Talk:Culture/Archive 6

My changes
I could not agree more with the various criticisms, above. This article has become a mess - too many cooks. I think some of the suggestions are well-intentioned but unconstructive, but they all highlight real problems. I have made some changes. The most major was simply deleting the material on different religions and countries - for one thing, very few social scientists and practically no anthropologist uses the word "culture" so crudely to conform to political boundaries. And most of that material just belongs in other articles, indeed, is already in other articles. I tried to keep the focus on what the word culture means and how it is used. This is hard because it means many things and the meaning has changed over time, so i have tried to highlight the major people/groups/academic disciplines that make "culture" a central concept for themselves, I hope people consider this.

I can add references in the next few weeks. As for the concept of culture, I did not cut anything about the concept of culture, or theories of culture, from other countries. They were not there before I made cuts. What I did do was add more information to what was already there about the concept of culture. There was inadequate coverage of Germany and I added, there. The article pre-revision also had a lot of material drawing on UK and US sources, but without attribution or explanation and jumbled up - I sorted it out, so the differences and relationship between US and UK anthropology is clearer ... but that information was in the earlier version, it just was not explained clearly. You say "surely the topic must have been thought about and studied in other parts of the world" ... well, the version as of earlier today did not provide any information about that, and I have no information about that. One may argue that Ibn Khaldoun anticipated some issues that would later become part of th modern conception of culture. The earlier version didn't say that, and I don't know of any reliable secondary sources on it, so I didn't add that new information; if you have good reliable sources on this let us know! Please tell me what aspects of culture are not covered? I am sure we can add them in if they come from significant views from reliable sources, but can you explain what they are? As for restoring the older version, well, let's see what others think. I am sure that what I just did can be improved upon (I didn't change the section on culture change and it is still a mess) but the version as of earlier today was a disaster. It repeated many things over and over; it had contradictory statements; it had a great deal of material that is and ought to be covered in other articles; it made no distinction between different points of view at all, and mixed up mainstream and minority views. I think that the previous version was a real embarrassment to Wikipedia. I consider my revision a minimal salvage attempt by (1) deleting fringe views and original research and (2) deleting repetitions and (3) distinguishing between different points of view in what remained. Slrubenstein  |  Talk 00:21, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

General To Do List
There are a few things I did not have time to do that definitely need work (this was true pre-revision as well);
 * bring the material on anthropological views of culture up-to-date, specifically culture as performance, and culture as a field of conflict and contestation. (e.g. starting with Sherry Ortner's Comparative Studies in Society and History essay from the 1980s, and more recent debates among anthropologists about "culture." Ira Bashkow's 2004 "A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries" in American Anthropologist 106(3): 443-458 is another important resource.
 * "culture" is a key concept in anthropology and cultural studies, but more can be said about its changing meanings in cultural studies
 * the difference between "society" and "culture" - as concepts and as research agendas/sets of questions - needs to be spelled out. Among other things, while societies are usually bounded, cultures are not
 * ditto "culture" and "ethnic identity?"
 * I didn't make any changes to the section on "culture change" yet "culture" was classically conceived of as something dynamic and changing. I am not even sure it deserves its own section.  And "acculturation" was considered an out-of-date and really refuted concept by the 1950s.
 * sections on how cultural historians and cultural geographers look at culture. How are their definitions, approaches, and questions different from anthropology and cultural studies?  Are there overarching threads?

I know there are many other ways this can be improved on, these are just a few obvious to me i didn't have time to get to. Slrubenstein  |  Talk 17:32, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

To Do: Cultural Geography
Just received a message re: the inclusion of Cultural geography within this article (which itself could do with some work). To be honest, cultural geography is as ill-defined as cultural studies, and can range from the marxist work on cultural production, exchange, cultural captial etc. to how various spaces are represented in cultural works (e.g: Bladerunner and the representation of LA seems to be a favourite) to studies of local, regional and global variation and cultural change. Bear in mind that cultural geography has only really existed since the late 80s, and so invariably draws mostly from anthropological, sociological and cultural studies approaches that came before - so there's not much to add, as many of the major trends noted in the piece here are relevant for cultural geography.

If there's one thing which the piece could do with is the spatial side of things that cultural geography deals with. For example, the last section on cultural exchange would be a very good place to add the examples of globalization and related cultural homogenization or imperialism (c.f.McDonaldization) as well the flip side of the possibility of the internet providing for cultural deviation. There are two of the main 'spatial' issues for cultural studies at present which link well to other good wiki pages.

So; either I can add a short blurb about cultural geography if that's needed - though maybe just a brief mention and a link near the end of the cultural studies section would be better, given its marginal status. And I'll work on the globalisation/cultural issue if I have time - but if there's anyone reading this with a better grasp of that, please go ahead. It's not quite my main field. --Cooper-42 (talk) 17:09, 21 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I think all of these are good suggestions and hope you will make a start of a new section on the theme. Hopefully you can draw in others who know more about cultural geography then to develop it.


 * For what it is worth, anthropologists have also been concerned with culture's spatial dimension. Franz Boas and many of his students were interested in the "diffusion" of culture i.e. the movement of cultural traits, and archeologists have studied the spatial distribution of traits.  More recently, a few works focus on the spatial dimensions of culture:
 * Appadurai, Arjun 1986	The Social Life of Things. (Edited) New York: Cambridge University Press.
 * Appadurai, Arjun 1996 Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 * Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson 1992 "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference," in Cultural Anthropology 1(7).
 * Marcus, George E. 1995 “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” In Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117.
 * Thomas, Nicholas 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
 * Wolf, Eric 1982 Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: The University of California Press.
 * Unfortunately, I do not have my library at hand and do not have these works ... I hope someone else who has them handy could build this article incorporating these works - I know they are all considered mainstream and significant within cultural anthropology. Slrubenstein  |  Talk 17:30, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

To Do: Culture and language
Another editor invited me to contribute a section on Culture and Language. I am afraid I will not have time to do so in the foreseeable future. Instead, I offer a few quotes and references around which others might wish to get started on such a section.
 * "Of all aspects of culture, it is a fair guess that language was the first to receive a highly developed form and that its essential perfection is a prerequisite to the development of culture as a whole" (Sapir 1995[1933]: 43)


 * "Language is a great force in socialization, probably the greatest that exists. By this is meant not merely the obvious fact that significant social intercourse is hardly possible without language but that the mere fact of a common speech serves as a peculiarly potent symbol of the social solidarity of those who speak the language" (Sapir 1995: 50)


 * "It does not follow, however, that there is a simple correspondence between the form of a language and the form of the culture of those who speak it. ... There is no general correspondence between cultural type and linguistic structure" (Sapir 1995: 59). Sapir is, I think, responding to deterministic theories in 19th & early 20th century social science. Compare Boas [1911]: "If it were true that anatomical form, language, and culture are all closely associated, and that each subdivision of mankind is characterized by a certain bodily form, a certain culture, and a certain language, which can never become separated, we might expect that the results of the various investigations would show better agreement. If, on the other hand, the various phenomena which were made the leading points in the attempt at classification are not closely associated, then we may naturally expect such contradictions and lack of agreement as are actually found" (Boas 1995: 11)


 * "For the notion of culture as learned patterns of behavior and interpretive practices, language is crucial because it provides the most complex system of classification of experience" (Duranti 1997: 49).


 * "So much of our social life is conducted, mediated, and evaluated through linguistic communication that it should be no surprise that social scientists such as Levi-Strauss used concepts developed in linguistics as tools for the study of culture. Language also provides a useful link between inner thought and public behavior. Even when we articulate our thoughts in our own mind we are only partly doing something 'private.' We are also relying on a set of cultural resources (including categorizations, theories, and problem-solving strategies) that probably belong not only to us but to a community" (Duranti 1997: 49).


 * "Finally, the view of language as a set of practices emphasizes the need to see linguistic communication as only a part of a complex network of semiotic resources that carry us throughout life and link us to particular social histories and their supporting institutions" (Duranti 1997: 49).


 * "[We] have seen that the primary concern of caregivers is to ensure that their children are able to display and understand behaviors appropriate to social situations. A major means by which this is accomplished is through language. Therefore, we must examine the language of caregivers primarily for its socializing functions, rather than only its strict grammatical input function. Further, we must examine the prelinguistic and linguistic behaviors of children to determine the ways they are continually and selectively affected by values and beliefs held by those members of society who interact with them" (Ochs & Schieffelin 2001: 263).


 * "[Cultures] are continuously produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues among their members. Cultural events are not the sum of the actions of their individual participants, each of whom imperfectly expresses a pre-existent pattern, but are the scenes where shared culture emerges from interaction" (Mannheim & Tedlock 1995: 2).

Cnilep (talk) 18:10, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Boas, Franz. 1995 [1911]. "Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages." In B. Blount (ed) Language, Culture, and Society pp. 9-28. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
 * Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 * Mannheim, Bruce & Dennis Tedlock. 1995. "Introduction." In D. Tedlock & B. Mannheim (eds) The Dialogic Emergence of Culture pp. 1-32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
 * Ochs, Elinor & Bambi Schieffelin. 2001 [1984]. "Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories." In A. Duranti (ed) Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader pp. 263-301. Malden, MA: Blackwell. (from Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, R.A. Shweder & R.A. LeVine eds.)
 * Sapir, Edward. 1995 [1933]. "Language." In B. Blount (ed) Language, Culture, and Society pp. 43-63. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. (from Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, E. Seligman ed.)


 * Thanks! I appreciate these suggestions and know these are all notable sources.  I think this article needs a good account of "ethnolinguistics" which is the subfield of linguistics that most specifically looks at the relationship between language and culture.  I think a few other areas that should be covered are "sociolinguistics" (how different kinds of people - e.g. race gender or class - use language differently), there is a good textbook on this published by Cambridge by R.A. Hudson; "Discourse Analysis" (how individuals build social relations through conversation), the Cambridge series has a textbook by Brown and Yule, and John Gumperz wrote a good book called Discourse Strategies; and "Historical linguistics" (gets a bit at the culture/society/ethnicity thing), there is a good textbook in the Cambridge series by Theodore Bynon.  These subfields lay out the theoretical and methodological landscape upon which virtually any research or policy discussions concerning language and culture occurs today. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 14:52, 4 February 2009 (UTC)


 * A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (Duranti 2004), Handbook of Sociolinguistics (Colmas 1998), Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Schiffrin, Tannen and Hamilton 2003) and Handbook of Historical Linguistics (Joseph and Janda 2003) are also useful, encyclopedic sources. 97.118.20.26 (talk) 17:43, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

To Do: Archeology and material culture
I just expanded the sections on structural functionalism and on symbolic anthropology and materialism. I know that at the moment it reads like just more history of anthropology but I hope that the section on mind vs. matter can be expanded by others to make clear how these really do lead to very different understandings of "culture."

