a set of observances, a collection of

doctrines or teachings, a particular type of behavior, a way

of thinking about the world or oneself, a way of regarding

others or interpreting reality.”

Gross (1992: 12) acknowledges that customs and

traditions have much in common and that therefore the

differences between them are easily blurred. He insists,

however, that from the perspective of society as a whole,

customs are less important than traditions. Compared

with traditions, Gross claims, customs involve “mostly

super<cial modes of behavior” that “are not as heavily

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 1 1

invested with value.” For example, says Gross, long

standing forms of greeting, like bowing in Japan, or

shaking hands in the U.S. are “relatively insigni<cant

social habits,” better characterized as customs than as

traditions. Still, Gross admits, “the boundary separating

custom from tradition is not always easy to discern.”

To call any practice a tradition, however, is often taken

to imply that the practice is not just of great value but also

ancient, something that has been passed down through

many generations unchanged. Scholarly studies of

tradition, however, contradict this widely held

assumption. Although some traditions may have ancient

roots, rarely, if ever, does any practice remain <xed for all

time. Times change, and traditions disappear or are

signi<cantly transformed.

Even more startling, traditions are often invented and

passed off as ancient, when in fact they are fully modern.

As Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) have argued, the

invention of tradition is a hallmark of that “recent

historical innovation, the ‘nation,’ with its associated

phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national

symbols, histories and the rest.” Although today’s nation-

states are modern inventions, they “generally claim to be

the opposite … namely rooted in the remotest antiquity,”

representing human communities that are entirely

‘natural’ (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983: 13-14).

Rituals

Rituals are sequences of actions involving gestures,

objects, and sometimes the utterance of words performed

in prescribed ways and carried out at speci<c times and

1 1 2 | N O L A N W E I L

places. When I ask American students to identify rituals,

they sometimes give examples such as:

• gathering to watch <reworks on the 4th of July

• “trick or treating” on Halloween

• gathering around the TV on Thanksgiving to watch

parades and football

• enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, including turkey and

other dishes typical of the occasion

But these not good examples of ritual as most

anthropologists would de<ne it.

True, some activities that are not clearly rituals, may

seem to have some ritual-like characteristics, an

observation that prompted Catherine Bell in her

book, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, to propose a

distinction between ritual and ritual-like activities.

According to Bell, ritual-like activities have some

characteristics of ritual. Routines of greeting and parting,

and table manners, for instance, are performative and

exhibit formality both of which are characteristic of ritual.

On the other hand, the American celebration of

Thanksgiving is ritual-like because of its appeal to

tradition.

As for full-fledged rituals, scholars have found it

convenient for the purpose of study to group them into

categories according to shared characteristics. Religious

studies scholar, Catherine Bell, has identi<ed six basic

categories of ritual.

Rites of passage (or life-cycle rites) are ceremonies that call attention to major events in the social life of

individuals, such as birth, the transition from childhood to

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 1 3

adulthood, marriage, and death. Rites of passage can also

mark initiation into religious communities, for example,

baptism in Christian communities. Clubs, fraternities, and

secret societies often put new initiates through ritual

ordeals before accepting them into the new community.

In some societies, rites of passage may be short and

simple while in others they may be lengthy and complex.

In rural China, says Bell (2009: 96), birth rituals are often

still observed in all their traditional complexity. When a

young woman marries, she is brought to live with the

husband’s family, and she may be considered an outsider

of little importance until she bears a son to carry on the

family name. Her mother-in-law may engage in rituals

involving presentation of offerings to special maternal

deities. Pregnancy and childbirth are also surrounded by a

seemingly endless series of ritual observances. (This is not

generally the case, however, in modern, urban China.)

Calendrical rites fall into two subcategories. Seasonal celebrations are associated with cycles of planting and harvesting among agriculturalists and with grazing and

moving the herd among pastoralists. In many societies,

sowing seeds is accompanied by offerings to ancestors or

deities, and harvesting often involves giving the <rst yield

to the gods or ancestors. Communal feasting is also

common, accompanied by music, dance, and a relaxing of

social restraint. Commemorative celebrations revolve around remembrance or re-enactment of events with

religious signi<cance, or importance for national heritage.

The rite of Holy Communion in the Catholic Church, for

instance, is performed in remembrance of the Last

Supper.

Rites of exchange and communion involve the making of offerings to a god or gods, sometimes with the

1 1 4 | N O L A N W E I L

expectation of getting something in return, like a good

harvest. Offerings may also be made to praise or please or

appease a god or deity. In some cultures, the offering

consisted of the sacri<ce of an animal (e.g., the ancient

Hebrews), and some cultures have even practiced human

sacri<ce (e.g., the Aztecs).

Rituals of affliction involve actions taken to diagnose and deal with the unseen causes of misfortune or to

alleviate physical or mental illnesses. Many pre-modern

cultures believe such problems are caused by things like

evil spirits, spirits of the dead, magic or witchcraft. Rituals

of affliction often involve not just the afflicted but entire

communities and have as their objective the idea of

puri<cation or exorcism.

Rituals of feasting, fasting, and festivals are focused on public displays of cultural and religious commitment and

sentiment. A good example of ritual fasting is the

worldwide Muslim communal fasting during the month of

Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar.

During Ramadan, Muslims do not eat or drink anything

from the time the sun rises until it sets. (Exceptions are

made for the elderly, the sick, and for pregnant women, as

well as for people traveling.) After Ramadan, Muslims

celebrate Eid al Fitr, literally the “feast of breaking the

fast.” Well known festivals include Carnival in places like

New Orleans and Brazil and water festivals that take place

in many countries in East and Southeast Asia (e.g., China,

Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand).

Political rites are ceremonial practices that display and promote the power of political institutions. The

coronation of the Queen of England would be an example.

National salutes might also count as political rites, e.g., the

American pledge of allegiance, or to give a more sinister

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 1 5

example, the “Heil Hitler” salute in pre-World War II

Germany. Revolutionary or anti-establishment gestures

could also be counted as political rites, for instance, cross-

burning by the KKK.

Most of us living in modern secular societies are not

generally surrounded by rituals to the same extent as

people in traditional societies often are or were. In the

United States, for example, except for people who may

belong to a religious tradition in which ritual is important,

we tend to observe just a few rites to mark major life

transitions such as birth, marriage, and death (Bell, 2009).

Final reflection

The terms covered in this chapter are among the most

common terms used in enumerating what we have called

non-material aspects of culture. But to reiterate a point

made at the beginning of the chapter, it is not always

possible to separate material and non-material culture. For

instance, while we have de<ned a custom as a widely

accepted way of doing something, that doing may very

well include a material object. For instance, it might be

customary to send a friend or relative a birthday

greeting—an action, but that greeting may take material

form—a birthday card. Or let’s take ritual as an example.

Although a ritual is an action, ritual actions often employ

ritual objects: incense, candles, chalices, prayer beads,

bells, gongs, drums, and so on.

Not only can it be dif<cult to separate material and non-

material culture, it is also not always easy to distinguish

between some categories of non-material culture

discussed in this chapter. For instance, we have already

discussed the dif<culty of distinguishing between a

1 1 6 | N O L A N W E I L

custom and a tradition. Is there a difference between a

custom and a norm? If there is, it is surely subtle and

unimportant for our purposes. On the other hand, there

clearly is a difference between a law (at least in the modern

sense of the term) and a more.

At this point, I would invite you, dear reader, to go

through the list of terms introduced in the chapter and

provide original examples of beliefs, values, norms,

customs, traditions, and rituals that you consider to be

elements of a cultural community that you are familiar

with.

Application

For Further Thought and Discussion

1. Identify at least three beliefs that are important in a

cultural community that you identify with. Try to

discover beliefs that govern different aspects of life,

e.g., political, economic, social, or some other. Can you

name an associated value for each belief ?

2. See if you can discover a cultural belief that is at odds

with one of your own deeply held personal beliefs.

3. We often belong to more than one cultural community.

Sometimes the beliefs of one community are in conflict

with the beliefs of another community. Can you

identify any such situation in your own experience?

For Further Research

1. Culture is not something Txed. Cultures can change

over time. Can you discover a custom that has changed

in the lifetime of someone that you know (e.g., a parent

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 1 7

or grandparent)?

2. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) have argued that what

we regard as ancient traditions are sometimes more

recent than we think. Can you discover any tradition

that is actually more recent than people commonly

believe?

References

Bell, C. (2009). Ritual: Perspectives and dimensions (Revised

Edition), Oxford University Press. ProQuest Ebook

Central.

Gross, D. (1992). The past in ruins. Amherst, MA: University

of Massachusetts Press.

Hobsbawm, E. & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). The invention of

tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2015). “Belief.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N.

Zalta (ed.). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/

archives/sum2015/entries/belief/

Stephenson, B. (2015). Ritual: A very short introduction.

Oxford University Press. Ebook.

Sumner, W. G. (1906/1940). Folkways: A study of the

sociological importance of usages, manners, customs, mores,

and morals. Boston: Ginn and Company.

1 1 8 | N O L A N W E I L

6

Chapter 6: Beliefs, Values,

and Cultural Universals

Nolan Weil

Suggested Focus

This chapter delves into two theories of cultural values in more

detail. The following tasks invite you not only to restate ideas from

the chapter but also to apply the theories to communities of your

own choosing.

1. What are the Tve questions that every society must

answer, according to Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck?

Identify the three potential responses to each question.

2. List and deTne Hofstede’s six dimensions of culture.

Choose two national cultures that interest you.

Compare and contrast them using Hofstede’s model.

3. Identify four problems that critics have identiTed with

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 1 9

Hofstede’s theory.

4. Do you think it is possible to identify national values, or

do you think values differ signiTcantly from person to

person and place to place? Explain.

Value Orientations Theory

The Kluckhohn-Strodtbeck Value Orientations theory

represents one of the earliest efforts to develop a cross-

cultural theory of values. According to Kluckhohn and

Strodtbeck (1961), every culture faces the same basic

survival needs and must answer the same universal

questions. It is out of this need that cultural values arise.

The basic questions faced by people everywhere fall into

<ve categories and reflect concerns about: 1) human

nature, 2) the relationship between human beings and the

natural world, 3) time, 4) human activity, and 5) social

relations. Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck hypothesized three

possible responses or orientations to each of the concerns.

Table 6.1 – Summary of Kluckhohn-Strodtbeck Values

Orientation Theory

Basic Concerns Orientations

Human nature Evil Mixed Good

Relationship to natural world Subordinate Harmony Dominant

Time Past Present Future

Activity Being Becoming Doing

Social relations Hierarchical Collateral Individual

1 2 0 | N O L A N W E I L

What is the inherent nature of human beings?

This is a question, say Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, that all

societies ask, and there are generally three different

responses. The people in some societies are inclined to

believe that people are inherently evil and that the society

must exercise strong measures to keep the evil impulses of

people in check. On the other hand, other societies are

more likely to see human beings as born basically good

and possessing an inherent tendency towards goodness.

Between these two poles are societies that see human

beings as possessing the potential to be either good or evil

depending upon the influences that surround them.

Societies also differ on whether human nature is

immutable (unchangeable) or mutable (changeable).

What is the relationship between human beings and the natural world?

Some societies believe nature is a powerful force in the

face of which human beings are essentially helpless. We

could describe this as “nature over humans.” Other

societies are more likely to believe that through

intelligence and the application of knowledge, humans can

control nature. In other words, they embrace a “humans

over nature” position. Between these two extremes are the

societies who believe humans are wise to strive to live in

“harmony with nature.”

What is the best way to think about time?

Some societies are rooted in the past, believing that people

should learn from history and strive to preserve the

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 2 1

traditions of the past. Other societies place more value on

the here and now, believing people should live fully in the

present. Then there are societies that place the greatest

value on the future, believing people should always delay

immediate satisfactions while they plan and work hard to

make a better future.

What is the proper mode of human activity?

In some societies, “being” is the most valued orientation.

Striving for great things is not necessary or important. In

other societies, “becoming” is what is most valued. Life is

regarded as a process of continual unfolding. Our purpose

on earth, the people might say, is to become fully human.

Finally, there are societies that are primarily oriented to

“doing.” In such societies, people are likely to think of the

inactive life as a wasted life. People are more likely to

express the view that we are here to work hard and that

human worth is measured by the sum of

accomplishments.

What is the ideal relationship between the individual and society?

Expressed another way, we can say the concern is about

how a society is best organized. People in some societies

think it most natural that a society be organized

hierarchically. They hold to the view that some people are

born to lead and others to follow. Leaders, they feel, should

make all the important decisions. Other societies are best

described as valuing collateral relationships. In such

societies, everyone has an important role to play in society;

therefore, important decisions should be made by

1 2 2 | N O L A N W E I L

consensus. In still other societies, the individual is the

primary unit of society. In societies that place great value

on individualism, people are likely to believe that each

person should have control over his/her own destiny.

When groups convene to make decisions, they should

follow the principle of “one person, one vote.”

In an early application of the theory, Kluckhohn and

Strodtbeck interviewed members of <ve cultural groups in

the American Southwest: 1) Navajo people traveling

around the Southwest seeking work, 2) white

homesteaders in Texas, 3) Mexican-Americans, 4) Mormon

villagers, and 5) Zuni pueblo dwellers. Researchers have

found the framework useful in making sense of diverse

cultures around the world.

As Hill (2002) has observed, Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck

did not consider the theory to be complete. In fact, they

originally proposed a sixth value orientation—Space: here,

there, or far away, which they could not quite <gure out

how to investigate at the time. And Hill has proposed a

number of additional questions that one might expect

cultural groups to grapple with:

• Space – Should space belong to individuals, to groups

(especially the family) or to everybody?

• Work – What should be the basic motivation for work?

To make a contribution to society, to have a sense of

personal achievement, or to attain <nancial security?

• Gender – How should society distribute roles, power

and responsibility between the sexes? Should

decision-making be done primarily by men, by

women, or by both?

• The Relationship between State and Individual –

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 2 3

Should rights and responsibilities be granted to the

nation or the individual?

Today, the Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck framework is just

one among many attempts to study universal human

values. Others include those of Hofstede (1997), Rokeach

(1979), and Schwartz (2006).

Hofstede’s dimensions of culture theory

Geert Hofstede articulated a Dimensions of Culture theory

in the 1980s, and has updated and revised it over the years.

Hofstede’s theory currently gets a lot of attention in basic

texts that include discussion of cultural values. Based on

survey data collected from IBM employees, Hofstede has

argued that his theory is particularly useful for

highlighting similarities and differences between national

cultures. Hofstede initially identi<ed four dimensions.

Power Distance

Power distance is a measure of the degree to which less

powerful members of society expect and accept an unequal

distribution of power. There is a certain degree of

inequality in all societies, notes Hofstede; however, there

is relatively more equality in some societies than in others.

Countries vary along a continuum from countries where

power distance is very low to countries where power

distance is very high. Measured on a scale of 1-100 for

instance, Denmark scores very low and Mexico scores

quite high. The U.S. falls somewhere in between.

Countries with lower PDI values tend to be more

egalitarian. For instance, there is more equality between

1 2 4 | N O L A N W E I L

parents and children with parents more likely to accept it

if children argue with them, or “talk back” to use a

common expression. In the work place, bosses are more

likely to ask employees for input, and in fact, subordinates

expect to be consulted. On the other hand, in countries

with high power distance, parents expect children to obey

without questioning. People of higher status may expect

conspicuous displays of respect from subordinates. In the

workplace, superiors and subordinates are not likely to see

each other as equals, and it is assumed that bosses will

make decisions without consulting employees. In general,

status is more important in high power distance countries.

