World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 236

Culture is the one people inherit. Alfred Kroeber (1876-1970) identified culture with the "superorganic," that is, a domain with ordering principles and laws that could not be explained by or reduced to biology. He proposes a distinction beteen culture and nature - culture is everything which is not natural. Kroeber argued that the "unlimited receptivity and assimilativeness of culture" made it practically impossible to think of cultures as discrete things. Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) and Margaret Mead (1901-1978), produced monographs on comparative studies analyzing the forms of creativity possible to individuals within specific cultural configurations. Essential to their research was the concept of "context": culture provided a context that made the behavior of individuals understandable; geography and history provided a context for understanding the differences between cultures. Benedict presents sketches of three cultures, the Zuni, the Dobu, and the Kwakiutl, and uses these cultures to elaborate her theory of culture as personality-writ-large.' Before introducing the ethnographies, Benedict includes two theoretical chapters and introduces the term 'pattern, which she interchanges with similar phrases in the rest of the text. Indeed, although she rarely uses the word 'pattern,' she articulates her theory of cultural patterns within the first chapter, stating: "What really binds men together is their culture - the ideas and the standards they have in common" (Benedict 1934:16). "A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action" (Benedict 1934:46); "The nature of the trait will be quite different in the different areas according to the elements with which it has combined" (Benedict 1934:37); "If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behavior is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture " (Benedict 1934:49).
Thus, by her definition, every culture has a system of beliefs -- the ideas and standards, the institutionalized motives, emotions, and values -- that enables internal coherence. This theory links individuals, almost like fractals, to the general cultural shape in which they participate. A culture can be understood as an individual personality, and each person within a culture can be understood in relation to the pattern, traits, or types which characterize their particular culture.
Although Benedict felt that virtually all cultures are patterened, she argued that these patterns change over time as a consequence of human creativity, and therefore different societies around the world had distinct characters. Patterns of Culture contrasts Zu?i, Dobu and Kwakiutl cultures as a way of highlighting different ways of being human. Additionally one may go to Guilt, Shame and Hope traditions of culture. Benedict observed that many Westerners felt that this view forced them to abandon their "dreams of permanence and ideality with the individual's illusions of autonomy" and
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