path_of_one
Embracing the Mystery
Hi, All-
So we’re at that time again, another installment of anthropology and religion. J This week, I thought I’d delve into a discussion of culture- as briefly as I can describe how anthropologists define culture and some basic information about it. Religion is, of course, seen by anthropologists as a part of culture. So by defining culture, we get closer to an anthropological definition of religion.
As we find with defining religion, anthropology has many definitions of culture. (Ah, the joys of social science!) My favorite is a very basic one. Culture is: learned and shared behaviors and ideas. Or you could say it in a fancier way: culture is traditions and customs that govern behaviors and beliefs, transmitted by learning. But it’s all saying the same thing. “A” culture is a group of people who share this stuff. It’s obvious, of course, that every culture is kind of a fuzzy thing. This is because culture isn’t really a thing. It’s a concept used to describe socially learned stuff. We always have to keep in mind that in any culture (and religions themselves have a culture too, especially the world religions), there is a lot of internal variety. This, as we’ll see, is because people are not programmed robots. We shape culture, use it, manipulate it… as well as are conditioned by it.
So, let’s break some of this stuff down…
Culture is learned, first of all. There are some things all humans share because it’s how our brains and bodies work, and that stuff isn’t cultural. Culture is stuff we have to learn. But most people think some stuff is “natural” or “innate” and it isn’t- it was learned, but so early in their lives and so subconsciously that they don’t remember learning it. Things like gender roles and how we relate to our environment often feels like this. Learning can happen in many ways: formally (like we have in schools) or informally, through observation or participation, directly or indirectly. We are little sponges when we are young, so we pick up most of the stuff in our first culture without much effort or analysis (generally speaking- I was an odd child that struggled with this, but those of us that are like that are more unusual statistically). This first culture generally feels comfy and cozy to us, and “natural.” This is why most people in the world have been ethnocentric- their own culture feels so right. Subsequent cultures we might need to learn due to immigration or business or vacations are more difficult to learn and often come with a sense of shock, confusion, and discomfort.
Culture is transmitted through symbols- through language, but also through signs and behaviors that are symbolic. Symbols are signs that have no natural connection to the things they stand for. Take a stop sign, for example. Nothing about a red octagon really says STOP. The association is arbitrary. Religion generally uses lots of symbols. Much of mythology is symbolic and religion generally includes ritual, which is symbolic action. When we consider religious ritual, such as baptism, we see these are ways for us to behave symbolically. There is no natural connection of dunking a person in water and attaining or acknowledging salvation. We have extended our thoughts about bathing and the cleansing quality of water to our ideas about spiritual purity.
Now, most of us would like to think we could get away from culture. Especially in the sciences, we want to believe we can approach things objectively. This is the positivist ideology. But, in reality, we can’t. None of us can help that we see our world through the lens of culture. All people do this and it is part of how our brain functions. What is hopeful is that we can analyze our own assumptions and understand our own biases, so although it will always color our perception of the world around us, we will be aware of how it is doing so. This is why I sometimes say things like atheism and theism are not too different on some level. People, no matter who they are, have biases and unfounded assumptions that they trust simply because everyone is culturally conditioned. This is not to say that “reality” doesn’t affect us. Obviously, we bump into things that don’t fit our assumptions. But what is clear is that people can hold a great deal of cognitive dissonance and people have a great capacity for ignoring information, so we generally can trip happily down the trail of our assumptions despite evidence to the contrary. We either alter the evidence in our mind to support our assumptions, or we ignore it, or dismiss it, and sometimes even hold it as true and also its opposite case as true simultaneously. Such is the nature of the human brain. Sometimes, though, the dissonance becomes too great (or we’re one of the oddball people that overthinks everything) and we end up changing- either we seek to change or manipulate our culture, or we seek entry to a different culture, or we reinterpret our culture to fit our new ideas. In religion, as I’ll discuss later, this has relevance for both individual changes (such as conversion) and social changes (such as revivals and the origins of new sects and religions).