I also felt this was important background to understand the clash between "new archeology" (largely American) and "post-processual archeology" (largely British). The article does not yet have a section on how archeologists view and study culture, but we need some such section. I would think that key reliable and notable sources for such a section would be: Archeology, whether located in the sciences or humanities, has long played a crucial role in the study of "culture." What archeologists mean by culture and how thy look at it should have an important place in this article. But I am not an archeologist and not fluent enough in archeology to write the section, I hope other Wikipedians are. Slrubenstein  |  Talk 19:35, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Charles Redman 1991 "Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: In Defense of the Seventies" in American Archeologist 93: 295-307
 * Bruce Trigger 1991 "Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Constraint and Freedom - A New Synthesis for Archeological Explanation" American Anthropologist 93: 551-569
 * Elizabeth Brumfiel 1992 "Distinguished Lecture on Archeology: Breaking and Entering the Ecosystem - Gender, Class, and Faction Steal the Show" in American Anthropologist 94: 551-567
 * George Cowgill 1993 "Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Beyond Criticizing New Archeology" in American Anthropologist 95: 551-573

To Do: Organizational Culture
I think the article provides a very good summary of the history of the concept. The greatest weakness is that it jumps too quickly onto the historical discourses. I would prefer to see some kind of an expanded summarizing introduction before the article goes into the details.

I think that the uses of the concept in business research like "organizational culture", "safety culture" and so on, should also be mentioned, and also that those and other modern understandings of the word could be linked to their historical origins. Normally it could be regarded as equal to "values and attitudes" in these contexts, and it is often seen as some kind of indepenent factor. Though I think these understandings are trivial, they should be mentioned and their origins discusssed, and also be contrasted to other ways of understanding it. I agree with slrubenstein that one should focus on the scolarly accepted concepts of culture in the core disciplines, but one should also have some kind of discussions of its "simplified" uses in related fields. A good reason for this is that many students from eg organization studies may be likely to go to wikipedia to look for different definitions and ways of understanding the concept. I think this could be summarized in a sentence or two in the intro.

Personally I am very fond of Bradd Shores book "Culture in Mind", and I think that the view he presents there represents a quite common understanding of culture today (quite similar to e.g. Ed Hutchins) where the tight interaction between culture (as external symbols) and culture (as cultured cognition) is stressed. I think this is more or less in line with others like Lakoff and Johnson, Bateson as well.

Maybe the historical part of the article should also include something about structuralism, for example Levi-Strauss' view on it.

This is just som thoughts from the top of my head. I'll try to follow up with some more concrete ideas when I have more WP-time. pertn (talk) 12:15, 26 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks Pertn. I thought of putting in material on Levi-Strauss, but frankly, I do not think his view of culture as such diverges enough from those in here to warrant it - his main contribution was to the nature of the anthropological project and the value of studying cultural difference, not culture as such ... if we added him, then the article really would be too much like a history of anthropology.


 * I do not have Lakoff and Johnson's book on hand but would welcome anyone adding content from that book as long as it were properly contextualized. (Ditto Brad Shore's book, which I do not know - it just has to be contextualized)


 * Ditto "organizational culture" - I know that the term is popular in business schools etc. The thing is, I do not know where they get their concept of culture from.  I am all for adding it ... but it has to be properly contextualized.  I read Binford and saw that he cited White and Steward so it was not OR to claim that his view of culture was influenced by theirs.  I can guess who influenced the organizational people, but so as not to violate NPOV or NOR, and to be "encyclopedic," I think we need to know who first introduced the idea "organizational culture" and how and when the term first entered the study of management or organizational psychology, and where the pioneers of "culture" in management and org. psych. got their ideas of culture from.  Does anyone know?  Does anyone have citations?  If so this could become a strong part of the article.


 * Finally, the introduction should introduce the article as a whole. My view is that the article as a whole still needs real development - we need an expanded section on cultural studies and perhaps cultural history and cultural geography, academic disciplines I know little about.  As you say, a section on the use of the culture concept in organizational psychology and/or management.  I am for putting off further work on the introduction until these sections have been developed.  In other words, yes I agree the introduction needs work.  But since the introduction has to introduce the body, we need to develop the body more first, and then we will know how best to develop the introduction.. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 14:38, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

The recent changes are a step in the right direction
For what it's worth, I think Slrubenstein's changes are exactly the way to go for this article. Top-level articles like this one tend to become a cluttered pile of unfocused paragraphs and trivia if they are not rigorously edited once in a while by knowledgeable editors. Comparing versions before and after Slrubenstein's editing job, I think we now have an article that's in way better shape than it ever was. &mdash; mark &#9998; 09:26, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I pretty much agree, but see my comments below. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 10:09, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

My two cents
Slrubenstein suggested that I take a look at this article, so here I am. I started going through it from the beginning, making edits. But I soon realized that it would be a mammoth task. I really don't feel qualified to judge the article's current quality, since "quality" in this case largely means "comprehensiveness", and I'm not familiar with all the major developments in cultural anthropology, sociology, etc. As far as quality goes, I will simply say that the article looks systematic and organized. By the way, I tend to be a fan of articles with many headings and subheadings: breaking an article up in this way helps a reader keep track of where he is. So I applaud that aspect of this article. Also, I (for the most part) like the way that the article provides a chronological/historical perspective.

Here are a few concerns I have after skimming the article: I'm basically an outsider here, a philosophy student with an interest in comparative mythology treading on cultural anthropologists' territory, but there are my two cents. Let me know what you think. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 10:09, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
 * There's a general lack of citations. As always, common sense should trump slavish adherence to the letter of Wikipedia policy; but I remind everyone that every substantive statement (e.g. "So-and-so did X") needs an endnote. I tried to add a few citations, but they seem insufficient.
 * As I said, I like the way the article currently traces historical developments. However, as the intro notes and the body of the article repeatedly affirms, there are at least 2 distinct meanings of "culture" — (1) personal cultivation and (2) the beliefs, activities, etc. of a societal group. The article traces the historical development of these two different meanings without distinguishing sufficiently between them. For example, the bit about Matthew Arnold relates to the first sense of "culture", whereas the bit about Tylor relates to the second sense. This would be okay if the article were depicting a smooth transition from the first usage to the second. But, on the contrary, the first usage pops up again in the discussion of Kant's notion of "enlightenment". I feel tempted to suggest that someone split the article into two historical accounts — an account of sense (1) and an account of sense (2). However, this may not be feasible, since the two meanings intertwine in the section on German Romanticism.
 * Some of the phrasing in this article is needlessly verbose and sophisticated. Granted, the concepts being discussed are sometimes sophisticated. However, there's no need to use more academic language when simpler language will do. For example, consider the following passage from the article: "Culture provided a context that made individual actions understandable; geography and history provided a context for understanding the cultural diversity of humankind." Now, it should be clear to most people what this means: we can understand why an individual behaves as he does by examining his culture, and we can understand why his culture is the way it is by looking at the geographical and historical forces that shaped it. Nonetheless, I tried to rephrase the passage to make it easier to understand.
 * I dislike how the article starts discussing structural functionalism without first discussing structuralism and functionalism in detail. As two major (if not the two major) approaches to the study of culture, structuralism and functionalism should be mentioned first. My concern here isn't primarily a chronological one; if we were organizing this article conceptually rather than chronologically, I would still (or, rather, especially) insist that we start out with a section on functionalism and a section on structuralism. I think Malinowski deserves a bigger discussion than he gets here; heck, I would even be happy to give him a separate subsection devoted to unpacking his approach to culture. Claude Levi-Strauss isn't mentioned at all, which is something I can't understand.
 * To resolve the above-mentioned tension between a "conceptual" format and a "historical/chronological" format, perhaps the article could have both: it could first lay out the major approaches (not necessarily any specific theories!) to studying culture (structural, functional, cultural-evolutionist, etc.), and then describe the historical processes by which these different approaches and the most important theories of culture developed (e.g. Tylor developed his theory of cultural evolution, seeing "lower" cultures as intellectually immature; but then people like Boas came along and refuted it, paving the way for cultural relativism in modern anthropology; etc.). Along the way, the historical section might also trace the development of the "first" sense of culture (i.e. cultural as personal cultivation). (See the article Mythology, which has sections that lay out different approaches to studying myth and also has a section ("Interpretations of mythology") that traces the historical development of the study of myth.)
 * I think your comments and edits are generally constructive and appreciate them. In some cases i can provide references but am waiting for the books I need but am all for adding more sources.  On one major point: "structural-functionalism" has nothing to do with "structuralism" or "functionalism."  I know that sounds weird but it is just true - structural-functionalism emerged in both the US and UK before Levi-Strauss's "structuralism" was well-known.  Levi-Strauss's analysis of kinship did not come out in French until 1949 and did not really reach an English speaking audience until it was translated into English in the 1960s, when structural-functunalism was on the wane.  Moreover, his analysis of kinship, which ended with an early formulation of what would come to be known as "structuralism," was still close enough to Durkheim that structural functionalists could assimilate it into British social anthropology - in this context, Levi Strauss had important ideas but was not yet the major theorist he would become.  Although he published Structural Anthropology(in French) in 1958 it was really The Savage Mind in 1962 that "structuralism" as a real theory emerged.  In short, "structural functionalism" may have eventually had some influence on structuralism, but structuralism did not exist when structural functionalism was formulated.  The word "functionalism" means many things; in relation to culture, it is only Malinowski's meaning and Durkheim's meanings that are relevant.  And they were not thmselves influenced by some general school of thought called "functionalism."  I don't really see I can note this in the article but to go into detail would be too much of an academic detour.  I didn't go into Levi-Strauss because his notability does not come from his concept of culture but rather from his vision of how anthropologists should work.   But I will add something.


 * it is true that one can divide up anthropological theories of culture very broadly as "functionalist," "structuralist," and "historicist" but I am not sure that any historian of anthropology has ever argued this so for me to use it as a way of explaining approaches to culture would violate NOR. Also, the problem is that the differences between these approaches are very clear when you look at them from a distance but as soon as you read the actual sources very closely, the boundaries quickly blur. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 20:20, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Symbolism and symbolic thinking
Hi Slrubenstein,

This article rightly states that culture involves the ability to use symbols. After all, institutions, social norms, etc. all require the ability to represent something as existing. In themselves, coins are just pieces of metal; there's nothing about the coins themselves that makes them money. The coins acquire cultural significance (as money) only because we represent them as money (e.g. by putting certain words and pictures [i.e. symbols!] on them).

