Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
1 P. 208.
2 1917.
200
YupDocK:] SCIENCE OF CULTURE 20 1
parent than real. They are for the most part differences in emphasis only,
resulting from the fact that some authorities have stressed one factor and
others another. I t is the thesis of this paper that the various approaches are,
actually, not contradictory, but supplementary; that their adherents err,
not in what they assert, but in what they deny; that, in short, a true con-
ception of culture will flow, not from the rejection of divergent points of
view, but from their acceptance and reconciliation. After all, culture is a
complex subject, and over-simple, particularistic explanations have gone
out of fashion in the social sciences. It is here maintained, then, not that the
students of culture should unite on some new concept, but that they are al-
ready in substantial harmony and need only to recognize that an adequate
picture of culture emerges from a mere synthesis of their conclusions.
There is,in the first place, universal agreement-if we except the extreme
racialists, eugenists, and instinctivists-that cultural behavior is socially
rather than biologically determined; that it is acquired, not innate; habit-
ual in character rather than instinctive. Culture rests, in short, not on
man’s specific germinal inheritance, but on his capacity to form habits
under the influences of his social environment.
Instinct and the capacity to form habits, while related functions, are present in any
animal in inverse ratio.’
Habitual behavior, being more susceptible to modification as the result of
experience, possesses a certain “survival value” which has led to selection in
its favor during the course of organic evolution. Hence, in general, as we
rise in the organic scale the proportion of specific instinctive reactions de-
clines while adaptive behavior becomes correspondingly more prominent.’
The higher the animal, the fewer its instincts and the greater its ability to
profit by experience. Man stands in this respect a t the head of the animal
world; he is the habit-forming creature par excellence.
If we neglect the vegetative . . . and the direct life conserving functions, such/as
attack and defense, there are few complete and perfect instincts in man yet ob-
served.’
Briffault,’ following Fiske, has sought to explain the adaptability of man’s
behavior, its comparative freedom from fixation by heredity, by the im-
maturity of the human child a t birth and the prolongation of infancy; the
network of association fibers in the brain, he maintains, is organized under
a Watson, 254.
’ Briffault, 1: 45.
Watson, 254.
‘ 1:96110.
232 A M E R I C A N A NTHROPOLOCIST [N. S . , 34,1932
other writers. He assumes them, but he recognizes that neither they nor
any of the other contributions of heredity determine or explain cultural
phenomena. At best they merely direct human activities into certain main
channels. Thus a sex impulse drives men to seek sexual gratification, and
presumably underlies the marriage relation, while other impulses may simi-
larly lie a t the root of language, economic organization, religion, etc. The
complexes of habit patterns which, in human society, surround the various
impulses and their satisfaction are known as “institutions,’J which Allport’
correctly regards as clusters of “similar and reciprocal responses of a large
number of individuals” rather than as entities in themselves capable of act-
ing upon and controlling individuals. The institutions of economic organiza-
tion, marriage, religion, etc., which recur in all civilizations because they
presumably have their roots in hereditary impulses or drives, constitute
in their ensemble what Wisslerlo has aptly termed the “universal culture
pattern.
I t is of the utmost importance to note, however, that although heredity
probably establishes the broad outlines of the universal culture pattern, it
in no way determines the content of the latter. Heredity may enable man
to speak, but it does not prescribe the particular language he shall employ.
It may drive him to some form of sexual association, but the impulse may
find adequate satisfaction in a wide variety of polygynous, polyandrous,
and monogamous relationships. In short, culture owes to heredity only the
number and general character of its institutions, not their form or content.
Here, where environmental influences alone are a t work, almost infinite di-
versity prevails. If we compare human behavior to a fabric in which heredity
furnishes the warp and habit forms the woof, the warp remains everywhere
much the same, for the student of culture is forced to recognize the essen-
tial
equality and identity .of all human races and strains as carriers of civilization.*l
The woof, however, varies with the number and variety of cultural influ-
ences. Since the warp remains comparatively constant, cultural diversities
are due solely to diversities in the woof. To continue the figure, in the lower
animals, whose behavior consists in the main of instinctive responses, the
woof of habit is so thin and scanty that it scarcely ever conceals the strands
of the warp. T o this is due the unfortunate but natural tendency of biologi-
cal scientists, familiar with the overwhelmingly important r61e of heredity
1927, p.168.
10 Pp. 73-97. -
l1 Kroeber, 1915, p. 285.
204 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N.S., 34, 1932
or ideas, such as religious and magical concepts, which are equally a part of
culture. The term “culture trait,’’ though it covers both of these types of
group behavior, is also used to include material objects or artifacts, which
are not group habits, indeed not habits a t all but facts of a totally different
order. Artifacts are not themselves primary data of culture, as is shown by
the recognized distinction between their dissemination by trade and the
process of cultural diffusion proper.