Culture is not only learned, it is shared. Religion, as a part of culture, is a shared thing. While it may impact individuals, you can’t have a religion of only one person. You can have spirituality and (I’d argue) philosophy, but you can’t have religion. Religion is a group thing. Culture, and more specifically religion as a part of culture, unifies a group through providing common experiences. Sharing behaviors and ideas helps to limit uncertainty in our lives and makes us more predictable to each other, which helps society function smoothly and limits our individual and collective stress. The common experience we have together generates a common understanding (cultural knowledge), through which we view future events. In this way, we use culture to interpret our lives and to make our decisions. Some parts of culture, everyone learns- things like foodways. Other parts are specialized knowledge and we rely on a smaller pool of people for these behaviors and ideas. Some parts are mostly in our minds, but other parts are embodied- ways of moving (walking, sitting, facial expressions) that become so second nature to us and are so deeply embedded that they feel innate.
Culture is all-encompassing. It is not limited to anything in our lives. If you do it or think it, it is probably at least influenced by your culture. Since culture encompasses our technologies, economy, food… pretty much everything… it’s inescapable. Furthermore, culture is deeply held. Certain core values, basic central values that integrate each culture and distinguish it from others, are very important and generally “right” feeling to members of the culture. This clearly is also applicable to religions. You could say that religion is both a part of a culture (all religions originate in a culture) and are cultures in and of themselves, interacting with other cultures (such as national, ethnic, etc.). Much of what we consider to be “me” is actually culturally conditioned.
Culture is integrated. This is an incredibly important concept to study religion from an anthropological perspective. All parts of culture are intertwined and work together. Changes in one part of culture alters other parts. As I’ll explore later, this has particular relevance for how culture relates to religion- we find that religious structure and key attributes such as authority are in relationship statistically to political and economic structures.
A final key point is that culture is actively and creatively used by people. Culture is not a program that we receive and obey. People individually avoid, manipulate, subvert, and change the rules and patterns of their own culture in an attempt to conform them to their own interests. People interpret the same symbols differently. People band together in subcultures that might attempt to change the larger cultural group’s patterns. And now, with global communication and transportation, some people choose to leave their culture of origin completely. All this is also true for religions. Some religions build in the capacity for people to interpret the symbols differently, for them to contest and change things. Other religions do not.
So we’re at that time again, another installment of anthropology and religion. J This week, I thought I’d delve into a discussion of culture- as briefly as I can describe how anthropologists define culture and some basic information about it. Religion is, of course, seen by anthropologists as a part of culture. So by defining culture, we get closer to an anthropological definition of religion.
As we find with defining religion, anthropology has many definitions of culture. (Ah, the joys of social science!) My favorite is a very basic one. Culture is: learned and shared behaviors and ideas. Or you could say it in a fancier way: culture is traditions and customs that govern behaviors and beliefs, transmitted by learning. But it’s all saying the same thing. “A” culture is a group of people who share this stuff. It’s obvious, of course, that every culture is kind of a fuzzy thing. This is because culture isn’t really a thing. It’s a concept used to describe socially learned stuff. We always have to keep in mind that in any culture (and religions themselves have a culture too, especially the world religions), there is a lot of internal variety. This, as we’ll see, is because people are not programmed robots. We shape culture, use it, manipulate it… as well as are conditioned by it.
So, let’s break some of this stuff down…
Culture is learned, first of all. There are some things all humans share because it’s how our brains and bodies work, and that stuff isn’t cultural. Culture is stuff we have to learn. But most people think some stuff is “natural” or “innate” and it isn’t- it was learned, but so early in their lives and so subconsciously that they don’t remember learning it. Things like gender roles and how we relate to our environment often feels like this. Learning can happen in many ways: formally (like we have in schools) or informally, through observation or participation, directly or indirectly. We are little sponges when we are young, so we pick up most of the stuff in our first culture without much effort or analysis (generally speaking- I was an odd child that struggled with this, but those of us that are like that are more unusual statistically). This first culture generally feels comfy and cozy to us, and “natural.” This is why most people in the world have been ethnocentric- their own culture feels so right. Subsequent cultures we might need to learn due to immigration or business or vacations are more difficult to learn and often come with a sense of shock, confusion, and discomfort.