However, I can't help feeling that there must be a better way to phrase things. First of all, it probably isn't immediately obvious to the ordinary reader why "symbolism" should be particularly important to culture. To most people, the word "symbol" evokes images of flags and museum paintings and sacred texts. "Why," an ordinary person might say, "should those things be particularly central to human culture? Isn't everyday human culture more about money, political structures, laws, etc.?" Such a person might not realize that money symbolizes value, and that laws and political offices exist only because we represent or symbolize them as existing.

Second, I notice that the article repeatedly says that culture relies on the ability to represent experiences symbolically. I think I understand what that means, but I'm not sure. Also, can't it be argued that much of culture involves the symbolic representation of things that haven't been experienced (e.g. gods, afterlife)?

I'm going to try to do some more "editing for clarity" on this article. I'll raise concerns as I come across them. Hope you find this helpful. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 05:05, 3 February 2009 (UTC)


 * First of all, not all anthropologists agree that culture is primarily symbolic. Many anthropologists (like Harris, Steward, Vayda and Rappaport - these are the significant figures but they have influenced a host of younger scholars) view culture as a set of adaptations and are not especially interested in symbols as such.  Second, for many anthropologists symbols are just one aspect of culture, and an aspect that some anthropologists (like Geertz, Schneider, and Turner) focus on.  I try to explain both of these points in the section on symbols versus adaptations and if you think it is not clear maybe now you can help clarify.  Finally, there are many anthropologists for whom culture is based on symbolic thought.  I agree that it is not entirely evident but the strongest evidence to support this view comes from research on human evolution and language.  I have only now written the section on evolution, although it is not my specialization I know all the notable sources.  I hope that this section clarifies things but the fact is I just wrote it and it definitely will need polishing and work.  Finally, I am not a linguist and have invited linguists at Wikipedia to work on the language section - this too would help explain the importance of symbols.  But there are very few linguists who are active wikipedians and only one left some notes on this talk page but has not worked on the article.  I will work on this when I have time, but the fact is the article needs a section on language and culture to fully answer your question. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 14:35, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

A confusing passage
"Gerald Weiss has pointed out that although Tylor’s classic definition of culture was restricted to humans, many anthropologists have equated culture with any learned behavior. This slippage is a problem because some primatologists were trained in anthropology, and others were not.  Notable non-anthropologists, like Robert Yerkes and Jane Goodall thus argued that chimpanzees have culture.   Anthropological primatologists are thus divided, several arguing that other primates have culture.    "

Sorry, but I don't understand the logical structure of the above passage. Specifically, I don't understand why the fact that "some primatologists were trained in anthropology, and others were not" is the reason why the diversity of useages of the word "culture" among anthropologists is a problem. If there's a diversity of uses of the term "culture" among anthropologists, then anthropological primatologists are going to be "divided" on the issue of non-human culture regardless of whether some primatologists weren't trained in anthropology.

Each of the statements in the quoted passage seems perfectly fine. I just don't understand what they're doing in the same paragraph. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 05:16, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I will try to clarify it now! Slrubenstein  |  Talk 14:29, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

My recent additions and strategy
I have worked a lot on the sections on archeologists and material culture, and biological anthropologists and the evolution of culture. We still need to work on the section on language and culture, and "cultural studies."

My objective is this: to adequately represent the current scholarship on culture. In academe, there are two disciplines that make "culture" their principal object of study: American anthropology (in Europe, anthropology's principal object of study is usually "society" and not "culture"), and Cultural Studies (which has two very different versions, in the UK and US). I am not an expert in Cultural Studies but have solicited the help of Wikipedians who are, to work on that section. I have been focussing on anthropology.

I think it makes sense to start with the academic disciplines that make culture their primary object of study, because it is these disciplines (anthropology and cultural studies) that have influenced researchers in other fields who use the word "culture" in scholarly research.

I do think it makes sense then to add on coverage of other fields of research.

This will result in a very large article. Indeed, eventually this article will need to be split up into linked articles, with summaries in the main article. However, I think it is wise to let Wikipedians who have expertise on cultural studies, and on linguistics, physical anthropology, cultureal anthropology, and archeology to work on this article in one space until it is stable and coherent. That is the time to spin off articles - because only at that time will we be sure that the linked articles are consistent with one another. Slrubenstein  |  Talk 15:38, 3 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I like where you have taken the article, SLR. It is now much more grounded in history and scholarship.


 * The distinction that "... in Europe, anthropology's principal object of study is usually 'society' and not 'culture'" seems somewhat facile to me. Surely there is considerable interplay between the two (several) anthropologies. Moreover, I believe that there is significant overlap between the curricula of British (Canadian, Australian) social anthropology and American cultural anthropology. And everyone seems to have borrowed freely from French structuralism. As the WP article on anthropology notes: "differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods." I would like to edit the article with this in mind.


 * Your point about the size of the article seems well taken. As I understand it, you are saying write and expand the article first, then, once it is stable, pare it down and decide what should go into subordinate or related articles. I like that approach. If we get a dedicated group of editors working on this, we might have an featured article in the making. Sunray (talk) 19:04, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

HI Sunray - I responded in detail to your point on your usefrpage. For now let me just say, I question this claim fron another article: "differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods." When I talk to my British colleagues, they tell me the only cultural anthropologists they had to read in university were Geertz, Schneider, and Wagner. At a recent conference, I heard a prominent UK anthropologist say that American cultural anthropologists had tried to colonize the UK and should be resisted. I wish there were more dialogue! That said, please do not think that dialogue leads to homogeneity. People value diversity! If you were to read ethnographies of Amazonian peoples, you would find - today I mean - that the ones written by UK anthropologists mostly cite work by UK anthropologists (or the LA students) and works by US anthropologistss mostly cite US anthropologists (or their LA students). This does not mean that US and UK anthropologists do not talk to one another or read one another's books. It does mean that there are networks with concentrated nodes in different countries that have a huge impact on the production of knowledge. There are individuals in the US and UK who are practically converts to structuralism. There certainly are influences. But when there was a push to merge the articles on cultural anthropology and social anthropology, the few anthropologists here at Wikipedia - US and UK based - all opposed it. See this comment by noted British social anthropologist Mdfisher. NB: I believe his interpretation of what is going on in the US is flat out wrong. But the fact that he misunderstands what is going on in US anthropology just reenforces his major claim, which is that social andthropology and cultural anthropolgy are really different, different enough to merit their own articles. Just like Culture and Society merit their own articles. I am not banning social anthropologists from Wikipedia! I would not want the article on Barrister to have a lot of content on Solicitor either - not because I am anti-solicitors, just because they merit their own article. Why is it so upsetting to some people to say that these two things are different? It is clarity, not prejudice! Slrubenstein  |  Talk 19:27, 3 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't argue for any merger or grand synthesis. Just a dialogue, and a basic recognition that when we study culture, we must look at societies and use the medium of language. Sunray (talk) 19:46, 3 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, in order to focus on "culture" I have actuallyu left a lot of history of anthropology out of the article. I agree with you, and hope that links to these other, related articles will help readers who want to know more! Slrubenstein   |  Talk 20:10, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Substantial edit of article to reduce length and add breadth
A lot of useful information has been added to the article over the past few weeks, however there are substantial problems. The current size of the article is about 102Kb. On length grounds alone, action to shorten and/or divide the article seems warranted. The subject of the article is the concept of culture. This concept is not owned by any one academic field, nor even by academic fields as a group. The concept is widely used in books on a miriad of topics. In that context, the article as it stands contains too littel discussion of the uses of the concept of culture in society at large - for example, in psychiatry, psychology, education of minorities, and so on, and too much material about academic theories of culture, and the history of development of these theories. I have been working offline on a substantial edit of the article to correct these problems. I intend to insert my edits within the next twelve hours. I would appreciate suggestions on the best way of preserving material that I remove for length or off-topic reasons. My current idea is to add a new topic Culture (theories), into which all of the parts of the current article which are about theories of culture would be moved, leaving here only shorter summaries.--AlotToLearn (talk) 23:10, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I have no problem with your adding material, as long s it complies with our policies: significant views from notable sources. Similarly, I ask you not to delete any material that complies with our policies, significant views from notble sources.  I know this article is long but I believe it is very important to work on a coherent omnibus article before spinning off sub-articles.  By the way, no one has ever claimed that any one owns the concept of culture.  But it is the subject of scholarly research.  The word "evolution" is used in a variety of contexts, but the article, Evolution, foregrounds the views of evolutionary scientists.  Psychology does not claim to make culture its object of study, for example - if psychologists use the concept of "culture" in their research, shouldn't a well-researched account of that belong in the psychology article?  Also, I am confused about your stated intention: are not psychology, psychiatry, and education academic fields?  How can you claim to remove academic theories of culture while adding .... more academic theories?  What criteria will you use to establish the significance of the material you wish to add?  It is unclear to me what you wish to add. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 23:48, 3 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree with Slrubenstein. There is no problem with adding material, but please do not make major deletions right now. Although the article is long at present, it can be trimmed later. I believe that the important thing right now is to cover all major perspectives on culture. Once we have done that we can edit the article, create sub-articles, and use summary style in this article. This is a fairly common approach with a major re-write and will often result in a much improved article. Sunray (talk) 06:57, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

SLRubenstein invited me to have a look at this article and I find that there certainly is a lot of work needed. SLR’s recent edits have definitely improved the article – particularly in the beginning, Nevertheless the initial paragraph needs to acknowledge that there are two primary concepts of culture – the COGNITIVE view, the MATERIALISTS view - and a third that synthesizes the first two. The article does contain this information; it just doesn’t show up until about 2/3 of the way in by which time the reader is confused and bored. The article is a mess because it splits hairs like crazy and gives way too much information about various debates instead of summarizing major positions. We don’t, for example need an in-depth review of the debate of how to classify macaque potato washing. It literally muddies the waters. SIMPLIFY!

The first and foremost thing that must be done to make a readable and coherent article is to get rid of all the artificial subdisciplinary divisiveness. I’ll give several reasons:

1) It is not practical from a historical development standpoint to keep jumping back and forth in time each time a different subdiscipline in anthropology is discussed.