Table 6.2 – Power distance index (PDI) for 50 countries

and 3 regions (Hofstede, 1997: 26)

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 2 5

Country/ Region PDI

Country/ Region PDI

Country/ Region PDI

Country/ Region PDI

Malaysia *104 France 68 South Korea 60 Australia 36

Guatemala 95 Hong Kong 68 Iran 58 Costa Rica 35

Panama 95 Colombia 67 Taiwan 58 Germany 35

Philippines 94 Salvador 66 Spain 57 Great Britain 35

Mexico 81 Turkey 66 Pakistan 55 Switzerland 34

Venezuela 81 Belgium 65 Japan 54 Finland 33

Arab countries 80

East Africa 64 Italy 50 Norway 31

Ecuador 78 Peru 64 Argentina 49 Sweden 31

Indonesia 78 Thailand 64 South Africa 49 Ireland 28

India 77 Chile 63 Jamaica 45 New Zealand 22

West Africa 77 Portugal 63 USA 40 Denmark 18

Yugoslavia 76 Uruguay 61 Canada 39 Israel 13

Singapore 74 Greece 60 Netherlands 38 Austria 11

Brazil 69

* A country may score above 100 if it was added after a

formula for the scale had already been <xed.

Table 6.3 – Individualism index (IDV) for 50 countries

and 3 regions (Hofstede, 1997: 53)

1 2 6 | N O L A N W E I L

Country/ Region IDV

Country/ Region IDV

Country/ Region IDV

Country/ Region IDV

USA 91 Germany 67 Turkey 37 Thailand 20

Australia 90 South Africa 65 Uruguay 36 Salvador 19

Great Britain 89 Finland 63 Greece 35

South Korea 18

Canada 80 Austria 55 Philippines 32 Taiwan 17

Netherlands 80 Israel 54 Mexico 30 Peru 16

New Zealand 79 Spain 51 Yugoslavia 27 Costa Rica 15

Italy 76 India 48 East Africa 27 Indonesia 14

Belgium 75 Japan 46 Portugal 27 Pakistan 14

Denmark 74 Argentina 46 Malaysia 26 Colombia 13

France 71 Iran 41 Hong Kong 25 Venezuela 12

Sweden 71 Jamaica 39 Chile 23 Panama 11

Ireland 70 Arab countries 38 West Africa 20 Ecuador 8

Norway 69 Brazil 38 Singapore 20 Guatemala 6

Switzerland 68

Individualism vs. collectivism

Individualism vs. collectivism anchor opposite ends of a

continuum that describes how people de<ne themselves

and their relationships with others. Countries that score

higher on individualism measure are considered by

de<nition less collectivistic than countries that score

lower. In more highly individualistic societies, the

interests of individuals receive more emphasis than those

of the group (e.g., the family, the company, etc.).

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 2 7

Individualistic societies put more value on self-striving

and personal accomplishment, while more collectivistic

societies put more emphasis on the importance of

relationships and loyalty. People are de<ned more by what

they do in individualistic societies while in collectivistic

societies, they are de<ned more by their membership in

particular groups. Communication is more direct in

individualistic societies but more indirect in collectivistic

societies. The U.S. ranks very high in individualism, and

South Korea ranks quite low. Japan falls close to the

middle.

Masculinity vs. femininity

Masculinity vs. femininity refers to a dimension that

describes the extent to which strong distinctions exist

between men’s and women’s roles in society. Societies that

score higher on the masculinity scale tend to value

assertiveness, competition, and material success.

Countries that score lower in masculinity tend to embrace

values more widely thought of as feminine values, e.g.,

modesty, quality of life, interpersonal relationships, and

greater concern for the disadvantaged of society. Societies

high in masculinity are also more likely to have strong

opinions about what constitutes men’s work vs. women’s

work while societies low in masculinity permit much

greater overlapping in the social roles of men and women.

Table 6.4 – Masculinity index (MAS) for 50 countries and

3 regions (Hofstede, 1997: 84)

1 2 8 | N O L A N W E I L

Country/ Region MAS

Country/ Region MAS

Country/ Region MAS

Country/ Region MAS

Japan 95 USA 62 Singapore 48 South Korea 39

Austria 79 Australia 61 Israel 47 Uruguay 38

Venezuela 73 New Zealand 58 Indonesia 46 Guatemala 37

Italy 70 Hong Kong 57 West Africa 46 Thailand 34

Switzerland 70 Greece 57 Turkey 45 Portugal 31

Mexico 69 India 56 Taiwan 45 Chile 28

Ireland 69 Argentina 56 Panama 44 Finland 26

Jamaica 68 Belgium 54 France 43 Yugoslavia 21

Germany 66 Arab countries 53 Iran 43 Costa Rica 21

Great Britain 66 Canada 52 Peru 42 Denmark 16

Philippines 64 Malaysia 50 Spain 42 Netherlands 14

Colombia 64 Pakistan 50 East Africa 41 Norway 8

Ecuador 63 Brazil 49 Salvador 40 Sweden 5

South Africa 63

Uncertainty avoidance

Uncertainty avoidance measures the extent to which people

value predictability and view uncertainty or the unknown

as threatening. People in societies that measure high in

uncertainty avoidance prefer to know exactly what to

expect in any given situation. They want <rm rules and

strict codes of behavior. They dislike ambiguity. People

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 2 9

from countries that score low on uncertainty avoidance

generally have a higher tolerance for ambiguity. They are

happy to have few rules and prefer less structured rather

than more tightly structured contexts. In educational

settings, people from countries high in uncertainty

avoidance expect their teachers to be experts with all of the

answers. People from countries low in uncertainty

avoidance don’t mind it when a teacher says, “I don’t

know.”

Table 6.5 – Uncertainty avoidance index (UAI)/ 50

countries and 3 regions (Hofstede, 1997: 113)

Country/ Region UAI

Country/ Region UAI

Country/ Region UAI

Country/ Region UAI

Greece 112 Costa Rica 86 Ecuador 67 Indonesia 48

Portugal 104 Turkey 85 Germany 65 Canada 48

Guatemala 101 South Korea 85 Thailand 64 USA 46

Uruguay 100 Mexico 82 Iran 59 Philippines 44

Salvador 94 Israel 81 Finland 59 India 40

Belgium 94 Colombia 80 Switzerland 58 Malaysia 36

Japan 92 Venezuela 76 West Africa 54 Great Britain 35

Yugoslavia 88 Brazil 76 Netherlands 53 Ireland 35

Peru 87 Italy 75 East Africa 52 Hong Kong 29

Panama 86 Pakistan 70 Australia 51 Sweden 29

France 86 Austria 70 Norway 50 Denmark 23

Chile 86 Taiwan 69 South Africa 49 Jamaica 13

Spain 86 Arab countries 68 New Zealand 49 Singapore 8

Argentina 86

1 3 0 | N O L A N W E I L

Long-term vs. short-term orientation

Long-term vs. short-term orientation is a 5th dimension

developed some years after the initial four. It emerged as a

result of an effort by a research group (The Chinese

Culture Connection, 1987) to develop a universal values

framework with a non-Western bias. According to

Hofstede (1997: 161), the resulting Chinese Values Survey

overlapped with three of Hofstede’s dimensions: power

distance, individualism, and masculinity although not

with the uncertainty avoidance dimension. In addition,

the group found a unique factor not reflected in Hofstede’s

work, which they called Confucian dynamism. Hofstede

has since incorporated Confucian dynamism into his own

theory as long-term vs. short-term orientation. Long-term

orientation is associated with thrift, savings, persistence

toward results, and the willingness to subordinate oneself

for a purpose. Short-term orientation is associated with

less saving, a preference for quick results, and

unrestrained spending in response to social pressure

(often referred to in English as “keeping up with the

Joneses”).

Table 6.6 – Long-term orientation (LTO) for 23 countries

(Hofstede, 1997: 166)

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 3 1

Country LTO Country LTO Country LTO Country LTO

China 118 India 61 Poland 32 Zimbabwe 25

Hong Kong 96 Thailand 56 Germany 31 Canada 23

Taiwan 87 Singapore 48 Australia 31 Philippines 19

Japan 80 Netherlands 44 New Zealand 30 Nigeria 16

South Korea 75 Bangladesh 40 USA 29 Pakistan 0

Brazil 65 Sweden 33 Great Britain 25

Indulgence vs. self-restraint

Indulgence vs. self-restraint represents another new

dimension. People living in countries that score high on

indulgence are more likely to value the free grati<cation of

human desires. Enjoying life and having fun are important

to them. On the other hand, people in countries high on

restraint are more likely to believe that grati<cation

should be curbed and that it should be regulated by strict

social norms (Hofstede, Hofstede & Minkov, 2010: 281).

Table 6.7 – Indulgence vs. Restraint. Ranking of 40

countries from most to least indulgent (reproduced from

Jandt, 2016: 175)

1 3 2 | N O L A N W E I L

High-Indulgence Countries High-Restraint Countries

1 Venezuela 11 Australia 74 Morocco 83 Iraq

2 Mexico 12 Cyprus 75 China 85 Estonia

3 Puerto Rico 12 Denmark 76 Azerbaijan 85 Bulgaria

4 El Salvador 14 Great Britain 77 Russia 85 Lithuania

5 Nigeria 15 Canada 77 Montenegro 88 Belarus

6 Colombia 15 Netherlands 77 Romania 88 Albania

7 Trinidad 15 USA 77 Bangladesh 90 Ukraine

8 Sweden 18 Iceland 81 Moldova 91 Latvia

9 New Zealand 19 Switzerland 82 Burkina Faso 92 Egypt

10 Ghana 19 Malta 83 Hong Kong 93 Pakistan

Critique of Hofstede’s theory

Among the various attempts by social scientists to study

human values from a cultural perspective, Hofstede’s is

certainly popular. In fact, it would be a rare culture text

that did not pay special attention to Hofstede’s theory. The

current text is a case in point. However, Hofstede’s theory

has also been seriously questioned, and we will summarize

some of the most common criticisms below.

First, Hofstede’s methodology has been criticized. To

begin with, the way in which the questionnaire was

developed has been described as haphazard (Orr &

Hauser, 2008). Indeed, the questionnaire was not even

originally developed to explore cultural values but instead

to assess job satisfaction within IBM. It is hard to believe

that questions framed to explore workplace attitudes are

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 3 3

relevant to broader cultural attitudes outside of the work

place.

Critics also point out that Hofstede’s conclusions are

based on insuf<cient samples McSweeney, 2002).

Although 117,000 questionnaires were administered, only

the results from 40 countries were used. Furthermore,

only 6 countries had more than 1000 respondents, and in

15 countries, there were fewer than 200 respondents.

Surely it is not appropriate for 200 people to speak on

behalf of a country of millions.

Critics have also been skeptical about the assumption

that IBM employees are representative of national cultures

as a whole. And even within IBM, the surveys were

administered only to certain categories of workers, i.e.,

“marketing-plus-sales,” leaving out many other employee

categories, including blue-collar workers, full-time

students, retired employees, etc. (McSweeney, 2002).

Hofstede has suggested that restricting the sample in this

way effectively controls for the effects of occupational

category and class, insuring that the relevant variable of

comparison is nationality. However, it seems hard to

escape the conclusion that since the study consisted solely

of IBM employees, the results may have more to say about

IBM corporate culture than about anything broader.

Moreover, we should not forget that when Hofstede’s

research was <rst conducted, IBM employed mostly men,

so women’s perspectives are also largely missing (Orr &

Hauser, 2008).

Hofstede’s theory has also been faulted for promoting a

largely static view of culture (Hamden-Turner &

Trompenaars, 1997). As Orr and Hauser (2008) have

suggested, the world has changed in dramatic ways since

Hofstede’s research began. The world map has changed,

1 3 4 | N O L A N W E I L

cultures themselves may have changed, and the original

data is likely to be out of date. In fact, it is somewhat of a

puzzle why Hofstede’s theory continues to enjoy the

popularity that it does. Indeed, over the years, attempts by

many researchers to replicate Hofstede’s <ndings have not

been very successful (Orr & Hauser, 2008).

Final reflection

In this chapter, we have surveyed two approaches to the

study of cultural values: that of Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck,

that of Hofstede. The study of values will no doubt remain

a vibrant subject for cross-cultural researchers.

However, implicit in Hofstede’s work, in particular, is

the idea that there exists such a thing as a national culture.

In discussing cultural values, we have temporarily gone

along with this suggestion. However, in closing, let us

raise the question of whether the idea of national culture

actually makes any sense. McSweeney (2002: 110), echoing

the sentiments of many other scholars insists that, “the

pre<xing of the name of a country to something to imply

national uniformity is grossly over-used.” In his view,

Hofstede’s dimensions are little more than statistical

myths.

In the chapters to come, we will suggest that culture is a

term better applied to small collectivities and explain why

the idea that there is any such thing as national culture

may be a mere illusion.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 3 5

Application

For Further Thought and Discussion

1. Choose a community that you know well and decide

where you think most members of the community

would place themselves within Table 6.1—the

Kluckhohn-Strodtbeck Value Orientations framework.

Explain your reasoning. Are your views the same or

different from those of your primary community?

2. Is your primary cultural community a “high-indulgence”

or a “high-restraint” community? How does this cultural

orientation align with your own personal orientation?

Are you a “high-indulgence” or a “high-restraint”

person?

References

Hamden-Turner, C. & Trompenaars, F. (1997), “Response

to Geert Hofstede,” International Journal of Intercultural

Relations, 21(1) 149-159.

Hill, M. D. (2002). Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck’s Values

Orientation Theory. Online Readings in Psychology and

Culture, 4(4). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1040

Hofstede, G. (1997). Cultures and organizations: Software of the

mind. New York: McGraw Hill.

Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J. & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures

and organizations: Software of the mind. (3rd ed.). New

York: McGraw Hill.

Jandt, F. E. (2016). An introduction to intercultural

communication: Identities in a global community, (8th ed.)

Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

1 3 6 | N O L A N W E I L

Kluckhohn, F. R. & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1961). Variations in

value orientations. Evanston, IL: Row Peterson.

McSweeney, B. (2002). Hofstede’s model of national

cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph

of faith – a failure of analysis. Human Relations, 55(1),

89–118.

Orr, L. M. & Hauser, W. J. (2008). A re-inquiry of

Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: A call for 21st century

cross-cultural research. The Marketing Management

Journal, 18(2), 1-19.

Rokeach, M. (1979) Understanding human values: Individual

and societal. New York: The Free Press.

Schwartz, S. H. (2006). A theory of cultural value

orientations: Explication and applications. Comparative

Sociology, 5(2-3), 137-182.

The Chinese Culture Connection. (1987). Chinese culture

and the search for culture-free dimensions of culture.

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 18(2), 143-164.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 3 7

7

Chapter 7: Group

Membership and Identity

Nolan Weil

Suggested Focus

This chapter deals with a complex topic that has generated much

scholarly debate. The following questions and tasks will get you

started on the road to understanding the issues.

1. Give a one-sentence deTnition of ethnicity. List some

features often associated with ethnicity. Identify some

other terms that also might suggest ethnicity?

2. Why do many scholars now think it is incorrect to

deTne ethnicity in terms of shared culture? How do

they now prefer to deTne it?

3. If race is not a biological category, and it is not a cultural

category, what is it? How does Appiah prove that racial

1 3 8 | S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E

identiTcation is not necessarily a cultural affair?

4. In what way do social classes seem to exhibit cultural

differences?

5. What is the difference between a country, a nation, and

a nation-state? How is a nation like an ethnic group,

and how is it different?

6. Identify two forms of nationalism. How are they similar

and how are they different? What does the work of

Theiss-Morse teach us about American national

identity?

Preliminary remarks

In this chapter, we will examine the theme of culture as

group membership. One of the most common ways that

we use the term culture in everyday English is to refer to

people who share the same nationality. We think of people

from Korea, for instance, as exemplifying “Korean

culture,” or people from Saudi Arabia as exemplifying

“Saudi culture.”

However, if we are interested in arriving at a coherent

understanding of the concept of culture, I believe this

usage leads us astray. The idea that culture is a product of

human activity and that it includes everything that people

make and everything they think and do (together) … that

idea of culture seems fairly clear and useful. However, to

turn around and call a whole nationality a culture, as we

are often tempted to do, is an invitation to confusion.

