Thinking about culture, the early years

Our world is full of cultural distrust, misunderstands and biases. These cultural misperceptions result in simplistic and often faulty assumptions about other people. Western cultures, for example, often assume that their cultural norms and values are superior to those of many developing countries. So-called ‘developing countries’, like our own, are also prone to adopt simplistic cultural stereotypes, such as the assumption that Western societies are too individualistic, and they do not have the deep family bonds or a true appreciation of moral values. Many of these negative perceptions about other people can be dispelled if we begin paying due attention to the issue of culture.

We can begin thinking about culture by posing some basic questions. For instance, what is culture? Why is culture important? Or, how can we think about cultural variation without making problematic assertions about people different from ourselves?

The understanding of culture has come a long way over this past century and a half. It was the colonial encounter with different parts of the world which led to the increasing need to think of the above-mentioned questions about cultural variation and led to the creation of anthropology as an academic discipline, concerned with the study of human beings and what makes them similar and different from one another.

The issue of culture is central to the question of what makes us human. The earlier days of anthropological queries concerning culture were rudimentary at best. They included arm-chair attempts to explain cultural differences based on secondary accounts of colonialist encounters with exotic people and customs. Influenced by Darwinian ideas, evolutionary thinkers began to create a hierarchy of culture, with European cultures at the top, and more rudimentary cultures of people around the developing world at lower stages of evolution.

British and American Anthropologists such as E B Tylor and Henry Lewis Morgan were major proponents of this evolutionary perspective on culture in the 19^th century. Morgan, for instance, labelled cultural evolution ranging from savagery to barbarism and civilised cultures. According to this classification, some cultures in different parts of the world were still stuck at the first two stages and needed to be civilised. The need to civilise savages also provided a convenient justification for colonisation itself.

While evolutionary notions of cultural hierarchy are obviously problematic, they did at least dissociate themselves from thinking about cultural difference based on skin colour alone, which was primarily the criterion used for thinking about cultural difference in the past.

However, it did not take long for other anthropologists to begin criticising the evolutionary approach towards culture, and its assumption that there is only a single path to cultural progression, based on which some cultures remain much behind others. The Polish-American anthropologist, Franz Boas, with his work on immigrants and Native American populations, became a strong critic of the notion of cultural evolution. Boas and his students began advocating more relativist approaches towards understanding cultural differences.

Since one is running out of space here, further developments in anthropological thinking concerning the nature of culture will be taken up in a subsequent article or two. I’ll just end here on the note that many people around the world are unfortunately still stuck in evolutionary and other rudimentary conceptions of culture, which once again points to the need to develop a more nuanced understanding of cultural differences.

The world would certainly be a much better place if we begin appreciating the diversity and uniqueness of varied cultures, instead of judging other people based on our own assumptions about which culture is better or worse.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 8^th, 2017.

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