Material objects [says Willey, p. 2071 are considered as the outgrowths of habits;
the material culture is transmitted, in the long run, in terms of knowledge of how to
make material objects.
“Culture trait” thus suffers from a basic inconsistency which renders its
use frequently misleading and conducive to confusion of thought. The in-
adequacy of the term is tacitly recognized by anthropologists when they
point out the danger of considering artifacts apart from their cultural set-
ting.
Articles of everyday use [says Herskovits, p. 2411, which might seem identical to
the museum worker, may be utilized for vastly different purposes by each of the
several tribes which employ them and with entirely different emotional reactions.
The substitution of “folkway” for “culture trait” would obviate all these
difficulties. The term has never been employed for artifacts themselves but
only for the group habits which surround them-the processes of their
manufacture, the styles of decorating them, the methods of using them, the
current ideas about them, etc. The folkways, in short, supply the social set-
ting. The acceptance of “folkway” by the science of culture would have
the great advantage of reducing the data of the science to a single class of
strictly comparable phenomena. These phenomena, moreover, are ob-
jective behavioristic facts susceptible of repeated verification-an absolute
prerequisite for a scientific study. The attempt in certain quarters to build
a sound scientific structure on the quicksand of unverifiable subjective
facts, such as “attitudes,” has proved singularly sterile.
A study of the behavior of man shows that actions are on the whole more stable than
thoughts.I6
What differentiates the folkway from the individual habit is primarily
the intervention of society. Non-gregarious animals, whatever their habit-
forming capacity, could not possibly possess culture. From this i t results
that culture is superindividual. Individuals, to be sure, are the carriers of
1’ h,
148.
206 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST IN. S., 34,1932
Society alone does not raise behavior to the superorganic plane, for, al-
though many lower animals live in societies, none of them possesses culture.
In this respect a tremendous gulf separates man and the lower forms of life, the an-
thropoid apes and social insects not excepted.*’
1928,p. 330.
*’ case, xxix.
’’1917,pp. 177-8.
SCIENCE OF CULTURE 209
Allport,= too, though with a different object in mind, has repeatedly at-
tacked what he calls the “group fallacy.” Not society, but culture is the
distinctively human phenomenon. Those sociologists who have overlooked
this fundamental fact have spent their time seeking “social processes”
common to ants, cattle, and men alike, and they have found little save
abstractions distressingly suggestive of the “conation” and “cognition”
which a n outmoded psychology once accepted as realities. The sterility of
their work, as reflected in the contempt for sociology manifested by scholars
in other fields, shows that they have been on the wrong track. As a conse-
quence, the social anthropologists, whose results have encountered any-
thing but a contemptuous reception from historians and others, now find
themselves joined by a rapidly increasing school of “cultural sociologists,”
who realize that the proper study of sociology is culture.
If society does not suffice to explain culture, just what is it which, when
added to social life, has made possible the development of culture in the
human race? Numerous writers have suggested human intelligence as the
answer to this question. It has frequently been pointed out that man’s
typical manner of adapting himself to his environment differs significantly
from that of the lower animals. His characteristic mode of adaptation, it
is suggested, is mental; that of the animals, physical. The development of
one great physical adaptation, the human brain, has rendered unnecessary
any further important physical specialization, since i t enables man, for
example, to invent fur clothing in the Arctic instead of developing a fur
coat of his own, or to invent an airplane instead of growing wings. On the
basis of this distinction KelleP defines culture as the “sum or synthesis of
mental adaptations.’’ Biological scientists (e.g., Tilney, 1931) go even
further in stressing the importance of the human brain and human intelli-
gence. But important as this factor unquestionably is, it by no means
suffices to explain culture, and it has probably, like society, been consider-
ably overemphasized.
The distinction between animal and man which counts is not that of the physical
and mental, which is one of relative degree, but that of the organic and social, which
is one of kind.”
Recent studiesa6have clearly demonstrated that the anthropoid apes pos-
sess intelligence, “insight,” or “ideation,” of a n order comparable to that
of man, inferior only in degree; that both apes and men. for example, solve
aa 1924 and elsewhere.
P. 21.
Kroeber, 1917, p. 169.
Kiihler, 185-224; Yerkes, 575-6.
YURDoCK] SCIENCE OF CULTURE 211
1928, p. 341.
1925.
214 A M E R I C A N ANTHROPOLOGIST [N.s., 34, 1932
u 1928, p. 326.
YrraDOCK] SCIENCE OF CULTURE 215
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