Perhaps it made sense for anthropologists in the 19th

and early 20th centuries who focused on traditional

societies to think of the small geographically isolated

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 3 9

groups they studied as cultures. Such groups were small

enough that for the most part they did share all aspects of

culture: language, beliefs, kinship patterns, technologies,

etc.

But the large collectives of the modern world that we call

nation-states are not culturally homogenous. In other

words, we will expect to <nd different cultures in different

places, or even different cultures intermingling with one

another in the same places. We say that the society in

question is multicultural. What this means for the idea of

culture as group membership is that we will need a

strategy for identifying the various groups that are

presumably the repositories of the many cultures of a

multicultural society. One way that sociologists have tried

to conceptualize the parts that together make up the whole

of a society is by means of the distinction between culture

and subculture. On the other hand, historians and political

scientists have been more interested in a macroscopic

view, inquiring into the origins of nationality and the

relationships between such things as nationality and

ethnicity.

Cultures and subcultures

According to many sociologists, the dominant culture of a

society is the one exempli<ed by the most powerful group

in the society. Taking the United States as an example,

Andersen, Taylor and Logio (2015: 36-37) suggest that while

it is hard to isolate a dominant culture, there seems to be a

“widely acknowledged ‘American’ culture,” epitomized by

“middle class values, habits, and economic resources,

strongly influenced by . . . television, the fashion industry,

and Anglo-European traditions,” and readily thought of as

1 4 0 | N O L A N W E I L

“including diverse elements such as fast food, Christmas

shopping, and professional sports.” Philosopher and

cultural theorist Kwame Appiah (1994: 116) is more pointed,

emphasizing America’s historically Christian beginnings,

its Englishness in terms both of language and traditions,

and the mark left on it by the dominant classes, including

government, business, and cultural elites.

In contrast to the dominant culture of a society, say

sociologists, are the various subcultures, conceived as

groups that are part of the dominant culture but that differ

from it in important ways. Many sociology textbooks are

quick to propose race and ethnicity as important bases for

the formation of subcultures. Other commonly mentioned

bases include geographic region, occupation, social or

economic class, and religion (Dowd & Dowd, 2003: 25).

Although this way of thinking about the connections

between culture and groups has now fallen somewhat out

of favor among cultural theorists, it is still common in

basic sociology texts. Therefore, we will outline it here

along with the caveat that there is an alternative way of

looking at group membership, one grounded in the

concept of identity rather than of culture.

Ethnicity

The term ethnicity has to do with the study of ethnic

groups and ethnic relations. But what is an ethnic group?

Let’s start by making clear what it is not. It is not a

biological category. Therefore, it is not possible to

establish a person’s ethnicity by genetic testing. Instead,

an ethnic group is one whose members share a common

ancestry, or at least believe that they do, and that also

share one or more other features, possibly including

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 4 1

language, collective memory, culture, ritual, dress, and

religion (Meer, 2014; Zenner, 1996). According to Meer (p.

37), the shared features may be real or imagined. Although

sociologists once treated ethnic groups as if they were

categories that could be objectively established, at least in

principle, many scholars today see ethnicity primarily as a

form of self-identi<cation (Banton, 2015; Meer, 2014). In

other words, an individual’s ethnicity is not something

that can be tested for by checking off a list of de<ning

features that serve to establish that individual’s ethnicity.

If you ask an American about his/her ethnicity, you

might get a variety of different answers. Some people will

emphasize their American-ness, by which they mean they

do not think of themselves as belonging to any particular

ethnic group. Others may point to national origins,

emphasizing the fact that they are children of immigrants

(or even perhaps themselves immigrants). If they identify

strongly with their immigrant heritage, they might use a

term, such as Italian American, Cuban American, or

Mexican American. Americans of African ancestry are

likely to identify (or be automatically identi<ed by others)

as African American. Americans of various Asian

backgrounds, may specify that they are Chinese American,

Japanese American, Korean American, etc. (although if

they think they are speaking to someone that wouldn’t

know the difference, they might just say, Asian American.

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Many U.S. cities abound in ethnic neighborhoods. (Dragon Gate to Chinatown in San Francisco)

A common

phenomenon in the

United States is the

presence of

neighborhoods, popularly

characterized as ethnic,

especially in large

cosmopolitan cities. Such

neighborhoods result from

the fact that the U.S. has

historically been a country

open to immigration, and immigrants are often likely to

settle where their fellow countrymen have previously

settled. Many American cities, for instance, have their

Little Italy(s), China Towns, Korea Towns, and so on. The

residents of these ethnic enclaves might be more or less

integrated into the larger society depending upon such

factors as how long they have lived in the U.S., or how well

they speak English.

A Native American (i.e., an American Indian) might

interpret an inquiry about ethnicity as a question about

tribal identity. He or she might say—Ute, Shoshoni,

Navaho, Lakota, etc. On the other hand, since not all of

these tribal names are names that the tribes claim as their

own, they may refer to themselves in their native

language. For instance, the Navajo call themselves Diné.

Tribal af<liations would also be salient in Africa, the

Middle East and Central Asia. For instance, two major

tribes in Afghanistan are the Tajiks and Pashtuns.

In China, the term minzu (民族) is used to refer to what,

in English, we would call ethnic groups. Of<cially, the

Chinese government recognizes 56 minzu. Just how the

government decided on 56 as the de<nitive number of

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Hui people, third largest ethnic group in China

minzu in China, however, is an interesting story. More

about that at another time though.

It may be tempting to

think that people who

share an ethnic identity

also share a common

culture. Indeed, that is

what is implied in calling

an ethnic group a

subculture. Sometimes it

is the case that people who

share an ethnic identity

are also culturally similar.

But it is shared identity and not shared culture that makes

a group ethnic. In fact, scholars specializing in ethnic

studies have discovered many examples of different

groups claiming a common ethnic identity but not sharing

a common language, nor even common beliefs, values,

customs or traditions. This shows that the connections

between culture, group membership, and identity are

loose at best.

It is also important to note that ethnic identi<cation is

not an irreversible decision. Sometimes people change

ethnicity as easily as they might change clothes by simply

deciding to no longer identify as, for example, Han 汉族

(the largest minzu in China) but to identify instead as Hui

回族 (one of the largest “national minorities” in China).

Racial identity

Since the demise of the idea that race is grounded in biology—race, like ethnicity, has come to be regarded

primarily as a matter of social identity. Also like ethnicity,

1 4 4 | N O L A N W E I L

it is often presumed, incorrectly, that individuals who

share a racial identity must share a common culture. As

Appiah (1994: 117) has noted, “it is perfectly possible for a

black and a white American to grow up together in a

shared adoptive family—with the same knowledge 
and values—and still grow into separate racial identities, in

part because their experience outside the family, in public

space, is bound to be racially differentiated.” In other

words, it is a mistake, not only to assume that race and

ethnicity represent biological categories; it is also a

mistake to assume them to be cultural categories.

As we mentioned in the previous section, ethnic

identi<cation is typically (although not always) self-

determined. On the other hand, racial identities are more

likely to be imposed on an individual by others. For

example, “white” Americans are likely to presume certain

individuals to be “black” or African American based on

perceived physical characteristics, including skin color,

hair texture and various facial features alleged to be

characteristically African. Long before “African American”

children have ever had time to reflect on matters of

identity, that identity has been decided for them. As with

any identity, individuals have it within their power to

resist ethnic or racial identi<cation. Ironically, the best,

and perhaps only way to effectively resist an ascribed

identity is to proudly embrace it.

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Barack Obama and family in the Whitehouse Green Room

No doubt, one the most

well-known Americans to

reflect publicly on the

perplexities of racial

identi<cation in America

is Barack Obama, the 44th

president of the United

States and the <rst black

president. In his memoir,

Dreams from My Father,

Obama (1995), writes eloquently of the confusion he

experienced growing up the son of a white woman born in

Kansas and a black man from Kenya. How did Barack

Obama come to embrace a black, or African-American

identity?

Born in Hawaii, a cauldron of ethnic diversity, peopled

by groups from all across Asia and the Paci<c Islands,

Obama tells a story of race and identity that is nuanced

and reflective. Barack’s father was somewhat of a mystery

to him since his mother and father divorced and his father

returned to Kenya shortly before Barack turned 3 years old.

Throughout his childhood, Obama recounts, his white

family nurtured in him a sense of respect and pride in his

African heritage, anticipating that his appearance would

eventually require him to face questions of racial identity.

These questions surfaced gradually during adolescence,

when he began to experience a tug of war between his

white and his black identities.

Inspired by a nationally ranked University of Hawaii

basketball team with an all-black starting lineup, Barack

joined his high school basketball team. There, he says, he

made his closest white friends, and he met Ray (not his

real name), a biracial young man who introduced Barack

1 4 6 | N O L A N W E I L

to a number of African Americans from the Mainland.

Barack’s experiences in multiracial Hawaii caused him to

reflect deeply on the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle,

indignities frequently faced by blacks. Increasingly

confronted by the perspectives of his black friends and his

own experiences with discrimination, Obama writes:

I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white

worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language

and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with

a little translation on my part the two worlds would cohere.

Still, the feeling that something wasn’t quite right stayed with

me (p. 82).

Amid growing confusion, Obama writes that he turned

for counsel to black writers: James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison,

Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, W. E. B. DuBois, and

Malcolm X. After high school, Barack’s quest continued

throughout two years of study at Occidental University in

LA before he transferred to Colombia University in New

York. Gradually, he constructed a provisional black

identity, while never really disavowing his white one.

But it seems to have been in Chicago that Barack Obama

<nally put the <nishing touches on the African American

identity that he would eventually embrace when he ran for

president in 2008. After years of working as a community

organizer in the black neighborhoods of Chicago, he had

become well known in the black community. He joined an

African American church. And he married Michelle

Robinson, herself African American and a lifelong

Chicagoan.

President Obama’s story illustrates some of the

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 4 7

dynamics involved in racial identi<cation. Obama faced

questions of racial identity initially because his

appearance prompted people to label him as black. In the

end, after years of reflection and self-exploration,

including a pilgrimage to Kenya after the death of his

father to acquaint himself with his Kenyan heritage,

Obama eventually publicly embraced an African American

identity.

Social class and culture

Social class refers to the hierarchical ranking of people in

society based on presumably identi<able factors.

American sociologists, in trying to de<ne these relevant

factors more precisely have tended to use the term

socioeconomic status (SES) which is measured by

combining indices of family wealth and/or income,

educational attainment, and occupational prestige (Oakes

and Rossi, 2003). While Americans are sometimes

reluctant to acknowledge the existence of social class as a

determinant of social life in the U.S., scholars have long

argued that social class is a culturally marked category.

Clearly social class is reflected in the material lives of

people. For instance, lower class and upper class people

typically live in different neighborhoods, belong to

different social clubs, and attend different educational

institutions (Domhoff, 1998).

Sociologists argue that different social classes seem to

embrace a different system of values and that this is

reflected in childrearing. For instance, Kohn (1977) showed

that middle-class parents tended to value self-direction

while working class parents valued conformity to external

authority. Middle class parents aimed to instill in children

1 4 8 | N O L A N W E I L

qualities of intellectual curiosity, dependability,

consideration for others, and self-control, whereas

working class parents tended to emphasize obedience,

neatness, and good manners.

More recent research (e.g., Lareau, 2011) con<rms

Kohn’s <ndings, further emphasizing the advantages that

middle-class parenting tends to confer on middle-class

children. For example, in observational studies of families,

Lareau found “more talking in middle-class homes than in

working class and poor homes, leading to the

development,” among middle class children, of “greater

verbal agility, larger vocabularies, more comfort with

authority <gures, and more familiarity with abstract

concepts” (p. 5).

According to Kraus, Piff and Keltner (2011), social class

is also signaled behaviorally. For instance, in videotaped

interactions between people (in the U.S.) from different

social classes, lower-class individuals tended to show

greater social engagement as evidenced by non-verbal

signs such as eye contact, head nods, and laughs compared

to higher-class individuals who were less engaged (as

evidenced by less responsive head nodding and less eye

contact) and who were more likely to disengage by means

of actions such as checking their cell phones or doodling

(Kraus & Keltner, 2009).

Lower-class and upper class individuals also exhibit

different belief systems, with lower-class people more

likely to attribute social circumstances such as income

inequality to contextual forces (e.g., educational

opportunity). On the other hand, upper-class people are

more likely to explain inequality in dispositional terms

(e.g., as a result of differences in talent) Kluegel & Smith,

1986.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 4 9

In short, different social classes seem to be

distinguished from one another by many of the

characteristics that we have previously identi<ed as

elements of culture, e.g., patterns of beliefs, values,

collective habits, social behavior, material possessions, etc.

Nationality

In this section, we will discuss group membership and

identity as historians and political scientists are more

likely to view them. Although their interests overlap

somewhat with those of sociologists, the main focus of

historians and political scientists is somewhat different.

Rather than taking the “microscopic” view that seeks to

divide a larger culture into constituent subcultures,

political scientists tend to take a more “macroscopic” view.

Political scientists, in other words, are more interested in

exploring how the various subgroups of society relate to

the larger political units of the world. Rather than dwelling

on subcultural identities, they are more likely to inquire

into national identities and the implications this may have

for international relations. Let’s shift our focus then from

ethnicity to nationality.

Our everyday understanding of nationality is that it

refers to the particular country whose passport we carry.

But this is a loose way of speaking. According to

International Law, nationality refers to membership in a

nation or sovereign state (“Nationality” 2013). Before

elaborating further, it will be useful to clarify some terms

that are often wrongly taken to be synonymous: country,

nation, and state. These are terms that have more precise

meanings in the disciplines of history, political science,

and international relations than they do in everyday

1 5 0 | N O L A N W E I L

discourse. The non-expert uses terms like country and

nation with little reflection, but feels perhaps a bit

uncertain about the term state. Let’s de<ne these terms as

the political scientist uses them.

First, what is a country? A country is simply a geographic

area with relatively well-de<ned borders. Sometimes these

borders are natural, e.g., a river or mountain range. But

often they are best thought of more abstractly as lines on a

map.

A nation is something entirely different. A nation is not a

geographical entity. Instead, it is a group of people with a

shared identity. Drawing on the opinions of various

scholars, Barrington (1997: 713) has suggested that many

de<nitions seem to converge on the idea that nations are

united by shared cultural features, which often include

myths, religious beliefs, language, political ideologies,

etc.). Unfortunately, this de<nition of nation has much in

common with the de<nition of an ethnic group. What is

the difference? Some scholars believe the difference is only

a matter of scale, e.g., that an ethnic group is simply a

smaller unit than a nation but not otherwise different in

kind. Others insist that because nations imply a

relationship to a state, in a way that that of an ethnic

group usually does not, it is important to make a clear

distinction between ethnic groups and nations (Eriksen,

2002: 97). In other words, as Barrington further

emphasizes, in addition to shared cultural features,

nations are united in a belief in the right to territorial

control over a national homeland.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 5 1

The stateless Kurds occupy the border regions of Sve countries

What then is a state?

First, let’s note that by the

term state, as we are using it here, we do not mean

the subdivisions of a

country, as in “Utah is one

of the 50 states of the

United States.” Instead,

we mean the main

political unit that provides

the means by which

authority is exercised over a territory and its people. In

other words, the state, as we are de<ning it here, refers to

the instruments of government, including things like a

military to counter external threats, a police force to

maintain internal order, and various administrative and

legal institutions.

Finally, one sometimes encounters the term nation-state.

This refers to an ideal wherein a country, nation, and state

align perfectly. However, as Walby (2003: 531) has pointed

out, perfect examples of the nation-state are rarely found

in the real world where “there are far more nations than

states.” In fact, nations sometimes spill over the territorial

boundaries of multiple states. For example, the Kurds, who

can be found in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and

Armenia, can be seen as a nation without a state. Because

they involve territorial claims, efforts on the part of some

Kurds to establish an autonomous state are resisted by the

governments of Turkey and others, sometimes leading to

violent conflict.