Culture is transmitted through symbols- through language, but also through signs and behaviors that are symbolic. Symbols are signs that have no natural connection to the things they stand for. Take a stop sign, for example. Nothing about a red octagon really says STOP. The association is arbitrary. Religion generally uses lots of symbols. Much of mythology is symbolic and religion generally includes ritual, which is symbolic action. When we consider religious ritual, such as baptism, we see these are ways for us to behave symbolically. There is no natural connection of dunking a person in water and attaining or acknowledging salvation. We have extended our thoughts about bathing and the cleansing quality of water to our ideas about spiritual purity.
Now, most of us would like to think we could get away from culture. Especially in the sciences, we want to believe we can approach things objectively. This is the positivist ideology. But, in reality, we can’t. None of us can help that we see our world through the lens of culture. All people do this and it is part of how our brain functions. What is hopeful is that we can analyze our own assumptions and understand our own biases, so although it will always color our perception of the world around us, we will be aware of how it is doing so. This is why I sometimes say things like atheism and theism are not too different on some level. People, no matter who they are, have biases and unfounded assumptions that they trust simply because everyone is culturally conditioned. This is not to say that “reality” doesn’t affect us. Obviously, we bump into things that don’t fit our assumptions. But what is clear is that people can hold a great deal of cognitive dissonance and people have a great capacity for ignoring information, so we generally can trip happily down the trail of our assumptions despite evidence to the contrary. We either alter the evidence in our mind to support our assumptions, or we ignore it, or dismiss it, and sometimes even hold it as true and also its opposite case as true simultaneously. Such is the nature of the human brain. Sometimes, though, the dissonance becomes too great (or we’re one of the oddball people that overthinks everything) and we end up changing- either we seek to change or manipulate our culture, or we seek entry to a different culture, or we reinterpret our culture to fit our new ideas. In religion, as I’ll discuss later, this has relevance for both individual changes (such as conversion) and social changes (such as revivals and the origins of new sects and religions).
Culture is not only learned, it is shared. Religion, as a part of culture, is a shared thing. While it may impact individuals, you can’t have a religion of only one person. You can have spirituality and (I’d argue) philosophy, but you can’t have religion. Religion is a group thing. Culture, and more specifically religion as a part of culture, unifies a group through providing common experiences. Sharing behaviors and ideas helps to limit uncertainty in our lives and makes us more predictable to each other, which helps society function smoothly and limits our individual and collective stress. The common experience we have together generates a common understanding (cultural knowledge), through which we view future events. In this way, we use culture to interpret our lives and to make our decisions. Some parts of culture, everyone learns- things like foodways. Other parts are specialized knowledge and we rely on a smaller pool of people for these behaviors and ideas. Some parts are mostly in our minds, but other parts are embodied- ways of moving (walking, sitting, facial expressions) that become so second nature to us and are so deeply embedded that they feel innate.
Culture is all-encompassing. It is not limited to anything in our lives. If you do it or think it, it is probably at least influenced by your culture. Since culture encompasses our technologies, economy, food… pretty much everything… it’s inescapable. Furthermore, culture is deeply held. Certain core values, basic central values that integrate each culture and distinguish it from others, are very important and generally “right” feeling to members of the culture. This clearly is also applicable to religions. You could say that religion is both a part of a culture (all religions originate in a culture) and are cultures in and of themselves, interacting with other cultures (such as national, ethnic, etc.). Much of what we consider to be “me” is actually culturally conditioned.
Culture is integrated. This is an incredibly important concept to study religion from an anthropological perspective. All parts of culture are intertwined and work together. Changes in one part of culture alters other parts. As I’ll explore later, this has particular relevance for how culture relates to religion- we find that religious structure and key attributes such as authority are in relationship statistically to political and economic structures.
A final key point is that culture is actively and creatively used by people. Culture is not a program that we receive and obey. People individually avoid, manipulate, subvert, and change the rules and patterns of their own culture in an attempt to conform them to their own interests. People interpret the same symbols differently. People band together in subcultures that might attempt to change the larger cultural group’s patterns. And now, with global communication and transportation, some people choose to leave their culture of origin completely. All this is also true for religions. Some religions build in the capacity for people to interpret the symbols differently, for them to contest and change things. Other religions do not.