(1) Why do the Chinese dislike milk and milk products? Why do some nations trace descent through the father, others through the different instincts? Not because they were destined by God or Fate to different habits, not because the weather is different in China and the United States. Sometimes keen common sense has an answer that is close to that of the anthropologist:"Because they were brought up that way." (By "culture"anthropology means the total life way of a people, the social legacy the individual acquires from his group.) Or culture can be regarded as that part of the environment that is the creation of man.
(2) This technical term has a wider meaning than the "culture" of history and literature.A humble cooking pot is as much a cultural product as is a Beethoven sonata. In ordinary speech a man of culture is a man who can speak languages other than his own, who is familiar with history, literature, philosophy, or the fine arts. In some circles that definition is still narrower. The cultured person is one who can talk about James Joyce, Scarlatti, and Picasso. To the anthropologist, however, to be human is to be cultured. The general abstract notion serves to remind us that we cannot explain acts solely in terms of the biological properties of the people concerned, their individual past experience, and the immediate situation. The past experience of other men in the form of culture enters into almost every event. Each specific culture constitutes a kind of blueprint for all of life's activities.
(3) One of the interesting things about human beings is that they try to understand themselves and their own behavior. While this has been particularly true of Europeans in recent times, there is no group which has not developed a scheme or schemes to explain man's actions. (To the insistent human question"Why?"the most exciting illumination anthropology has to offer is that of the concept of culture.) Its explanatory importance is comparable to categories such as evolution in biology, gravity in physics, disease in medicine.A good deal of human behavior can be understood, and indeed predicted, if we know a people's design for living. Many acts are neither accidental nor due to personal peculiarities nor caused by supernatural forces nor simply mysterious.Even those of us who pride ourselves on our individualism follow most of the times a pattern not of our own making. We brush our teeth on arising. We put on pants-not a loincloth or a grass skirt. We eat three meals a day-not four or five or two. We sleep in a bed-not in a hammock or on a sheep pelt.I do not have to know the individual and his life history to be able to predict these and countless other regularities, including many in the thinking process, of all Americans who are not locked up in jails or hospitals for the insane.
(4) To the American woman a system of plural wives seems "instinctively"hateful. She cannot understand how any woman can fail to be jealous and uncomfortable if she must share her husband with other women. She feels it"unnatural"to accept such a situation. On the other hand,a Koryak woman of Siberia, for example, would find it hard to understand how a woman could be so selfish and so undesirous of feminine companionship in the home as to wish to restrict her husband to one mate.
(5) Some years ago I met in New York City a young man who did not speak a word of English and was obviously bewildered by American ways. (By"blood"he was an American, for his parents had gone from Indiana to China as missionaries.) Orphaned in infancy, he was reared by a Chinese family in a remote village. All who met him found him more Chinese than American. The facts of his blue eyes and light hair were less impressive than a Chinese manner of walking, Chinese arm and hand movements, Chinese facial expression, and Chinese modes of thought. The biological heritage was American, but the cultural training had been Chinese. He returned to China.
(6) (A highly intelligent teacher with long and successful experience in the public schools of Chicago was finishing her first year in an Indian school.) When asked how her Navaho pupils compared in intelligence with Chicago youngsters, she replied,"Well,I just don't know. Sometimes the Indians seem just as bright. At other times they just act like dumb animals. The other night we had a dance in the high school.I saw a boy who is one of the best students in my English class standing off by himself. So I took him over to a pretty girl and told him to dance. But they just stood there with their heads down. They wouldn't even say anything." I inquired if she knew whether or not they were members of the same clan. "What difference would that make?"
(7)"How would you feel about getting into bed with your brother?"(The teacher walked off in a fit of anger, but, actually, the two cases were quite comparable in principle.) To the Indians the type of bodily contact involved in our social dancing has a directly sexual connotation. The incest taboos between members of the same clan are as severe as between true brothers and sisters. The shame of the Indians at the suggestion that a clan brother and sister should dance and the indignation of the white teacher at the idea that she should share a bed with an adult brother represent equally nonrational responses, culturally standardized unreason.
我