1 5 2 | N O L A N W E I L

Also stateless are the Palestinians in Israel

Another example of a

stateless nation involves

the case of the Palestinian

people currently living in

the state of Israel. Prior to

1948, the land in question

had been occupied by

Palestinian Arabs. But in

1948, the state of Israel was

established, the result of a

complicated set of post-

World War II

arrangements negotiated

principally by old

European colonial

administrators, in

particular for Palestine,

Great Britain. These

arrangements made it possible for many Jews returning

from war torn Europe to have a Jewish homeland for the

<rst time in 2000 years. At the same time, many

Palestinian people found themselves pushed by the

newcomers from homes where their families had lived for

generations.

Indeed, the conditions under which Israel was

established in 1948 sowed the seeds of perpetual conflict,

the details of which are too complicated to summarize

here. However, the result has been that Israel has become

an economically prosperous modern nation-state, and

Israelis on the average have thrived. Palestinians, on the

other hand, have found themselves dispossessed,

oppressed, and robbed of the possibility of national self-

determination. For decades, many Palestinians, and

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 5 3

indeed most international observers have called for an

independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, a “two

state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such a

solution, however, would require anti-Israel partisans to

acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and guarantee her

security, and it would require Israel to hand over some

coveted territories.

As the above discussion suggests, one reason that issues

of national identity are complicated is because the

relationships between nationhood, ethnicity, country,

territory and state are extraordinarily complex.

The origin of nations

Recall that a nation is a group of people who see

themselves as united by various shared cultural features,

including myths, religious beliefs, language, political

ideologies, etc. Some scholars see nations as having deep

roots extending back to ancient times. Smith (1986), for

instance, claims that most nations are rooted in ethnic

communities and that there is a sense in which nations

have existed in various forms throughout recorded history.

On the other hand, Gellner (1983) and Anderson (1991)

argue that nations merely imagine themselves as old,

when in fact they are really recent historical developments,

having only emerged in 19th century Europe with the rise

of sophisticated high cultures and literate populations.

Gellner and Anderson are counted among a group of

scholars often referred to as modernists who argue that

while there may have been elites in pre-modern societies

with visions of nationhood, national consciousness is a

mass phenomenon. According to this view, nations, as we

understand them today, only came into being when elites

1 5 4 | N O L A N W E I L

Two different historical processes of nationalism

acquired tools for conveying a feeling of national unity to

the masses. At <rst this occurred by means such as print

and the spread of universal schooling and later by means

of radio, <lm and television. What Gellner suggests, in

fact, is that nations are a product of nationalism, which is

not merely “the awakening of nations to self-

consciousness,” as nationalists often proclaim, but instead

“invents nations where they do not exist” (cited in Erikson,

2002: 96).

It is perhaps also useful

to point out that not all

nations came to be nations

in the same way, nor are

all nations constituted in

exactly the same way.

Looking at nations in

historical perspective, for

instance, a distinction is often made between ethnic nations

and civic nations. The difference turns on the question of

whether the members of a population developed a feeling of

national identity before or after the emergence of a

modern state. As an illustration, historians often point to

Britain and France as the <rst European nation-states to

emerge through a process often described as civic

nationalism. In other words, in Britain and France, the

rational, civic, and political units of modernity came <rst,

and the development of a national consciousness came

later. On the other hand, Germany and Russia followed a

path of ethnic nationalism in which the emergence of a

national consciousness came <rst, followed by the

development of a fully modern state (Nikolas, 1999).

Where does the United States <t into this scheme?

Opinions vary. As Erikson (2002: 138) has pointed out, the

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 5 5

U.S. differs in important ways from Europe. For one thing,

it has no myths pointing to some supposed ancient

origins. In fact, it was founded barely before the beginning

of the modern era. This is not to say, however, that the U.S.

lacks a national myth; only that it is not a myth lost in the

mists of memory.

The American myth is instead a historical narrative

stretching back only about 400 years when English settlers

began arriving on the continent. The most important

chapter perhaps (from the perspective of American

national identity) revolves around the dif<cult and

contentious negotiation of a set of founding ideals and

principles, articulated in two rather brief documents: The

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Thereafter,

the myth continues with an account of the rapid

population of the continent by successive waves of

immigration from four other continents, Europe, Africa,

Asia, and South America. However, in our telling of the

national myth, we often omit the shameful history of

injustice dealt to the indigenous First Nations (as they are

called in Canada) or make of these details only footnotes.

On the other hand, we usually do confront the history of

slavery that nearly tore the nation apart in a civil war. We

usually also recount the story of the more than 100-year

struggle of African Americans to secure the full rights of

citizenship, with its major 20th century victories, as these

reinforce a narrative of American striving to live up to its

ideals.

Today the United States is often described as

multiethnic in the sense that many of its people can trace

their ancestry to one or more geographic regions around

the world. Indeed, while most Americans speak English, at

least 350 different languages are spoken in U.S. homes,

1 5 6 | N O L A N W E I L

including languages from every (inhabited) continent, as

well as 150 Native American languages (U. S. Bureau, 2015).

But is the U.S. an ethnic nation or a civic nation? Or to

put it in historical terms, is the U.S. a product of ethnic

nationalism or civic nationalism? Social scientists have

often regarded the U.S. as a civic nation but not in the

same way as Britain or France. American national identity

is presumably based on shared cultural features rather

than on shared ethnic heritage. However, American

identity is complicated, and current public discourse

suggests a sharp divide among American people.

One sees among many American conservatives, for

instance, a tendency to stress the nation’s Colonial Era

origins (1629-1763) with its Protestant (Christian) roots and

its Revolutionary Era (1764-1800), featuring the Founding

Fathers, who were mostly, white (male) and English.

Theiss-Morse (2009: 15-16) sees this as at the root of an

ethnocultural view of American identity. While many

Americans may see this as only part of the story, there are

some who see it as the most important part. Some

Americans have embraced this particular narrative at

various points throughout American history, promoting

nativist political agendas and restrictive immigration

policies. White supremacists often seize upon it in their

efforts to marginalize, not only immigrants, but anyone

not perceived to be ethnically “white,” Christian, and of

European ancestry.

The liberal left, on the other hand, is more inclined to

emphasize a view, which Theiss-Morse has called

“American identity as a set of principles” (p. 18-20).

Liberals tend to acknowledge the revolutionary

achievements of the Founding Fathers in establishing the

noble ideals and liberal political principles of liberty,

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 5 7

equality, democracy, and constitutionalism. However, they

do not hesitate to recognize that the Founding Fathers

were flawed men, some of whom even defended the

institution of slavery, while others continued to own slaves

even after they saw that it contradicted the founding

ideals. Moreover, liberals give equal weight to the story of

American immigration, recognizing that the nation’s

founding principles made room for newcomers who could

come from anywhere and become American simply by

embracing those principles. Identity as a set of principles

seems more closely aligned to a multicultural, rather than

an ethnocultural view of the nation.

While the above contrast somewhat over simpli<es the

complexities of American national identity, it does

illustrate the fact that the question of American identity is

a highly contested one. Kaufmann (2000) has claimed that

the view of the U.S. as a civic nation is supported only if we

restrict our attention to developments that have occurred

since the 1960’s. According to Kaufmann, for almost its

entire history, the political and cultural elite de<ned the

U.S. in ethnic terms as white, Anglo-Saxon, and

Protestant. During periods of high immigration, this elite

expended great effort to assimilate immigrants to their

own ethnic ideal, and when the growth of immigrant

populations posed a challenge, defensive responses arose,

including restrictions to immigration. In fact, from

1920-1960, this defensive response was institutionalized.

After this long period in which national quotas kept a tight

lid on immigration, the U.S. only became more open to

immigration again in 1965 with the passage of the

Immigration and Nationality Act.

The tendency, then, to see the U.S. as a civic nation of

immigrants is a recent historical development. Nor is the

1 5 8 | N O L A N W E I L

U.S. exceptional in this respect. Rather, the U.S. is merely

part of a broader trend among “Western” nations to

rede<ne themselves in civic terms. In fact, Kaufmann

(2000: 31) cites research showing that contrary to popular

perceptions of the U.S. as a land of immigration, “Western

Europe … has had a higher immigrant population than the

United States since the 1970’s and by 1990 had

proportionately two to three times the number of foreign-

born” as the United States.

Whether the post-1960’s immigration trends will

continue is currently an open question across much of

Western Europe and the United States as evidenced by

such events as Great Britain’s decision in 2016 to withdraw

from the European Union, the rise of far-right challenges

to liberal European democracies, not to mention the 2016

U.S. election, which has brought in a president that

apparently seeks to recreate immigration policies

reminiscent of the exclusionary pre-1965 era.

National identity

Earlier we suggested that anthropologists and sociologists

have moved from trying to establish the cultural features

that de<ne groups to studying how the members of groups

self-identify. Political scientists have made similar moves

in their studies of nationalism. Rather than focusing

wholly on ethnocultural roots or civic transformations, the

recent trend among many scholars is to focus on the social

and psychological dynamics of national identity.

Let’s consider the issue of national identity in the

United States. Now the criteria of American citizenship

are quite clear. Anyone born in the United States or a U.S.

territory (e.g., Puerto Rico) is a citizen, regardless of

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 5 9

whether one’s parents are citizens or not. Anyone born

outside of the United States is a citizen as long as at least

one parent is a citizen. And anyone who goes through the

naturalization process becomes a U.S. citizen by virtue of

established law. Nevertheless, many Americans, despite

clearly being citizens (by either birth or naturalization) are

sometimes regarded by other Americans as somehow less

American. Some Americans, for instance, view themselves

as more American if they are white and of English descent,

or at least if their non-English ancestors immigrated

several generations ago instead of more recently. We refer

to this phenomenon as nativism, the belief that the longer

one’s ancestors have been here, the greater one’s claim on

an American identity. And we can call a person who

espouses such a belief, a nativist.

To what extent then do individual Americans differ in

the degree to which they embrace an American national

identity? Elizabeth Theiss-Morse (2009) has studied this

question and suggests that Americans can be

distinguished from one another according to whether they

are strong, medium, or weak identi<ers. Furthermore, the

strength of national identity appears to be tied to other

social characteristics.

For example, compared with weak identi<ers, strong

identi<ers are more likely to be: older, Christian, less

educated, more trusting of others, and more likely to

identify with other social groups in general. On the other

hand, black Americans and Americans with extremely

liberal political views are less likely to claim a strong

American identity. Strong identi<ers are also more likely

to describe themselves as “typical Americans.” People who

espouse a strong national identity are also more likely to

set exclusionary group boundaries on the national

1 6 0 | N O L A N W E I L

group—to claim, for instance, that a “true American” is

white, or Christian, or native-born. In contrast, weak

identi<ers are less likely to believe that their fellow

Americans must possess any particular qualities to be

counted as American.

While Theiss-Morse has utilized social identity theory to

describe American social identity, she has also noted that,

of course, the same kind of analysis can be made of any

national identity, German, Japanese, Brazilian, etc.

Final reflection

The relationship between culture and group membership

is complicated. Whereas scholars once de<ned certain

types of groups, e.g. ethnic and racial groups, or national

groups, on the basis of shared culture, group membership

is now more likely to be seen as a matter of social

identi<cation. Moreover, social identities are fluid rather

than <xed and are established by means of processes

whereby group members negotiate the boundaries of the

group as well as the degree to which they identify with

valued groups.

Application

For Further Thought and Discussion

1. Do you belong to a dominant culture in your country, or

are you a member of a minority community?

2. Do you identify with any particular ethnic group or

groups? For each group with which you identify, explain

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 6 1

how members of the group deTne themselves.

3. Do you think of yourself in terms of any racial identity?

Explain.

4. To what extent do you think you exhibit any signs of

social class afTliation?

5. How would you describe your national identity? How

typical are you of other people from your country? …

a) very typical, b) somewhat typical, or c) not very

typical. … What makes you typical or atypical?

6. Some people have more than one identity, or feel they

have different identities in different social contexts. We

refer to this as hybridity. Do you have a hybrid identity?

If so, what is that like?

References

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the

origin and spread of nationalism, 2nd ed. London, Verso.

Anderson, M. L., Taylor, H. F. & Logio, K. A. (2015).

Sociology: The essentials, 8th ed. Belmont, Stamford, CT:

Cengage.

Appiah, K. A. (1994). Race, culture, identity: Misunderstood

connections. Retrieved from

https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/a/

Appiah96.pdf

Banton, M. (2015). Superseding race in sociology: The

perspective of critical rationalism. In K. Murji & J. Solomos

Balwin, (Eds.), Theories of race and ethnicity: Contemporary

debates and perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press.

Barrington, L. W. (1997). “Nation” and “nationalism”: The

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misuse of key concepts in political science. Political

Science and Politics, 30(4), 712-716.

Domhoff, G.W. (1998). Who rules America. Mountain View,

CA: May<eld Publishing.

Eriksen, T. H. (2002). Ethnicity and Nationalism:

Anthropological Perspectives, (2nd ed.). London: Pluto Press.

Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Kaufmann, E. P. (2000) Ethnic or civic nation: Theorizing

the American case. Canadian Review of Studies in

Nationalism 27, 133-154.

Kluegel, J.R., & Smith, E.R. (1986). Beliefs about inequality:

Americans’ views of what is and what ought to be.

Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Kohn, M. (1977). Class and conformity: A study in values, (2nd

ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Kraus, M. W., Piff, P. K. & Keltner, D. (2011). Social class as

culture: The convergence of resources and rank in the

social realm. Current Directions in Psychological Science,

20(4), 246-250. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/

10.1177/0963721411414654

Kraus, M. W. & Keltner, D. (2009). Signs of socioeconomic

status: A thin-slicing approach. Psychological Science,

20(1), 99-106.

Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family

life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com.dist.lib.usu.edu

Meer, N. (2014). Key concepts in race and ethnicity. Thousand

Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Oakes and Rossi, (2003). The measurement of SES in

health research: Current practice and steps toward a

new approach. Social Science & Medicine, 56(4), 769-784.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(02)00073-4

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Obama, B. (1995). Dreams from my father. New York: Three

Rivers Press.

“Nationality” (2013). Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved

November 23, 2017 from https://www.britannica.com/

topics/nationality-international-law

Nikolas, M. M. (1999). False opposites in nationalism: An

examination of the dichotomy of civic nationalism and ethnic

nationalism in modern Europe. The Nationalism Project,

Madison, WI. Retrieved Nov 23, 2017 from

https://tamilnation.org/selfdetermination/nation/

civic_ethno/Nikolas.pdf

Smith, A. (1986). The ethnic origins of nations. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Theiss-Morse, E. (2009). Who counts as an American?: The

boundaries of national identity. New York: Cambridge.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2015, Nov 3). Census Bureau reports at

least 350 languages spoken in U.S. homes. (Release Number:

CB15-185). Retrieved from

https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USCENSUS/

bulletins/

122dd88#:~:text=Census%20Bureau%20Reports%20at%

20Least%20350%20Languages%20Spoken%20in%20U.S.

%20Homes,-

Most%20Comprehensive%20Language&text=NOV.,avai

lable%20for%20only%2039%20languages

Walby, S. (2003). The myth of the nation-state: Theorizing

society and polities in a global era. Sociology, 37(3),

529-546.

Zenner, W. (1996). Ethnicity. In D. Levinson & M. Ember

(Eds.), Encyclopedia of cultural anthropology. New York:

Holt.

