Paul Bohannan - How Culture Works

Copyright 1995 by Paul Bohannan

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printing number

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bohannan, Paul.

How culture works / Bohannan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-02-904505-3
eISBN 978-1-451-60229-6

1. Culture. 2. Social behavior in animals. I. Title.

HM101.B6319 1995

306dc20 94-31733

CIP

Theres no limit
to how complicated things can get
on account of
one thing leading to another
E.B. WHITE

For well over a hundred years, culture has been a substantivea noun. It either did things or things happened to it. It existed, but it was inert.

The call has been made by many to examine culture as a process. The calland little more. The callers dont go on to tell you how to do that.

Culture does not have a useful companionate verb, as life has its cognate, to live. Leslie White tried to supply it, but what he did was turn the noun culture into the verb to culture. He didnt have any takers. In part, he was ahead of his time. But he had an even greater strike against him: he tried to use the word as a variant of itself.

In the present exercise, culture is a verb more in the conceptual than in the grammatical sense. I have found the word culturize useful in some places in this book, but its meaning is restricted; certainly it does not provide an analogy to the life/live situation.

Two assumptions underlie this exercise:

• there is a time dimension to all culture, and

• one state of culture often leads to another (in ways that do not, as well as ways that do, imply cultural evolution).

I am beginning with something as simple as a flowchart, a process that is today followed by many computer programmers to assist in planning the timing and flow of projects. As far as I am aware, the first flowchart in anthropology was that given by Arnold van Gennep in 1908.

There is one additional set of ideas on which I build: that of the cultural trap, which as far as I know was introduced by John Platt. For example, if agricultural methods that ruin the soil are pursued without change, those agricultural methods become a cultural trap; if they are not altered the whole culture-environment arrangement will break down. Just so, ideas of law or government that work for communities of a few hundred people must be changed when the same communities grow to several hundred thousand and their family and religious pressures no longer assure social equity.

The history of the world can be seen as the study of cultural processes: those that create adjustments to changed environmental conditions on the one hand, and those that lead to cultural traps on the other. Some cultural traps (like power struggles as we hand over offices) have been overcome, at least in some places. Others (like ethnicity) have not. We are surrounded today by culture traps, as every cultural tradition has always been surrounded by such traps. Only if we recognize those traps, which means understanding the way our actions and our beliefs turn into traps, and actively seek exits or solutions or both, can our civilization survive.

Ancient Greek civilization foundered on a social trap. Having invented the city-state, the Greeks stuck to their guns and could not take the next step: agreeing on ways for city-states to cooperate and coexist. Communist civilization ended in a social trap very like it: having invented a new form of planned economy, they were unable to adapt it to changing world conditions, particularly to the information revolution.

But, what about us? Do we know enough about social and cultural process to avoid the traps?

In an important sense, this book is about recognizing and avoiding cultural trapswhich, here, include the traps of social organization. We cannot avoid these traps without understanding just how we (like everybody else) walk into them. Anthropology and the other social sciences know enough today so that we should be able to get on with the job. The secret is in simplifying what we know to the point where we can apply our knowledge successfully and people will not confuse our applying it with political manipulation.

Works of social science can be ranked along a scale from simple to obfuscating. Obfuscating is easier. I have tried hard to be simple in this book. Sometimes simple spills over into simplistic or obvious. But restating the obvious in a new context sometimes clears the air.

The gravest need in social science is a good program of synthesis. We know a lot. There is an awful lot of theory out there, some of it even good. There are libraries of good ethnography, many of them all but unread.

But systematic synthesis of what we know is in short supply. Transferring insights from one realm to another so that our whole enterprise can become less fragmented is a worthwhile goal. It can be achieved only by gaining simplicity. We need ways to get our initial premises as clear as our subsequent logic, and to make simple, clear statements about how it all fits together.

And it is only with such synthesis that we can recognize cultural traps and begin to overcome them. In this book, I ask how culture works. It is akin to the medical profession asking how the human body works.

HOW CULTURE WORKS

Part I

Culture in the Natural World

Culture is as natural as life. We shortchange ourselves if we view culture as artifice to be opposed to nature. On the other hand, we must separate cultural information from genetic information. The two are in no sense opposed; indeed, the confusion arises because they are so totally commingled in our experience. In the course of growing up, we learn culture as ways to exercise our genetic capacities.

We cannot deal with culture as long as we oppose it to nature rather than accept it as an integral part of nature, or as long as we confuse it with our genetic endowment (which some biologists still do) or with Gods will (which some fundamentalists of all faiths always have).

When we finally learn to deal with culture as part of the natural world, but a part separable from our biology, we can question it, ask how it works, take advantage of parts of it, and learn to avoid some of its manifestations, just as we deal with any other natural phenomenon.

Chapter 1

Matter, Life, and Culture

People are subject to constraints that arise from the rules of matter, the rules of life, and the rules of culture. Matter is what everything in the universe is made of, including usthe elemental constituents of human bodies follow the rules of chemistry and physics. Until life is added, matter is inert.