什么是Culture_什么是culture

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-Kluckhohn, C.(1965), Mirror for Man, Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications

Culture

One of the interesting thins about human beings is that they try to understand themselves and their own behavior.While this has been particularly true of Europeans in recent times, there is no group which has not developed a scheme or schemes to explain man’s actions.To the insistent human query “why?” the most exciting illumination anthropology has to offer is that of the concept of “culture”.Its explanatory importance is comparable to categories such as evolution in biology, gravity in physics, and disease in medicine.A good deal of human behavior can be understood, and indeed predicted, if we know a people’s design for living.Many acts are neither accidental nor due to personal peculiarities nor caused by supernatural forces nor simply mysterious.Even those of us who pride ourselves on our individualism follow most of the time a pattern not of our own making.We brush out teeth on arising.We put on pants – not a loincloth or a gra skirt.We eat three meals a day – not four or five or two.We sleep in bed – not in a hammock or on a sheep pelt.I do not have to know the individual and his life history to be able to predict these and countle other regularities, including many in the thinking proce, of all Americans who are not incarcerated in jails or hospitals for the insane.All men undergo the same poignant life experiences such as birth, helplene, illne, old age, and death.The biological potentialities of the species are the blocks with which cultures are built.The facts of nature also limit culture forms.No culture provides patterns for jumping over trees or for eating iron ore.There is thus no “either-or” between nature and that special form of nurture called culture.Culture determinism is as one-sided as biological determinism.The two factors are interdependent.Culture arises out of human nature, and its forms are restricted both by man’s biology and by natural laws.It is equally true that culture channels biological procees – vomiting, weeping, fainting, sneezing, the daily habits of food intake and waste elimination.When a man eats, he is reacting to an internal “drive”, namely, hunger contractions consequent upon the lowering of blood sugar, but his precise reaction to these internal stimuli cannot be predicted by physiological knowledge alone.Whether a healthy adult feels hungry twice, three times, or four times a day and the hours at which this feeling recurs is a question of culture.What he eats is of course limited by availability, but is also partly regulated by culture.It is a cultural fact that a few generations ago, most Americans considered tomatoes to be poisonous and refused to eat them.Such selective, discriminative use of the environment is characteristically cultural.In a still more general sense, too, the proce of eating is channeled by culture.Whether a man eats to live, lives to eat, or merely eats and lives is only in part an individual matter, for there are also cultural trends.Emotions are physiological events.Certain situations will evoke fear in people from any culture.But sensations of pleasure, anger, and lust may be stimulated by cultural cues that would leave unmoved someone who has been reared in a different social tradition.I have said “culture channels biological procees.” It is more accurate to say “the biological functioning of individuals is modifies if they have been trained in certain ways and not in others.” Culture is created and transmitted by people.However, culture, like well-known concepts of the physical sciences, is a convenient abstraction.One never sees gravity.One sees bodies falling in regular ways.One never sees an electromagnetic field.Yet certain happenings that can be seen many be given a neat abstract formulation by auming that the electromagnetic field exists.Similarly, one never sees culture as such.What is seen are regularities in the behavior or artifacts of a group that has adhered to a common tradition.The regularities are due to the existence of mental blueprints for the group.Culture is a way of thinking, feeling, believing.It is the group’s knowledge stored up(in memories of men;in books and objects)for future use.We study the products of this “mental” activity;the overt behavior, the speech and gestures and activities of people, and the tangible results of these things such as tools, houses, cornfields, and what not.It has been customary in lists of “culture traits” to include such things as watches or lawbooks.This is a convenient way of thinking about them, but in the solution of any important problem we must remember that they, in themselves, are nothing but metals, paper, and ink.What is important is that some men know how to make them, others set a value on them, are unhappy without them, direct their activities in relation to them, or disregard them.“Culture,” then, is “a theory.” But if a theory is not contradicted by any relevant fact and if it helps us to understand a ma of otherwise chaotic facts, it is useful.Darwin’s contribution was much le the accumulation of new knowledge than the creation of a theory which put in order data already known.As accumulation of facts, however large, is no more a science than a pile of bricks is a house.Anthropology’s demonstration that the most weird set of customs has a consistency and an order is comparable to modern psychiatry’s showing that there is meaning and purpose in the apparently incoherent talk of the insane.In fact, the inability of the older psychologies and philosophies to account for the strange behavior of madmen and heathens was the principal factor that forced psychiatry and anthropology to develop theories of the unconscious and of culture.A culture constitutes a storehouse of the pooled learning of the group.A rabbit starts life with some innate responses.He can learn from his own experiences and perhaps from observing other rabbits.A human infant is born with fewer instincts and greater plasticity.His main task is to learn the answers that persons he will never see, persons long dead, have worked out.Once he has learned the formulas supplied by the culture of his group, most of his behavior becomes almost as automatic and unthinking as if it were instinctive.There is a tremendous amount of intelligence behind the making of a radio, but not much is required to learn to turn it on.The members of all human societies face some of the same unavoidable dilemmas, posed by biology and other facts of the human situation.This is why the basic categories of all cultures are so similar.Human culture without language is unthinkable.No culture fails to provide for aesthetic expreion and aesthetic delight.Every culture supplies standardized orientations toward the deeper problems, such as death.Every culture is designed to perpetuate the group and its solidarity, to meet the demands of individuals for an orderly way of life and for satisfaction of biological needs.However, the variations on these basic themes are numberle.Some languages are built up out of twenty basic sounds, others out of forty.Each culture diects nature according to its own system of categories.The eence of the cultural proce is selectivity.The selection is only exceptionally conscious and rational.Once, however, a way of handling a situation becomes institutionalized, there is ordinarily great resistance to change or deviation.When we speak of “our sacred beliefs,” we mean of course that they are beyond criticism and that the person who suggests modification or abandonment must be punished.No person is emotionally indifferent to his culture.Certain cultural premises may become totally out of accord with a new factual situation.Leaders may recognize this and reject the old ways in theory.Yet their emotional loyalty continues in the face of reason because of the intimate conditionings of early childhood.A culture is learned by individuals as the result of belonging to some particular group, and it constitutes that part of learned behavior which is shared with others.It is our social legacy, as contrasted with our organic heredity.It is one of the important factors which permit us to live together in an organized society, giving us ready-made solutions to our problems, helping use to predict the behavior of others, and permitting others to know what to expect of us.Culture regulates our lives at every turn.From the moment we are born until we die there is, whether we are conscious of it or not, constant preure upon us to follow certain types of behavior that other men have created for us.Some paths we follow willingly, others we follow because we know no other way, still others we deviate from or go back to most unwillingly.Mothers of small children know how unnaturally most of this comes to us – how little regard we have, until we are “culturalized,” for the “proper” place, time, and manner for certain acts such as eating, excreting, sleeping, getting dirty, and making loud noises.But by more or le adhering to a system of related designs for carrying out all the acts of living, a group of men and women feel themselves linked together by a powerful chain of sentiments.Ruth Benedict gave an almost complete definition of the concept when she said, “culture is that which binds men together.”

(Excepted from Clyde Kluckhohn: Mirror for Man, Chapter 2)

Notes Incarcerated

kept in a place, esp.a prison no more a science than a pile of bricks is a house

绝非科学，如同砖木堆积在一起不是房子一样

heathens

异教徒 institutionalized

体制化

Questions for thinking 1.Why is the concept of “culture” important and useful? 2.How is culture related to nature? And how does culture affect human life? 3.What does the author mean by saying that culture is a theory?