1 6 4 | N O L A N W E I L

Image Attribution

Image 1: San Francisco Dragon Gate to Chinatown by Alice

Wiegand is licensed under CC 4.0

Image 2: Chinese Muslims by Hijau is licensed under

Public Domain

Image 3: Obama Family by Annie Leibovitz is licensed

under Public Domain

Image 4: Kurdish-Inhabited Area by U.S. Central

Intelligence Agency is licensed under Public Domain

Image 5: Israel and Surrounding Area by Chris O is

licensed under Public Domain

Image 6: Nationalism Diagram by Nolan Weil is

licensed under CC BY 4.0

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 6 5

8

Chapter 8: Religion and

Culture

Eliza Rosenberg

BY SPECIAL GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

ELIZA ROSENBERG

Lecturer in Religious Studies at USU

Suggested Focus

Keep the following questions in mind as you read the chapter.

1. What is the origin of the word religion? How do the

words “religion” and “culture” seem to overlap in

meaning?

2. What are some words in other languages that seem to

correspond to the word religion?

1 6 6 | S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E

Boys praying at the Western Wall, a holy site in Judaism

3. What is religion NOT?

4. What are some important questions that religions

often seek to answer?

5. What are some different aspects of daily living that are

often regulated by religious rules?

What is religion?

What do we mean when

we say “religion”? In some

ways, the answer seems

obvious. Most people can

tell you that they are

atheist, Buddhist,

Christian, Daoist, Hindu,

Jewish, Muslim, etc. In

other ways, the answer is

more complicated. The

English word “religion” comes from the Latin word religio.

Ancient Roman philosophers actually disagreed about

where the word came from, and modern scholars are not

sure either. Still, most ancient Romans knew what religio

meant. They used the word for their rituals, holidays,

beliefs, myths, and rules. They also applied it to those of

non-Romans around them, such as Greeks, Jews, and

Egyptians. But for hundreds of years, Greeks, Jews, and

Egyptians did not adopt the Latin word religio or come up

with their own words to express the concept. To everyone

except the Romans, the things that made up religio–

rituals, myths, holidays, rules, etc. – were just part of “the

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 6 7

way things were.” They did not need a separate category or

term.

Eventually, Christianity became widespread in Rome’s

empire, which included Greece, Egypt, and many other

places. When the Roman emperor became Christian,

Christians – including non-Roman Christians – started to

think of Christianity as their religio. The idea of “religion”

remained important even after the Roman empire fell. It

influenced Judaism and Islam, as well as other religions.

Today, many languages have words that were invented or

re-interpreted to translate religio. In western Europe,

many languages borrowed the Latin religio. In southern

Asia today, the ancient Sanskrit word dharma can be used

to mean about the same thing as “religion.” (It also has

many other meanings.) In Eastern Asia, the Chinese word

dao and loan words in neighboring languages works in a

similar way.

The term “religion” is useful, but like many words, it is

complicated. The concept of “religion” makes sense

because there are many elements that you can <nd in

many different religions. But no religion has every single

one of these elements, and there is probably no one

element that every religion has. In addition, the same

element may “mean” different things or “work” in different

ways in different religions. For example, Buddhism and

Islam both have beliefs about what happens to us when we

die. But they have very different ideas about what that is,

about what should happen, and even about who “we” are.

For at least the last hundred years, scholars have tried to

<nd a de<nition of religion that would always be useful

and accurate. Although their hard work did not succeed, it

has taught scholars today a valuable lesson: There is no

perfect de<nition of religion. Most people more or less

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understand what they mean when they use the term

“religion,” even if they cannot de<ne it perfectly. In this

chapter, we will not try to explain what religion “really

is.” Instead, we will explore some of the things that

different religions are. By doing so, we will understand all

of them better. There are many shared features and many

differences – not only between different religions, but

within the same religion.

Religion and culture are parts of each other. Culture

affects religion, and religion affects culture. The same

religion can have different forms in different cultures.

Within one culture, different religions can take similar

forms. And, of course, religion is practiced by people, who

are all different.

What religion is not

While religion is many different things, it is also

important to know what it (usually) is not. First, religion is

not (usually) a way to explain things that people did not

understand before modern science. In ancient China,

most people did not think that the flesh of the giant Pangu

had literally turned into the earth at some exact time. In

ancient Israel, most people knew perfectly well that the

whole universe was not formed in six days. How could it

have been, when there was no sun or moon until the

fourth “day”? Every religion has at least one example of

this. In ancient times, people did not know the scienti<c

history of the world, and they did not think their religions told

them. Stories of the cosmic tortoise, the <rst human, etc.

were (and are) important because people connected with

them emotionally and poetically. They allow people to

connect personally to the scope of the universe. But they

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 6 9

have rarely been pre-scienti<c answers to complicated

questions. In fact, religion has often been the cause of

science. We owe modern mathematics to Jain

contemplation of the nature of existence; modern

chemistry to Muslim ideas about the spiritual virtue of

observing nature; some branches of physics to the

Christian scholastic movement of the middle ages; and

many scienti<c ideas to various Daoist practices.

Second, religion is not “really about” any one simple

aspect of life. People who like religion sometimes say that

it expresses the highest human ideals; that it makes

communities strong; that it inspires goodness; that it

inspires people; and so on. People who dislike religion

sometimes say that it is used to control people; that it is

connected with ignorance; that it supports corrupt power;

that it provides false reassurances; etc. All of these things

can be true. Religion can and does promote good order and

oppress people; promote knowledge and ignorance; inspire

peace and violence; etc. It is not possible to reduce religion

to a single, simple factor. Religion is dynamic and

complex, just like the cultures that influence it (and that it

influences) – and just like the people who practice it (or

don’t practice it).

The world’s religions

There are probably more religious identities in the world

than there are religions!

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Yin and Yang, a Daoist symbol for the harmonious flow of the universe

That is because it can be

possible to be part of more

than one religion at a

time. For example, many

European Christians feel

that you cannot be a

Christian and any other

religion, but many Native

American Christians feel

that it is possible to

practice Christianity

without abandoning their

ancestral religions. In

Japan, most people practice both Buddhism and Shinto

and identify themselves accordingly. In traditional China,

Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism were known as the

“three great teachings,” and it was assumed that people

should learn from all of them. To be a Christian is to

commit to a religion that relies on Judaism for its very

existence. To be a Buddhist is to be an heir to the de<ning

concepts of Hinduism. To be an atheist is sometimes to

choose a speci<c system of thought as a reaction to a

particular religion. And so on.

Some common religious questions

Where do human beings St into the universe?

Religion, like culture, is something that humans do. This

may seem obvious, but it is not a statement that all

religions would <nd meaningful. In traditional Native

American religions, for example, there is no part of

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 7 1

existence that is separated from the sacred. Of course,

humans play a unique, human role in this – just as bears

play a unique, ursine role in it; rivers a unique river role;

etc. And Daoism teaches that “alone among the ten

thousand things, humans must be taught to follow the

dao.” That is, everything else that exists is naturally part of

the harmonious flow of the dao. The fact that human

beings need philosophy, religion, etc., shows that there is

something wrong with us!

An ancient painting of the “medicine wheel,” a Native American symbol of unity and holiness

Most Native American religions see human beings as

one kind of being among many. Just as human beings have

their own communities, social rules, life histories, and

individual personalities, so do all other animals. If human

beings are different from all other animals, according to

these religions, it is usually because we are worse! Until

recently, most Native Americans were hunter-gathers, and

many today hunt and gather as well as buying farmed food

at grocery stores. In Native American thought, hunted

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A painting of the Buddhist realms of rebirth. Buddhists hope to escape the endless cycle of death.

animals voluntarily give up their lives to let humans eat.

But human beings are not as generous, – no animal native

to North or South America normally preys on human

beings. (Only a handful – polar bears; grizzly bears;

mountain lions; and alligators – prey on humans at all, and

even then, it is rare.) Human beings are seen as more

sel<sh than animals, whereas animals are altruistic.

Judaism and Christianity both teach that God allows

human beings to rule over the rest of nature. Today, many

Jews and Christians interpret this as meaning that human

beings have a responsibility to care for nature. But some

today, like many in earlier times, interpret this as

permission to use nature however they want. Islam’s

concept has a subtle but critical difference. Muslims

believe that God entrusted human beings with the

responsibility to administer the natural world, but that,

rather than being worthy of God’s trust, humanity all too

often “has proved [to be] a sinner and a fool.”

Many religions that

believe in reincarnation

also place human beings

in a special category. In

Buddhism, the human

realm is one of six realms

in which it is possible to be

born (the other <ve are

divine; heavenly; animal;

hungry-ghost; and hell). In

Jainism, it is one of four

(the other three are

heavenly; animal; and

hell). Both Jainism and

Buddhism teach that you

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 7 3

The Christian Eucharist (the body and blood of Christ)

can only gain enlightenment during a human birth. If you

are born into another realm, you can proceed toward

enlightenment, but you can only actually reach it as a

human. Hinduism tends to think that being human is

helpful for reaching spiritual liberation, but not actually

necessary. Although it is less likely, a soul certainly can

attain liberation while existing as a flower, a butterfly, or

whatever else. In addition, all these religions teach that the

human realm is a high-risk birth. Human beings can think

abstractly and make moral choices, which is bene<cial for

true understanding. But by the same token, we can choose

ignorance, embrace delusion, and practice cruelty in a way

that no other creature can, and all too often, we in fact do

these things. This earns us (bad) karma and moves us away

from liberation instead of toward it.

What happens when we die?

It is easy to become

curious about death.

When someone we love

dies, are they gone

forever? Will we ever see

them again? Different

religions have different

ideas answers to these

questions, and different

members of the same

religion may also give different answers. In general,

though, most Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that

each human being comes into existence either when they

are born or in the mother’s uterus, lives out one lifetime,

and then dies. They did not live before this and they will

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not be born again after this. Instead, these religions teach,

God will judge them for how they lived. They believe that

God is kind and forgives people for making mistakes, and

that because of God’s kindness, “good enough” people exist

at peace with God after they die. This existence may be

called Heaven or Paradise. Most Jews, Christians, and

Muslims say that it is impossible to understand it fully in

this life.Instead, they use metaphors and comparisons. For

example, Muslims may say that Paradise is like a beautiful

garden of fruit trees, or Christians that Heaven is like a

beautiful city <lled with fruit trees. In Judaism, it is more

common to say that we will know “in God’s own time” but

not before. As long as we live in this world, we should focus

on doing what it is right. All of these religions teach that

people who insist on choosing evil will be punished. For

example, a murderer who refuses even to admit their

actions were wrong might be punished in Hell, kept out of

Paradise, or just be completely “gone” when they die.

In contrast, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs believe

in reincarnation (literally, “being put back in flesh”). This

is the idea that after death, the soul – the essence of the

person – is born again in another form. How you are born

depends on how well you lived in your previous life. If you

live wrongly, your soul earns karma (or bad karma,

according to Buddhists) that you must burn away through

suffering (punishment) and then living rightly. Right now,

you are a human being, but you might previously have

been a tree or a deer, and that you could be a tree or a deer

or a different human in a future life. The goal is to stop

being reincarnated, which is possible when you no longer

have any karma (or only have good karma, according to

Buddhism) and have reached spiritual enlightenment.

Hindus call this moksha and believe that it means being

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 7 5

fully aware that the individual soul is not truly separate

from the universal soul. After that, it is no longer

necessary to exist any one individual (who, after all, exists

only by being separate from every other individual).

Buddhists call it nirvana and believe that it means

understanding that the soul is only an illusion. Jains

believe that the enlightened individual remains an

individual but no longer needs a body, instead existing

forever as a being of pure light. Sikhism envisions

something more similar to the Muslim idea of jinnah,

Paradise.

Other religions do not have single, obvious ideas about

what happens after we die. Traditional Native American

religions, for example, did not see the soul or personality

as being completely different from the body, and they did

not believe that humans were somehow apart from the

rest of the world. Human beings were part of the world

before they lived, a part of the world while they lived, and a

part of the world after they died – just not the same part at

each time. Similarly, Daoism has never had a speci<c

teaching about death that all members of the religion

would agree on. Instead, it has ideas about timeless flow of

the dao and the harmonious cycle of yin and yang. This

allows Daoists to have different ideas about reincarnation,

heavenly existence, long life on earth, etc. And Confucius

taught that we should worry about the afterlife when we

get to it! If we spend too much time thinking about what

happens after death, it will distract us from how we should

behave during life. Many Jews would agree with

Confucius.

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The Qur’ān is the holy book of Islam.

Where do we look for answers?

Many religions in the

world today have a holy

book. For most of human

history, though, most

people learned sacred

teachings, stories, and

songs by hearing them

and repeating them. This

is an example of oral

tradition, and people could remember many stories, rules,

etc., very accurately. (Many societies had a few

professional singers and story-tellers, which helped.)

Actually, this is a “cost” of universal literacy – when

everyone in a society reads regularly from childhood,

people’s memories are not as good! In some religions

today, such as Native American religions, it is important to

many people to keep this oral tradition alive in the

religion. Hymns, rituals, and prayers are often the only

things that are notwritten down by people who practice

these religions. (All other kinds of literature are very

important.) And today, even in religions that have ancient

books and members who can all read them, non-written

aspects are very important! Here is one example: If you

have ever seen a painting or a display showing the birth of

Jesus, you will have seen an ox and a donkey with the baby

Jesus. The ox and the donkey are nowhere in the Bible! But

Christians, even those who read the Bible often, cannot

imagine the scene without the animals there. For highly

educated Buddhists and Muslims, it is still important to

learn mantras and parts of the Qur’ān by heart, and to

recite them from memory.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 7 7

But books are very important in many religions. Most

religions with written books have more than one! All

schools of Buddhism share the Palī canon, but different

Mahayana traditions also have different texts in addition.

Hinduism has a vast number of texts in many languages,

including ancient hymns and rituals like the Vedas;

philosophical texts like the Upanishads; mythological texts

called the Puranas; heroic epics such as the Mahabharata

and the Ramayana; devotional hymns; etc. No one Hindu

community uses all or even most of these texts. Instead,

most Hindus see this variety of texts as offering limitless

avenues to truth and goodness. Daoism’s central text is the

Daodejing, but the Zhuangzi is also extremely important,

and so are many of the more than 1,500 books that are

included in the Daozhong(“Daoist canon” or “Daoist list”).

Today, many Christians and Jews think of the Bible as a

book, but this is a mistake. The world “Bible” comes from

the Greek biblia, “books” – plural! The Bible is actually a

collection of different books, all of which can be printed in

a single volume. But until 1500 or so, it was not possible to

print all the books in one volume. Earlier Jews and

Christians understood that they had “scriptures”

(writings) rather than one single book. The Qur’ān in

Islam may be an exception to this rule. It is a single book (a

book with “chapters”). The Daodejing is also a single book,

but the Qur’ān has a unique status in Islam. While Islam

has other important religious writings, there is nothing

comparable to the Zhuangzi, for example.

There are subtle but important differences in how

religions view their books. Many Hindus view the Vedas as

divinely revealed in a speci<c way, but believe that humans

have been divinely guided to produce many other texts in

different ways. Speaking very generally, Daoists and

1 7 8 | N O L A N W E I L

Buddhists usually emphasize that their texts contain the

wisdom of enlightened teachers but consider the “how” of

these texts much less important than the “what.” Jews and

Christians generally believe that God inspired various

human authors to write the books of the Bible. Muslims

believe that the Qur’ān always existed and was simply

revealed to Muhammad (pbuh). The physical text obviously

had scribes (the prophet’s (pbuh) companions, may God be

well pleased with them), but they do not believe that the

contents have an author.

Religion and right behavior

Religions often have rules that their members are

supposed to follow. Within most religions, members may

disagree about some of what the rules are and about which

rules are most important. In addition, few people (if any!)

follow all the rules of their religion perfectly all the time.

Nevertheless, rules can be an important part of many

people’s religious experience.

There are some basic rules that most religions share.

Most of these are very basic rules that non-religious

systems also have. For example, no religion allows its

members to murder or steal, just as no government allows

its citizens to murder or steal. (Of course, murder and

stealing unfortunately still occur.) Many religions also

have some version of the “Golden Rule”: Treat others the

way you want others to treat you; do not do to others what

you would not want done to you. This, too, is a rule that

every child must be told at some point!