2) There are areas of anthropology that develop theory but do not fall neatly into one of the four traditional subdiciplines – applied anthro being one of the better known.

3) The anthropology section isn’t just about anthropologists and shouldn’t be. Several important theorists are mentioned from related disciplines, such as Sociology and Geography and no attempt is or should be made to address their subdisciplines or we’ll end up with an even bigger mess.  I suggest below that the title of section 2.1 be changed from the inaccurate AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY to ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES.

4) This may be the most important reason: Anthropological theory is anthropological theory. Anthropology is a holistic science and anthropologists draw from all the subdisciplines and from other social sciences when developing theory.  Anthropologists do not have separate ideas of culture by subdiscipline and it simply makes no sense to force the article into a sbudiciplinary format.  When discussing culture, an archaeologists may draw on the research of Binford (archaeologist) or Sapir (linguist) or Radin (ethnographer) or Marx (philosopher) or Jung (psychologist) or Richard Wrangham (physical anthro) or Parsons (sociologist) or Carol Crumley (historical ecologist).  We don’t work in subdicipinary closets.

5) By focusing on subdisciplines, the article misshandles key historic paradigm shifts in our understanding of culture. Two are listed – Universalism vs. Particularism and Structuralism, but these are awkwardly shoehorned into the cultural anthropology subhead – itself questionably organized into roughly around a Boas (1899 – 1946) and post Boas timeframe.  Very importantly, the feminist and post modern/post processual critique of positivism is completely missing!  These two movements of the latter decades of the twentieth century have forever altered our understanding of culture and deserve its own subhead.

6) A last disadvantage of dividing the article by anthropologies subdiciplines is that they are likely to have a very uneven amount and quality of text. For example, at the moment, there is exactly nothing in the Linguistics section.

How the article should be organized:

2.1 Cultural Theory in Anthropology and the Social Sciences

2.1.1 Universal versus Particular

2.1.2 The Structural-Functionalist Challenge: Society versus Culture 2.1.3 Cognitive versus Material

2.1.4 Post Modern and Feminist Critique

3 Development of Culture

3.1 Evolution of Culture

3.2 Art, Language and the Cultural Revolution

3.3 Cultural Change

Notice that I basically follow the arrangement already in place under the cultural anthro subhead, deleting the questionable dates, renaming as appropriate and adding Post Modern and Feminist Critique. Next cultural evolution – much of which is now listed under biological anthropology - and social change is treated as a separate category – 3. Although some new info is required, for the most part this is a cut and paste exercise.

I do think a lot of this article does need to be trimmed though. There is just way too much tangential and extraneous information – too much about chimpanzees and historical geneaologies of who followed who’s chair or was a student of XYZ and other such inessential data. This stuff is long, dense, boring and will just confuse average readers who are looking for answers, not appendices. The article should summarize the views and contributions of the major theorists, discuss their research and place them in the contexts of the paradigms of the time.

Finally (whew) SLR asked me some specific questions which I list here with my answers:

Q) what do we know about the evolution of tool-use?

A) Tool USE has nothing to do with culture except in the sense of style of use – such as how one holds and shoots a bow and arrow. It is not necessary to have culture to make and use tools – beavers make beaver dams.  The question isn’t how tool use evolved but when tools became infused with cultural, symbolic meaning by their makers.  Many researchers suppose this occurred with the advent of anatomically modern homo sapiens about 125,000 B.P., while others argue that it more likely arose during a genetic bottleneck that occurred around 70,000 years ago.

Q) what is the relationship between material culture and symbolic or mental culture?

A) In some senses that’s the whole debate. Material culture is physical objects (both natural and anthropogenic) whose existence is realized and interpreted through cultural understanding by a cultural being (humans) just as behavioral culture is realized and interpreted. “All behavior is communication” – Gregory Benson. To a cognitivist – ala Walter Tayler – the behavior and the object are not culture but rather a cultural media.  To a materialist – ala Hodder or Binford – the object or behavior are culture made manifest.

Q) how do archeologists conceptualize culture? A) Exactly within the same theoretical frameworks as other anthropologists and social scientists. P.S. Just so you know, only a shrinking handful of historical archaeologists spell the word without the ae.

Q) What are the main debates today among archeologists over how to define and study culture? A) see next to last answer above. Not much has changed. We are divided by the degree to which we fall into the Materialist or Cognitive camps and likely will be for a very long time.

Q)Should we have separate sections on cultural anthropology and archeology?

A) Definetly not. Research from various subdisicplines needs to be integrated and placed in the appropriate section - Cognitive versus Material for example, as I argued above and not scattered by artificial subdiciplinary headings.

Q) Should we have separate sections on Taylor's categories, non-material culture, behavioral culture, and material artefacts of the preceding two? Or something else?

A) I think, if anything, those kinds of things could be stubs with basic definitions and a link referring back to the main article on culture.  They are particular ways that culture is made manifest, negotiated and carried forward.  I may have more thoughts on this later. DHBoggs (talk) 20:14, 4 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I am not sure what you mean by "cognitive" vs. "materialist." Stephen Taylor was a cognitive anthropologist as were Frake and Conklin, and Marvin Harris was a materialist, but this seems to leave out an awful lot of other people theorizing culture.  Roy Rappaport does not fit in either of these categoried


 * You write, to "place them in the contexts of the paradigms of the time" which frankly I thought I had done. But what do you mean by "paradigms of their time?"  It seems to me that identifying a paradigm is itself a view, and then we would need to represent different views of "paradigms."  If "cognitive" and "materialist" are the paradigms you mean, well, like I said, this leaves out many important theorists who did not identify with either of these approaches.


 * Also, the critique of positivism applies to some people studying culture, but most anthropologists in the US and France at least have not been positivists, so this critique applies to a limited group of people.


 * You say that tool use has nothing to do with culture. I have notable, verifiable sources that say it does.  If you want this other view included, we need verifiable sources.


 * Can you provide notable sources on how feminism has changed cultural theory? I know a good deal of feminist theory that engages ethnography and certain anthropological theorists, and I know of some like Marilyn Strathern who have argued that feminism lacks a coherent theory of culture or is Eurocentric.  But I have not read any feminists redefine the concept of culture.  Are you talking about feminists like Margaret Mead?  Who?


 * As to the length, as I explained above, I think it makes sense to work on "culture" all at one place, and then decide how to spin off separate articles. You may not be interested in chimpanzee culture (although you also say you are for getting rid of the distinction between different fields of anthropology and focusing on any research on culture and research on primate tool use is a notable bit of research on "culture" so I am confused, now it sound like you want to include cultural anthropology and archeology but not physical anthropology - by what reasoning to you say we must combine two of the four fields, but get rid of one of the fields entirely?  You say anthropology is holistic, and then want to delete large parts of it?) but others are, if you read the discussion above.  I think it makes sense to get it all out on the table first, and then decide how to divide it up.


 * It would be great if you want to suggest improvements to the article, but as you know we must provide significant views from notable sources, and the sources must be verifiable. ThanksSlrubenstein   |  Talk 20:42, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Okay, in my own mind I thought I was fairly clear but you are misunderstanding what I was saying so I apologize and will attempt to be more explanatory. Nevertheless I would ask that you go back and re read the first couple paragraphs since you seem to be reacting mostly to the second half – it’s a long post I know. The most important part of the argument I’m making involves organization of the article, not so much the content and I would hope you give the most serious though to the list of headings and subheading I revised below. Anyway, I’ll tackle your comments one at a time. While there have been some schools or ascribed or self identified cognitive archaeologists and cultural anthropologists, I use the term more broadly. Cognitive is a term referring to thought i.e. cognition. It is preferable, in my opinion to your phrase “symbolic or mental culture” or to cultural semiotics since both material and cognitive (non material “mental”) schools recognize the importance of symbols. Further, most anthropologists, whether “mentalists” or “materialists” see culture as adaptive on some level, whether directly adaptive to an environment such as Stewart argued or more broadly adaptive on a species level e.g. that Culture bearing primates are advantantaged over non culture bearers. This is why I changed your “adaptive” heading to “materialist”. Suite yourself on terminology. Ultimately however, all theorists fall into one of three positions - non-materialist/Cognitive/mentalist, Materialists, or those sythesists who blend the two positions as a complex whole – ala Tylor. The article needs to acknowledge this up front.

“paradigms of their time”. I meant exactly the ones you were already using in the general time frame you (I suppose) set up. Universal versus Particular, Structuralism and structural functionalism. I added the post modern bit and it might also be useful to put in the culture in personality school. If so it would flow like this:

2.1 Cultural Theory in Anthropology and the Social Sciences

2.1.1 Universal versus Particular

2.1.2 Culture in Personality

2.1.3 The Structural-Functionalist Challenge: Society versus Culture

2.1.4 Cognitive versus Material

2.1.5 Post Modern and Feminist Critique

3 Development of Culture

3.1 Evolution of Culture

3.2 Art, Language and the Upper Paleolithic Revolution

3.3 Cultural Change

So what I mean – the heart of my argument – is that the text as it is be selectively trimed and cut and pasted into the broad framework above so that the work of researchers is placed within the appropriate frame regardless of their academic categorization (archaeologist, primatologist, ethnologist, sociologist, whatever) because that is how they actually work. Indeed, many anthropologists are not neatly categorized because they work across the subdiciplines. For example, is Hodder an etnographer an archaeologist a linguist or a statistician? His work spans all those categories. However, Hodder and Binford and Harris and Stephen Sanderson are all materialists. That is the paradigm they work in and that is where their work fits. Again, to divide the article by subdiciplies is just artificial.

“critique of positivism” The effect of post modernism and the feminist movement is hardly limited to America but even if it were it effected a profound influence on ideas of culture and identity. Barth’s work can be referenced here but a seminal and excellent work you can turn to is Renato Rosaldo’s “Culture in Truth”. I am far less versed in the feminist material but Wynn Maggi has some interesting insight to gender and culture in “Our Women are Free” as do Lynn Meskell and Rosemary Joyce in “Embodied Lives: Figuring Ancient Egypt and the Classic Maya”. Also Suzanne Spencer-Wood, has written about culture, landscape and gender. Others, of course, mostly archaeologists, whose names escape me at the moment.

