Abstract
Culture! Westerners often use this word to mean a taste for the fine arts, music and other aesthetic matters. But it has a much broader meaning, namely, the shared values, language and traditions that define a particular group of people, be they Australian aborigines, black Americans, or the ancient Greeks. Culture is learned as a child, and as children we each learned from those around us a particular set of rules, beliefs, priorities and expectations that moulded our world into a meaningful whole. That is our culture. It tells us what is correct, expected, normal and right. It explains the world for us. It gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Culture is the socially determined mental framework in which we live. It is our Weltanschauung, our worldview, our abstract conception of reality.
One day, without transition, Ramon broke in upon his descriptions of grinding mesquite and preparing acorn soup. ‘In the beginning’, he said ‘God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life … They all dipped in the water, but their cups were different. Our cup is broken now. It has passed away’ … The old man was still vigorous and a leader in relationships with the whites. He did not mean that there was any question of the extinction of his people. But he had in mind the loss of something that had value equal to that of life itself, the whole fabric of his people’s standards and beliefs. There were other cups of living left, and they held perhaps the same water, but the loss was irreparable.
Ruth Benedict, 1934†
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934) p. 21. Benedict’s insights are still immensely valuable.
M. Midgley, Beast and Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978) p. 332.
W. Durant, quoted by J.L. Christian in Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977) p. 384.
R. Graves, The White Goddess, 3rd edn, (London: Faber & Faber, 1953) p. 27.
E.R. Service, ‘The Ghosts of Our Ancestors’, in Primitive Worlds: People Lost in Time (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1973) pp. 816
R. Benedict, ‘The Diversity of Cultures’, Chapter 2 in Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934, 1959) pp. 21–44.
Most of the following discussion is based on this source, but see also, A. Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) especially p. 84 f.
K. Birket-Smith, Primitive Man and His Ways (New York: Mentor Books, New American Library, 1963) pp. 45–48.
R.E. Leakey and R. Lewin, Origins of Mankind (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977) p. 242.
J.C. Goodale, ‘An Example of Ritual Change among the Tiwi of Melville Island’, in A.R. Pilling and R.A. Waterman (eds), Diprotodon to Detribalization: Studies of Change among Australian Aborigines (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1970) pp. 350–66.
R. Benedict, Patterns of Culture, pp. 188–211; quote is from p. 211.
R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (eds), Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and Their Neighbors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). This book contains summaries of most of the work that had been written before 1976 on these people.
R.B. Lee, ‘Eating Christmas in the Kalahari’, Natural History (December 1969) pp. 14–22, 60–63.
A.H. Maslow and J.J. Honigmann, compilers, ‘Synergy: Some Notes of Ruth Benedict’, American Anthropologist, 72 (1970) pp. 320–33.
Reported in L.S. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976) pp. 154–5.
Benedict, Patterns of Culture, pp. 130–72.
N. Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce People (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968).
Chagnon, Yanomamö, p. 48.
Chagnon, Yanomamö, p. 118.
Chagnon, Yanomamö, p.91.
Benedict, Patterns of Culture, pp. 57–239.
Benedict, Patterns of Culture, p. 89.
Personal communication, Barton A. Wright, ethnologist, 4143 Gelding St, Phoenix, AZ, 85023.
Benedict, Patterns of Culture, p. 103.
L. Sharp, ‘Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians’, Case 5 in E.H. Spicer (ed.), Human Problems in Technological Change (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1952) pp. 69–90. A similar disruption from the introduction of steel implements into New Guinea has been blamed for increased warfare. See reference 46 in Chapter 5.
C.M. Turnbull, The Mountain People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972).
Turnbull, The Mountain People, p. 282. For a concise statement of how aid can be utterly destructive of a way of life, read pp. 281–2.
F.M. Lappé and J. Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity revised edn (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978) p. 141. See pp. 134–64 for the total extent of the impact of the Green Revolution.
For a comprehensive description, see M. Mead (ed.), Cultural Patterns and Technical Change: A Manual Prepared by the World Federation for Mental Health (Paris: UNESCO, 1953).
Lappé and Collins, Food First, pp. 61–6; 330–5; 336–8.
M. Mead, New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation — Manus, 1928–1953 (New York: William Morrow, 1966).
M.C. Bateson, Chapter X in With a Daughter’s Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, Simon & Schuster, 1984) pp. 174–96.
T. Kochman, ’“Rapping” in the Black Ghetto’, Transaction, 6 (February 1969) pp. 26–34.
K.R. Johnson, ‘The Vocabulary of Race’, in T. Kochman (ed.), Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972) pp. 140–51. See also other articles in this book.
Benedict’s views in this area are to be found in her book Patterns of Culture and more especially in the notes from her lectures at Bryn Mawr, compiled by Maslow and Honigmann, ‘Synergy’.
J. Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982). I cannot subscribe to Jaynes’s thesis that primitive people regularly had auditory hallucinations that they believed were gods speaking to them, however.
J.H. Bodley, Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems (Menlo Park, CA: Cummings, 1976).
quote is from R.L. Heilbroner, The Great Ascent: The Struggle for Economic Development in Our Time (New York: Harper & Row Torchbooks, 1963) p. 53.
Bodley, Anthropology, pp. 22–3. See also R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (eds), Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine, 1968).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1989 Mark E. Clark
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clark, M.E. (1989). The Cultural Spectrum. In: Ariadne’s Thread. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20077-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20077-1_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-46600-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-20077-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)