Religious rules apply to many kinds of behavior:

Worship; occupation; <nance; social structure; marriage;

clothing; and countless others. Instead of including all of

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 7 9

these, let’s discuss one type of rule – rules about food – as

an example.

Example: Rules about food

Native American religions rarely forbid any speci<c kind

of food. However, they usually limit how much people are

allowed to hunt and gather. Hunting too much is

disrespectful to animals that give up their lives to feed

humans. If animal communities feel disrespected, they

will go away and not allow hunters to get them. Wasting

any part of the animal’s body is also unacceptable, and

there are often strict rules about using every part

respectfully. For example, among some of the Cree nations

(formerly called “tribes”), it is forbidden to speak while

eating fresh hunted meat.

One of the most famous religious rules about food is

that Jews and Muslims do not eat pork. The Bible states

that pigs are unclean and that Jews may not eat them.

Most Christians (although not all!) interpret the New

Testament to mean that Christians do not need to obey

Jewish laws about food. But the Qur’ān also states that pigs

are unclean, so Muslims do not eat pork either. The Qur’ān

lists several other animals whose meat is forbidden to

Muslims, and the Bible has entire categories of land

animals, birds, and sea animals whose meat is forbidden

to Jews. The reason is always stated to be that these

animals are unclean – but in scienti<c terms, most of them

are no dirtier than the animals whose meat is permitted.

Judaism also has other food rules – for example, meat

products and dairy products must be eaten separately –

that are unrelated to cleanliness or health. Jews and

Muslims often say that these rules are really about obeying

1 8 0 | N O L A N W E I L

God. Having to think about whether a given food is okay is

a reminder to pay attention to God’s will at all times. (It is

easy to say that people should not need this reminder, but

much harder to apply the principle!) In a similar way, the

rule is a daily reminder to Jews and Muslims that they

cannot just do whatever they want. There is no obvious

practical reason not to eat pork if you want to – but

sometimes there seems to be no obvious practical reason to

ful<ll other desires that, if you think more carefully, might

be harmful to others or to you. Obeying food laws (called

kosher for Judaism and halal for Islam) is good practice.

(Kosher and halal also regulate slaughter to try to limit the

suffering of animals as much as possible, but the reason

for this is obvious.)

A vegetarian thali, sampler plate. Vegetarianism is important for many Hindus.

Another widely known religious food rule is that Hindus

are strongly encouraged to be vegetarian and strictly

forbidden to eat the meat of cows. The reason for

encouraging vegetarianism is straightforward: the duty of

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 8 1

ahimsa, “not harming.” Eating meat obviously harms

animals, so people should not do it. Some schools of

Mahayana Buddhism have similar teaching. Of course it is

natural for tigers to eat deer and for hawks to eat mice, but

for most Hindus (like all Jains and some Mahayana

Buddhists), this is not important. Tigers and hawks do not

have a choice, but humans do. Or – perhaps it is “natural”

for humans to eat meat. But, many Hindus (and others)

might counter, it is also “natural” for the human life

expectancy to be thirty-<ve years and for the child

mortality rate to be 50% or even higher. We do not accept

these things because they are “natural.”

The special prohibition of cows’ meat can seem more

complicated to non-Hindus. After all, dairy products (such

as milk, yogurt, ghee butter, paneer cheese) are an

important part of the diet in many regions of southern

Asia, the homeland of Hinduism. If Hindus are willing to

drink cows’ milk, why not eat their meat too?

Actually, Hindus do not eat cows’ meat because they

drink their milk. Humans take milk as sustenance from

dairy cows just as they take milk as sustenance from their

mothers. Therefore, a cow is a mother to people as well as

calves, and people have a duty to take care of cows just as

grown-up children have a duty to take care of their

parents. One of the duties of a Hindu son is to provide an

appropriate funeral for his parents when they die. For

Hindus, eating beef is equivalent to cutting up and eating

the dead body of your own mother. As such, it is one of the

most serious sins a Hindu could commit, far worse than

eating pork would be for a Jew or a Muslim. In fact,

Muslims are permitted to eat pork if it is the only way to

avoid starvation, and Jews are actually required to do so.

1 8 2 | N O L A N W E I L

But for many Hindus, the (bad) karma that would result

from cow-killing is far, far worse than death.

Not every religion has such speci<c rules about food.

Daoist practice, for example, is less likely to forbid speci<c

foods than to have a system of which foods are good to eat

(or to avoid) under which circumstances, and why.

Christianity also tends not to forbid speci<c foods, but

many Christians would feel that it was sinful to eat the

meat of an animal that is considered “special” in their

culture. An amusing example: My American Christian

auntie, visiting Sweden, was offered a common Swedish

food – reindeer meat – by a fellow Christian. She did not

want to eat one of Santa Claus’ helpers! Santa’s reindeer

are not “of<cially” Christian, and my auntie had not

believed in Santa since she was a small child. But in this

case, emotion was more important than “of<cial” religion!

Conclusion

Religion is a complex part of culture, and the two influence

each other in many ways. It is impossible to identify one

thing that religion is “really” or “always” about. However,

there are some questions that are often useful to ask.

Indeed, asking questions can be the most important part

of understanding religions! It is best to think about

different possibilities, rather than try to <nd the one “right

answer” to any of these questions. Thinking about the

possibilities can enrich our understanding of religions, the

people who practice them, and the communities in which

they live.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 8 3

Application

1. Do you identify with any particular religion? Why or

why not?

2. What do you believe happens to a person when they

die?

3. Do people in your home community observe any

religiously prescribed rules?

4. Do you think it is possible to adhere to more than one

religion? Why or why not?

For Further Reading

Ambalu, Shulamit, et al., editors. The Religions Book: Big

Ideas Simply Explained. DK Publishing, 2013.

Bowker, John. World Religions: The Great Faiths Explored &

Explained. DK Publishing, 2006.

Hinnells, John R. The Penguin Handbook of World Religions.

Penguin Books, 2010.

Mooney, Carla, and Lena Chandhok. Comparative Religion:

Investigate the World through Religious Tradition. 2015.

Shouler, Kenneth A., and Robert Pollock. The Everything

World’s Religions Book: Discover the Beliefs, Traditions, and

Cultures of Ancient and Modern Religions. Adams Media,

2010.

Smith, Huston. The World’s Religions. HarperOne, 2009.

Image Attribution

Image 1: “Jerusalem_Western Wall_4_Noam Chen_IMOT”

byIsrael_photo_gallery is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

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Image 2: Klem, Public domain, via Wikimedia

Commons

Image 3: Medicine Wheel, Palatki Heritage Site and

Ruins, Coconino National Forest, AZ. Pixabay License.

Image 4: Tibetan Buddhist Wheel of Life. Pixabay

License.

Image 5: The Christian Eucharist. Pixabay License.

Image 6: Person reading the Qur’an. Pixabay License.

Image 7: Indian vegetarian thali sampler plate. Pixabay

License.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 8 5

9

Chapter 9: Roots of

American National Culture

Nolan Weil

Suggested Focus

This chapter is a crash course in American history from the

perspective of social history and cultural geography. If you can

grasp the argument of this chapter, you might begin to see

American culture in a completely new light.

1. Name from memory as many as you can of the

American beliefs and values discussed at the beginning

of the chapter.

2. What does Woodard mean when he says there are 11

nations in North America? (What is a nation?)

3. Besides the English, which three other European

powers established a major presence in North America?

1 8 6 | S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E

4. What makes New York the unique city that it is?

5. To which colonies does Albion’s Seed refer? From where did these colonists come exactly? How was the

understanding of “freedom” different in each of those

colonies?

6. From where did the founders of the Deep South come?

7. What happened during the Westward Expansion?

Preliminary remarks

The title of this chapter, The Roots of American Culture, may

require a bit of explaining; otherwise perhaps it may not

be apparent how the two parts of the chapter <t together.

Where does one look for the roots of a national culture?

This chapter suggests looking in two places. On one hand,

we might suppose those roots might be exposed if we

simply examine the beliefs and values that seem to

animate the culture as it lies before us in the present. This

then is how we begin this chapter on American national

culture, with a snapshot of American beliefs and values

that have been repeatedly identi<ed by observers of the

American scene.

On the other hand, we suggest, perhaps this view is too

super<cial, painting American culture in an overly

generalized, stereotypical way. We point out that there is

too much strife and political division in the United States

to suppose that the national culture can be so easily

captured. In fact, we question whether there is a “national

culture” at all and suggest that if we look at the founding

and settlement of the United States in historical

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 8 7

perspective, as we do throughout the remainder of the

chapter, we see not one national culture but many regional

cultures. And while an overwhelming majority of

Americans may say they hold dearly the value of

“freedom,” if we look closely, we begin to see that not all

Americans understand freedom in the same way. Once we

realize this, we may be better able to understand the

obvious divisions in contemporary American society.

American beliefs and values

As pointed out in the last chapter, it is a mistake to

automatically assume that everyone in a large

multicultural country like the U.S. shares a common

culture. But this hasn’t stopped many writers from

suggesting that they do. Among the most recent popular

essays to address the question of American beliefs and

values is Gary Althen’s “American Values and

Assumptions.” Here is a list of the beliefs and values that

Althen (2003) identi<es as typically American:

• individualism, freedom, competitiveness and privacy

• equality

• informality

• the future, change and progress

• the goodness of humanity

• time

• achievement, action, work and materialism

• directness and assertiveness

In what follows, I summarize Althen’s description of

1 8 8 | N O L A N W E I L

typical American values and assumptions, sometimes

extending his examples with my own.

Individualism

According to Althen (2003), “the most important thing to

understand about Americans is probably their devotion to

individualism. They are trained from very early in their

lives to consider themselves as separate individuals who

are responsible for their own situations . . . and . . .

destinies. They’re not trained to see themselves as

members of a close-knit interdependent family, religious

group, tribe, nation, or any other collectivity.”

Althen illustrates the above point by describing an

interaction he observed between a three-year-old boy and

his mother. They are at the mall, and the boy wants to

know if he can have an Orange Julius, (a kind of cold drink

made from orange juice and ice). The mother explains to

him that he doesn’t have enough money for an Orange

Julius because he bought a cookie earlier. He has enough

for a hot dog. Either he can have a hot dog now, she says,

or he can save his money and come back another day to

buy an Orange Julius.

Althen says that people from other countries often have

a hard time believing the story. They wonder, not just why

such a young child would have his own money, but how

anyone could reasonably expect a three-year-old to make

the kind of decision his mother has suggested. But

Americans, he says, understand perfectly. They know that

such decisions are beyond the abilities of three-year-olds,

but they see the mother as simply introducing the boy to

an American cultural ideal—that of making one’s own

decisions and being responsible for the consequences.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 8 9

Freedom

Americans feel strongly about their freedom as

individuals. They don’t want the government or other

authorities meddling in their personal affairs or telling

them what they can and cannot do. One consequence of

this respect for the individuality of persons, Althen claims

is that Americans tend not to show the kind of deference

to parents that people in more family-oriented societies

do. For example, Americans think that parents should not

interfere in their children’s choices regarding such things

as marriage partners or careers. This doesn’t mean that

children do not consider the advice of parents; quite the

contrary, psychologists <nd that American children

generally embrace the same general values as their parents

and respect their opinions. It is just that Americans

strongly believe everyone should be free to choose the life

he/she wishes to live.

Competitiveness

The strong emphasis on individualism pushes Americans

to be highly competitive. Althen sees this reflected not only

in the American enthusiasm for athletic events and sports

heroes, who are praised for being “real competitors,” but

also in the competitiveness that pervades schools and

extracurricular activities. According to Althen, Americans

are continually making social comparison aimed at

determining:

. . . who is faster, smarter, richer, better looking; whose

children are the most successful; whose husband is the best

1 9 0 | N O L A N W E I L

provider or the best cook or the best lover; which salesperson

sold the most during the past quarter; who earned his Trst

million dollars at the earliest age; and so on.

Privacy

Americans assign great value to personal privacy, says

Althen, assuming that everyone needs time alone to reflect

or replenish his or her psychic energy. Althen claims that

Americans don’t understand people who think they always

have to be in the company of others. He thinks foreigners

are often puzzled by the invisible boundaries that seem to

surround American homes, yards, and of<ces, which seem

open and inviting but in fact are not. Privacy in the home

is facilitated by the tendency of American houses to be

quite large. Even young children may have bedrooms of

their own over which they are given exclusive control.

Equality

The American Declaration of Independence asserted

(among other things) that “all men are created equal.”

Perhaps most Americans are aware that equality is an ideal

rather than a fully realized state of affairs; nevertheless,

says Althen, most Americans “have a deep faith that in

some fundamental way all people . . . are of equal value,

that no one is born superior to anyone else.”

Informality

American social behavior is marked by extraordinary

informality. Althen sees this reflected in the tendency of

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 9 1

Americans to move quickly, after introductions, to the use

of <rst names rather than titles (like Mr. or Mrs.) with

family names. Americans, says Althen, typically interact in

casual and friendly ways. Informality is also reflected in

speech; formal speech is generally reserved for public

events and only the most ceremonious of occasions.

Similarly, Americans are fond of casual dress. Even in the

business world, where formal attire is the rule, certain

meetings or days of the week may be designated as

“business casual,” when it is acceptable to shed ties, suit

coats, skirts and blazers. Foreigners encountering

American informality for the <rst time may decide that

Americans are crude, rude, and disrespectful.

The Future, Change, and Progress

The United States is a relatively young country. Although

the <rst European colonies appeared in North America

nearly 400 years ago, the United States is only 240 years

old as I write these words. Perhaps this is why the U.S.

tends to seem less tied to the past and more oriented

towards the future. Moreover, the country has changed

dramatically since the time of its founding, becoming a

major world power only in the last 75 years.

To most Americans, science, technology and innovation

are more salient than history and tradition, says Althen.

Americans tend to regard change as good, and the new as

an improvement over the old. In other words, change is an

indication of progress. Americans also tend to believe that

every problem has a solution, and they are, according to

Althen, “impatient with people they see as passively

accepting conditions that are less than desirable.”

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The Goodness of Humanity

Although some Americans belong to religious groups that

emphasize the inherent sinfulness of man, Althen claims

that the basic American attitude is more optimistic. For

one thing, the American belief in progress and a better

future, Althen argues, would not be possible if Americans

did not believe human nature was basically good, or at

least that people have it within their power to improve

themselves. The robust commercial literature of self-help

or self-improvement is another source of evidence for this

conviction.

Time

Americans regard time as a precious resource, says Althen.

They believe time should always be used wisely and never

wasted. Americans are obsessed with ef<ciency, or getting

the best possible results with the least expenditure of

resources, including time.

Achievement, Action, Work, and Materialism

American society is action oriented. Contemplation and

reflection are not valued much unless they contribute to

improved performance. Americans admire hard work, but

especially hard work that results in substantial

achievement. “Americans tend to de<ne and evaluate

people,” says Althen, “by the jobs they have.” On the other

hand, “family backgrounds, educational attainments, and

other characteristics are considered less important.”

Americans have also been thought of as particularly

materialistic people, and there is no denying that

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 9 3

American society is driven by a kind of consumer mania.

Material consumption is widely seen as the legitimate

reward for hard work.

Directness and Assertiveness

Americans have a reputation for being direct in their

communication. They feel people should express their

opinions explicitly and frankly. As Althen expresses it,

“Americans usually assume that conflicts or disagreements

are best settled by means of forthright discussions among

the people involved. If I dislike something you are doing, I

should tell you about it directly so you will know, clearly

and from me personally, how I feel about it.”

Assertiveness extends the idea of directness in the

expression of opinion to the realm of action. Many

Americans are raised to insist upon their rights, especially

if they feel they have been treated unfairly, or cheated, e.g.,

in a business transaction. There is a strong tradition, for

example, of returning merchandise to retail stores, not

only if it is defective but even if it just does not live up to

an individual’s expectation as a customer. The retailer who

refuses to satisfy a customer’s demand to refund the cost

of an unacceptable product is likely to face a stiff

argument from an assertive or even angry customer. The

customer service personnel of major retailers tend,

therefore, to be quite deferential to customer demands.

