|
Culture is a product of tradition
Culture does not result from tradition but from the activity of sharing,
exploiting, utilising and dividing some area of the earth and its resources.
Successful cultures are those that adjust these activities in response to
changing physical, social and economic constraints of their environment.
To achieve this societies societies do draw on traditions but also draw
on their needs and aspirations. Tools, skills . laws, forms of communication
and entertainment are usually more about meeting today's needs rather than
clinging to traditions. Thus, if an Inuit ("Eskimo") culture adopts a snowmobile
rather than a dogsled for transport, it does not mean that the culture is
disappearing, but that is dynamic and evolving.
Culture is environmentally determined
Certainly the earth's varied environment's influence culture (available
resources, distance to the sea, climate) but culture is not
environmentally
determined. People choose a variety of adaptations within environmental constraints.
This is strongly affected by non-material dynamics such as religion, world
view, a sense of identity and forms of humour that can persist despite
a changing environment. The Shuar Nation, First Peoples of and premier
rainforest agriculturists until the 1960s, witnessed the destruction of
their rainforest homeland for cattle ranching. Undeterred the Shuar became
premier cattle ranchers and also consultants to other indigenous people
facing catastrophic environmental change.
Culture is an anachronism and will disappear with modernisation
Since culture; unlike earth and water, is socially constructed it is sometimes
dismissed as an abstraction that is not "real". This can lead policy makers
to; underestimate the geopolitical force inherent in culture; to impose
new cultural "realities" that meet with violent resistance; and to overlook
the obvious physical manifestations of culture. To exemplify the first
point, by the 1980s many social scientists were so convinced that Western
technology, ideology, globalisation, and nation-building had reduced cultural
identification to an anachronism that they failed to predict the break-up
major states (eg the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslavia, the secession
of Eritrea) or general wave of post-Cold War nationalism. The second point
is illustrated by the general global failure of nation-building exercises
in Africa and elsewhere in the aftermath of decolonisation (eg Sudan's
failure to Islamicise the South has led to Africa's longest ongoing war).
Third, distinct ways of doing things lead to distinctive housing types,
cuisine, smells, languages, sounds and sights that manifest in a cultural
landscape. Thus, one culture can be distinguished from another by using
our senses, not just our theories.
Culture is equivalent to ethnicity and race
The biggest myth about culture is that it is equivalent to ethnicity and
race. Ethnicity refers to physical ancestry and is so narrow in scope
that it omits many cultural actors and conflates the variety of over lapping
geographical scales that produce them. A culture may or may not include
ethnicity as an identifier but culture itself is much broader (e.g.
nations,
tribes, regional cultures) and includes many interactions across space.
One could be Ndebele, Nguni, Zimbabwean, South African, and African all
at once and interact across all these scale in the construction of identity.
Race is not tantamount to culture for four reasons:
there are only five "races" and thousands of self-identifying cultures;
"race" as a classification is a social construct rather than a "fact"
since DNA analysis can only identify a spectrum of genetic traits which
differ more between individuals than between races; culture, unlike
race, is not dependent upon an external system of classification but is
a form of self-identification about which we must carefully enquire; and
one may be adopted into a culture, regardless of "race", if one is
accepted by that society and choose to share a certain way of life.
Quick, e-mail now for further info to
IPT
|
|