ANT207H1 Study Guide - Final Guide: Marshall Sahlins, Edward Burnett Tylor, Zande People
ANT 207. The Culture Concept - some definitions
1 From our text book:
"Culture: the complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any
other capabilities and habits acquired by humans as a member of society" (Kenny and Smillie
2015:221).
Note the emphasis on a "whole." This definition is an adapted version of the one given by Edward Tylor
in 1871. For a critique of this use, see Barnard and Spencer (2010:170).
2
"Cultural anthropologists want to know how the elements in a cultural system are related to one
another, and how they are expressed in individual lives. When we try to account for the
behavior of other people, what we are really asking is: What does their behavior mean? What
do they intend by it? What institutional structures constrain or direct it? What makes it sensible,
rather than random or crazy? Culture is a system of meaning: it provides the standards of value
through which action is judged and is usually an unconscious, taken-for-granted reality for the
people who share it"(Kenny and Smillie 2015:5-6).
Note here the reference to a system, with elements that relate, but less emphasis on a bounded
"whole". This definition would fit well with our attempt to make sense of what a student means by
walking out of class, lecture 2.
3 Marshall Sahlins:
"takes as the distinctive quality of man not that he must live in a material world, circumstance
he shares with all organisms, but that he does so according to a meaningful scheme of his own
devising, in which capacity mankind is unique. It therefore takes as the decisive quality of
culture—as giving each mode of life the properties that characterize it—not that this culture
must conform to material constraints but that it does so according to a definite symbolic
scheme which is never the only one possible. Hence it is culture which constitutes utility (Sahlins
1976: viii).
In this definition, the key feature of culture is its arbitrariness: as with language, each social group gives
its own unique meaning to the world. It is that system of meaning that determines what is valuable or
useful. This definition pushes back on Malinowski's idea that we should focus on utility or function, and
understand culture as flowing from that. Culture, for Sahlins, is an "independent conceptual or symbolic
scheme that intervenes and mediates between human action or behaviour and objective material
circumstances. As such, culture is determining rather than determined; it is neither constrained by
objective necessity nor dictated by natural needs" (Li 2001:212).
4 Strong concepts of culture often use a web metaphor, to emphasize integration, wholeness and
boundedness. In his description of Azande witchcraft, anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard wrote:
[A]ll their beliefs hang together. . . . In this web of belief every strand depends upon every other
strand, and a Zande cannot get out of its meshes because this is the only world he knows. The
web is not an external structure in which he is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought and he
cannot think that his thought is wrong(Evans-Pritchard 1937:194-5).