Conclusion

In his discussions of American values and assumptions,

Althen is careful to point out that generalizations can be

risky—that it would be a mistake to think that all

1 9 4 | N O L A N W E I L

Americans hold exactly the same beliefs, or even that when

Americans do agree, that they do so with the same degree

of conviction. He is also careful to note that the

generalizations represent the predominant views of white,

middle class people who have for a long time held a

majority of the country’s positions in business, education,

science and industry, politics, journalism, and literature.

He acknowledges that the attitudes of many of the nation’s

various ethnic minorities might differ from the values of

the “dominant” culture but insists that as long as we

recognize these limitations, it is reasonable to regard the

observations he offers as true on the average.

There may be a good deal of truth to Althen’s claim;

however, a closer look into American history reveals

considerable regional variation in Americans’

understanding of even the most fundamental ideals, e.g.,

ideas about the freedom of the individual. In Part 2, we

will see that a closer look at the American political scene,

may force us to conclude that even when Americans

endorse the same values, they may actually have different

things in mind.

A closer look at American cultural diversity

In this section, I want to show why the idea of a dominant

American culture is more complicated than it is often

taken to be. Listen to any serious political commentary on

American TV and sooner or later you will hear about the

radical polarization of American culture and politics.

Commentators may differ on whether we have always

been this way, or whether it is worse than ever, but

journalists and scholars alike are nearly unanimous in

insisting that the country is anything but uni<ed. Every

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 9 5

U.S. President at the annual State of the Union Address

says we are uni<ed, but that is something the President

must say. “The state of our Union is strong,” are the words

traditionally uttered. But does anyone believe it?

Figure 8.1. Woodard (2011) argues that there are 11 American nations occupying the continental U.S.

And just when many of us think we have <nally put the

American Civil War and the shameful legacy of slavery

behind us once and for all by electing the <rst black

president, the nation turns around and elects a successor

that surely has Abraham Lincoln turning over in his grave.

How is it possible? Essays like Althen’s certainly do not

give us any clue.

What could possibly explain it?

Perhaps we can <nd a clue in the work of cultural

geographers, historians, and journalists. Back to the

original question: Is there really a dominant American

culture? Depending upon whom you read, there is not one

uni<ed American culture. Rather, at least four cultures

1 9 6 | N O L A N W E I L

Table 8.1 Studies identifying U.S. regional cultures

sprang from British roots, and altogether there may be as

many as eleven national cultures in the U.S. today. (See

Figure 8.1)

Understanding U.S. Cultural Landscapes

In 1831, 26-year old French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville

toured the United States. Four years later, he published the

<rst of two volumes of Democracy in America. At that time,

Tocqueville saw the United States as composed of almost

separate nations (Jandt, 2016). Since then, cultural

geographers have produced evidence to support many of

Tocqueville’s observations, noting that as various cultural

groups arrived in North America, they tended to settle

where their own people had already settled. As a result,

different regions of the U.S. came to exhibit distinctive

regional cultures. Zelinsky (1973) identi<ed <ve distinctive

cultural regions while Bigelow (1980) identi<ed no fewer

than nine. (See Table 8.1)

Joel Garreau (1981),

while an editor for the

Washington Post, also

wrote a book proclaiming

that the North American

continent is actually home

to nine nations. Based on

the observations of hundreds of observers of the American

scene, Garreau begins The Nine Nations of North America by

urging his readers to forget everything they learned in

sixth-grade geography about the borders separating the

U.S., Canada, and Mexico, as well as all the state and

provincial boundaries within. Says Garreau:

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 9 7

Consider, instead, the way North America really works.

It is Nine Nations. Each has its capital and its distinctive

web of power and influence. A few are allies, but many

are adversaries. Some are close to being raw frontiers;

others have four centuries of history. Each has a peculiar

economy; each commands a certain emotional

allegiance from its citizens. These nations look different,

feel different, and sound different from each other, and

few of their boundaries match the political lines drawn

on current maps. Some are clearly divided

topographically by mountains, deserts, and rivers.

Others are separated by architecture, music, language,

and ways of making a living. Each nation has its own list

of desires. Each nation knows how it plans to get what

it needs from whoever’s got it. …Most important, each

nation has a distinct prism through which it views the

world. (Garreau, 1981: 1-2)

Historian David Hackett Fischer (1989) has argued that

U.S. culture is best understood as an uneasy coexistence of

just four original core cultures derived from four British

folkways, each hailing from a different region of 17th

century England. Most recently, journalist Colin Woodard

(2011) drawing on the work of Fischer and others has

identi<ed eleven North American nations. In the sections

that follow, I hope to show why essays like Althen’s may

not be helpful for understanding American culture. In the

process, I will briefly recount the story of the settling of

North America for those who may not be entirely aware of

that history.

Of<cially, of course, only three countries, Canada, the

United States, and Mexico, occupy the entirety of North

America, and each country began as a European project.

1 9 8 | N O L A N W E I L

The principal powers driving the settlement of the

continent were England, France, and Spain. All three

powers had a major presence in parts of what is now the

United States before the U.S. assumed its present shape.

Spanish influence

Spain was the <rst European power to insert itself into the

Americas, starting in the Caribbean islands after the

arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Spain would

eventually dominate most of South America and Mexico

and even gain a temporary foothold in present day Florida

as well as much of the American Southwest and California.

By the time the Trst Englishmen stepped off the boat at

Jamestown . . . Spanish explorers had already trekked through

the plains of Kansas, beheld the Great Smoky Mountains of

Tennessee, and stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon. They

had mapped the coast of Oregon . . . [and] established short-

lived colonies on the shores of Georgia and Virginia. In 1565,

they founded St. Augustine, Florida, now the oldest European

city in the United States. By the end of the sixteenth century,

Spaniards had been living in the deserts of Sonora and

Chihuahua for decades, and their colony of New Mexico was

marking its Tfth birthday. (Woodard, 2011: 23)

The descendants of the <rst Spanish settlers in the

Southwest (many of whom intermarried with the

indigenous peoples) thought of this region as el Norte (the

north), and while Spanish influence on the West would

eventually be eclipsed by English folkways, Spanish

influences persist to this day.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 1 9 9

French influence

While the Spanish spread out across the South and laid

claim to the West, the French dropped in from the North.

Frenchmen explored the coasts of Newfoundland and

sailed up the Saint Lawrence River in 1534. They sailed the

coasts of New Brunswick and Maine and established the

<rst successful French settlement in Nova Scotia in 1605,

followed by Quebec City in 1608 and Montreal in 1642.

From Montreal, the St. Lawrence River carried them to the

Great Lakes and from there by way of an extensive

network of rivers into the vast interior of the continent,

the so-called Louisiana territory. Following the great

Mississippi River down to the Gulf of Mexico, the French

founded New Orleans in 1718.

Moreover, the French established a more sympathetic

and human relationship with the native peoples than

either the Spanish or the English had. As Woodard (2011)

has observed, the Spanish enslaved the Indians; the

English drove them out; but the French settled near them,

learned their customs and established trading alliances

“based on honesty, fair dealing, and mutual respect” (p. 35)

The legacy of New France, as it was called, can still be

felt in isolated pockets of the U.S., like southern Louisiana

and the city of New Orleans, and also near the northern

boundaries of eastern states like Vermont and Maine.

Otherwise, it has a stronger pull on Canada where it

continues to resist domination by the English-speaking

regions of Canada. On the other hand, Spanish influences

are more widely felt in the United States, particularly in

South Florida and throughout the southwestern U.S. and

California. However, the dominant culture of the United

2 0 0 | N O L A N W E I L

States—or as Fischer (1989) has argued—the four

dominant cultures are British.

Dutch influence

Another European power to establish a presence in North

America was the Netherlands. In 1624, the Dutch

established a fur trading post on what is today the Island

of Manhattan in New York City. In fact, Woodard (2011: 65)

reminds us, the character of New York City is due very

much to the cultural imprint of the <rst Dutch settlers of

New York. Of course, it was not called New York back then

but New Amsterdam.

Unlike the Puritans who would come <ve years later, the

Dutch had no interest in creating a model society. Nor

were they interested in establishing democratic

government. During the <rst few decades of its existence,

New Amsterdam was formally governed by the Dutch

West India Company, one of the <rst global corporations.

The Dutch were interested in North America primarily for

commercial purposes.

To understand how the Dutch influenced New York, it is

important to understand the culture and social history of

the Netherlands. By the end of the 1500’s, the Dutch had

waged a successful war of independence against a huge

monarchical empire (the kingdom of Spain). They had

asserted the inborn human right to rebel against an

oppressive government, and they had established a

kingless republic nearly two centuries before the American

Revolution, which established American independence

from the British Empire.

“In the early 1600s, the Netherlands was the most

modern and sophisticated country on Earth,” says

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 0 1

Woodard (2011: 66-67). They were committed to free

inquiry. Their universities were among the best in the

world. Scientists and intellectuals from countries where

free inquiry was suppressed flocked to the Netherlands

and produced revolutionary scienti<c and philosophical

texts. Dutch acceptance of freedom of the press resulted in

the wide distribution of texts that were banned elsewhere

in Europe. The Dutch asserted the right of freedom from

persecution for the free exercise of religion. They

produced magni<cent works of art and established laws

and business practices that set the standard for the

Western world. They invented modern banking,

establishing the <rst clearinghouse at the Bank of

Amsterdam for the exchange of the world’s currencies.

The Dutch had also virtually invented the global

corporation with the establishment of the Dutch East

India Company in 1602. With 10,000 ships of advanced

design, shareholders from all social classes, thousands of

workers, and global operations, the Netherlands

dominated shipping in northern Europe in the early 1600s.

By the time the Dutch West India Company founded New

Amsterdam, the Netherlands had assumed a role in the world

economy equivalent to that of the United States in the late

20th century, setting the standards for international business,

Tnance, and law. (Woodard, 2011: 67)

The Dutch effectively transplanted all of these cultural

achievements to New Amsterdam. Dutch openness and

tolerance consequently attracted a remarkable diversity of

people. The ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, says

Woodard, shocked early visitors. The streets of New

2 0 2 | N O L A N W E I L

Amsterdam teamed with people from everywhere, just as

New York does today.

By the mid 1600’s, there were “French-speaking Walloons;

Lutherans from Poland, Finland; and Sweden; Catholics from

Ireland and Portugal; and Anglicans, Puritans, and Quakers

from New England. . . [D]ozens of Ashkenazim [eastern

European Jews] and Spanish-speaking Sephardim [Jews from

Spain] settled in New Amsterdam in the 1650s, forming the

nucleus of what would eventually become the largest Jewish

community in the world. Indians roamed the streets, and

Africans—slave, free and half-free—already formed a Tfth of

the population. A Muslim from Morocco had been farming

outside the city walls for three decades. (Woodard, 2011: 66)

When the Duke of York, future King James II of

England, arrived with a naval fleet in 1664, the Dutch were

forced to cede political control of New Amsterdam to

England. New Amsterdam became New York. However,

the Dutch managed to negotiate terms, which enabled

them to maintain a presence and preserve Dutch norms

and values. Thus, diversity, tolerance, upward mobility,

and the emphasis on private enterprise, characteristics

historically associated with the United States in general

and New York in particular, began in New Amsterdam and

represent the Dutch legacy in America.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 0 3

Geographic origins of four English groups that colonized different regions of North America

New Amsterdam, centered in the eventual Lower Manhattan, in 1664, the year England took control and renamed it “New York”.

Albion’s Seed

Of the three major

European powers, the

English were latecomers.

But when they <nally

came, they washed over

the continent like a

tsunami. Today English

cultural influences prevail

over vast areas of both

Canada and the United

States.

In his book, Albion’s

Seed, David Fischer argues

that the foundations of U.S. culture were laid between

1629-1775 by four great waves of English-speaking

2 0 4 | N O L A N W E I L

immigrants. Each wave brought a group of people from a

different region of England, and each group settled in a

different region of British America.

• The <rst wave (1629-1640) brought Puritans from the

East of England to Massachusetts.

• The second wave (1642-1675) brought a small Royalist

elite and large numbers of indentured servants from

the South of England to Virginia.

• The third wave (1675-1725) consisted of people from

the North Midlands of England and Wales. This

group settled primarily in the Delaware Valley.

• Finally, multiple waves of people arrived between

1718-1775 from the borders of North Britain and

Ireland. Most of these people settled in the mountains

of the Appalachian backcountry.

According to Fischer, despite all being English-speaking

Protestants living under British laws and enjoying certain

British “liberties,” each group came from a different

geographical region, and each region had its own

particular social, political, and economic circumstances.

As a result, the basic attitudes, behaviors, and values of

each group were profoundly different.

Massachusetts (Yankeedom)

The Puritans who founded Massachusetts Bay Colony

were not the <rst English settlers in New England; the so-

called Pilgrims beat them by about 10 years. But the

Massachusetts Bay Puritans left a more lasting legacy. The

Puritans came in greater numbers over an eleven-year

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 0 5

period (1629-1640), primarily from East Anglia. In the 17th

century, East Anglia was the most economically developed

area of Britain. East Anglians were artisans, farmers, and

skilled craftsmen; they were well educated and literate.

They had little respect for royal or aristocratic privilege. In

East Anglia, they had practiced local self-government by

means of elected representatives (selectmen) whom they

trusted to carry out the affairs of the community. They

were middle class and roughly all equal in material wealth.

When they migrated to Massachusetts, they brought

with them their own particular folkways. These included

many of the customs and values they had been accustomed

to in East Anglia. They were also deeply religious and

brought a utopian vision of a society that would bring

about God’s kingdom on earth, governed by a particular

Puritan interpretation of the Bible. They only accepted

people into their communities that were willing to

conform to their Puritan brand of Calvinism; dissenters

were punished or exiled.

On the other hand, according to Boorstin (1958), the

Puritans were completely non- utopian and practical in the

way they lived their daily lives. Because they considered

their theological questions answered, says Boorstin, they

could focus less on the ends of society and more on the

practical means for making society work effectively.

Eventually, historical circumstances would even sweep the

religious authoritarianism away, leaving behind a legacy

self-government, local control, and direct democracy.

As Woodard (2011) has observed, “Yankees would come

to have faith in government to a degree incomprehensible

to people of the other American nations.” New Englanders

trusted government to defend the public good against the

sel<sh schemes of moneyed interests. They were in favor

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of promoting morality by prohibiting and regulating

undesirable activities. They believed in the value of public

spending on infrastructure and schools as a means for

creating a better society. Today, notes Woodard, “More

than any other group in America, Yankees conceive of

government as being run by and for themselves.” They

believe everyone should participate, and nothing makes

them angrier than the manipulation of the political

process for private gain (p. 60).

Virginia (Tidewater)

According to Fischer (1989) as the Puritan migrations were

coming to an end in 1641, a new migration was just about

to begin. This migration was from the south of England,

and these newcomers settled in what is today southeast

Virginia, in the area known as the Tidewater. The founders

of Virginia were about as different from the New England

Puritans as any group could be.

While the Puritans were artisans, farmers, and

craftsmen from the east of England, the Tidewater

Virginians had been English “gentlemen” in south

England. The economy of south England in 17th century

was organized mainly around the production of grain and

wool. While the Puritans enjoyed a fairly egalitarian life in

East Anglia, the south of England was marked by severe

economic inequality. Those who didn’t own land were

tenants. The region had also suffered greatly during the

English Civil War, a conflict that pitted the King of

England against the Parliament over the manner in which

England was to be governed. The landed gentry of south

England were Royalists; they supported the King.