You wrote “now it sound like you want to include cultural anthropology and archeology but not physical anthropology - by what reasoning to you say we must combine two of the four fields, but get rid of one of the fields entirely? You say anthropology is holistic, and then want to delete large parts of it?” Actually I was quite taken aback when you wrote that. Exclusionism is exactly what I’m saying not to do. What I said, again, was research and theory from the four or five (depending on who you ask) subfields of anthropology, and related fields, especially sociology, be organized into a hierarchy of headings and subheadings (which I listed before and have edited and listed again above) that reflect major topics and paradigms in the more or less historical framework you already provided instead of breaking it up into the history of thoughts on culture in cultural anthro, and then the thoughts on culture in linguistics, and then the thoughts on culture in physical, etc. Most of the data you have under physical anthropology - along with information from linguists and archaeologists - would naturally go in the section Development of Culture, which I have listed as Heading 3 in the reorganization scheme I proposed above. It certainly would not be deleted. Again I’m suggesting integration and inclusion not segregation which I have argued is artificial and exclusionary of whatever does not fit a subdiciplinary category. I did suggest that it needs to be trimmed as others have noted because there is a lot of tangential material. I certainly didn’t mean “remove all the chimpanzee material” but rather remove material that is too digressional, of which there is a lot, but, also as others have noted, that can be accomplished after the article is better organized. I stand by what I said about tool use. I’m guessing your notable sources are Schick and Toth? Anyway, the important thing is the advent of culture itself, when tools went from being useful objects to meaning laden objects and that needs to be a key part of the discussion on the evolution of culture Here is a link to some general references. http://ebbolles.typepad.com/babels_dawn/2006/09/speechs_big_ban.html Note that I should not have written “cultural revolution” because of its confusing political connotations   What I meant is the Upper Paleolithic Revolution of which the “cultural big bang” represents a particular (late theory) point of view. As for negative references, sorry my friend, I am in the middle of a dissertation, studying Danish for an upcoming exam, remodeling my house and chasing my two year old. I only took the time to make these comments because the culture concept is central to our discipline. I have confidence that you can do the job.DHBoggs (talk) 18:23, 5 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I appreciate your comments and your thoughts about the structure. I do get your point about breaking away from dividing things into fields and I am not adverse to it but I would just like to get more content out before figuring out the best way to organize it; consider the current organization provisional place-holders until more content is out.  As for tool use, I was referring to Deacon.  The feminist work you describe do not seem to me to alter in any way any major theory of "culture" as such, although they do have a major impact on the analysis of specific societies.  But I still have questions about your first comment, that all theories of culture can be divided into non-materialist/Cognitive/mentalist or Materialists, or some synthesis of the two.  That the third position is a synthesis implies that the first two are antithetical.  That the third position is really three words makes me wonder why they are lumped together and not three separate categories.  Also, why is one term "non-materialis?"  Why is there not a "non-mentalist?"  But how many theorists have really definied themselves by what they are not?  It seems strange to me, surely just because one is not a materialist does not mean we really know what they are, I can not be a bird but that gives you very little insight in towhat kind of creature I actually am. I am afraid I have tor epeat my main question: what is your notable source for dividing theories of culture up this way?  I have read a lot of cultural theory and I wouldn't divide it up this way at all.  But of course if you have a significant view from a notable source, that would matter a good deal. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 18:43, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. Don't get too hung up on the terminogy I'm using though.  Most Materialists would define themselves as such, I believe, but what I have called cognitivists may not.  It comes down to whether one agrees with Watler Taylor, ("cognative" culture is in the mind and a step removed from material and behavior) or Binford ("materialists" culture lies entirely in extra somatic objects and behaviors) or Tyler ("synthesists" culture lies in the complex whole that includes the objects/behavior and symbolizing).  Synthesists is propably a poor choice of terms as this view acutally preexists the other two positions, which however do tend to be antithetical. Stephen Sanderson, drawing from Harris, is a good source for the materialists point of view.  "Inclusive" may be a better word for synthesist.  Other than Sanderson, there are a couple papers I have in mind so I will dig through my library when I have a chance.  Could take me a while to get back to you. Keep in mind though, I'm not suggesting we try to identify into which category any particular researcher fits but rather to point out that there are these three different fundamental views that a debate exists between them. DHBoggs (talk) 21:05, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I appreciate your looking for the articles. But it sounds to me like "there are these three different fundamental views that a debate exists between them" may just be a debate among archeologists or some archeologists.  It certainly is not a notable debate among cultural anthropologists nor I think physical anthropologists.  I realize you think that there are many currents linking and cutting across different fields and I agree, but that fact does not necessarily mean that all fields are fixed on the same debates.  In this case, I am fairly confident that the debate you describe is a non-issue for cultural anthropologists.  Slrubenstein   |  Talk 21:29, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh come on now. As I said before, there is a whole section already in the article describing the very debate I'm refering to - The 1946-1968: Symbolic versus Adaptive section which in the reorganization scheme I proposed above, I suggested should have the seemingly baseless dates (1946-1968) removed and be reworded Cognitive versus Material, or at the very least, Symbolic versus Material.  But reworded or not its already there.  Below is a direct quote from that section.
 * "Most promoted materialist understandings of culture in opposition to the symbolic approaches of Geertz and Schneider. Harris, Rappaport, and Vayda were especially important for their contributions to cultural materialism and ecological anthropology, both of which argued that "culture" constituted an extra-somatic (or non-biological) means through which human beings could adapt to life in drastically differing physical environments. The debate between symbolic and materialist approaches to culture dominated American Anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s."


 * The Symbolic/Cognitive or Adaptive/Material debate has of course, never been settled, is occasionally rehashed (Sandersons epic volumes most recently) and, like lumpers and splitters, pretty much everyone falls into either one camp or the other or makes some "inclusive" attempt to synthesise both views. For example, although I am not directly familiar with their work, I assume from the article that MCgrew is clearly a materialist, Holloway clearly a cognitivists, while Deacon may perhaps be what I have termed a synthesists.  Whatever thier case may really be, there is no doubt that placing culture in the mind or as extra-somatic is really the fundamental distinction in how researchers conceptualize their approach, whether they are cognizant of their assumptions or not.  All I'm suggesting here is that some basic reference to this debate be made in the opening paragraphs because it's fundamental to understanding the subsequent arguments.  The details can be left largely where they are in the article, or intergrated across the subdiciplines as I had argued earlier. DHBoggs (talk) 15:12, 7 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I would say some cultural anthropologists would say it has been settled. Others would say the whole debate was a waste of time.  Others would say that in its day it generated some important research.  Others would say the discipline has moved beyond it (which does NOT mean "synthesized").  Some people haven't ever read Harris, Rappaport, Vayda or Steward or their students.  Some have read Geertz but don't engage him at all.  There are many views out there.  It is terrible history to think that because there was a debate among some anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s, that therefore this debate had been going on in the 1940s and 1950s, or this debate continued to be of importance in the 1980s and 1990s. Or maybe you are a lumper and I am a splitter!!  But it is my sense that the lumping strategy makes sense when there is a paucity of data, and splitting is possible when we have more data.  The work of cultural (and other) anthropologists is not hidden beneath the ground, it comes out ever quarter in many notable journals, quarter after quarter, we have tons of data on what anthropologists think and we know from direct evidence that debates now are quite removed from debates in the 1970s. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 16:51, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps its just that archaeologists typically take a longer and more inclusive view but you are right about describing our positions as me lumping and you splitting. That is clear now on several levels. Notably your assumption that I wouldn’t know what passes for current thought in cultural anthropology. My MA is, of course, in anthropology, with an emphasis in archaeology and physical anthropology. I attend a traditional Boasian four field department where one is expected to have a solid and current grounding in all four fields; my committee chair is an ethnographer and I have done work in ethnoarchaeology. Such is typical of traditional, holistic four field institutions and particularly common for archaeologists who must draw on many, many sources. My guess is that your academic experience was of a different sort which may be why your are inclined to break everything along subdiciplinary lines and divide theory research into multiple discrete categories that grow and die like trees in a forest. In any case I’m certain that I’m inclined to see a living forest where you see dead trees. In short I completely disagree with your assessment that anthropologists have “moved beyond the argument” whether or not they engage Geertz or Harris or whoever. Certainly, scholars may or may not engage with any particular school of thought or any particular leading theorist. Ignoring a theorist isn’t the same as dismissing a paradigm or a theoretical position. Nor does it mean the Metaparadigm, the underlying assumptions, have been discredited or abandoned. Moving beyond a priori ideas necessitates progress and can only be accomplished by demonstrating falseness or, as is more likely, incompleteness. Such is certainly the case with structural functionalism. While, the majority of anthropologists have perhaps always held to some version of the synthesizing, inclusive position of symbolic materialism and there may not be a large number of anthropologists who argue a purely Cognitivists/Idealist position, there certainly are a large number who continue to hold to a Materialist, extra-somatic view of culture. Nevertheless and regardless of numbers, understanding the contrast between these positions remains fundamental to cultural theory. Its also worth pointing out that many of the theorists mentioned are still alive and still adhering to and publishing on the positions the espoused in the 60’s 70’s and 80’s, Hodder and Binford among them. All definitions of culture fall within these three metaparadigms, which is hardly surprising because they are but aspects of the philosophy of mind, Idealism (cognitive/mentalist/semiotic), Materialism, and Dualism/Pluralism (inclusive/synthesizing positions). I'll repeat myself here, The relationship of theories of culture to these three positions absolutely needs to be discussed in the opening paragraphs because it's fundamental to understanding the subsequent arguments. Since you have tasked yourself with the much needed improvement of the culture article yet seem to be unexplicably unaware of the Idealists/Materialist relationship, I have included direct quotes below, but before going into those it occurs to me that one concept that is taken for granted by archaeologists that may not be immediately obvious to other researchers is that we relate anthropogenic objects with behavior, particularly patterned behavior. To use Binfordian terminology, artifacts, features and patterns are the “static” relics of the “dynamics” of behavior. To an archaeologist, artifacts, objects and behavior patterns are tightly bound forms of materialism. Whether they are the locus of culture or a product of culture is a different matter as I have been trying to point out. For an overview of archaeological approaches to material culture pattern and meaning see “Habitus, Techniques, Style: An Integrated Approach to Social Understanding of Material Culture and Boundaries.” Michael Dietler and Ingird Herbich in “The Archaeology of Material Boundaries.” edited by Miriam T. Stark. As I mentioned, I haven’t the time to do much research beyond my own library, but I pulled out some relevant, if somewhat eclectic, bits below. “Clifford Geertz was right when he insisted that we understand the mind as naturally located outside the head, in the midst of social life. But it is equally true that these culturally orchestrated landscapes are also to be found inscribed as dimensions of the mind. That is why cognitive science is unavoidably an ethnographic enterprise.” Brad Shore, Culture in Mind 1996.