However, they found themselves on the losing side of the

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conflict. Unlike the Puritans who migrated to New

England for religious reasons, the Royalists hoped to

escape their deteriorating situation by seeking their

fortunes in the New World. To the extent that religion was

important to them, they embraced the Anglican Church of

England, the same church as the King of England.

Like the Puritans, the Royalists were not the <rst

English settlers in their respective region. The earliest

Virginians had founded the Jamestown Colony in 1607.

Also, like the Puritans, the Royalists turned out to be more

successful administrators than the settlers who had come

before. But while the Jamestown settlers had been

incompetent in many ways, they had set the stage for a

successful agricultural export industry based on tobacco

(Woodard, 2011).

Tobacco was a very lucrative crop and Virginia was

perfect for growing it, but it was very labor-intensive. The

Virginians solved their labor problem by recruiting a large

workforce of desperate people from London, Bristol, and

Liverpool. In fact, poor newcomers greatly outnumbered

the Royalist elites; more than 75 percent of immigrants to

Virginia came as indentured servants. Two thirds were

unskilled laborers and most could not read or write. The

Royalists, in fact, succeeded in reproducing the conditions

that had existed in the south of England where they had

been the lords and masters of large estates, exploiting a

vast and permanent underclass of poor, uneducated

Englishmen. Even worse, when the Virginians began

losing their workforce because the servants completed

their indentures, they turned to slave labor, which would

eventually spread across the entire southern United States.

Before the abolition of slavery in 1865, millions of Africans

would be kidnapped and shipped to the New World (and

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later bred In America) as permanent property (Woodard,

2011).

As Fischer (1989) has pointed out, people everywhere in

British America embraced the ideal of liberty (freedom) in

one form or another; however, it would be a mistake to

think that liberty had the same meaning to New

Englanders as it did to Virginians. New Englanders

believed in ordered liberty, which meant that liberty

belonged not just to an individual but to an entire

community. In other words, an individual’s liberties or

rights were not absolute but had to be balanced against the

public good. New Englanders voluntarily agreed to accept

constraints upon their liberties as long as they were

consistent with written laws and as long as it was they

themselves that collectively determined the laws. It is also

true though that because the original Puritan founders

saw themselves as God’s chosen people, they did not at

<rst feel compelled to extend freedom to anyone outside of

their Puritan communities.

The Virginians, in contrast, embraced a form of liberty

that Fischer has described as hegemonic or hierarchical

liberty. According to Fischer (1989) freedom for the

Virginian was conceived as “the power to rule, and not to

be overruled by others. . . . It never occurred to most

Virginia gentlemen that liberty belonged to everyone” (pp.

411-412). Moreover, the higher one’s status, the greater

one’s liberties. While New Englanders governed

themselves by mutual agreement arrived at in town hall

meetings, Virginian society was ruled from the top by a

small group of wealthy plantation owners who completely

dominated the economic and political affairs of the colony.

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Delaware Valley (The Midlands)

The third major wave of English immigration took place

between 1675-1725 and originated from many different

parts of England, but one region in particular stood

out—the North Midlands, a rocky and sparsely settled

region inhabited by farmers and shepherds. The people

had descended from Viking invaders who had colonized

the region in the Middle Ages. They favored the Norse

customs of individual ownership of houses and <elds and

resented the imposition of the Norman system of feudal

manors, which the southern Royalists had embraced

(p.446). The most peculiar thing about the people was their

religion. They were neither Puritans like the people of

eastern England, nor Anglican like the Royalists of the

south, but Quaker, or as they called themselves Friends.

The Quakers began arriving in great numbers in 1675,

settling in the Delaware Valley, spreading out into what is

today western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.

Sandwiched between Puritan Massachusetts and Royalist

Virginia, Woodward (2011) refers to this region as the

Midlands.

By 1750, the Quakers had become the third largest

religious group in the British colonies (Fischer, p. 422).

Like the Puritans and unlike the Royalists, the Quakers

sought to establish a model society based on deeply held

religious beliefs. But whereas the Puritans tended restrict

the liberties of outsiders, even persecuting them, the

Quakers (under the leadership of William Penn)

“envisioned a country where people of different creeds and

ethnic backgrounds could live together in harmony”

(Woodard, p. 94). The Quakers would not impose their

religion on anyone but would invite everyone into the

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community who accepted their worldview. They extended

the right to vote to almost anyone and provided land on

cheap terms. They maintained peace with the local

Indians, paid them for their land, and respected their

interests.

Quakers held government to be an absolute necessity

and were intensely committed to public debate. At the

same time, they developed a tradition of minimal

government interference in the lives of people. The Quaker

view of liberty was different from that of both the Puritans

and the Royalists. While the Puritans embraced ordered or

bounded liberty for God’s chosen few, and the Royalists

embraced a hierarchical view of liberty for the privileged

elite (and who saw no contradiction in the keeping of

slaves), the Quakers believed in reciprocal liberty, a liberty

that they believed should embrace all of humanity. The

Quakers were the most egalitarian of the three colonies

discussed so far, and they would be among the most

outspoken opponents of slavery.

Appalachia

The last great waves of folk migration came between

1718-1775 from the so-called borderlands of the British

Empire, Ireland, Scotland, and the northern counties of

England. They were a clan-based warrior people whose

ancestors had endured 800 years of almost constant

warfare with England (Woodard, p. 101). Unlike the

Puritans or the Quakers who dreamed of establishing

model societies based upon their religious beliefs, or the

Royalists who wished to regain their aristocratic wealth

and privilege, the Borderlanders sought to escape from

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 1 1

economic privation: high rents, low wages, heavy taxation,

famine and starvation.

These new immigrants landed on American shores

primarily by means of Philadelphia and New Castle in the

Quaker Midlands, mainly because of the Quaker policy of

welcoming immigrants. Unfortunately, the Borderlanders,

proved too belligerent and violent for the peace-loving

Quakers, who tried to get them out of their towns and into

the Appalachian backcountry as quickly as possible. The

Appalachian Mountains extend for 800 miles from

Pennsylvania to Georgia and several hundred miles east to

west from the Piedmont Plateau to the Mississippi. The

Borderlanders would end up spreading their folkways

throughout this vast region.

While the other three colonial regions established

commercial enterprises revolving around cash groups and

manufactured goods, the Borderlanders lived primarily by

hunting, <shing, and farming. In Britain, they had never

been accustomed to investing in <xed property because it

was too easily lost in war. In the American backcountry,

they carried on in the same way; whatever wealth they had

was largely mobile, consisting of herds of pigs, cattle, and

sheep. They practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, moving

to new lands every few years when they had depleted the

soil in one place. In time, some individuals managed to

acquire large tracts of land, while others remained

landless. The result was to reproduce the pervasive

inequality that had existed in the northern English

borderlands.

Early on, Appalachia acquired a reputation as a violent

and lawless place. In the earliest years of settlement, there

was little in the way of government. To the extent that

there was any order or justice, it was according to the

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principle lex talionis, which held that “a good man must

seek to do right in the world, but when wrong was done to

him, he must punish the wrongdoer himself by an act of

retribution. . .” (Fischer, p. 765).

The people that settled Appalachia held to an ideal of

liberty that Fischer has called “natural liberty,”

characterized by a <erce resistance to any form of external

restraint and “strenuously hostile to ordering institutions”

(Fischer, p. 777). This included hostility to organized

churches and established clergy. The Appalachian

backcountry was a place of mixed religious

denominations, just as the borders of North Britain had

been. However, if there was a dominant denomination, it

may have been Scottish Presbyterianism.

In essence, the Borderlanders reproduced many aspects

of the society they had left behind in the British

borderlands, a society marked by economic inequality, a

culture of violence and retributive justice, jealous

protection of individual liberty, and distrust of

government. A more different culture from that of New

England or the Midlands is hard to imagine. Except

perhaps for the Deep South.

Englanders from Barbados

The Deep South

Fischer does not deal with the founders of the Deep South

in Albion’s Seed for the simple reason that none of them

came directly from England as the Puritans, Virginians,

Quakers, and Borderlanders had. Instead, they were in

Woodard’s words “the sons and grandsons of the founders

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 1 3

of an older English colony: Barbados, the richest and most

horrifying society in the English-speaking world” (p. 82).

The colonizers of Barbados had established a wealthy and

powerful plantation economy based on sugar cane, grown

entirely by means of a brutal system of slave labor. Having

run out of land on Barbados, it became necessary for

Barbadians to <nd new lands, which they did by migrating

to other islands in the Caribbean and to the east coast of

North America.

The Barbadians arrived near present day Charleston,

South Carolina in 1670 and set to work replicating a slave

state almost identical to the one they had left behind in

Barbados. They bought enslaved Africans by the boatloads

and put them to work growing rice and indigo for export

to England. They often worked them to death just as they

had in Barbados. They built a tremendous amount of

wealth from this slave labor, and most of it was

concentrated in the hands of a few ruling families who

comprised only about one quarter of the white population.

They governed the territory solely to serve their own

interests, ignoring the bottom three-quarters of the white

population, and of course the black majority who actually

made up 80 percent of the population. The brutality of the

system is certainly shocking to modern sensibilities, and it

was even shocking to the Barbadian’s contemporaries.

While slavery was initially tolerated in all of the colonies, it

was an organizing economic principle only in the

Tidewater region and the Deep South. However, there

were important differences. Initially, the Tidewater

leaders had imported labor in the form of indentured

servants both white and black. Indentured servants could

earn their freedom, and many blacks did. In the Tidewater,

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Popularly regarded as the cultural boundary separating North and South (Dixie)

slaves outnumbered whites by only 1.7 to 1, and the slave

population grew naturally after 1740, eliminating the need

to import slaves. And because there were few newcomers,

the black population of the Tidewater was “relatively

homogenous and strongly influenced by the English

culture it was embedded within” (Woodard, p. 87). Having

African heritage did not necessarily make someone a slave

in the Tidewater. People in the Tidewater found it harder

to deny the humanity of black people.

In the Deep South,

however, the black

population outnumbered

the white population by

about 5 to 1, and blacks

lived largely apart from

whites. Moreover, the

separation of whites and

blacks was strictly

enforced, and the white

minority thought of blacks

as inherently inferior. Because they were so greatly

outnumbered, Southern plantation owners also feared the

possibility of a violent rebellion, and they organized

militias and conducted training exercises in case they

might need to respond to an uprising. “Deep Southern

society,” says Woodard, “was not only militarized, caste-

structured, and deferential to authority, it was also

aggressively expansionist” (p. 90). Unfortunately, the

slaveholding practices of the Deep South eventually caught

hold in the Tidewater too. By the middle of the 18th

century, permanent slavery came to be the norm

everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 1 5

The Westward Expansion

After the American Revolution, four of the nations that we

have just surveyed headed west: New England, the

Midlands, Appalachia, and the Deep South all raced

towards the interior of the continent apparently with little

mixing. Figure 8.1 shows the territories that each nation

settled. Woodard’s argument and the work of cultural

geographers suggests that these four nations carried their

particular folkways and cultural attitudes with them and

that the states they settled still bear those same cultural

markings.

The Far West

The cultural migrations were halted for a time by the sheer

extremity of the West, which was not well suited to

farming. Only two groups braved the arid West. The

Mormons hailed from Yankee roots. Like the New England

Puritans, two centuries earlier, they set out on a utopian

religious mission, and began arriving in the 1840s on the

shores the Great Salt Lake in present day Utah. “With a

communal mind-set and intense group cohesion,” notes

Woodard, “the Mormons were able to build and maintain

irrigation projects that enabled small farmers in the region

to survive in far Western conditions.” Interestingly, the

Mormon values of communitarianism, morality, and good

works are all Yankee values. One wonders sometimes why

Utah politicians seem to align themselves so often with

politicians espousing values more typical of Appalachia

and the Deep South rather than with New England.

The other hardy souls to venture into the Far West were

the Forty-niners, so named after the year 1849 which

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brought a flood of frontiersmen to California seeking gold.

Otherwise, the West was successfully settled only after the

arrival of corporations and the federal government, the

only two forces capable of providing an infrastructure that

would eventually permit widespread settlement.

Westerners would come to resent both the corporations

and the federal government as unwelcome intrusions in

their lives.

The Left Coast

“Why is it,” asks Woodard, “that the coastal zone of northern California, Oregon and Washington seems to

have so much more in common with New England than

with the other parts of those states?” The explanation,

according to Woodard, is that the <rst Americans to

colonize it were New England Yankees who arrived by

ship. New Englanders were well positioned to colonize the

area having become familiar with the region as New

France’s main competitor in the fur trade.

The <rst Yankee settlers were merchants, missionaries,

and woodsmen. They arrived determined to create a “New

England on the Paci<c.” The other group to settle the

region consisted of farmers, prospectors and fur traders

from Greater Appalachia. They arrived overland by wagon,

and took control of the countryside, leaving the coastal

towns and government to the Yankees. The Yankee desire

to reproduce New England was ultimately unsuccessful

because as ever more migrants arrived from the

Appalachian Midwest and elsewhere, the Yankees were

outnumbered <fteen to one. They did manage, however, to

maintain control over most civic institutions.

Today the region shares with coastal New England the

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 1 7

same Yankee idealism and faith in good government and

social reform blended with Appalachian self-suf<cient

individualism.

Final reflection

While these various European founders of the United

States were working out their destinies, the U.S. was also a

destination for immigrants from all over the world.

Throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century, the

majority of immigrants were from Europe, <rst from

northern and western Europe, then from southern and

eastern Europe, and then once again from western

Europe. From the 1960s on, the majority of immigrants

have come from Asia and Latin America.

Given the passage of time and the huge influx of

immigrants, it might not seem believable that these

founding nations would have maintained their distinct

cultural identities. Haven’t they surely been diluted and

transformed, asks Woodard, by the tens of millions of

immigrants moving into the various regions? It might

seem, says Woodard, that by now these original cultures

must have “melted into one another, creating a rich,

pluralistic stew.”

However, cultural geographers such as Zelinsky (1973)

have found reasons to believe that once the settlers of a

region leave their cultural mark, newcomers are more

likely to assimilate the dominant culture of the region. The

newcomers surely bring with them their own cultural

legacies, foods, religions, fashions, and ideas, suggests

Woodard, but they do not replace the established ethos.

In American Nations, Woodard argues that the divisions

in American politics can be understood in large part by

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understanding the cultural divisions that have been part of

the United States since its founding. These divisions can

help us understand regional differences in basic

sentiments such trust vs. distrust of government. They can

also help us understand why certain regions of the country

are for or against gun control, environmental regulation,

or the regulation of <nancial institutions, and so on, or for

or against particular Congressional legislation.

Application

1. Whether you are an American citizen, U.S. resident, or

international student … which, if any, of the American

national values discussed in the chapter are important

where you come from? Which, if any, are unimportant?

2. Based on this history of the United States, what

adjustments are necessary to the idea of a dominant

American culture?

3. If you are not an American citizen or U.S. resident, how

might the lessons of this chapter apply to your own

country?

References

Althen, G. (2003). American ways: A guide for foreigners in the

United States. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.

Bigelow, B. (1980). Roots and regions: A summary

de<nition of the cultural geography of America. Journal

of Geography, 79(6), 218-229.

Boorstin, D. J. (1958). The Americans: The colonial experience.

New York: Random House.

S P E A K I N G O F C U LT U R E | 2 1 9

Fischer, D. H. (1989). Albion’s seed: Four British Folkways in

America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Garreau, J. (1981). The nine nations of North America. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin.

Woodard, C. (2011). American nations: A history of the eleven

rival regional cultures of North America. New York: Viking.

Zelinsky, W. (1973). The cultural geography of the United

States. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Image Attribution

Image 1: “The American Nations Today” by Colin

Woodward is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Image 2: Table by Nolan Weil is licensed under CC BY

4.0

Image 3: “GezichtOpNieuwAmsterdam” by Johannes

Vingboons is licensed under Public Domain

Image 4: (not creative commons)

Image 5: Mason-Dixon Line by National Atlas of United

States is licensed under Public Domain

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