Regarding the change in culture theory brought by post modernism, Shore says the following “Our concept of culture as a master narrative has given way to a stress on competing voices or discourses.” P.8

A really thoughtful and highly recommended, if somewhat obscure discussion of culture is “Culture, The Human Way” by Harold B. Barclay, western publishers 1986. “Differences amongst anthropologists concerning where culture may be located and the nature of its ultimate reality arise out of opposing philosophical positions, often reduced to a contrast between materialists and idealists, also sometimes disparagingly referred to as mentalists.” (p18) (Idealists) then consider that culture … is ideas, plans for action, designs for living which ultimately are inside people’s heads. Culture clearly manifests itself in behavior and in material concrete objects – objects of these ideas. There is no such thing as material culture, only material manifestations of culture. (p22)

In Constructing Frames of Reference (2000) Binford continues to argue a strictly materialists position. “It is clear that for E. B. Tylor, … the capabilities and habits the he designated as cultural were extrasomatic, or learned, and were not referable to what today are thought of a genetic processes of differentiation.” (p9) “This book accepts Tylors challenge and regards those events reported or inferred to have occurred in the past, as well as those documented in the present, as the consequences of a fundamental set of processes… “(p10).

Rick Peterson’s 2003 monograph “Neolithic Pottery from Wales” BAR British series 344, is a gold mine of insight into the philosophical underpinnings of archaeological thought. He develops a synthesist’s view drawing on Hodder and others. “I would argue that, like Ian Hodder, Van der Leeuw is wrong to separate ‘culture’ as a perceptive thing done in the mind, from the material on which it is supposed to act. In both the materialist and idealist schemes pottery is made to do things.” (3.4)

Similarly, recent synthesists have turned to the human body as a seat of culture and the expression of thought. See for example Horst Ruthrof “Semantics and The Body” and, of course. Lakoff and Johnsons “Philosophy in the Flesh”  A good portion of  “Anthropological Linguistics – An Introduction” by William A. Foley 1997, is devoted to discussing the culture as embodied practice as a synthesis of the behavioralist/symbolic materialist, and the cognitive/idealist approach. “Culture in this view is that transgenerational domain of practices through which human organisms in a social system communicate with each other.” (p12) “Where in symbolic anthropology, culture is public, located in shared codes of meaning realized in social interaction, in cognitive anthropology, it is individual, found ‘in the minds and hearts of men’ (quoting Goodenough 1981:51) (p18)    “The idea that there  is an abstract domain of cognition apart from acts of knowing is as nonsensical as the idea of a reified culture transcending individual human enculturations. Both knowing and acting are human practices lived in an ongoing social environment, and, thus seamlessly interconnected.” (p21) By the way, Foley’s book is an excellent place to start for a grounding in the discussion among linguists of culture and meaning.

Regarding the history of the culture concept in Archaeology see Patty Jo Watson “Archaeology, Anthropology, and the Culture Concept” in American Anthropologist 97 (4) 683-694, 1995 This is an excellent overview and covers a great deal of ground. Here is a quote pointing to the contrast between idealist and materialist concept of culture. “Hodder advocates a contextualist archaeology – as did Walter Taylor – but one in which artifacts are not just objectifications of culture, they are culture. Like Binford’s earlier rejection of an archaeologically unworkable, mentalist-idealist concept of culture in favor of Leslie White’s functionalist, neo-evolutionist formulation, Hodder’s move is clever and strong, but it is in the opposite direction of Binford’s.” (p687)

Some Quotes from “The Symbol, The Origin and Basis of Human Behavior”, Leslie White Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Oct., 1940) “It is the symbol which transforms an infant of homo sapiens into a human being; deaf mutes who grow up without the use of symbols are not human beings. All human behavior consists of, or is de- pendent upon, the use of symbols. Human behavior is symbolic behavior; symbolic behavior is human behavior. The symbol is the universe of humanity.” (p451) “All culture (civilization) depends upon the symbol. It was the exercise of the symbolic faculty that brought culture into existence and it is the use of symbols that makes the perpetuation of culture possible. Without the symbol there would be no culture, and man would be merely an animal, not a human being.” (p460)

Regarding White and his supposed conversion from the idealist position expressed in The Symbol to his materialist cultural evolutionary teachings, Richard A. Barrett, provides us a great cautionary tale about reductionist just so histories in anthropological thought in “The Paradoxical Anthropology of Leslie White”, American Anthropologist, 91:986-999, 1989. “On the rareoccasions when White perceived a conflict between his materialist-evolutionary theory and his culturology, it was the culturology that prevailed. Generally speaking, however, White was not obliged to choose between his two major philosophies. Then, at the very end of his career this quite unexpectedly changed. It dawned on him … that there had been a long-standing contradiction in his thinking about culture. He was sufficiently inspired by the realization to put other work aside in order to develop some of the implications. This was accomplished in his final publication, The Concept of Cultural Systems (1975). There he conceded that the utilitarian conception of culture that had dominated his evolutionary writings was incompatible with the sui generis conception that was the foundation of his culturology.” (p992)

Lastly, an idealist position from one of my own professors, Gary A. Wright “…a culture defines its own natural environment; thus the principal articulation between culture and nature is not technology, but the system of symbols. Culture does not meet the environment on the latter’s terms, but filters its experience to the environment through its unique symbolic system. Thus, only certain plants, animals, and geographical features are recognized as meaningful. Culture then, is the active modifier. “Symbols, Ecology, and Cultural Variation.” Anthropos 81 1986 (p416) DHBoggs (talk) 17:17, 14 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I do not understand how you get from agreeing that I am asplitter and you are a lumper, to your seeing a living forest and my seeing only dead trees. I have never denied that some anthropologistsd identify themselves as cognitive anthropologists, others as symbolic anthropologists, others as ecological anthropologists, others as materialists.  The difference between a lumper and a splitter is not the difference between seeing a living forest versus dead trees.  The difference is this: you claim you see three species of "trees."  I claim to see those three species of trees plus many, many more species.  How you would equate this with death is beyond me.  Be that as it may, my background and rcredentials do not matter.  What matters is policy.  I do not as I say contest that some anthropologists are materialists and others are symbolic.  What I do have questions about is your claim that all cultural theory falls into three camps.  I have asked you to provide a source that says this, to comply with WP:V and WP:NOR.  And I have also said that while the article can include this view, once sourced, it has to include other significant views from notable sources that are different from the one view you promote; this is to comply with WP:NPOV.  What I believe about the history of anthropology is not the issue, and what you believe about the history of anthropology is not the issue.  This article is on culture, and it should comply with our core policies, WP:NPOV, WP:V, and WP:NOR.  That is the issue: policy. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 19:58, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

The "dead" trees is a reference to your statement that you believed many anthropologists no longer found the work of the cognitive and symbolic anthropologists - such as Geertz - relevant. I'm simply saying that I believe those schools of thought to still be alive and well, if perhaps not as popular, hence living trees versus dead ones. I won't quibble if you disagree with the analogy nor of course do I care or judge your academic credentials, I only suggest that your academic experience may explain why you wish to split and I do not. Much more to the point however, I listed and provided quotes from more than half a dozen sources that discuss, directly the Idealist versus Materialist split in cultural theory and that all cultural theorists fall into these metaparadigms (see the Barlcay quote in particular) or in an attempt to reconcile these two meta paradigms (see Foley). It is not "my claim" or "my view". It is a long understood way of categorizing the approaches to cultural theory. The sources are there, plain as day, and I'm sure many others could be found that discusse the same thing. I only provided short quotes and if you find them unconvincing I can only suggest you read the whole texts or seek out more yourself.DHBoggs (talk) 17:44, 15 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Pleeease believe me when I say that I say this with respect, but Barclay wrote 23 years ago and a lot has happened since them. I am not denying that some people thought and even continue to think that cultural theory can be divided this way.  I am only saying that this is not the only way people - by which I mean cultural anthropologists mostly, but other cultural theorists as well- think.  If this were an article on anthropology I would have no objection to including in the article, maybe not in the lead but certainly prominently, that many anthropologists have viewed this as the key divide or debate, but even in that article I would insist that other views be represented.  In this article, which is not about anthropology as such, I just wouldnt give it that prominence.  I do think the article explains a variety of "symbolic" and "materialist" views of culture, and I think I named the key and most influential theorists. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 00:39, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Your argument then becomes two different but related issues. The first is the burden of proof. You have pointed out that material must be sourced yet have twice argued that materialist vs idealist and/or materialist idealist synthesis positions are now largly passe. Without going any further than the stack of papers next to my desk I have shown scholars in archaeology engaged with this characterization as recently as 2003, so I am not the one lacking sources here. I'm going to remind you of your earlier statement, not to be petty but rather because you were quite correct and these are important issues. You said "I have asked you to provide a source that says this, to comply with WP:V and WP:NOR. And I have also said that while the article can include this view, once sourced, it has to include other significant views from notable sources that are different from the one view you promote; this is to comply with WP:NPOV." If you feel you do have a range of sources in mind that seriously questions the role of longstanding paradigms in theories of C/culture then that surely represents an important step in the evolution of culture theory, and that brings up the second issue - what goes in the article. It already is organized around historical changes in thinking, particularism, rise of structural functionalism, as well as many discussions of individual anthropologists in historical and sometiems tangental contexts. If you feel that within the last decade a significant shift away from the materialist/idealists/synthesists metaparadigms has occured in cultural anthropology and you have the sources to establish that then that surely desreves as much discussion as whether Malinowski influenced Benedict or how one might characterize tool use by chimps. The article is after all, about defining a theoretical concept, "C/cultue" defined throughout the 19th and twentieth centuries by philosophical paradigms that themselves date back millenia. If you have the proof that the past ten or fifteen years has changed how researchers embed culture then it surely needs to be a section of the article. Put it there and we needn't discuss it anymore.DHBoggs (talk) 04:25, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree with you. But am I right that we would both agree that earlier work by anthropologists have had greater influence outside of anthropology than more recent work?  I think - this is my personal opinion but I think a lot of people would agree with me - that Benedict's notion of culture and Geertz's have had a great continuing influence on non-anthropologists, Benedict outside of the academy, Geertz within.  I think Harris in the 1970s tried to have the popular influence Benedict had.  Frankly, I think he failed - I do not understand why he failed, and it is my personal opinion that that is a real shame (Our Kind is in my view one of the most underrated works of non-fiction of the past twenty or thirty years, people will learn more from it than Jared Diamond but that is must my opinion), but it would not be too hard for me to argue that in the 1970s he was more influential even than Geertz and yet today when you ask most people in the US and UK what they know about cultural anthropology they will answer "Geertz," and most non-academics don't know any name to mention but if you ask them what they mean by "culture" it ends up being either Matthew Arnold or Ruth Benedict.  Those guys had a lot of influence.  In the popular imgaination I mean.


 * Frankly, I spent a lot of energy working on the people who I think have had the greatest influence within and beyond academia. I do not think these people continue to represent active scholarship today, but I cannot do everything and I have my own job to work on I am sure you can sympathize.  One debate from the 50s and 60s that may be isomorphic with mateialist versus syumbolic but I think is slightly different is "instrumental" vs. "expressive."  I think the article should talk about Ortner's famous article, talk about Butler and Bourdieu and how notions of "performance" and "practice" sidestepped and went beyond (not synthesizing) the instrumentalist vs. expressive debate.  Also the article should cover Wolf, Appadurai, Gupta and Ferguson.  I would not call these people materialists or mentalists because I do not think that they are interested in that debate and they do not identify themselves that way, I think the debate now has returned to one about the importance of the local versus the global, have colonialism and capitalism let to one world culture as many feared, or are there many different "globalizations," or is everything still "local."  I think there are other big debates going on today but this is certainly one of them and it gets at how we think about culture and I wish someone else had the time and resources and will to write it now because right now I do not have the time.  But if no one else does maybe in a few months I will. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 15:48, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Indeed I do agree with you. Of course I'm sceptical of claims to have sidestepped the materialist/idealists frames but certainly the emphasis and direction of thought has changed as you point out. I also wonder about why anthropology seems almost invisible at a time when it should be most relevant. Diamond, I feel is somewhat of a chistesment to the discipline, an outsider who is able to translate and make relevant anthropological, archaeological, and historical material (even though I would argue some of it is quite outdated, or otherwise problematic) to a wide audience. I dont know why anthropology doesn't seem to have the kinds of voices captuing the public imagination it once had.DHBoggs (talk) 21:46, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I LOVE Diamond and agree with you. I also think Del Hymes' Reinventing Anthropology is also still relevant.  And I would say these expose other debates again, than symbolic vs. materialist, debates having to do with history and politics.  Some of these debates displaced the debate between symbolists and materialists not because they dismissed Geertz and Harris as wrong, perhaps we could say that other debates emerged that were "orthogonal" to symbolic vs. materialist.  Anyway, I think we are moving into territory that is more important for the anthropology article than this article.  My view of this article remains basically the same: there is much that is missing and unless others add it it will just take time before I can add what I can ... but there is more that can go in here ... and once that is done, it would make sense to reconsider the way it is organized and consider rewriting the introduction.  AA had a special issue on Muslim cultures no ttoo long after 9/11 I thought was pretty good; AA or AE recently had an interesting issue with several articles on the cultural consequences of the human genome work ... I think that there are people producing good and timely work.  One might think that the multiplication of "documentary" channels on cable (Nat Geo, History, Discovery) would actually want to cover all this but no, no, no, they couldn't care less about anthropology and are producing the most fraudulent representations of what some people end up thinking is real "history" or "archeology" or "ethnography" blech. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 23:55, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Ruth Benedict
I just added a paragraph on Benedict. Although this means another paragraph on an AMerican anthropologist, I did this for two reasons: first, Benedict's view of culture has had a great influence in other fields that AlotTolearn has called attention to, like psychology and education. Second, this paragraph is an opportunity to provide a great example of an American anthropologist who was influenced by Europeans and who had an influence on Europeans, thus making the section a little less American-centric, per comments by AlotToLearn and Sunray. Slrubenstein  |  Talk 16:17, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Material available for insertion
Rather than throw away the material I wanted to insert in this article, I have placed some of it on my user page. Please feel free to take it and use it as you think fit. The idea is that it replaces everything down to the 20th Century discourses of American Anthropology. I think this whole WP standards thing is a real joke and am aiming to quit if I can drag myself away. But it seems a pity to just bin it. By the way, at least three or four people have thought it better that the "American Anthropology" be left out of headings and be de-emphasised. One very experienced user a week or two ago actually made the edit in a heading. It was immediately reverted! I don't thinnk the editor ever noticed, he was a busy man. I was a mathematician. I don't recall much emphasis on where the ideas came from, though they came from India, the middle east, and everywhere. In the area of ideas, nationality should not be of importance in the same way that race is not. We are all human. --AlotToLearn (talk) 06:04, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Anthropology studies human, including cultural, variation across time and space. It is important data, when and where an idea first emerged, how it diffused, and when and where and how it as transformed.  I can understand why a mathematician may not think this is important, as they claims to deal with what is objective (although historians and sociologists of science might not agree).  Anthropology by definition deals with what is subjective so :who, what, when, where" questions lead to important data.  They may also be important categories for analysis.  It would be very ironic if an article about something - culture - which sometimes takes very different forms in different places, often spreads from one place to another, or changes due to contact with people or ideas from people in other places, does not actually apply the same standards to the study of ideas and theories about culture.


 * That said, I agree that there are many ideas about culture not yet covered in this article and if you have found notable sources with significant views not yet expressed in this article, that's great! Thanks!! We will look at it!


 * But off-hand, I have to say I am a little concerned about how American-centric your proposals are. You deleted the material on German thinkers, who were very important.  You wrote a paragraph on Henry Hale, an American whom no one today considers significant or notable, yet you make no mention of Mooney, an Irishman, who was very significant and notable.  I think we need to be careful tio include the work of scholars who were not just American or Brittish.Slrubenstein   |  Talk 13:56, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with File:Funeral of Tamesese.jpg
The image File:Funeral of Tamesese.jpg is used in this article under a claim of fair use, but it does not have an adequate explanation for why it meets the requirements for such images when used here. In particular, for each page the image is used on, it must have an explanation linking to that page which explains why it needs to be used on that page. Please check


 * That there is a non-free use rationale on the image's description page for the use in this article.
 * That this article is linked to from the image description page.

This is an automated notice by FairuseBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Media copyright questions. --20:41, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Problem solved! Slrubenstein  |  Talk 00:33, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Request
All those of you watching this page, please come and have a look at linguistics. There is a gross misrepresentation and censorship taking place there. Post-structural linguistics has been deleted and censored by the community there, and I urge you to participate in the discussion to restore a balanced view for the article.  Supriya  07:18, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Modify 3 Basic Senses
I have used this information to discuss the culture within my work-place. Would it be possible to change the third sense from:

"the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group."

to:

"the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group (quite simply, the way things get done around here".

The value being it will provide a very simple definition that many people will understand?

Just a thought, Thanks, Dave Dcraveneh (talk) 01:16, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Culture in Non-Humans
I would like to suggest adding this section because Chimps (and to a certain extent other primates) have been shown to have culture for some time now, according to at least one of the definitions on this page.

see

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-46434135.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/370807.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2622101.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4166756.stm 129.169.10.56 (talk) 20:12, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

,, and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7928996.stm 129.169.10.56 (talk) 20:13, 11 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The article already includes this view, and provides scholarly sources for this view. It happens to be a fringe view, i.e. rejected by most scientists, and the article provides a well-sourced discussion of the scientific research on the topic, specifically comparing chimps and humans.  When there is a good deal of scientific research on a topic, articles from peer-reviewed journals are far better sources than a news account. de Waal is an important scholar but his view remains a minority view.  No one questions that chimpanzees have forms of social learning; most scientists - the vast majority - consider these forms of social learning to be so far from the social learning found among humans that it shoud not be called culture.  But, no matter, de Waal is just the latest to make a claim first made in the 1930s or 1940s and this view IS already in the article. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 20:42, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Recommended reading
If you want a good thumbnail sketch on the use of culture and why it is such a mess there are some source materials I can recommend. Trigger, Bruce G (1989) A History of Archaeological Thought Cambridge University Press is a define must read. A more relevant reference for this particular article is Naroll, R (1973) A Handbook in Method in Cultural Anthropology Chapter 39 (pgs 215-260) Columbia University Press which suggested throwing out the term "culture" (because the definition was such a mess even back then) and replacing it with "Cult-unit"--BruceGrubb (talk) 01:33, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

what is Culture?
The question is often asked lots of times- "What is culture? How can it be defined and what does it do?" well here’s the answer, Culture is the way in which a group of people solves their problems and reconciles dilemmas. When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity.

In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.191.35.252 (talk) 10:29, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

more meaningful etymology of Culture
In the etymology of Culture, I think it is more significant to use a different definition than "to cultivate" because of the etymologic relationship of culture to cultivate and the common use of cultivate in English, making "to cultivate" too general, figurative, and self-referential. I suggest replacing, or at least inserting before "to cultivate" the definition "to till" or "to till (land)".

Or as is shown in the referecne source for this etymology, "the tilling of land" (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=culture). For this change, the same source is utilized.

I am interested most in simply adding the sense of "tilling the earth" (ground, soil, land...) into the etymology. It literally grounds the etymology of the word culture in its historic sense as used in latin with less ambiguity due to figurative use and self referencing. That is the point of etymologies, in my opinion. (Rivenexus (talk) 15:45, 7 May 2009 (UTC))
 * Over in Vicipaedia, la:Cultura is the page of the month (May 2009). More than twice as long as the next-longest article in that wiki, it addresses these issues by giving more information about the etymology of the word and the background of the concept. Though most of its text remains a translation of Culture, it adds useful nuances, connecting the presentation more carefully with the history of philosophical thought. Also, its layout is more attractive, not least because the illustrations have captions that connect them with points made in the text. Jacob (talk) 13:52, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

"2.1 American Anthropology"
Is there any particular reason why the bulk of the article, and specifically 20th century discourses on culture, falls under the heading of "American Anthropology"? Admitted the key role of the U.S. the discourse on culture, this heading seems incredibly Americocentric.

222.129.24.3 (talk) 06:59, 28 May 2009 (UTC)


 * That is because American Anthropology is the oldest and largest academic discipline that studies "culture." There is also a field called "Cultural Studies" and I have left messages on the talk pages of all the principle contributors to Wikipedia's article on cultural studies to ask them to expand this part of the article, but so far no one who knows anything about cultural studies has stepped forward to contribute to the article.


 * Our standard is to include all significant views from notable sources. What non-American views are significant and left out?  Aside from ones in cultural studies, I cannot think of any.  But we should not add theories by people living in say Japan or Saudi Arabia just because they exist, they have to be significant to the study of culture. Do you think the article on quantum mechanics is Eurocntric because so many of the major scientists noted there were European? Slrubenstein   |  Talk 15:03, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Individualist societies
Does anybody know if the individualist cultures (example those of the British isles) have always been individualist, or if they were more collectivist in the past? If so, what could cause/explain the shift? Any references? --DTMGO (talk) 19:02, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Way, way, way too long
Obviously it cannot be a short article, but at present this is an unfocused mess with way too much detail indifferently presented in long streams. It reads like a grad student's notes for an article on culture, and not an article on culture. I am not asking for brief, TV like sound bites here, but some accomodation must be made to the non-specialist reader. At the moment, I wonder if anyone who is not actively working on this article has read all of it, or would ever read all of it. There is much good in this article but it must be sorted out from a lot of dead weight. Will those who know this subject well bear in mind that most do not come to the entry on culture to join in a discussion of what culture is, or to be given an unedited transcript of a long series of academic deliberations. The entries on "mathematics" or "history" are good models for how a very broad topic can be dealt with in detail without turning into a Frankenstein-like attempt at thesis by committee. (n.b. Although I do not have a Wikipedia account, I am not a crank and would genuinely like to read a better article on culture.) 75.175.218.52 (talk) 03:10, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * For the moment, I hope readers would use the "contents" to go to whicever section they are interested in. I agree with the above comment and I would like to see parts of this article spun off to new articles, with summaries and links here.  However, in my experience it is best to work through the various aspects of a complicated issue (Race is a better example than Mathematics or history, both of which describe relatively unified academic discplines whereas this article describes a conecpt that means very different things to different groups of people) first and together, before spinning off.  This article has a few major gaps, still, and we all know that Wikipdia is a work in progress, every article is a work in progress.  I'd like to see a few other knowledgable editors finish work on this article, make sure all parts are consistent, and then spin them off as linked articles.  It is easier to make sure that all the stuff on culture is consistent, when working on them in one place ... it gets much harder after they have been made separate articles.  Someone above made some suggestions on culture and language - can't some volunteer editor do the research to write that section?  There are some suggestions about how to improve the section on material culture - can a volunteer editor do some research and revise that section?  The section on cultural studies needs to be completely overhauled - are there volunteer editors?  The historical antecedents should have a section on French romanticism from Rousseau to Durkheim - can someone do the research and help out?  I think once everything is in order, it would be a good time to split this up into linked articles. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 22:02, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that the article is way too long as it is and that the sections should be spun into subarticles with in situ summaries here. I would be happy to volunteer for writing the first draft of a section on language and culture.·Maunus· ƛ · 01:30, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

First paragraph
The first paragraph of this entry is disasterous, as it is incomprehensible and filled with grammatical errors. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.66.226.95 (talk) 12:30, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I made some changes to address this. Slrubenstein  |  Talk 18:08, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Culture and language
Here I present my draft of the culture and language section. Tell me what you think. It is unsourced for now but I will provide the sources as we insert it into the article.

Draft
The connectedness between culture and language has been noticed as far back as in the classic period and probably long before. The ancient Greeks for example distinguished between civilized peoples and bárbaros "those who babble", i.e. those who speak unintelligible languages. The fact that different groups speak different, unintelligible languages is often a much more tangible evidence for cultural differences than other more inconspicuous cultural traits. The German romanticists of the 19th century such as Herder, Wundt and Humbolt, often saw language not just as one cultural trait among many but rather as the direct expression of a people's national character, and as such as culture in a kind of condensed form. Franz Boas, founder of American anthropology, like his German forerunners, maintained that the shared language of a community was the most essential carrier of their common culture, and he was the first anthropologist to whom it was unimaginable to study the culture of a foreign people without also becoming acquainted with their language. For Boas, the fact that the intellectual culture of a people was largely constructed, shared and maintained through the use of language, meant that understanding the language of a cultural group was the key to understanding that culture. Boas and his students, however, were also aware that culture and language are not dependent on eachother, that is, groups with widely different cultures may share a common languages and speakers of completely unrelated languages may share the same fundamental cultural traits. Often ideas of language being the cause of specific cultural traits have been suggested, for example by Alexander Von Humboldt. While Boas himself rejected such a notion of causality, some of his intellectual heirs entertained the idea that to some degree speaking and thinking in a particular language might influence the culture of the linguistic group - such a belief is related to the theory of Linguistic relativity. Boas and most modern anthropologists however are more inclined to believe that the interconnectedness between language and culture is due to the two having "grown up together".

Indeed, the origin of language, understood as the human capacity of complex symbolic communication, and the origin of complex culture is often thought to stem from the same evolutionary process in early man. Linguists and evolutionary anthropologists suppose that language evolved as early humans began to live in large communities which required the use of complex communication to maintain social coherence. Language and culture then both emerged as a means of using symbols to construct social identity and maintain coherence within a social group too large to rely exclusively on pre-human ways of building community such as for example grooming. Since language and culture are both in essence symbolic systems, twentieth century cultural theorists have applied the methods of analyzing language developed in the science of linguistics also to analyze culture. Particularly the structural theory of Ferdinand de Saussure which describes symbolic systems as consisting of signs (a pairing of a particular form with a particular meaning), has come to be applied widely in the study of culture. But also post-structuralist theories, that nonetheless still rely on the parallel between language and culture as systems of symbolic communication, have been applied in the field of semiotics. The parallel between language and culture can then be understood as analog to the parallel between a linguistic sign, consisting for example of the sound [kau] and the meaning "cow", and a cultural sign, consisting for example of the cultural form of "wearing a crown" and the cultural meaning of "being king". In this way it can be argued that culture is itself a kind of language. Another parallel between cultural and linguistic systems is that they are both systems of practice, that is they are a set of special ways of doing things that is constructed and perpetuated through social interactions. Children, for example, acquire language in the same way as they acquire the basic cultural norms of the society they grow up in - through interaction with older members of their cultural group.

However, languages, now understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speak them. Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural groups and difference from others. Even among speakers of one language several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal identity with particular subgroups within a larger culture. In linguistics such different ways of using the same language are called "varities". For example, the English language is spoken differently in the USA, the UK and Australia, and even with a country like the UK there are hundreds of dialects of English that each signal a belonging to a particular region and/or subculture. For example the cockney dialect signals its speakers' belonging to the group of lower class workers of east London. Differences between varieties of the same language often consist in different pronunciations and vocabulary, but also sometimes of different grammatical systems and very often in using different styles (e.g. cockney Rhyming slang or Lawyers' jargon). Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.

The differences between different languages does not consist only in differences in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar, but also importantly in different "cultures of speaking". Some cultures for example have elaborate systems of "social deixis", systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English social deixis is shown mostly though distinguishing between adressing some people by first name and others by surname, but also in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy", "Doctor" or "Your Honor", but in other languages such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. In several languages of east Asia, for example Thai, Burmese and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is adressing someone of higher or lower rank than one self in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and membes of royalty as the highest. Other languages may use different forms of adress when speaking to speakers of the opposite gender or in-law relatives and many languages have special ways of speaking to infants and children. Among other groups the culture of speaking may entail not speaking to particular people, for example many indigenous cultures of Australia have a taboo against talking to one's in-law relatives, and in some cultures speech is not adressed directly to children. Some languages also require different ways of speaking for speakers different social classes of speakers, often such a system is based on gender differences as in Japanese.

·Maunus· ƛ · 14:54, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Useful but needs references and links - eg T-V distinction, which of course has only relatively recently vanished from English. Why not add Japanese to the list?  Johnbod (talk) 15:11, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't think there is a need to add Japanese - I added english for familiarity and the southeast asian languages because they are among the languages with the most highly complex systems of social dexis - Japanese, like T-V systems, is just a middle of the road language in that respect and any number of other languages could be included in its place. It does lack references but i will look them up when we have a good feeling of the form the section needs to have. I haven't written anything that should be controversial or difficult to source.·Maunus· ƛ · 15:21, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I think Honorific speech in Japanese and Gender differences in spoken Japanese go well beyond anything in Europe, where we don't have a "womens' language", and are useful links - in fact we have a whole category on them. Johnbod (talk) 19:34, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * We'll I tried only to include English and the most extreme systems in order to keep it as a summary, but if you think you can fit in links to those articles in Japanese it is fine with me. Just go ahead an edit the draft if you want, I won't mind.·Maunus· ƛ · 20:27, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I won't make any changes, but you asked for comments. Johnbod (talk) 23:18, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * And they are appreciated. I actually think it was a good idea to show how social deixis is not only using different frms based on the class of the adressee but also as in women's language based on the class of the speaker. I am just not sure that Japanese is the most salient example of this - but of course it might also be good to include it since there is a separate article on the topic. I was not being annoyed when I asked you to edit the draft - please do edit it I am sure it can only get better. ·Maunus· ƛ · 23:22, 17 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, Japanese doesn't really have women's language, either. It's much like Lakota language in that respect: there are forms that are stereotypically thought of as masculine or feminine, but their use is not as separated by gender as the moniker "women's language" makes it appear. Still, most Japanese speakers could tell you what the gendered forms are, making it arguably interesting in a discussion of language and culture. Cnilep (talk) 23:08, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmmm. It's a very common term, in English & Japanese. I knew a Japanese-American whose mother died in her childhood, so she learnt Japanese from her father. She found, when in quite an important position in later life, it best to pretend hardly to speak Japanese at all, as she made such a bad impression using the male forms. Another male friend was taught Japanese by a woman & can only understand the women in films. Johnbod (talk) 23:15, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I also think some other languages would maybe be a better example of Women's language, I think maybe some native american languages (I think Arawak and Muskogean) might be better examples - I was trying to be accomodating. ·Maunus· ƛ · 23:19, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I have copied the draft above to User:Cnilep/Culture draft because I thought it might easier to edit there. All editors interested in the language and culture section for this page are invited to contribute at User:Cnilep/Culture draft. When we've got it in workable condition, we can paste into the main page, where anyone can continue to edit it. Cnilep (talk) 00:01, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Intro pictures
I putted the first three pictures in the intro in the right order (based on year). First the Petroglyphs in Azerbaijan (10,000 BC) followed by Ancient Egyptian Art (1,400 BC) and finaly the Persian Art AD. This way it shows a nice and smooth evolution of culture. Neftchi (talk) 17:45, 20 July 2009 (UTC)